Evolution is like an operational amplifier
As promised, one of my random muses.
I find evolution a fascinating subject. What drives it, why things end up the way they do, why we have species and so on. The nice thing about this is that no one really has much of a clue as to what's really going on, so that means that my guesses are as good as anyone else's.
An evolutionary theory that I have thought up is that the observed rate of evolution is an artefact of the effect of negative feed back on a much, much, higher rate of change.
There is undoubtedly a negative feed back in operation in evolution. The fact that those less fit than others are less likely to breed is tantamount to that. If say X represents the collection of inheritable characteristics (IC), which includes the genome but also includes other parent to offspring information transfers. And say an offspring's IC = X + dx, where dx is some change on X. Then if X is the best fit for an environment, those offspring with a minimal dx will outperform those with a higher dx.
Now generation 2 will therefore be X + dx + dx2 and the closer | dx + dx2 | is to 0, the fitter a G2 offspring will be to the ideal X. Hence there is a continuous pressure to return the IC to X. This is exactly what happens in a negative feedback system, where perturbation form some ideal are feed back into the system to restore it back to the ideal.
However, because there are many factors that affect survivability, there is no one ideal state, these states can be thought of as peaks of a mountain range. Each peak represents the best local ideal for a particular combination of feedback paths. Each peak can be thought of as a different species. Also, because of the competition from other species and environmental changes, these ideal states are continuously changing. Just as mountains raise and fall in response to the effects of continental drift and erosion.
One type of feedback system that I studied while at university is one that is based on the operation amplifier. In such a system an amplifier with huge and unstable gain can be modified by the addition of feedback that massively improves its stability, but also at the expense of drastically reducing its gain.
My inspiration has been to make the evolutionary driving process analogous to the amplifier, and the losses due to competitive pressure and the environment analogues to the feedback circuitry. As I will go on to discuss in later blogs, this approach explains all sorts of contradictory observations on the rate speciation and the differences in species diversity between different environments.
I find evolution a fascinating subject. What drives it, why things end up the way they do, why we have species and so on. The nice thing about this is that no one really has much of a clue as to what's really going on, so that means that my guesses are as good as anyone else's.
An evolutionary theory that I have thought up is that the observed rate of evolution is an artefact of the effect of negative feed back on a much, much, higher rate of change.
There is undoubtedly a negative feed back in operation in evolution. The fact that those less fit than others are less likely to breed is tantamount to that. If say X represents the collection of inheritable characteristics (IC), which includes the genome but also includes other parent to offspring information transfers. And say an offspring's IC = X + dx, where dx is some change on X. Then if X is the best fit for an environment, those offspring with a minimal dx will outperform those with a higher dx.
Now generation 2 will therefore be X + dx + dx2 and the closer | dx + dx2 | is to 0, the fitter a G2 offspring will be to the ideal X. Hence there is a continuous pressure to return the IC to X. This is exactly what happens in a negative feedback system, where perturbation form some ideal are feed back into the system to restore it back to the ideal.
However, because there are many factors that affect survivability, there is no one ideal state, these states can be thought of as peaks of a mountain range. Each peak represents the best local ideal for a particular combination of feedback paths. Each peak can be thought of as a different species. Also, because of the competition from other species and environmental changes, these ideal states are continuously changing. Just as mountains raise and fall in response to the effects of continental drift and erosion.
One type of feedback system that I studied while at university is one that is based on the operation amplifier. In such a system an amplifier with huge and unstable gain can be modified by the addition of feedback that massively improves its stability, but also at the expense of drastically reducing its gain.
My inspiration has been to make the evolutionary driving process analogous to the amplifier, and the losses due to competitive pressure and the environment analogues to the feedback circuitry. As I will go on to discuss in later blogs, this approach explains all sorts of contradictory observations on the rate speciation and the differences in species diversity between different environments.
posted by Snow Jester at 7:21 pm
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