Richard Dawkins: Why the universe seems so strange

[JamesF]

I fully accept your point Olly and I think it does illustrate that we have to be careful about looking at the process of evolution through the lens of our own.  I think we have to start somewhere though, and see where it leads.  And this is only for my own amusement, not some scientific proposal that I'm making.

Playing devil's advocate is a required part of the process.  Why shouldn't some aliens have evolved wheels rather than legs?  We could look at the circumstances under which wheels might confer an evolutionary advantage and see where it leads.  Assuming we're not talking about a "water world", does it mean the ground must be relatively flat?  Does that mean the planet would have no tectonic activity?  Does that in turn mean the planet would not have a molten core?  What does that mean in terms of protection from the solar wind?  Would wheel-users have been able to climb trees?  Would there even be trees?  And if so, would non wheel-users get a significant evolutionary advantage by being able to live in the trees and keep away from the wheel-users who couldn't climb trees?

Perhaps if some land-based alien life-form did evolve wheels they'd reach the stage where the wheels were more useful at the end of appendages.  And even more so if they shrank and the "spokes" became instruments for tactile feedback and manipulation, so you'd end up with a "hand" on a fully rotating wrist.  Now that would be useful

It may be easier to look at the question the other way around.  What kind of planet do we think is necessary to allow a technologically advanced alien race that we would recognise as such to evolve?  I absolutely grant the possibility that there may be advanced alien races that we might not even recognise as existing, but for the purposes of my game I don't really feel that discussing how something we might not even realise exists when it's under our noses might evolve really leads me to any greater understanding.

As the "fingers" thing illustrates, nature has "tried out" a huge number of possibilities.  By some measure on our own world we seem to have come out top, perhaps because the evolutionary niche we have found for ourselves is "being adaptable".  In a way, what evolution has done with humans is evolved a generalist, not a specialist.  Do these things mean that evolution on another planet would necessarily find a humanoid form?  And if so would it come to dominate (whatever that means)?

I don't have answers to most, if any, of these questions.  But for me it's fun to ask them and see where they lead.

James

[Ptarmigan]

Saw the gorilla and got the number of passes right.

But you did not count how many times he beat his chest,

because had you done so the programers would have shut down this universe, upgraded their core store

and started a new universe to re-test theories of humour.

Sounds of manic laughter , , ,   :)

[Knight of Clear Skies]

I don't have answers to most, if any, of these questions.  But for me it's fun to ask them and see where they lead.

Absolutely, these kinds of thought experiments are crucial. I'm a big fan of the toolbox approach to thinking. Take an idea, flail around with it for a bit and see if it goes anywhere. It all goes a bit wonky when people get too attached to their speculations and way of thinking, which is easily done. I have more faith in the process of science - interative theorizing and experimentation - than anything else, I just wish we'd learn to apply these principles more widely. From an educational point of view, understanding the scientific method is more important than grasping any specific theory. Most people don't use Boyle's law in everyday life, but the importance of evidence has universal applications.

Two things seem to enable us to take our thought processes further than we might have expected given their evolutionary heritage.

1) Metaphor. This extends the range of the verbal language we have. We cannot conceive outside the usual four dimensions but we can create illustrative metaphors like saddle shaped spacetime geometry.

I agree that metaphors allow us to grasp concepts that wouldn't otherwise be comprehensible, but they can be a little two-edged and subtly misleading. Take Dawkin's "selfish gene" - in the foreword to the 30th anniversary edition he says that he should have taken Tom Maschler's advice and called the book "The Immortal Gene". If you wanted to be picky "The Extra-Mortal Gene" would technically be more accurate, but would be a poor title as it obfuscates the concept behind it. It's very difficult to come up with good scientific metaphors, and this is a skill that distinguishes the best popular science writers.

[ollypenrice]

Although I've played with the idea of wheeled animals before, it was for a different purpose, also Dawkins-related! The problem with the living wheel is that it requires the wheel to grow (and be sustained and rejuvinated) without any physical contact with the rest of the animal. If an axle touches a wheel they both wear out. Lubricant is needed to keep them apart. In my original thought experiment I was wonderng whether an evolutionary route to living wheels and axles would be possible. I concluded that it probably wouldn't. With the C of C in mind I won't labour the ideas behind this line of thought but the problem is obviously one of communication within a two part animal. However, when I first thought about a 'two part living wheel animal' I hadn't thought about 3D printing. Suppose there were a natural reproductive system in the universe which was analagous with the 3D printer! Gosh yes, might nature not, in principle, find a way to make two-part animals, one part of which contains the genetic (equivalent) capacity for 'printing' new two-part animals. Why stop at two parts? A one part printer can create multi part products. This might throw into question the nature of 'organism.'

All I'm trying to do (playfully but seriously) is consider ways in which life (and intelligence) might vary radically from what's familiar. I'd like to ask a geneticist what it would take in principle to achieve 3D genetic printing equivalence.

On metaphor, I agree that its risky. When the metaphor takes on a life of its own in the mind it can encourage new and increasingly suspect offspring-metphors. However, language is so stuffed with metaphor that I sometimes wonder if it really is entirely composed of it. High quality. Why high? Etc etc etc.

Olly

[JamesF]

Although I've played with the idea of wheeled animals before, it was for a different purpose, also Dawkins-related! The problem with the living wheel is that it requires the wheel to grow (and be sustained and rejuvinated) without any physical contact with the rest of the animal. If an axle touches a wheel they both wear out. Lubricant is needed to keep them apart. In my original thought experiment I was wonderng whether an evolutionary route to living wheels and axles would be possible. I concluded that it probably wouldn't. With the C of C in mind I won't labour the ideas behind this line of thought but the problem is obviously one of communication within a two part animal. However, when I first thought about a 'two part living wheel animal' I hadn't thought about 3D printing. Suppose there were a natural reproductive system in the universe which was analagous with the 3D printer! Gosh yes, might nature not, in principle, find a way to make two-part animals, one part of which contains the genetic (equivalent) capacity for 'printing' new two-part animals. Why stop at two parts? A one part printer can create multi part products. This might throw into question the nature of 'organism.'

In a manner of speaking, nature has already evolved the wheel (or at least the axle and bearing) in the form of the bacterial flagellum.  It's one of those things that is regularly brought out by supporters of "intelligent design" as being "too complicated to have evolved piecemeal".

I wonder if it's one of those things that can only work on a small scale though, for precisely the reasons you suggest.

I think it might take a while to get my head around the idea of 3D printing as a natural reproductive process

James

[Knight of Clear Skies]

I'd forgotten about the bacterial flagellum, but isn't there also a lizard that curls itself into a ball and rolls down sand dunes?

I think it might take a while to get my head around the idea of 3D printing as a natural reproductive process

Maybe a dating site for office equipment would facilitate the process.

[JamesF]

Kind of highlights how small, limited and self important our thinking is at times.

I wonder if that's actually an effect of what Dawkins is getting at in the lecture.  We are what we are: the product of our environment.  We "naturally" think in terms of those things that we evolved to understand because we needed to.  To step outside that and contemplate the infinite is quite an amazing thing to be able to do.

Our choice is to throw our hands in the air and run away screaming that it's all too much, or to nibble off just the teeny-tiniest bit and see where that leads us.  Then keep going back for seconds

James

[JamesF]

Maybe a dating site for office equipment would facilitate the process.

"Well-presented scanner with own power cord would like to interface with caring printer for reproduction.  Must have own ink." ?

James

[Knight of Clear Skies]

"Well-presented scanner with own power cord would like to interface with caring printer for reproduction.  Must have own ink." ?

James

That made me smile. 

Did some searching, and I think I'm getting the Armadillo lizard (which curls up for defence) mixed up with the golden wheel spider, it's the latter that rolls down dunes.

(Skip ahead to about 1:05 to get to the action.)

There are a few other wheelers according to wikipedia.

[ollypenrice]

Increasing corpulence is making me ever more likely to join the community of dune rollers...

But you know what I'm getting at with the 3D printing idea! In principle you could 3D print a car. You'd just need sufficient control over the mixtures emanating from the nozzle. if a genetic-like process could emulate this then creatures might take radically different forms from those we have so far thought about. Perhaps the 3D printer can be defined mathematically. I wonder if my mathematical friend Julian is reading this? I don't mean the maths of the engineering, I mean the maths of interlocking disconnected components. When a mathematician (whose name I can't remember) set himself the task of writing the mathematics needed to describe self replicating automata he produced something closely resembling the double helix. (Did I get this from Gleick on Chaos? Hopeless memory.) So perhaps the same might be done for genetic 3D printing.

Take me away...

Olly

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Rollin', Rollin', Rollin'...

The '3D genetic printer' is an interesting idea, but I'm not really sure what to make of it. Are you thinking of something evolved or engineered?

I was just pointing out that nature found a simpler way of making wheels, with some limited applications. Philip Pullman has some wheeled creatures in the last book of His Dark Materials, but the wheels themselves are the nut of a tree rather than part of the creature itself. There may be simpler ways of achieving some kind of wheeled creature, but they better either live in flatland or have a good solution the dalek problem:

[Cath]

I guess Dung beetles have a sort of wheel.

Though on the whole, legs are far more useful than wheels. Wheels get you speed, but legs get you places wheels never could.