Guy Hoelzer  wrote or quoted:
> in article cks1r6$feq$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org, Tim Tyler at tim{at}tt1lock.org

> > If a biologically-based entropic maximand is proposed, I therefore
> > think that it can't simply stress short term measurements of entropy
> > increase - instead, it must consider long-term effects.
> 
> I'm not sure how to formalize this conjecture, but I agree that strategies
> promoting persistence in the long term may also be favored
> thermodynamically.  However, I am not sure how to distinguish between
> forward-looking thermodynamics and forward-looking by emerged systems.  For
> example, I don't know of any thermodynamic reason that natural selection
> can't engineer organisms or species to behave strategically so as to
> increase their chances of survival or reproduction in the long-term.
> Natural selection, and other processes underpinned by thermodynamics (all
> processes under my view) are free to elaborate on the constraints of
> thermodynamics, including the evolution of long-term strategies.  On the
> other hand, it seems too thermodynamically convenient to me that protecting
> the persistence of dissipative systems would tend to increase the rate of
> entropy gain in the universe in the future as a mere side effect.
> 
> I don't know of any proposed connection between thermodynamics and the
> existence of time, which would be directly relevant to this issue.  Do you?

Alas, I have to back out of this one with "I don't understand the
question".

> > This is directly analogous to the situation with maximising genetic
> > descendants:
> > 
> > Genes should be expected to maximise the number of their long-term
> > descendants - rather than the number of their immediate offspring.
> 
> And this is something that, IMHO, they do.  Do you agree? [...]

Yes.

Caveat 1: they might find local (not global) maxima;

Caveat 2: they might fail to ascend these maxima - due to mutation load;

Note 1: maximising the number of long-term descendants is often rather
a lot like maximising the number of their immediate offspring - especially
in one common case - where there's no parental care.
-- 
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 |im |yler  http://timtyler.org/  tim{at}tt1lock.org  Remove lock to reply.
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