Space, Time, and Life : the Probabilistic Pathways of Evolution
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
SPACE, TIME, AND LIFE THE PROBABILISTIC PATHWAYS OF EVOLUTION V. V. NALIMOV Edited by ROBERTG. COLODNY Translated by A. V. YARKHO Published by 'A Subsidiary of the flSfl PREBB lnrritute for Scientifc Information" 3501 Market Street. Philadelphia. PA 19104 USA. 0 1985 IS1 Press Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Nalimov, V. V. (Vasilil Vasil'evich), 191& Space, time, and life. Translated from the Russian. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Biology-Philosophy. 2. Evolution-Philosophy. 3. Biornathematics. 4. Probabilities. I. Colodny. Robert Garland. 11. Title. QH331.N35 1985 57S.001'5192 85.18134 ISBN 0-89495-048-7 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photographic, or magnetic, without prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America 92 91 90 89 88 87 86 85 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Foreword ....... ...... ...... ...... ..... ...... ... ..,.......... ...... ...... ...... ...... ...... ...... vii .. Prefac Xlll Acknolwedgments xvii CHAPTER 1 Number as Symbol ........................... .. ........................................... World as a Text Structured by Rhythm Numerical Vision of the World as Expressed by Ancient Thinkers ... CHAPTER 2 Number as an Organizing Principle of the World Number as an Organiring Principle of thc Physical World ............... Zipf's Law as a Manifestation of the Numerical Arrangement of the Text ........................................ ................................................... In Search of a Number Structuring the Biosphere: Chislenko's Phenomenon and Other Numerical Manifestations of the Living World CHAPTER 3 Global Evolutionism. as Revelation of World Semantics Through a Probabhstic Measure ...................... .............................. Global Evolutionism: A Bayesian Approach ................................ ...... Two Illustrations of the Model: Nomogenesis and Neotenic Internal Biological Time as a Measure of Changeability ................... Evolution of the Texts of Cultur vi Contents CHAPTER 4 Is Pangeometrism Legitimate? CHAPTER 5 How Is Theoretical Biology Possible in a Geometric Vision of the World? .................................................................................. CHAPTER 6 Conclusion as Metaphysics of the Above Reasoning .................. References ................. ................... .... ........................ Index of Names ............... ... ........................................................ Index of Subjects ................... ... ............................................... Foreword Nature geometrireth and observeth order in all things. -Thomas Brown For the principle of Lagrange, the principle of virtual work, is the key to physiological equilibrium, and physiology itself has been called a prob- lem in Maxima and Minima. -D'Arcy Thompson, On Growth ond Form That Nature keeps some of her secrets longer than others-that she tells the secret of the rainbow and hides that of the Northern Lights-is a lesson taught me when I was a boy. -D3Arcy Thompson All science as it grows towards perfection becomes mathematical in its ideas. A.N. Whitehead On islands in that sun-drenched Aegean Sea where Pythagoras had heard the music of the spheres, other curious Greeks observed that sea shells and fish skeletons were embedded high in the rocky mountains. From these facts they inferred that life had originated in the sea and had later adapted itself to existence on land. They included man in this great process of transformation. In other parts of the Hellenic world, Democritus postulated a cosmos composed of atoms in motion and Heraclitus posited a cosmos governed by a dialectical flux of becoming. Such was the dawn of science in the sixth and fifth centuries before the Christian era. It was one of the tragedies of the history of science that when Aristotle created his World System, he rejected atomism and mathematics as explanatory ingredients in the study of the world of living creatures. Twenty-three centuries were to pass before Pasteur found the link between geometry and the living world and D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, a creative mathematician and expert biologist, began to put together some, but not all, of the elements of the Ionian vision of the living world. ... vti~ Foreword V. V. Nalimov, emerging from the tradition of Oparin, Vernadsky, and Kolmogorov, and conscious heir also of the Hellenic pioneers, brings to this work the additional insights of a probabilistic ontology and epistemol- ogy. The views of Nalimov have been introduced to the Western world in the trilogy already published by IS1 Press: In the.Labyrinths of Language: A Mathematician's Journey. 1981; Faces ofScience, 1982; Realms of The Unconscious: The Enchanted Frontier. 1982. In all of the above, the author searched carefully the relics of ancient thinkers, East and West, for insights forgotten or covered up by modern Western science as this science displaced or demoted all other forms of cognitive inquiry. The subject here is the evolutionary process-not in the narrow Darwinian or even neo-Darwinian sense-but as cosmic process in a context familiar to the old philosophers of nature and to contemporary cosmologists. This broadened concept of evolutionary process was articu- lated with elegance and beauty by Hermann Weyl two generations ago in his Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science (original German version, 1927): The statement that the natural laws are at the bottom not only of the more or less permanent structures occurring in nature, but also of all processes of temporal development, must be qualified by the remark that chance factors are never missing in a concrete development. Classical physics considers the initial state as accidental. Thus "common origin" may serve to explain features that do not follow from the laws of nature alone. Statistical thermodynamics combined with quantum physics grants chance a much wider scope but shows at the same time how chance is by no means incompatible with "almost" perfect macroscopic regularity of phenomena. Evolution is not the foundation but the keystone in the edifice of scientific knowledge. Cosmogony deals with the evolution of the universe, geology with that of the earth and its minerals, paleontology and phylogenetics with the evolution of living organisms. As his external features betray a person's age, so are the spectral lines emitted by stars clues to their stage in life, and we have thus been enabled to write with some authenticity the"lifen of a typical star. James Jeans in our day put forward a cosmogonic theory based on observation and exact computations that traces the evolution from a slow rotating gas ball over a spiral nebula to a cluster of stars like the galaxy. A century earlier Laplace had advanced his hypothesis about the birth and development of the planetary system; the fact that all planets circle around the Sun in the same direction in nearly coinciding planes points very clearly to a common origin. Lem2itre has recently ventured still further back in the history of the universe than did Jeans. The decisive factor in his cosmogony is the expansive force as expressed by the cosmological term in Einstein's equations of gravitation. Under the numerical conditions assumed by Lemiitre, gravitational attraction Foreword ix almost balances the expansion, so that at a certain precarious phase of evolution minute local variations of density give rise to accumulative condensations. He surmises that the world has its origin in the radioac- tive disintegration of a single giant atom. There is certainly much that is hypothetical and preliminary in such cosmogonies; to mention but one point: deeper insight into the basic nature of gravitation will very likely result in radical modifications. But in view of all the achievements of astrophysics, it can hardly be doubted that the chosen approach is fundamentally right, that one has to appeal to atomic physics in order to explain the inner constitution of the stars and the evolution of the stellar system. Among the three inferred evolutions mentioned above, that of the Earth is the least hypothetical. The empirical evidence by which the reconstruction of the Earth's past history is supported is by far the strongest, and the physical interpretation of the relevant geological processes is nowhere beset by difficulties of a principal character. Read as a prophecy rather than a statement of fact, Weyl was remarkably prescient. Still to come was the biological revolution occa- sioned by the discovery of the structure and role of DNA, the beginning of the understanding and decoding of gene information storage, and human intervention at the very heart of the life processes. To this must be added the extraordinary expansion of geophysics, geochemistry, and the far-flung triumphs of molecular biology! With this immense terrain in view, Nalimov focuses on two main themes: (I) the stochastic element within the process of variability, and (2) the explanatory power of the probabilistic approach. It is not to be assumed that a generalized probabilistic metaphysics (I use the last term deliberate- ly) has come into the world easily. Modern science evolved from its seventeenth and eighteenth century cradle in the swaddling clothes of a rigorous deterministic causal structure, a structure that had metascientific support from theological and philosophical traditions that were centuries