Sunday, June 15, 2008

The Universe On Evolution

The subject of this article is one of the most (and confusingly) contested ideas in our time: Evolution. I will try to limit wasted time defending against ill informed arguments against it, but I will review it in a way that anyone should be able to understand.

Lets step away from the word evolution and go back to the basics of it in the contexts of biology. All there have to be are way of causing differences in an organism genetically, in this case: mutation. It is understandable that most changes in an organism will change its ability to survive in a negative or positive way. The tiger with short stubby teeth will not be able to kill its prey as easily, and most likely wont survive as well. This tiger may survive to produce offspring, but all of its offspring will also have defect teeth, many of them will not survive as well as the rest of the tigers. In the world with the stubbed teeth tigers and the normal tigers, the normal ones will survive and the stubbed tigers will either die out, or become so rare that they are insignificant. Of course this is only after 10 20 or even 100 generations, but it happens and it is inevitable. This exact thing is going on for every animal and every aspect of those animals(color, bone structure, organ efficiency, etc.) It is only difficult to comprehend because it works on such a different time-scale than humans normally view the world with. Our lifespan is so short in this time scale that it takes a number of our human generations to perceive a significant change in a species.

Lets take it yet another step back. More important than there being differences in reproductive success, is simply the ability to reproduce. When something has the ability to reproduce, it will do so. And assuming there are more than 1 reproducing object as well, the one that reproduces faster(and/or survives longer) will be more prominent than the others.
Now evolution is not my forte, and explaining it isn't either. A good book for those interested is The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. It takes my understanding of it to a whole new level in a clear and well explained manner.

But, this is not about biology and the evolution of life. This is about the evolution of anything that can evolve. Biology is simply the first object which evolution was first applied to. Attempting to understand the evolution of lifeforms is a glossed over version that tends to hide many key details about the general term: evolution. At this point most would not see why understanding evolution is key to understanding our universe. Evolution is a subset of generalized change in the universe. The difference is that Evolution has a direction of rewarding that which is strongest in its environment. However, most only apply the term evolution to the strife of animals. I on the other hand attribute evolution to any entity that has the ability to change itself in any way. This opens up the ideas to any entity that has a limited resource of some kind. I attribute evolution to every scale of time and space where there are a few particular properties. It requires that there is any possibility of change, any form of production(reproduction is a special case) which can be effected by these changes, and finally any limited resource. I say reproduction is a special case, but this does not limit its importance. When reproduction comes about, it effectively transfers an object into a much quicker timescale. It is no longer a random production of a type of sand, but it is a collection of chemicals that can reproduce themselves at relative light-speed.

But the DNA-protein complex is a snails pace when you consider the speed of the relatively young brain. The brain creates and destroys more ideas in its lifetime than is possible to count. All is done through the process of evolution. The unique properties of the brain harness the universal concept of hierarchies and because of this, can model itself after the universe itself. In this sense the brain is nearly as complex as the universe, and can truly conceptualize most anything in it, assuming the correct time/space - scale is used.