In this podcast Eric Anderson brings in a powerful concept, but he discusses it from an angle that seems unproductive to my tastes. His approach must be persuasive to some types of scientists, but it doesn’t hit the mark for my engineerish mindset.
The concept: When organisms change over time, they’re not Innovatively Disrupting. They’re seeking stasis. They’re changing to MAINTAIN THEIR OWN SPECIES AND CHARACTERISTICS in the face of externally imposed stresses.
This breaks the main Darwinian notion that gradual changes are “meant” to create new species. That’s not why we change. We change to maintain our own life and form.
Anderson’s concept is simply an extension of what living things do every second and minute of every day. NEGATIVE FEEDBACK. Also known as homeostasis in organic terms. Anderson extends feedback to the next generation.
Oddly, Anderson doesn’t mention feedback once, and doesn’t talk about loops. Instead he talks about three-dimensional function space, with ‘gravity wells’ that each species tries to stay in.
Many of the changes originally discussed by Darwin, like color and beak shape, are known to be epigenetic now. They were known to be epigenetic BEFORE Darwin. We’ve finally returned to the earlier idea after we spent 70 years avoiding it because it was “contaminated” by Evil Commie Lysenko.
We’re also seeing that between-generation feedback is controlled by the same nervous system that gives us the fast-scale negative feedback within one individual. Nematodes have a special organ that turns the epigenetic knobs in a developing egg to match the stress-induced changes needed for the next generation.
LIFE IS FEEDBACK.
Polistra's Mill 