wilkins{at}wehi.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote in
news:bmp254$153c$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org: 

> William Morse  wrote:
 
>> wilkins{at}wehi.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote in
>> news:bm77kg$29rc$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org: 


>> >> Well, even in statistical mechanics that is the case (at least if
>> >> Tsallis is right about the proper equation for entropy). But I can
>> >> still make predictions based on the statistics, so even if the
>> >> actual cause is historical the net cause is teleological.
>>  
>> > Now that I have choked on "teleological" (are you reading my
>> > diatribe against teleology in That Other Group?), let me just note
>> > that fitness is also a statistical property, just like entropy. As
>> > to whether this is, as Darwin thought, following Laplace,
>> > randomness due to our ignorance or there is some contingent
>> > randomness in the physical properties of organisms, I leave to
>> > another, more philosophical, discussion.
>> 
>> I guess if I was willing to write "teleological"  as an
opposite of 
>> "historical" I deserve a response that refers to "contingent 
>> randomness" :-) 
> 
> Well there is deterministic randomness, non? Or else what is a
> gaussian distribution? The Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium is surely a
> deterministic random distribution.

I hate philosophers. They insist on asking questions that get me 
thinking, and it makes my head hurt. 


Let's suppose that I grant you that there is deterministic randomness. I 
will also grant that there is random determinism (I have to grant that, 
since I have argued that that is what entropy is about). That still 
doesn't mean I have to swallow "contingent randomness" without a fight. 
Contingent on what? If it is contingent on a factor which is predictable, 
then it is deterministic randomness. If it is contingent on a factor 
which is unpredictable, then it is random randomness. You could argue 
that it might be chaotic randomness, but then I will go back to using 
teleological as an opposite of historical:-)

More seriously, I do think that randomness is a "deep" property. 
Statistics overcomes it at the level of most of biology, so that most of 
what we ascribe to randomness in evolution is probably ignorance. But 
evolution almost has to be chaotic, since it involves a feedback loop, 
with the succesful phenotypes recreating the genotypes of the next 
generation, affected by the nonlinear results of drift and selection. And 
the sensitivity of chaotic systems means that randomness at even a small 
scale is important.

Yours,

Bill Morse
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