Stuart Kauffman | Beyond Pythagoras: No Laws Entail Evolution | Full Lecture | KLI

#KLIAustria #KLIColloquium #Pythagoras

Pythagoras' dream was that all is number, hence entailing law. Newton formulated this in classical physics, whose laws entail the becoming of the universe from given initial (and boundary) conditions. Do similar mathematizable laws entail the becoming of the biosphere? I am convinced the answer is “No”. Physics requires the prestatement of the very phase space of the system. In terms of that phase space, the relevant variables are known and dynamical laws can be written and then integrated, much as Newton taught us, to entail the temporal evolution of the system.
But we cannot prestate the phase space of biological evolution. Unprestatable new functionalities arise all the time due to Darwinian “preadaptations”, or “exaptation”. No one could have known 3 billion years ago that feathers would evolve for thermoregulation then be co-opted for flight. No one could have known that legs would evolve from the fins of fish, or that fins would arise. Not only do we not know what will happen, we do not even know what can happen. Hence we can write no laws of motion for the evolution of the biosphere, we have no idea what the relavant variables will be. Lacking laws of motion, we cannot integrate the missing laws, so no laws entail the radical emergence of the most complex system in the universe that we know, the biosphere. This evolution is not even mathematizable and the Pythagoran dream here fails.

Biographical note:
Stuart Kauffman is a theoretical biologist and a pioneer of complex systems research. Kauffman introduced many now-familiar models of complex systems, such as boolean networks to study gene regulatory networks, the NK model to study fitness landscapes, and collectively autocatalytic sets to study the origin of life. He is probably best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian adaptation. Kauffman is the author of several books, including his latest, "Humanity in a creative universe", in which he argues that biological evolution is not entailed by any laws.

[modvs]

I called my wife a "Kantian whole" and she slapped me.

[georgeangles]

I like how Stuart Kauffman speaks common sense while making it sound scientific. 💪💪

[medaphysicsrepository]

Can’t believe I am just now discovering his works

[thephilosophicalagnostic]

This is a fantastic lecture. I've learned so much from it on topics I'm fascinated by, including evolution, emergence, and the open universe. Thank you for organizing the event and posting it here.

[thomasmurphy]

Biochemist here. His conception of mathematical laws is incoherent. The complexity observed in evolved living systems necessarily emerges from the laws of motion operating on particles combined with their chemistry (which emerge from electromagnetic/nuclear physics). And so down through subatomic particles and fields. If you plugged all the particle information into a large enough computer, you could predict every single data of evolution on Earth; all you need is the initial state, the evolution (physical change over time) law, and computational power. Kauffman is essentially arguing that the trajectory of evolution in language interpretable to us (i.e. not particle data) is not possible by way of 'laws of motion' specific to evolutionary phenomena. Kauffman is right, but what's wrong with this? Why would reality be reducible to mathematical laws at every scale (including biology), as opposed to just the most fundamental (subatomic particles)?

[daveman]

Wow!, I like what was stated there in the box below the window for this video. Wow

[Roscoe]

I didn't get past the initial calculation of how long it would take the universe to create one protein. Which by many times exceeds the age of the universe itself. So how exactly does one protein even come into being let alone hearts, let alone civilizations?

[JayBowles]

"the parts exist for and by means of the whole" – kant
autopoietic system
collectively autocatalytic set
functional/task closure
adjacent possible empty niche

[GuillermoValleCosmos]

I don't agree with everything, but there are many good ideas here.

[frodo]

Why can't we just consider each organism as a goal seeking agent and that throwing in some statistical mutations we could in a way put a mathematical form to evolution? Agreed that you can't quantify using PDE's with BC and IC's, but that still doesn't refute the face that we are simple goal seeking agents trying to maximize our fitness function (which is basically to pass on our genetic materials successfully). Take the case of the peptide he mentions in the talk. If that mutation were to never occur, then the universe we live in might have never evolved the way it is. That thought is coherent with the theory of infinite universes occurring in parallel time lines. But the universe is the way it is and I believe that a mathematical framework is still applicable.

[nicholaswestbury]

So the context point wrt the adjacent possibilities for the use of a screwdriver 🪛, is something relational like, if screws suddenly vanish or something else appears that could make use of some part of a screwdriver...

[Setherian]

In more places then not it is definitely harder to open a new and prosperous business today then say 40 years ago! We are not getting enough context per capita and people are not getting more creative and there is not less bureaucracy and people are not in need of so many new things. Its not because now I can imagine doing a business of parties in a metaverse that i have any chance of succeeding..
Maybe in the USA people have a sense that there will be always more opportunities, but trust me, anywhere else it's just not like that..in Europe for example, all country side that could be farmed is already, a hell lot of people then move to a big city, it becomes a saturation hell, shit loads of people have ever more precarious working conditions and if there is no welfare the whole system shuts down. To say economies everywhere are negentropic is just insane. Hope I got it wrong then. Or maybe "order" in this case of economy just means it will get ordered towards one single agent, like if one person or entity could have it all? He might be thinking then that Capitalism leads to God? hahaha
Oh and I'm also not so sure Culture is becoming more complex.., but if it is, it is "evaporating".. It seems to me that the vast majority of people are actually becoming more and more alike again..

[ericpalmer]

Of course their aren’t any fundamental laws. Can’t be.

[PerNystedt]

Great talk by a very wise man. Nothing really came as a surprise after reading the "Futurica Trilogy" by Bard & Söderqvist though.

[leo.budimir]

What is a chin-up molecule? Googling doesn't help

[prinzessor]

what are chinups aoround the minute 9 to 10 ? I am german and I dont get it. Okay, finally I got it. It is a hortcut of "carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur" = CHNOPS

[samueldeandrade]

7:24 "how many ...?" The old fallacious human surprise with big numbers. How original.

[esorse]

You cannot conclude that there is some thing corresponding with all the stuff representative noun universe with a purpose because of your hearts function.

[yifuxero]

On Kant's statement that the parts exist only by means of the whole, this is an ancient concept going back to Marcus Aurelius. Set Theorist Georg Cantor came up with a hierarchy of sets, such as hyperinfinities, then in an AHA moment, realized that such levels of mathematical reality have a limit, which he called "The Absolute Infinite". This is experiential. Access "Mahamritunjaya mantra - Sacred Sounds Choir" and listen to it for 5 min per day for at least two weeks. Entities such as "auto-catalytic functions" are Pure Consciousness, along with the entire universe.

[Achrononmaster]

He mixes levels too much. Swim bladders etc do have a cause. The adjacent possible niche is a high level concept, and is not the level where fundamental causal processes operate. The Darwinian stories we use to explain adaptations are not causal stories, they are stories at a fairly high level of abstraction, and fundamental causal processes do not act at such levels. The fact one cannot generally find causal processes at a high level of abstraction is because physical complexity at such high levels is what philosophers refer to as "multiply realizabie". There are so many ways a swim bladder could form, so no physical causal process explains all swim bladders. But one particular swim bladder in one individual organism has a bunch of fundamental causal events which realize it. 
If you find you cannot explain phenomena using causation principles, but can use functional purpose concepts to explain the existence of the phenomena, then you know you are using abstractions. Such abstractions are difficult to reduce to base level physics due to multiple realizability. But any particular instance of a chain of events do have simple physical causes.
This does not mean physical reductionism is "true".  Kauffman is on point about this point, but does not really show reductionism is false. His arguments are qualitative and persuasive, but fall short of being definitive.