Great Evolutionary Transitions

How should we interpret the Geological Record?

This lecture by Neil Shubin, at Berkley California, is mainly concerned with the key transitions in Devonian Period rock depositions, and thereby gives a clear, if overall, trajectory for the evolutionary line, which ultimately led to land animals from lobe-finned fishes.

Although this is a remarkable piece of work - based mainly upon found fossils, it was also supported by examples of currently-living animals in similar transitional states - BUT, of course, it could never reflect either the multiple causal impulses, or the actual varying tempos involved. You can't ever make a totally-revealing movie of reality out of such separated stills!

Indeed, as with all fossil-based scenarios, they can only mark-out individual snapshots along the actually-travelled road from those overall, past trajectories of change, without in any way identifying which caused what, and how it did it. And, consequently, the actual causes and consequent dynamics of actual Evolution, with their necessary alternating interludes of Holistic Balanced Stabilities, and crisis-precipitated Revolutions of dramatic qualitative changes, can never be causally explained with the fossil record as the sole evidence.

The Great Transitions in Evolution by Neil Shubin

For, of course, there still had to be all the usual disadvantages of such evidence, which is reflected in most Science concerned with Development. Limited snapshots are all we have of what in actuality was a dynamic and tumultuous series of multiple qualitative transformations, NONE of which could ever be fully reflected in the data.

NOTE:

Now, elsewhere, this researcher had to design a motion analysis system based upon recorded footage of professional dance performance, which the experienced and expert teacher was attempting to communicate to advanced students. She found the task to be impossible due to the weaknesses of moving film [remember each new still is delivered every 1/25th of a second, and remains there, totally-unchanging for the that duration]. Using analogue video footage instead, she was also stymied by the way a butchered mini-movie was squashed into each individual frame of a video recording (via interlacing) of the very same dance sequence.

Clearly, as with the fossil record in the rocks, it is both a built-in track of the prior history of such a movement, along with, a similar track of its subsequent future developments would also be necessary. But because evidence from every moment within the frame-time, and from all positions within the frame's-extent were available, the video footage had much more of the movement's dynamic quality than the film. Yet every part of the frame was unavoidably blurred!

So, in order to effectively use both versions, they would have to be superimposed, in such a way as to very clearly deliver the best of both: and in achieving this for dance, with overlaid history and future both-building-and-fading animations of positions on top of the video, the correct interpretation of the studied movements was successfully achieved!

Andy Denzler's video glitch paintings

However a similar temporal solution is not possible in Geology, as no alternative dynamical record can possibly be available to correct the sequences of stills in the fossil record alone.

The crucial causes for such changes are never evident, and the easiest interpretations are always both distortingly simplifying and invariably erroneous.

What else could it possibly be, when unavoidably-interpreted by the actual still-sequemces of the always inadequate historical development of the Understanding by Mankind over several millennia? It is not only the nature of the evidence but, crucially, also the historical inadequacies of Human thinking throughout that period too.

And, that approach was consequentially determined by the unavoidable, natural inadequacies in the Philosophy of Mankind, which was never a given of their own evolution.

Man has had to slowly develop that Philosophy, via a series of more or less inadequate stages, as his wider and deeper experiences gradually delivered the wherewithal to achieve a series of improvements within it.

Now, of course, Science has been a primary contributor to that development, but it can still, at best, only reflect the limitations of its own revealed content.

And, most significant of all, the most hidden, yet vital, episodes in all development occur at such tempos that they are too slow to be physically experienced, yet too fast to be available in the fossil evidence, always reflecting truly vast intervals of time, via quite meagre depositions, while always being a very tiny proportion of what actually existed then, and which, by chance, is still available now.

There is always a parallel consideration to be made, along with the gathered evidence, which is the current state of Human Understanding generally - indeed the philosophical level of development of the human interpreters.

And, ever since the first significant intellectual stirrings, with the Ancient Greeks, the major-and-damning omissions have always been to do with the Dynamics of Qualitative Change. The universally-applied Principle of Plurality, derived from early Mathematics, was also wrongly-applied to both Formal Reasoning and then later to Science. But, Plurality sees Reality as-only-changing-incrementally - that is quantitatively, and sees this as being due to eternal and unchanging laws.

It wasn't until Hegel, only a mere 200 years ago, that Qualitative Change was considered to occur in Human Thinking, and led to his important developments within Reasoning, which he termed Dialectics. And, though Karl Marx realised that Hegel's discoveries were relevant in concrete Reality too, and saw their application to the Sciences as absolutely vital - that, in fact, did not happen, and has only begun to be applied in the last decade, by as yet only a meagre few investigators. 

And Shubin is not yet among them!

But, such a long delay was, indeed, unavoidable, as the pluralist inadequacies, of the then current thinking, turned those studies, first, into various "Supposedly Different Subjects", and, thereafter, even within those "Subjects" into descrete "Specialisms". So, the wherewithal to address those difficulties were generally once again unavailable to allow such necessary developments.

Interestingly, this professional physicist, looking for a way out of the current Crisis in Physics, was getting nowhere, until he was involved in the above research to wed Multimedia to the teaching of Dance Performance and Choreography.

Believe it or not, in solving this problem, I had to deviate, for some time, into an absolutely crucial detour into Philosophy (which, fortunately, solved my impasse in Physics too!)

The same problems will certainly also be true, for the very able Palaeontologists involved in the Evolutionary Transition studies referred to above.

For, what was finally revealed in all major Qualitative Changes, by the studies in creative Dance Movements, was a remarkably dramatic and tumultuous series of stages, always commencing with Crises within what had been a "Persisting Stability", which increased in intensity, until that Stability totally collapsed, and was followed by a new, this time wholly constructive interlude, which, via many temporary constructional crises, finally coalesced, into a new persisting Stability. And, as you might have guessed, reactive, expressive movement delivers the epitome of such changeovers, within its transitions, when they are effectively revealed!

The necessary context for the dynamism delivered by the analogue video frames, was supplied by the possibility of extracting precise positions from the digital stills. And then, by a subsequent superimposition of animated-sequence overlays of positions upon the moving video, which delivered precisely what was required, under immaculate Access-and-Control facilities. In effect, these additions extended every moment into a necessarily dynamic duration, providing both glimpses of its immediate history, and subsequent future, to provide what the two kinds of recordings alone could never do.

And, capturing different views, simultaneously, in the same way, and delivering them in synchrony with the front view, when directed by an expert teacher, seemed to deliver the best possible recorded solution.

So the problem for our geologists, is to fit their exemplars into such a trajectory, OR, much more likely into a series of such trajectories. While, of course, remembering that all the many failures in such processes are unlikely to have left the slightest trace.

Now, with my essential detour into analysis of dance movement, before being able to return to the problems in Physics, and Hegel's similar researches in Thinking, to unearth the need to also abandon Plurality in Formal Reasoning - it similarly involved a major investigation into revolutionary changes in History, for Marx to be in a position to analyse the current Capitalist Economics to envisage revolutionary changes there too.

So, for the Palaeontologists to correctly interpret the fossil record, they too will have to, in addition, study Qualitative Changes elsewhere, which occur at a tempo that will allow general valid conclusions to be drawn! For example, it will require a study of current living animals, to import a dialectical understanding to the series of stills that constitutes the fossil record.

An earlier version of this article was published in Special Issue 66 of the SHAPE Journal.

A Dialectics of Climate Change?

Dialectical Materialism is the only methodology capable of grappling system-wide qualitative change.

Multi-Factor Cyclic Systems

and their Forms of Stability & Change

The current crucial climate debate surrounding what was always called, until recently, "Global Warming", is complicated by the multi-cycle nature of our world's weather systems, as they are affected both externally, primarily by the Sun, and internally by the composition and movements of Earth's atmosphere. 

This too is modified both from within as well as from the outside, influenced by both natural and Man-Made systems, and occurring usually at tempos so very different, at least initially, to the actual life-spans of individual human beings, BUT nevertheless entirely capable of succumbing to cataclysmic overall, planet-wide transformations - though more often only suffering from recoverable Crisis Interludes.

Such complications are then used to demote all such negative interludes as being solely due to quite normal oscillations to-and-fro of any complex, multi-part varying system - but one which, nevertheless, self-corrects to a "normal-settled-stability" - and is consequently "Nothing to worry about".

And such a conclusion is the only possible one, if and only if, the usually assumed Principle of Plurality, is true: for it allows ONLY Fixed Laws, and Stability as its inevitable outcomes in almost every varying Interlude.

So, the problem is, that without the appropriate philosophic stance, for a real changing and developing Reality, it will always be impossible to know where the situation actually is dynamically, and whether the current crisis is temporary or terminal!

The problem is, of course, dialectical, involving the unavoidable causal interactions of multiple simultaneous factors, which can, and indeed do, wholly dissociate in what is termed an Emergence or Revolution, of what appeared to be a wholly stable, even permanent situation.

The best Mankind will ever be able to do in such situations, is monitor those crises, both as they occur now, and as they have in the past, as ultimately providing sufficient evidence of some interpretable forms, as are generally left behind in the resultant surfaces of the ground, which are later turned into permanent records, sometimes revealed, but also ever more often fairly deeply buried beneath our feet.

Geologist researching past cataclysms in Greenland

Clearly, Philosophy, is NOT as the idealists see it - merely the Discipline of Human Thought - but, on the contrary, it is the Discipline for our Understanding of Everything, including Material Reality, and its indisputable ongoing Development.

But, crucially, the long established stance, in both all the Sciences, and in most Reasoning, has, for millennia, been what we call Plurality, which can only ever deal with a trajectory of merely Quantitative Change, whereas, for example, the whole clearly evident Emergence of Life, from NON-Living Matter, simply must totally refute such a simplifying stance, as being wholly inappropriate - for actual Qualitative Changes would MOST certainly have occurred, in such dramatic developments, which would have to physically and chemically explain such Qualitative Changes - always totally impossible via Plurality.

Indeed, though the development of the very first Intellectual Discipline - Mathematics, was made possible only via the invented special relational-premises of the Greeks, they were Totally Pluralist, and could never be the basis of any other Intellectual Disciplines, which just have to handle Qualitative Changes causally, rather than merely descriptively, and after the fact, so enabling at least the overall trajectories of such changes to be made sense of.

But, as distinct from damaging total calamities, the vast majority of natural situations are NOT straightforward avalanches of Change, but always involve whole sets of multiple simultaneous and interacting processes - usually significantly always involving whole sequences of differing Cycles, though, at the same time, of similar Qualitative Changes, resulting in very unusual trajectories involving both long-lasting interludes of "Balanced Stabilities", which were preceded in their final formation, by a series of multiple Crises, and always, at some terminating stage, are totally dismantled in a general, everything-involved dissolution, which then rather quickly builds a wholly new Balanced Stability upon the changed products and properties of that Dissolution.

Emergence theory is an extension of Dialectical Materialism by this author (Jim Schofield)

Now, the Earth, as an affected body within the Solar System is NOT as Newton might have believed, majorly determined by Geometry and Gravitation, but also subject to other influences and past collisions, to maybe cause its Spin, its axis Tilt, and its capture of a Moon, plus an evidently constant Solar Wind of energetic Charged Particles from the sun, and whatever caused it to develop an internal Magnetism and extensive Magnetic Field.

And, just to concentrate upon its Global Atmosphere, with constant angular momentum throughout, but with different radii beteen the Equator and areas closer to the Poles, the surface will be moving at very different speeds an affecting the local atmospheres differently.

While the different angles of the Sun's rays onto its curved surface as well as the Day/Night on/off nature of that Radiation will all affect various areas of the Atmosphere differently too!

Finally the Earth's Orbit around the Sun is elliptical rather than circular so there will be Yearly variations in the radiation reaching earth at different times and places.

Indeed, all of these will be modified by the Earth's Spin, there will be multiple cycles, all of them constantly repeated but at different rates and different amounts of external heating from the Sun!

And the Question must arise, "Why is the Weather usually so ordered, within a season, and what might both make this happen, and, alternatively sometimes appear to approach chaos?"

Physics and Philosophy

The closing of Middlesex University Philosophy Department

Are both disciplines really about the Nature of Reality?

What do Philosophy Departments in our Universities do?

I am a physicist, and in my experience, Physics Departments (worth their salt, anyway) do Physics! They do experiments.

So, what happens in Philosophy? Is it like the Art Department in my own (undergraduate) University, which didn’t actually do any Art, but just talked about it? Indeed, I, as a physicist, ended up as the secretary of the Art Society in the University for two years.

Do the members of staff in Philosophy actually practice Philosophy? I ask this question because as a physicist today I simply cannot avoid Philosophy – and, I don’t mean the Philosophy of Science, for such restrictions merely end up being about the History of Mankind in Science, and not about the Understanding of Reality. Surely, Science and Philosophy should be very close bedfellows and work together on this same crucial task?

But, I have also observed that very few of the “doing” physicists have any real idea of their own philosophic stance and underlying assumptions. Yet, after generations of scientists being confirmed materialists (as a matter of course), they, as a body, in the latter part of the 19th century, found that the ground beneath their feet was beginning to shake, and deliver ever more damaging tremors, which threatened the very fabric of their once rock-steady stance. The discovery of the Quantum opened up the biggest ever can of worms. Indeed, great fissures opened up, and something had to be done!

The result, finally consummated in 1927 at the Solvay Conference, was a total abandonment of their prior Mechanical Materialism, but what replaced it was even worse.

In Sub Atomic Physics a totally idealist standpoint, with “materialist” experiments was adopted. Instead of the search for physical causes, the whole approach was re-orientated to merely seek Form in experimental results as sufficient in itself. Causes were either unknown or unknowable, but here in our hands were the useable results. We would not only abandon the next question, namely “Why?”, but we would seek our patterns as themselves being the causes of phenomena. The equations produced were conceived of as the Natural Laws of Reality.

The inference was clear: the found equations were the driving imperatives of Nature – they actually caused observed phenomena.

Let us reiterate that stance!

The purely formal relations (abstracted from Reality most certainly, but there had been simplified and idealised from purposely farmed experimental situations) were turned into being the sole drivers of Reality.

Science had become a branch of Mathematics (and could be researched mainly on a blackboard with chalk). It had been changed into an idealist discipline.

Of course, a fig leaf of “explanation” was vigorously defended, but it certainly was not an attempt at real explanation in terms of physical substances and their properties. It had been removed into the Parallel World of Pure Form alone, which I call Ideality, and as such was doomed

Of course, there had been a great deal wrong with the prior scientific standpoint. It has for centuries been a dualist compromise between an idealist belief in form, and a materialist search for causal explanations, that somehow remained together as a workable compromise. The equations were so useful, you see: they had to be an objective in any research!

And, along with this illegitimate compromise, the materialist stance was indeed entirely mechanist: it did not address reality's development at all.

The odd genius, such as Darwin, though transcending that stance, did not, and at that stage could not, change the basic standpoint one iota. The basic sciences were about eternal Natural Laws, as encapsulated in formal equations.

You could not THEN challenge that belief!

The vast majority of physicists really did believe that everything in the Universe could be directly explained in terms of a straight-through series of causes, right back to fundamental particles, and also that these were accurately described by the formal equations – the Natural Eternal Laws. You can see the amalgam. It wasn’t easy to demolish by individual gains in isolated areas. It was the generally agreed ground!

Thus, though many linking gaps were evident, they would ultimately be closed, resulting in everything being derived ultimately from the Primary Science that was Physics. And, increasingly within that subject the nitty gritty would then have to be the Study of Fundamental Particles.

Of course, such a stance did not represent the real situation. Indeed, it was miles away from a comprehensive position, but it had been productive at all levels for centuries, and would not be renounced with the occurrence of as yet unexplained anomalies.

Until undeniably demolished, most scientists would stick to Reductionism – the concept that eternal Natural Laws at the bottommost layer of Reality generated absolutely everything else above it – all the way to Life, Consciousness and Society. And in such a context, the various different subjects be they Chemistry, Biology and even Psychology were then only forced sub divisions of a single structure, as would be proved as the missing links were found one by one.

But, of course, that assumption is incorrect!

The divisions into different sciences are not down to mere human categorisation. They are, in fact, reflective of wholly different Levels of Reality, which when they first happened resulted in new worlds with their own relationships, that did not exist prior to that Event.

NOTE: The inability of scientists to discover the Origin of Life proves this conclusively: it isn’t a mere complication of existing laws from a lower Level, but the product of a seismic Revolution.

And, the reason that one can be so adamant about this is that the prevailing stance ignores Development almost entirely, and simply believes it is merely complication.

Indeed, this criticism is proved by the predominance of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in the views of present day Physicists. For such a Meta law is ONLY about dissolution, and says absolutely nothing about what created the evident structures in an indisputable prior Development. Puny efforts have been made to ally the Second Law with Randomness and Chance, in which that crucial progress in the history of Reality is put down to the roles of these random contributions, but the evident ineffectiveness of such efforts prove that they are mere constructs and reflect nothing of the real Development that has occurred at all!

The problem is, and always was, the shortness of the life spans of individual human beings. No individual could actually observe big developments in reality, and indeed, for millennia, Humanity has considered reality as a fixed thing – an achievement and then a maintenance of a natural stability in all things.

Now, stability, as commonly observed, appeared to be the normal state of Reality, and all change, if there was any at all, was tiny and incremental – occasionally passing some formal quantitative threshold, and thereafter slipping things over into a more conducive and maintainable alternative stability. It was an understandable mistake, but incorrect due to lack of evidence.

The first cracks appeared, centuries ago, in the studies of geologists, who revealed a changing world clearly recorded in the rocks beneath our feet.

But, this development was incredibly long winded – even thousands of years were insufficient to reveal changes, and significant transformative changes were much rarer – usually only apparent over millions of years. And, as the science developed, what it revealed not only included vast changes in the material forms of continents and even the oceans, but also revealed an indisputable evolution of Life itself, AND even the actual time of Life’s Origin on earth.

Yet this subject, Geology, was regarded as merely a “secondary discipline”: its conclusions were majorly distorted by the fact that Geology was a limited discipline, where investigative experiments were impossible, so clearly, the testable and superior discipline of Physics, which could explain things from bottom to top, was still unchallenged as the product of everything there is.

And sadly, even Geology was mute when it came to the clearly evident step-changes in the record of the rocks.

For such a record, very slowly built up over tens and even hundreds of millions of years, could only clearly deliver established stable levels gradually laid down over colossal periods of time, and the crucial dramatic changes would be located in time, but totally absent as an investigatable record. The essential interludes of major and often qualitative changes were simply unrecorded: all that could be clearly seen would be an impenetrable step-change.

These crucial interludes were invariably of relatively short duration. Indeed, the first indications that such transforming interludes actually occurred were found in the recorded histories and the archaeological revelations of earlier Human Societies. For there, without any doubt, such transforming interludes definitely occurred.

Even in the found remains of earlier human beings, there were clear examples of indisputable evidence of what was then described as the Neolithic Revolution. And, this occurred at a time when the only tools available were knapped fragments of flint, plus a few shaped softer materials such as wood and horn.

Yet in this remarkable interlude, Mankind invented animal husbandry, farming, pottery, weaving and many other new techniques. It was no, slow, incremental set of changes, but just such a relatively short-length Revolution.

Also, from the opposite end of Mankind’s studies, in Social History, came the concepts of Stability and Revolution – an oscillation between long periods of slow, incremental quantitative changes, and short interludes of major, qualitatively transforming changes.

Could this be the natural pattern of all developments at all levels?

Slowly, evidence began to accumulate that this was indeed the case... But, did it change the stance of our physicists? No! They actually admitted that switches occurred in the development of Reality, but also insisted that all of these would ultimately be totally explicable in the usual mechanical materialist ways. No change was necessary in their philosophic stance.

Clearly, following this blinkering, a crisis was unavoidably looming, and it would be a biggy! Indeed, there was a Revolution in the offing. Then finally, that time arrived - the avalanche of contradictions multiplied all the time, and a transcending of the causes (long overdue) became imperative. These head-down scientists were extremely unlikely to allow any generalist, head-up conceptions (by uninformed dreamers) to deflect them from their “holy” path.

The intervention just had to come from without!

It had happened in 19th century politics with the intervention of Karl Marx (a philosopher) into areas such as Social History and Economics, but the necessary intervention in Science was never carried through. Yet, Marx was initially only an academic philosopher – a follower of the idealist giant Hegel, yet his intervention transformed politics.

The question therefore posed at the outset of this paper can now be restated:- “Do academic philosophers DO philosophy?”

What is their position on the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory, and the consequent switch among scientists to Reality itself, being determined by Formal Relations, as embodied in Equations?

Something MUST be going on, which simply must be in the remit of practising philosophers. For in my developmental studies, contributions by the philosopher Salmon enabled me to see the role of the Principle of Plurality in science. Yet, no moves are then made by today’s philosophers to address this flawed principle, as Hegel would most certainly have done 200 years ago!

The question has to be, “Why?”

Now, if, as seems to be the case, what is studied (and explained?) is merely the History of Philosophy, cannot the trajectory towards Truth be discerned in that, as it was in History by the philosopher Marx?

Issue 38 of Shape: Ideas on the Origin of Life

Read the issue

This latest edition started as a reaction to an article in New Scientist (3008) on Eukaryotic and Prokaryotic cells in the development of life, but soon drew in the prior work by this theorist on the Origin of Life itself.

It was worth stressing that either working downwards from living entities, or working upwards from non-living entities, would both fail to explain this crucial event, which rather than being a mere incremental development in the evolution of matter, was certainly a kind of revolution, and must have occurred in what we now term an Emergent Event. Thus this collection of papers became a kind of review of the ideas vital to a solution to the most important problem in Science: why does life exist at all?

Ecce Habilis

Ecce Habilis by Jim Schofield