Entangled particles used for communication

[saac]

1 minute ago, saac said:

Predation - just another way of balancing the entropy equation - life is about postponing the inevitable destination of disorder. We are not meant to be here   

Jim 

 

Edited April 2, 2021 by saac

[Tiny Clanger]

Interesting.

Predation (which in biology simply means the consumption of one life form by another, the energy moving up the food chain, so applies just as much to 'grass is eaten by cow' as it does to 'antelope is eaten by lion')  is a driver of evolution though.

A life form which is well suited to its environment (because natural selection stopped the individuals who couldn't cope with the temperature or other straightforward environmental factor from breeding ) can succeed in that environment. Success in this case is  living and producing offspring .

Predation complicates this.  An apparently evolutionarily well fitted organism can fall prey to a predator *  and further random genetic variations can throw up a variation more capable of survival in the face of that risk of predation. A classic example is the Peppered Moth.

Would an environment without predation have organisms evolve the ability to see , smell, hear, run, hide, collaborate in a hunt ( and develop language to do that well )  ,  hide from a hunter, employ tools (chimps using twigs to get bugs out of crevices, thrushes using rocks as anvils to crack snail shells ) teach the offspring how to hunt and / or hide, imagine making tools which do not easily exist, flake bits off a flint nodule to form a new shape which is an ideal hand axe, note that fire has a remarkable effect on some specific rocks ... ?

When I was an undergrad, one of our geology prof .s Sylvester-Bradley had quite a lot to say on the subject of evolution of life (when he wasn't enthusing about Ostracods) and he rather seemed to enjoy telling the students that it was all about sex. ( as teenagers, we didn't think an old bloke should be talking like that ... what did he know ?! He was as old as our parents ...)   That it is all about sexual reproduction is at least partly true. More complex life on Earth mostly, (altho'  parthenogenesis is common in simpler life forms)  uses the combined chromosomes from two parents to produce a zygote which has the genetic 'blueprints' to build the offspring .That combination causes variation, that variation may be a good thing, a bad thing or an unimportant thing  in evolutionary fitness terms. Sexual reproduction must be an important survival trait for the species though, because the process is not cost free to the creatures involved.

So, for genetic variations which result in physical changes, evolution can sift for fitness to the environment, but then we need to combine chromosomes, and to drive evolution towards what we think of as intelligence , we need predation (as predator, prey or both).

And then there's the concentration of energy as you go up the food chain, the effect which means many grazing creatures, one level up on the food chain from the producer (usually a green plant) at the bottom, have to eat all day, whilst the top predator (a lion or a human) can laze around for much of the day, surviving for some time on the energy tied up in the meat of a single successful hunt.

 With sexual reproduction, evolution, predation , and the concentration of energy high in food chains, it seems to me the likelihood of a delightful, peaceable  Co-operative Socialist Collective of Intelligent Alien Life is quite low, if we are thinking of the sort of life which may be able to start to understand the universe in a scientific or mathematical way, and communicate with us. 

 

* examples of this abound,  where animals like cats, rats, cane toads , grey squirrels etc have been introduced on to islands either on purpose or by accident , and had a terrible effect on the wildlife which evolved to live without those alien species predating on them.

Edited April 2, 2021 by Tiny Clanger
slightly improved the readability (I fondly hope )

[saac]

There is a line in the movie Lucy which caught my imagination. It's by Morgan Freeman's character , a professor in Biology,  commenting on the problem of life and how organisms come up with different solutions he says words to the effect "if the environment is forgiving organisms will chose to pass on their DNA through reproduction, where the environment is unforgiving organisms chose to be immortal" .  Later on David Attenborough would introduce me to creatures like star fish which  clone themselves  effectively being immortal.  Then I came across the "immortal" HeLa cells  and the story of Henrietta Lacks - a truly fascinating story .  The biology of life is utterly amazing and as complicated if not more so than anything in the physical word.  And all the while we life in a universe which as far as we are aware does not know of us nor needs us !

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks

Jim 

[Tiny Clanger]

14 minutes ago, saac said:

There is a line in the movie Lucy which caught my imagination. It's by Morgan Freeman's character , a professor in Biology,  commenting on the problem of life and how organisms come up with different solutions he says words to the effect "if the environment is forgiving organisms will chose to pass on their DNA through reproduction, where the environment is unforgiving organisms chose to be immortal" .  Later on David Attenborough would introduce me to creatures like star fish which  clone themselves  effectively being immortal.  Then I came across the "immortal" HeLa cells  and the story of Henrietta Lacks - a truly fascinating story .  The biology of life is utterly amazing and as complicated if not more so than anything in the physical word.  And all the while we life in a universe which as far as we are aware does not know of us nor needs us !

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks

Jim 

I read that.and thought the film would be about The Leakey's exploits in uncovering fossils ! It seems not 😉

There is a line given to a character in Babylon 5 by J.M Straczynski ( a perhaps surprisingly philosophical show considering the general shallowness of TV SF) which makes perfect sense to me :

'We are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out.'

[Corncrake]

56 minutes ago, Tiny Clanger said:

'We are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out.'

This is curious, I dont often think of the word "manifest" but this is the second time today !

The first time was when @ollypenrice posted his picture of (un)intelligence, I thought then "Heironymus is made manifest "

 

[saac]

3 minutes ago, Corncrake said:

This is curious, I dont often think of the word "manifest" but this is the second time today !

The first time was when @ollypenrice posted his picture of (un)intelligence, I thought then "Heironymus is made manifest "

 

Must be a ripple in the "matrix " somewhere  

Edited April 2, 2021 by saac

[ollypenrice]

4 minutes ago, Corncrake said:

This is curious, I dont often think of the word "manifest" but this is the second time today !

The first time was when @ollypenrice posted his picture of (un)intelligence, I thought then "Heironymus is made manifest "

 

Manifest destiny...

lly

[ollypenrice]

2 hours ago, Tiny Clanger said:

Interesting.

Predation (which in biology simply means the consumption of one life form by another, the energy moving up the food chain, so applies just as much to 'grass is eaten by cow' as it does to 'antelope is eaten by lion')  is a driver of evolution though.

A life form which is well suited to its environment because natural selection stopped the individuals who couldn't cope with the temperature or other straightforward environmental factor from breeding, can succeed in that environment. Success in this case is  living and producing offspring .

Predation complicates this.  An apparently evolutionarily well fitted organism can fall prey to a predator *  and further random genetic variations can throw up a variation more capable of survival in the face of that risk of predation. A classic example is the Peppered Moth. Would an environment without predation have organisms evolve the ability to see , smell, hear, run, hide, collaborate in a hunt ( and develop language to do that well )  ,  hide from a hunter, employ tools (chimps using twigs to get bugs out of crevices, thrushes using rocks as anvils to crack snail shells ) teach the offspring how to hunt and / or hide, imagine making tools which do not easily exist, flake bits off a flint nodule to form a new shape which is an ideal hand axe, note that fire has a remarkable effect on some specific rocks ... ?

When I was an undergrad, one of our geology prof .s Sylvester-Bradley had quite a lot to say on the subject of evolution of life (when he wasn't enthusing about Ostracods) and he rather seemed to enjoy telling the students that it was all about sex. ( as teenagers, we didn't think an old bloke should be talking like that ... what did he know ?! He was as old as our parents ...)   Which is at least partly true. More complex life on Earth mostly, (altho'  parthenogenesis is common in simpler life forms)  uses the combined chromosomes from two parents to produce a zygote which has the genetic 'blueprints' to build the offspring .That combination causes variation, that variation may be a good thing, a bad thing or an unimportant thing  in evolutionary fitness terms. It must be an important survival trait for the species though, because the process is not cost free to the creatures involved.

So, for genetic variations which result in physical changes evolution can sift for fitness to the environment, we need to combine chromosomes, and to drive evolution towards what we think of as intelligence , we need predation (as predator, prey or both).

And then there's the concentration of energy as you go up the food chain, the effect which means many grazing creatures, one level up on the food chain from the producer (usually a green plant) at the bottom, have to eat all day, whilst the top predator (a lion or a human) can laze around for much of the day, surviving for some time on the energy tied up in the meat of a single successful hunt.

 With sexual reproduction, evolution, predation , and the concentration of energy high in food chains, it seems to me the likelihood of a delightful, peaceable  Co-operative Socialist Collective of Intelligent Alien Life is quite low, if we are thinking of the sort of life which may be able to start to understand the universe in a scientific or mathematical way, and communicate with us. 

 

* examples of this abound,  where animals like cats, rats, cane toads , grey squirrels etc have been introduced on to islands either on purpose or by accident , and had a terrible effect on the wildlife which evolved to live without those alien species predating on them.

This is an analysis of what happens here and I fully accept it. My own knowledge of these processes lags far behind yours. What I'm trying to do, though, is identify those processes which do not have to apply universally even though they happen to apply here.  Terrestrial evolution has been driven in a competitive environment but it strikes me as possible that there might be non-competitive environments which would still lead to intelligence of some sort. I'm minded of Percival Lowell who was persuaded that his non-existent Martians were right wing Republicans because only that political model could organize the global construction of non-existent canals.  I would want to avoid falling into such notions!!

Olly

[saac]

1 hour ago, Tiny Clanger said:

I read that.and thought the film would be about The Leakey's exploits in uncovering fossils ! It seems not 😉

There is a line given to a character in Babylon 5 by J.M Straczynski ( a perhaps surprisingly philosophical show considering the general shallowness of TV SF) which makes perfect sense to me :

'We are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out.'

Yep the movie Lucy itself was a bit disappointing.  I used to like Babylon 5 but then it just seemed to disappear from the TV;  was it cancelled perhaps?   The quote echos Carl Sagan's "The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”   Im going to argue against myself now    In my previous post I suggested that the universe does not know or care about us.  It's funny but we have a tendency to see ourselves as separate from the universe (nature) when the truth is we are very much part of it , no less than any mighty star or galaxy. We are undeniably of this universe . Maybe Sagan and Babylon 5 then were not that far of the mark - we are the universe's attempt at figuring itself out !  My God, it's a teenager and we are its angst !  

 

Sci fi movie recommendation - found on Amazon the other day on Amazon Prime Video   "Archive" - it's an AI  theme . I thought it was quite good. 

 

Jim 

[saac]

18 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

This is an analysis of what happens here and I fully accept it. My own knowledge of these processes lags far behind yours. What I'm trying to do, though, is identify those processes which do not have to apply universally even though they happen to apply here.  Terrestrial evolution has been driven in a competitive environment but it strikes me as possible that there might be non-competitive environments which would still lead to intelligence of some sort. I'm minded of Percival Lowell who was persuaded that his non-existent Martians were right wing Republicans because only that political model could organize the global construction of non-existent canals.  I would want to avoid falling into such notions!!

Olly

I guess a world where life never evolved further beyond green plants would be devoid of predation. The only thing eaten  would be photons. Could plants have evolved through without first going through the evolutionary stage of microorganisms (bacteria etc) which, I think, some are predators (not really sure though).   I suppose the need for predation comes down to the availability of energy and resources - if these are readily available elsewhere requiring less risk and energy expenditure then why bother eating !  The moment eating though delivers more energy, then the evolutionary blue touch paper is lit again and we are back to making predators.  As energy is concentrated in each organism , then  I wonder that this route is almost a certainty. 

Jim 

Edited April 2, 2021 by saac

[ollypenrice]

25 minutes ago, saac said:

I guess a world where life never evolved further beyond green plants would be devoid of predation. The only thing eaten  would be photons. Could plants have evolved through without first going through the evolutionary stage of microorganisms (bacteria etc) which, I think, some are predators (not really sure though).   I suppose the need for predation comes down to the availability of energy and resources - if these are readily available elsewhere requiring less risk and energy expenditure then why bother eating !  The moment eating though delivers more energy, then the evolutionary blue touch paper is lit again and we are back to making predators.  As energy is concentrated in each organism , then  I wonder that this route is almost a certainty. 

Jim 

Yes, but consider two environments with the potential for life. One is like ours, with a limited energy source and another with an abundant one. We tend to be locked into the notion of competition for limited energy. What if it were pentiful?

Missionaries in the south seas were utterly exasperated to find themselves among people who had no work ethic because they didn't need one...

Olly

[Tiny Clanger]

3 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

This is an analysis of what happens here and I fully accept it. My own knowledge of these processes lags far behind yours. What I'm trying to do, though, is identify those processes which do not have to apply universally even though they happen to apply here.  Terrestrial evolution has been driven in a competitive environment but it strikes me as possible that there might be non-competitive environments which would still lead to intelligence of some sort. I'm minded of Percival Lowell who was persuaded that his non-existent Martians were right wing Republicans because only that political model could organize the global construction of non-existent canals.  I would want to avoid falling into such notions!!

Olly

I'm not saying life on Earth is the only template for life, far from it, as a fan of SF I'm very happy to accept the possibilities suggested by writers whose imaginations far outstrip mine.

It's the processes though : if the laws of thermodynamics hold true across the universe, then life, whatever and wherever it might be , will be constantly fighting to acquire energy and combat entropy. On Earth, our 'producers' ( there are exceptions, but the vast majority of our producers) i.e the life forms which start the food chains , are green plants which get their energy from the Sun. Other 'higher' levels on the food chain (trophic levels is the term if you fancy doing some research)  form what ecologists call an energy pyramid, with the top predator at the peak . That's the creature which eats but does not get eaten . That's us.

First step in any food chain, producer sources of food/energy across the universe , I'd guess will be stars too. Maybe some life might use chemical or thermal energy (like the weird bacteria which occur deep in the ocean in hydrothermal vents and 'eat' hydrogen sulphide) Is one , straightforward, competition free , low energy pyramid life form possible ?  Yes, I think it is. But I also suspect that where one life form appears, and thrives, you won't get a static , single type of life. Or if you do it won't last long : environments change , the waste products of that life accumulate, etc etc, and if the life form does not randomly mutate or vary in any way, it will not be able to continue as the environment changes around it.

If it does change, and some successful changes happen to accommodate it (quite by accident) to the new conditions, it is evolving ... and off we go .

I'm by no means an expert in this stuff, just an interested amateur with some geological um, grounding , the scientific advances made in evolutionary biology since they have been able to sequence DNA have been amazing, and ecology has become a huge complex web of knowledge from many disciplines , life is a complex thing ...

[Tiny Clanger]

8 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

Yes, but consider two environments with the potential for life. One is like ours, with a limited energy source and another with an abundant one. We tend to be locked into the notion of competition for limited energy. What if it were pentiful?

Missionaries in the south seas were utterly exasperated to find themselves among people who had no work ethic because they didn't need one...

Olly

Energy is plentiful, but the trick is converting that energy efficiently to something you can use . I've no time to check this (things to do, people to annoy) but I seem to recall the conversion rate for sunlight to energy in green plants is below 10%.

[JamesF]

10 hours ago, ollypenrice said:

The problem with anthropomorphism is that it is highly insidious. It creeps into our thinking and infects it without our noticing. Implicit throughout the thread are several entirely anthropomorphic assumptions.: All intelligence leads to technology. All intelligence produces 'civilizations.' All intelligence is composed of many individual beings with a need and a desire to communicate between themselves and with others. 

It's possible that our anthropomorphic assumptions are valid because of some cosmic evolutionary principle as yet not known, but it is equally possible that our version of intelligence is atypical.

Bit late to the party on this one, but I think I've come to the conclusion that in this respect anthropomorphism is not just insidious, but in fact probably unavoidable.  Could we recognise "intelligence" if it didn't lead to those effects (such as a technological civilisation) that we understand to be the consequences of intelligence?  Would it mean redefining "intelligence" to the point where it ceased to be a useful term?

I think I'm in the same kind of place when it comes to the search for extra-terrestrial life.  Sure, there may be all sorts of weird and wonderful creatures in the galaxy/universe that aren't carbon-based oxygen-respiring life-forms, but if there are, how would we recognise them?

In many respects I think we can only look for, and recognise, that which is within our understanding of ourselves.  Quite possibly that means we will miss things, but if so how would we know we're not missing things already?  How do we even know we're not sharing our own planet with forms of life/intelligence that we just don't recognise as such?

James

[saac]

5 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

Yes, but consider two environments with the potential for life. One is like ours, with a limited energy source and another with an abundant one. We tend to be locked into the notion of competition for limited energy. What if it were pentiful?

Missionaries in the south seas were utterly exasperated to find themselves among people who had no work ethic because they didn't need one...

Olly

That's what I was hinting at Olly; I agree, energy would need to be plentiful. In fact there would have to be a surfeit of energy to avoid the evolutionary advantage of  predating on a life that had concentrated the energy for you.   Would not that temptation arise though either by wilful action or accident !  Evolution is afterall a series of useful accidents.   As soon as there is a shortcut to gaining more energy for less effort then evolution is back in the driving seat and we are back to predation. 

 Those missionaries remind me of a Calvin and Hobbes on the much maligned art of indolence.

 

Jim 

 

[andrew s]

4 minutes ago, Tiny Clanger said:

Energy is plentiful, but the trick is converting that energy efficiently to something you can use . I've no time to check this (things to do, people to annoy) but I seem to recall the conversion rate for sunlight to energy in green plants is below 10%.

An entropy gradient is what's needed.  You need a source of low entropy to drive the creation of order and a sink for high entropy. For, example the Sun provides UV and visible light as a low entropy  source and IR light is radiated into the sink of empty space. Give or take global warming the earth us in thermal equilibrium.

What makes predation advantageous is that it provides a concentrated source of low entropy. 

Regards Andrew 

[saac]

15 minutes ago, Tiny Clanger said:

Energy is plentiful, but the trick is converting that energy efficiently to something you can use . I've no time to check this (things to do, people to annoy) but I seem to recall the conversion rate for sunlight to energy in green plants is below 10%.

I may have mentioned this in a different thread but there is a lovely BBC Horizon documentary by Jim Al Khalili in which he shows how the surprisingly low efficiency of photosynthesis is made viable by quantum effects within the delivery mechanism of the photon to the site of photosynthesis.  It's one of a number of examples he presents which show quantum effects in living organisms. 

Jim

[saac]

11 minutes ago, andrew s said:

 

What makes predation advantageous is that it provides a concentrated source of low entropy. 

Regards Andrew 

And "life" would seem to be programmed to exploit that concentration .  Which makes me wonder if predation would be inevitable even in an environment with surfeit energy. 

Edited April 2, 2021 by saac

[JamesF]

Just now, saac said:

And "life" would seem to be programmed to exploit that concentration .  Which make me wonder if predation would be inevitable even in an environment with surfit energy. 

I recall one of Brian Cox's programmes where he introduced the idea of an energy gradient in relation to "life".  For me it was one of those rare moments where my understanding of a subject was completely changed by being shown a different way to look at it -- in a similar way to how reading "The Selfish Gene" completely changed (and expanded) my understanding of evolution.  It's as though someone shows you a view of the world that was previously unknown and you can't ever see things the old way again.

I recall sitting in a biology lesson many, many years ago being taught about some group of attributes that are properties of living things.  Clearly it made a big impression as I struggle to recall what they are now.  Perhaps "seeking out and exploiting sources of low entropy" (or something along those lines) could be one fundamental attribute that underpins all life?

James

[vlaiv]

By the way - evolution seems to be "mathematical construct" in its nature.

Heuristic searches can be performed by use of couple of simple concepts - population, offspring, mutation and fitness function. Offspring randomly inherits traits from parents, mutations are randomly added and fitness function is cut off point - should offspring survive into next generation of population or not. It also represents search criteria.

You can do very funny things this way - for example create computer program to find computer programs to find a solution of a problem. You start by simple sequences of code that will run on a virtual machine. You create offspring in the similar way genes mix - by taking sequences of code from parents and attaching them in linear fashion. Fitness function equates to 0 if code produces error (can't be run on virtual machine) - or positive integer that describes how close output is to a solution of your problem for a given input - next generation consists out of highest scoring offspring.

See this for further details:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm

and this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm

As such, I believe, evolution is likely to happen all over the universe rather to be specific to the earth.

[Basementboy]

23 minutes ago, JamesF said:

Could we recognise "intelligence" if it didn't lead to those effects (such as a technological civilisation) that we understand to be the consequences of intelligence?

We barely recognise it even when it's carbon-based and oxygen-respiring and genetically very similar to us, like octopuses. We just eat it

If we did find an environment without predation, is there any chance we wouldn't (as it were) predate it? I know more about North American history than Oceanian but I don't recall those people of the south seas faring particularly well after the arrival of the missionaries

[andrew s]

18 minutes ago, saac said:

And "life" would seem to be programmed to exploit that concentration .  Which makes me wonder if predation would be inevitable even in an environment with surfeit energy. 

You could imagine stimulating an environment with no limitations of any of the requirements for life. Energy in a low entropy state, materials etc. and a set of  mutating reproducing organisms. They would just grow exponentially with no evolutionary pressure so predation would not have any obvious advantage.

Not very interesting, so say one or more constraints were added then a limit would be reached. However, now any organisms that evolved a way of extracting the limiting resources from another organisms would be at an advantage . Predation would be an advantage.

Regards Andrew 

[JamesF]

1 minute ago, Basementboy said:

We barely recognise it even when it's carbon-based and oxygen-respiring and genetically very similar to us, like octopuses. We just eat it

They even (so I am led to believe) have a better design of eye than we do.  Unfortunately (for them) they're also quite tasty.

James

[vlaiv]

1 minute ago, JamesF said:

They even (so I am led to believe) have a better design of eye than we do.  Unfortunately (for them) they're also quite tasty.

James

Would not we all want for chicken to have eight legs? I guess octopuses are next best thing

[saac]

52 minutes ago, andrew s said:

You could imagine stimulating an environment with no limitations of any of the requirements for life. Energy in a low entropy state, materials etc. and a set of  mutating reproducing organisms. They would just grow exponentially with no evolutionary pressure so predation would not have any obvious advantage.

Not very interesting, so say one or more constraints were added then a limit would be reached. However, now any organisms that evolved a way of extracting the limiting resources from another organisms would be at an advantage . Predation would be an advantage.

Regards Andrew 

I think the interesting point there Andrew is containment of the condition "no evolutionary pressure".  With evolution resulting from and then exploiting mistakes in the duplication process  I would argue that evolution is inevitable. Then follows predation which as you said would be an advantage.   It would be interesting to find out if there are any biomes where predation is not present; most likely extremophiles  I guess.

Jim