Darwin's Error #1 Digitization

The Origin of Species, or as I like to call it, the Digitization of Life presented a great model that got people thinking in the terms of how life advances. But to say Darwin had a complete theory is to say Newton, or even Einstein had the final revelation. It's nonsense to believe in the perfection of his theory. I call this the Digitization, because, much like digital technology does to analog signals, discrete points (mating) are treated as the entire signal, ignoring the necessary understanding that much of the information is lost between the points. In this perspective, all the intricacies of life are pinned down as something to improve chances of mating.

Now, it is a perfectly good model for items of such short lifespan (e.g. microscopic organisms) that it is beyond our comprehension to try to imagine the temporal space between generations. But as the lifespan of organisms gets larger and larger, biological evolutionary mechanisms get usurped by social evolution with its own unique set of rules. Biological evolution likes to sweep it under the rug by saying whatever happened to survive is the species that was more fit. The common explanation of social evolution is a simple process of males vying to "impress the female" and females vying to "choose the strongest male". The perspective treats life like it exists in a vacuum, where nothing important comes from the non-breeding parts of a species (after all, they just die out), and also there being no useful aspect to the species except for being the strongest one that breeds. In other words in the [common conception of the] Darwinist perspective, there is no room for empathy.  This falls to pieces if even one example of an evolutionary change can be found that was influenced by a non-breeding member of an animal society(yes, animals have society too I'm not talking social Darwinism for humans.. yet).

If one example of social learning could be observed in the animal kingdom, then it is proof enough that the non-breeding portions of a society are still an important part. Is it completely unreasonable to believe that one animal can learn what not to do from another that is so bad at living that one could only call it a "fool". Even if there was little to no genetic relation between these two animals one that is smart enough to see how not to act would go on to be considered more likely to breed. Would it be possible to imagine that without the foolish animal, the smarter one could make the same mistakes simply because of the lack of a bad example, thus becoming a non-breeding one himself. Oddly enough, he himself could even become the fool for a newer generation. There are a lot of hypotheticals here, but I feel its an important thought experiment.

Society is more of a constant amorphous system that species swim through as they breed. Back to the signal analogy,  societal interactions could be viewed as "high frequency" (in relation to the low sampling frequency of breeding cycles). When you look at a system using a sampling frequency that is too low, you lose ALL higher frequency information, and this is the esoteric beef I have with the current general understanding of evolution. In the world of cultural evolution, the lifespan of ideas, attitudes, ideals and actions can be much shorter or much longer than the lifespan if their biological carriers. Taking a perspective so limiting as treating a halfway point (or even quarter-way in the case of humans) in a life as the end goal is naive at best.

I suppose the end-goal of this is to relay the understanding that genes aren't everything, not even most of it all. To believe this is so is to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy where humans focus on an any-means necessary breed as much as possible attitude. They forget all of the aspects of life that brought them to that point, and don't care much about anything that happens after because they've achieved their goal. Alternatively, even if science cannot explain the deep complexity that happens in the myriad of different livelihoods does not mean it has to be squished out of perception so we can understand the "big picture"(albeit in a flawed manner).

*I think i must emphasize again, that these are not necessarily errors that Darwin himself made, but instead are errors that emerge when his theories are taken to the utmost intellectual extremes as complete.

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.