A Critical Examination of the Concept of Randomness in Adaptation in Evolution

OR An Excuse to Show Animals Being Jerks. You Decide.

If you are familiar with biological evolution then you know that its primary driver is adaptation. If you are not familiar with biological evolution, you might not have learned it yet, had a bad science teacher or two, or you might be a highly intelligent piece of software; I can’t be sure. But you can catch up with this article. Adaptation can be a difficult word to congeal with a concept like evolution simply because adaptation, to us humans, seems a matter of will, to some extent.

Writing, for me, is more like an obsession than a hobby, and I can make no promises about its sensibility.

However, it should be plainly stated that evolution at a low, individual level occurs in a cyclical fashion; that is, mutation occurs, and then if the adaptation is suitable to the environment, the individual with the mutation can survive. There is a secondary hurdle as well though. Mutation and its affordance with regards to the evironment is not enough for evolution to complete its cycle.

Judo, is helpful in feral mating rituals.

An example of unsuccessful copulation.

Sex is a major factor in the success of adaptation. Mating rituals like the one illustrated above clearly show that for a mutation to spread from one generation to another, copulation between individuals must occur for the new gene to be introduced to the species—speciel group? Is that a word? How about specielle just to make it fancy.

This member of the specielle group will never copulate.

Dogs are funny.

The cyclical nature of biological evolution (mutation, success, copulation) would imply is that there is a calculation for the probability of evolution amongst any population, which is ironic since opponents of evolution often argue that probability itself might refute biological adaptation:

Both traditional creationists and intelligent design scholars have invoked probability arguments in criticisms of biological evolution. They argue that certain features of biology are so fantastically improbable that they could never have been produced by a purely natural, “random” process, even assuming the billions of years of history asserted by geologists and astronomers. They often equate the hypothesis of evolution to the absurd suggestion that monkeys randomly typing at a typewriter could compose a selection from the works of Shakepeare, or that an explosion in an aerospace equipment yard could produce a working 747 airliner

This is, of course, an easily refutable and stupid argument.

Aaaaand thesis statement!

I say easily refutable because at the core of the argument is the concept of randomness. What we have discovered so far about our Universe is that elements of it are random, so long as we do not have a model of the generative process that is creating the evidence that we see. Often, once a model, such as Newtonian gravity or biological adaptation, has come to light, it appears to us to be quite mechancial and what once was random, now seems methodic. Is that a word? I refuse to google anything as I write this.

If it is a word, then this is methodic.

Calling adaptation random is not answering a question from good premises. Adaptation is calculable even if it is composed of what appears to be random elements, but not random in itself. This undercuts the idea that evolution has any design principles or is attempting to “move” in any particular direction (sometimes seen by humans as superiority over other animals.)

Let’s all admit that raccoons have it easier than us *and* can use their hands, so are therefore superior.

Often, once a model, such as Newtonian gravity or biological adaptation, has come to light, it appears to us to be quite mechanical and what once was random, now seems grape—uh, plain.

I can’t believe, dear reader, that you bought that.

By approaching a calculation for evolutionary adaptation, we can accomplish two things. First, such a calculation acts as a first draft model. There is likely a much more complex model available then the one that I would like to present here, but even models evolve. (Well, maybe not fashion models.) Mathematical models evolve. I would like to use the Drake model as a foundation, presented as a means (though not complete) for calculating the probability that there is extraterrestrial life. His model appears as follows:

N, The number of extraterrestrial species, is equal to the rate of star formation, multiplied by a fraction of those that have planets, fraction of those that can support life, fraction of those that DO support life, fraction of those that have civilization, finally multiplied by the length that a civilization can be expected to last.

That’s not complicated at all!

For our purpose, we will use N as the number of species likely to occur given an environment in which biological species can be expected to survive.

Ok. So, I totally made this up, but stick with me. (You’ve come this far.) I think what we have here is the Number of species that will evolve is equal to the rate that mutation occurs amongst anything with DNA times the fraction of that species that would mate with a mutant, times the members of that species that are not cats times length to extinction for the species times E which I’ve seen in other equations and seems to be useful.

No really, I’m being serious here. But apologies.

So, with regards to biological evolution modeled more as a cycle, we can see that if we plug in numbers to the above equation, we will get a new number. That seems handy. And it would also seem to strongly enforce the idea that we evolved just like animals—that they’re jerks and that so are we.

What would be really handy is an equation that informed us of the number of jerks in any population of species.