Economists often talk about the invisible hand of the market. This fictitious and rarely spotted phenomenon is supposed to make sure that a freely flowing market will come to some sort of optimum. This need not be the global optimum and it might be time dependent, but this is there argument against regulation as the system is self-regulating.
The problem is that this invisible hand has some pre-conditions for it to work.
The market has to be transparent. Everyone has to have the same amount of knowledge or ignorance about how the market is going to move. Anyone who has preferential knowledge can fix the market. This is why insider trading is illegal to prevent those with insider knowledge using it to their advantage. But the general case will be that people will try to get ahead in their knowledge compared to their opponents and so in this arms race there will always be a leader (although usually temporary). So there is never a level playing field and there is always some aspect of "insider" or preferential knowledge.
Secondly the market has to be free. This means free from regulation, free from influence of special interest groups, free from subsidies. Now these are a lot of frees that rarely if ever exist. Protectionism and national interest mean that governments interfere not only through regulation but also through subsidies. The EU has its famous farm subsidy the CAP. The US has protectionist policies for steel and agriculture through subsidies and preferential agreements. All of these influences are further supported by the policies of the World Bank and the WTO through the international trade agreements. These agreements make sure that there is an imbalance of power in globalised markets.
So unless some clever economist can show that there is a genuine free market that is free from any inequality of trade or knowledge then I will not expect to see any invisible hands for the market making an appearance in the near future.
Saturday, 16 February 2013
Wednesday, 13 February 2013
Progressive Evolution
People who talk about positive selection annoy me because from my view evolution is never positive it is always winnowing out failure. There is no pat on the back and yes there is a good gene, there is just an indifferent pursuit of any weak members of the population. I need to explain this view and why some might feel it pedantic.
I was reading The Selfish Gene when I came across a description of the progressive nature of evolution. If Dawkins had read the controversies regarding Darwins's theory of natural selection carefully he would know that this idea of progress was the heart of the problem. Darwin denied progress in the creation of random mutations. Any kind of appearance of progress is an accidental gratuity from the survival of the fittest and that only applies to that ecosystem in those particular set of conditions. Popper from a philosophical view was also damning of any view of progressive evolution, which he called the "Poverty of Historicism" and his main argument against Marxism and the view that the Communist Society was going to inevitable triumph. This progress smacks of Teleological thinking and ideas like those of Teilhard de Chardin who tried to reconcile his Catholicism with the evolution of complexity.
The reason for this is that the material that is mutated is a different material to that on which selection applies. Mutations occur in DNA at the genotype level, but selection occurs on the cellular or organism level in the phenotype. Some parts of the genome are more "fixed" than others because changes are likely to lead to an unviable phenotype that most likely will not even be born (sex is useful for filtering out these mistakes without wasting an entire organism). Many proteins have cores or active sites that cannot allow mutations. Often these are hydrophobic regions represented by synonymous codons. Then there are parts of the genome that are largely unregulated and in which a considerable amount of probably neutral mutations can occur. These are often in the surface loops of proteins and these are often hydrophilic amino acids. This bias in the way the codon table has evolved makes it hard to use the simple statistics of looking for sites where there are different numbers of synonymous and non-synonymous mutations complex because it does not mean a site is immutable, it just means that some have a low probability of achieving that change even if it would create an organism that benefits in natural selection.
What they mean by positive selection is a change that makes the organism better than the current one. The way natural selection is working is now the optimum shifts from the organisms of the past to the new variety and so the old variety is less fit compared to the new. Whether this is "progress" or not we cannot know as this might be a step to a dead end. Extinction does not care about progress, only we care about it because we want to make ourselves the culmination of this progressive evolution, but we forget that actually bacteria are more evolved than we are. They have experienced more generations than we have, they have undergone more rounds of natural selection.
So for me "positive selection" is one of these phantom ideas. It exists because of the way we look back in time but it is an illusion, it is an accident. Unlike Popper I do not completely disregard historicism as history plays an important role. Some parts of evolution we can understand as responses to physical and chemical laws (long necks to eat leaves from trees, eyes for seeing)and evolution often converges on these solutions, but some parts of evolution are frozen accidents. Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen coined the terms universals and parochials for the things we can say will happen from the "laws of evolution" and for the serendipitous products of chance. This is the same as the different types of information in the ideas of complexity of Murray Gell-Mann's the Quark and the Jaguar. If we ignore history then we ignore these chance effects that CANNOT be described by any theory. These effects will always remain phenomenological and so the hope of biologists to achieve rigorous laws analogous to those of physics and chemistry is IMPOSSIBLE in the field of evolution. We simply never can know what will happen next, but we can make up some nice "just-so" stories to explain what has happened in the past. That is what Richard Dawkins does best.
I was reading The Selfish Gene when I came across a description of the progressive nature of evolution. If Dawkins had read the controversies regarding Darwins's theory of natural selection carefully he would know that this idea of progress was the heart of the problem. Darwin denied progress in the creation of random mutations. Any kind of appearance of progress is an accidental gratuity from the survival of the fittest and that only applies to that ecosystem in those particular set of conditions. Popper from a philosophical view was also damning of any view of progressive evolution, which he called the "Poverty of Historicism" and his main argument against Marxism and the view that the Communist Society was going to inevitable triumph. This progress smacks of Teleological thinking and ideas like those of Teilhard de Chardin who tried to reconcile his Catholicism with the evolution of complexity.
The reason for this is that the material that is mutated is a different material to that on which selection applies. Mutations occur in DNA at the genotype level, but selection occurs on the cellular or organism level in the phenotype. Some parts of the genome are more "fixed" than others because changes are likely to lead to an unviable phenotype that most likely will not even be born (sex is useful for filtering out these mistakes without wasting an entire organism). Many proteins have cores or active sites that cannot allow mutations. Often these are hydrophobic regions represented by synonymous codons. Then there are parts of the genome that are largely unregulated and in which a considerable amount of probably neutral mutations can occur. These are often in the surface loops of proteins and these are often hydrophilic amino acids. This bias in the way the codon table has evolved makes it hard to use the simple statistics of looking for sites where there are different numbers of synonymous and non-synonymous mutations complex because it does not mean a site is immutable, it just means that some have a low probability of achieving that change even if it would create an organism that benefits in natural selection.
What they mean by positive selection is a change that makes the organism better than the current one. The way natural selection is working is now the optimum shifts from the organisms of the past to the new variety and so the old variety is less fit compared to the new. Whether this is "progress" or not we cannot know as this might be a step to a dead end. Extinction does not care about progress, only we care about it because we want to make ourselves the culmination of this progressive evolution, but we forget that actually bacteria are more evolved than we are. They have experienced more generations than we have, they have undergone more rounds of natural selection.
So for me "positive selection" is one of these phantom ideas. It exists because of the way we look back in time but it is an illusion, it is an accident. Unlike Popper I do not completely disregard historicism as history plays an important role. Some parts of evolution we can understand as responses to physical and chemical laws (long necks to eat leaves from trees, eyes for seeing)and evolution often converges on these solutions, but some parts of evolution are frozen accidents. Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen coined the terms universals and parochials for the things we can say will happen from the "laws of evolution" and for the serendipitous products of chance. This is the same as the different types of information in the ideas of complexity of Murray Gell-Mann's the Quark and the Jaguar. If we ignore history then we ignore these chance effects that CANNOT be described by any theory. These effects will always remain phenomenological and so the hope of biologists to achieve rigorous laws analogous to those of physics and chemistry is IMPOSSIBLE in the field of evolution. We simply never can know what will happen next, but we can make up some nice "just-so" stories to explain what has happened in the past. That is what Richard Dawkins does best.
Friday, 8 February 2013
A Little Bit of Woo
I was reading Joanne Harris' book Runelight when the mad old woman character was talking about the old stories and how they had been corrupted. She was talking about how the land of Roast Beef was a corruption of the land of Bif Rost the land beyond the bridge (p229). She also talked about the world serpent curled with its tail in its mouth (p220). It was one of those moments when I felt inspired and I realised that perhaps we always need a bit of woo to inspire us and give us intuition.
One of my heroes of science Conrad Waddington used the symbol of the snake swallowing its own tail in an article in Towards a Theoretical Biology. But he was not thinking of the Norse Gods, he was thinking of the Egyptian, then Greek and Gnostic legend of the Ouroboros. Then that connects in my mind to Red Dwarf. So Waddington definitely had a few woo ideas.
I had also recently read a Schumacher Briefing by Meyer on Contraction and Convergence and then I went to the website of the GCI the organisation that he founded. Just look at the publications page for the worst case of inappropriate woo I have seen in a long time. This geometrical craziness undermines the sense of the contraction and convergence arguments, but the author felt the need to make the connection. Why did he do that?
This got me thinking. Newton was obsessed by alchemy, Einstein believed that God did not play dice, Lovelock's Gaia has too much association with Earth goddesses, Bohm was also a very spiritual physicist. There is a need for a bit of woo in many scientists because they want it to make a great story and to be at least a little poetic and illogical.
In film Terry Gilliam makes this argument against the pure logic and reason of the "Enlightenment" in both Baron Muchausen and The Brothers Grimm (Jonathan Pryce gets to play the evil forces of reason in both cases). Stephen King makes the same attack in The Stand where Randall Flag is the force of blind science and inhuman reason while Mother Abigail is the earthly ecological spiritual leader for good. In Star Trek we all prefer Captain Kirk to Mr Spock because too much logic makes hus inhuman. We do not live by pure reason.
All of these stories can also be connected to the story of King Arthur and the Holy Grail - of the Hero with a thousand faces and the Masks of God by Joseph Campbell (another inspirational book I read as an undergraduate). These in turn were the inspiration for George Lucas to write Star Wars and to create the character Darth Vader - the one who balances the force. This is the Yin and Yang the dragon swallowing its tale again.
One of my heroes of science Conrad Waddington used the symbol of the snake swallowing its own tail in an article in Towards a Theoretical Biology. But he was not thinking of the Norse Gods, he was thinking of the Egyptian, then Greek and Gnostic legend of the Ouroboros. Then that connects in my mind to Red Dwarf. So Waddington definitely had a few woo ideas.
I had also recently read a Schumacher Briefing by Meyer on Contraction and Convergence and then I went to the website of the GCI the organisation that he founded. Just look at the publications page for the worst case of inappropriate woo I have seen in a long time. This geometrical craziness undermines the sense of the contraction and convergence arguments, but the author felt the need to make the connection. Why did he do that?
This got me thinking. Newton was obsessed by alchemy, Einstein believed that God did not play dice, Lovelock's Gaia has too much association with Earth goddesses, Bohm was also a very spiritual physicist. There is a need for a bit of woo in many scientists because they want it to make a great story and to be at least a little poetic and illogical.
In film Terry Gilliam makes this argument against the pure logic and reason of the "Enlightenment" in both Baron Muchausen and The Brothers Grimm (Jonathan Pryce gets to play the evil forces of reason in both cases). Stephen King makes the same attack in The Stand where Randall Flag is the force of blind science and inhuman reason while Mother Abigail is the earthly ecological spiritual leader for good. In Star Trek we all prefer Captain Kirk to Mr Spock because too much logic makes hus inhuman. We do not live by pure reason.
All of these stories can also be connected to the story of King Arthur and the Holy Grail - of the Hero with a thousand faces and the Masks of God by Joseph Campbell (another inspirational book I read as an undergraduate). These in turn were the inspiration for George Lucas to write Star Wars and to create the character Darth Vader - the one who balances the force. This is the Yin and Yang the dragon swallowing its tale again.
Wednesday, 30 January 2013
Humanists vs Atheists
The current fanatical humanists really get on my nerves. They do not see that they are falling into the same trap as the people they oppose. Richard Dawkins is a prime example. There is a nice chart about religious extremism which includes people who think that Apple is God. They should add a column for people who think Dawkins is God.
Early humanists like Hobbes and Erasmus were not necessarily atheists although some saw them as atheists. What they meant is that people should not abdicate responsibility for their religious views and practices to a church and to a priest. If you do you are letting someone else make decisions about beliefs that are fundamental to who you are, and this is never a good thing. Now the humanist movement and particularly the British Humanists are trying to impose their views in the same way. Even in the 20th century humanists like Santayana and Lippmann were not suggesting that atheism was the answer. They said that everyone must find their own answer. It is personal. I do not think badly of those who hold a religious view of any type, that is up to them. I think they are wrong if they try to impose that belief on others, or if they are blind to there being any alternative to their view. I also think that they must be careful to separate their beliefs from their work if they are to make objective decisions.
But I do not think that atheism should be pushed presented as the right answer. There are no right answers. To say that there are is falling into the teleological trap of believing in progress towards some ultimate goal. There is no goal, we are not going anywhere special. Humans are not particularly special within the universe. We are self conscious which means we have access to a higher level of possibilities but this is emergent from the blind actions of evolution.
The modern humanists need to get off their high horses and try reading some history and meeting some more people, rather than sitting there lecturing people on how they should run their lives.
Early humanists like Hobbes and Erasmus were not necessarily atheists although some saw them as atheists. What they meant is that people should not abdicate responsibility for their religious views and practices to a church and to a priest. If you do you are letting someone else make decisions about beliefs that are fundamental to who you are, and this is never a good thing. Now the humanist movement and particularly the British Humanists are trying to impose their views in the same way. Even in the 20th century humanists like Santayana and Lippmann were not suggesting that atheism was the answer. They said that everyone must find their own answer. It is personal. I do not think badly of those who hold a religious view of any type, that is up to them. I think they are wrong if they try to impose that belief on others, or if they are blind to there being any alternative to their view. I also think that they must be careful to separate their beliefs from their work if they are to make objective decisions.
But I do not think that atheism should be pushed presented as the right answer. There are no right answers. To say that there are is falling into the teleological trap of believing in progress towards some ultimate goal. There is no goal, we are not going anywhere special. Humans are not particularly special within the universe. We are self conscious which means we have access to a higher level of possibilities but this is emergent from the blind actions of evolution.
The modern humanists need to get off their high horses and try reading some history and meeting some more people, rather than sitting there lecturing people on how they should run their lives.
Tuesday, 29 January 2013
How Not To Write a Lecture
I had spent lots of time looking for examples for my lecture on Communicating Science to show how news stories can lose the evidence and how the facts can get lost. Then I delivered it today and my verdict is - well that didn't work did it.
The illustrations and examples are fine except for the end and the Conspiracy Theories which need to be more current and relevant. What was wrong was the structure. It did not flow. There was no pathway to follow and no consistency. It was just one silly story after another. So back to the drawing board but this also shows me the problems with having a massively parallel narrative as a method for teaching as the students will end up in the same position as the students today - with an over-whelming jumble of fact that they cannot relate to concrete situations they might be in.
The illustrations and examples are fine except for the end and the Conspiracy Theories which need to be more current and relevant. What was wrong was the structure. It did not flow. There was no pathway to follow and no consistency. It was just one silly story after another. So back to the drawing board but this also shows me the problems with having a massively parallel narrative as a method for teaching as the students will end up in the same position as the students today - with an over-whelming jumble of fact that they cannot relate to concrete situations they might be in.
Monday, 21 January 2013
Amazon Reviews
I am amused by how angry people can get over Amazon reviews. Reviews about climate change books and politics polarise the audience and so the discussions following reviews can be quite revealing about the types of people who read a particular book.
Here are some examples I have found:
Here are some examples I have found:
Realism in Science
Most people want science to capture the real world. Plato used the allegory of the cave and shadows of the real world projected onto the walls. The shadows never capture the reality of being able to look out of the cave. The view is never impartial, it always depends on what passes in front of the cave.
The Greeks also had the idea of an absolute definition - that things defined b a word exist separate to humans creating that word. A chair once defined exists distinct from its context. Wittgenstein continued this idea. All objects contain what they are forever.
Copenhagen rejected this objective realism. The observer and the context define what we see. If a tree falls and there is nobody there to hear it then it made no noise. This is a very anthropomorphic view of the universe as it needs humans as observers. Who observed the big bang?
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