Perspectives on Evolution

[bennyboy]

What do you think there is when there is a population of creatures sharing sufficient genetic similarity such that they can interbreed and exchange genes amongst themselves, but not breed with those from outside the population, thus confining the interbreeding into discrete pools?

Each individual isn't sharing its genetic information with all the others. It's not actually a communal property.

If we do devolve into divergent species, would would happen to our reproductive compatibility? I'd imagine that it would be something like bloodtype-- certain subsets of the species could interbreed with other certain subsets, and eventually those subsets if they continued to diverge would end up with breeding exclusion.

---

If the bucket pool was an indeterminate number of individual bodies of water, yes, I'd say it wasn't a thing.  But it's not.  That's an actually single collection of water molecules, not a conceptual one. 

If I told you my bucket pool was the contents of two buckets, is it suddenly not a thing.  Does the water disappear or something..when there's more than one bucket?  

If there were an indeterminate number of buckets, and their contents were not known, then we'd have a problem defining what it means to be one of your buckets, perhaps.

 
So, if i added specificity..like..the gene pool of species x, or of subspecies y, or of all species.........and then I started adding species z...or subtracting some........

I'm not sure how to respond to this. How do you add a gene pool? You don't have access to the genetic information of the entire group, only a select number of individual members.

[I_am_not_mafia]

You're all trying to lift Bennyboy out of the rabbit hole he's fallen into and that's all very admirable and whatever. I on the other hand am going to kick him further down it because I feel like it.

There is a school of thought (autopoeisis)  when reasoning about agents that the distinction between where the agent begins and end and its environment is actually quite arbitrary. You can't exist without being in an environment. You sense your environment, you process information and act within an environment, which further changes what you sense. You are part of the environment, along with everyone else who makes up part of your environment. You can't live without your gut bacteria for example and this population inside of you changes over time based on what you eat from your environment.

From the perspective of self organising systems, each system is one of many all of which are part of a larger self organising system. Whether its neurons in your brain, fellow members of your own species, part of an ecosystem or economic system, one planet in a solar system, galaxy, super-cluster etc.

The point I am making is that the labels are more useful than anything else. We can just as much refer to a gene pool as we can what is or isn't part of human.

[bennyboy]

That's right. You can see people as agents struggling to reproduce, or you can see both the DNA and a person's actions as an expression of a chain of events across a billion years of organic interactions with the environment-- a kind of environmental time machine in a sense, with the human agent being something like a Skinnerian black box: for all our drama and our narratives, we are actually just a gazillion interactions over those billion years being weighed all the time.

I wonder what the ultimate output of evolution might be, in say another 10 billions years. Will life end up doing battle with entropy, creating a kind of homeostatic mechanism which fights off heat death itself?

/free association caused by rabbit-hole

[Sal]

I wonder what the ultimate output of evolution might be, in say another 10 billions years.  Will life end up doing battle with entropy, creating a kind of homeostatic mechanism which fights off heat death itself?

There are a few possible scenarios based on the structure of the Universe which has been brought up elsewhere.

Entropy seems like an inescapable arrangement of how everything goes towards less organization (order) and more chaos (disorder). Eventually, all the stars will have used up their fusion "fuel" and become either black holes, neutron stars, or dense masses of iron with a thin layer of hydrogen or whatever arrangement based on their mass and slowly cool down while the black holes evaporate extremely slowly via Hawking radiation, and the life-giving light will fade away into disparate particles, never interacting with anything as the stars are pulled apart by "dark energy", whatever that is.

I don't think life on this planet will be around long enough to create a sort of intergalactic civilization(s).

[bennyboy]

I don't think life on this planet will be around long enough to create a sort of intergalactic civilization(s).

I'm thinking more of an intergalactic race of super technological beings, which in 10 billion years will have evolved all over almost every galaxy in the universe.

I'm also thinking "42" for some reason. Not sure what that's about, though.

[ignoramus]

10 billion years?


We can't get that coal in the atmosphere quick enough! Too many orders for Hyundais, iphones and fidget spinners, sorry.
Fuck, I'll be happy if we survive the next hundred years!

[Gawdzilla Sama]

That's right.  You can see people as agents struggling to reproduce, or you can see both the DNA and a person's actions as an expression of a chain of events across a billion years of organic interactions with the environment-- a kind of environmental time machine in a sense, with the human agent being something like a Skinnerian black box: for all our drama and our narratives, we are actually just a gazillion interactions over those billion years being weighed all the time.

I wonder what the ultimate output of evolution might be, in say another 10 billions years.  Will life end up doing battle with entropy, creating a kind of homeostatic mechanism which fights off heat death itself?

/free association caused by rabbit-hole

Maybe, but evolution doesn't have a goal, so that would be pure happenstance.

[Anomalocaris]

What do you think there is when there is a population of creatures sharing sufficient genetic similarity such that they can interbreed and exchange genes amongst themselves, but not breed with those from outside the population, thus confining the interbreeding into discrete pools?

Each individual isn't sharing its genetic information with all the others.  It's not actually a communal property.

Of course we are.  That’s why we screw.  The more we screw around, the more broadly we share our genetic information.

To say we are not sharing genetic information with all the others is like saying when first adding a dye to a pool of water, the dye does not mix evenly with all parts of the pool.   Eventually the dye, if it does not have a chemical shelf life, will.   So the genetic material you share with your Partner will become part of your offspring, who will then share them with others.  Your genetic material, assuming it doesn’t have a equivalent of shelf life in the form of conferring reproductive handicap, will eventually mix thoroughly, but dilutely, like the dye into the entire gene pool.

If we do devolve into divergent species, would would happen to our reproductive compatibility?  I'd imagine that it would be something like bloodtype-- certain subsets of the species could interbreed with other certain subsets, and eventually those subsets if they continued to diverge would end up with breeding

The definition of divergent species is reproductive incompatibility.  So when species diverge, the stop being able to carry on sharing genes.  

It won’t be an abrupt cutoff.   Instead some limitations on reproductive compatibility first arise, and then these limitations become severe, until eventually it either becomes impossible for members of the two population to share genes through sexual reproduction at all, or the offspring carrying the shared genes are all infertile and the shared genes resulting from the interbreeding can not further mix back into each population.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

We've seen human-guided evolution in action already. Chihuahuas can't reproduce with Great Pyrenees any more than you can cross a Smart car with an Mack truck. Humans did that.

[Anomalocaris]

I wonder what the ultimate output of evolution might be, in say another 10 billions years.  Will life end up doing battle with entropy, creating a kind of homeostatic mechanism which fights off heat death itself?

/free association caused by rabbit-hole

Heat death of the universe will not occur in just 10 billion years.   It will be many orders of magnitude more than that.

Even the last of the stars currently shinning in our sky and possess planets similar to our own will not wink out for approximately 10 trillion years.     As a matter of fact, these dim but extremely long lived stars are vastly more numerous than brighter but much shorter lived stars more similar to our sun.   It is quite possible that 99% of all planets in the universe orbit these dim red dwarves rather than sun like stars.

If we could manage to transplant ourselves to planets around one those red dwarf stars the we in theory can live there for 1000 times longer than the remaining life of our own sun.