Alan doesn’t believe that there are any other proposed explanations to rival ‘evolutionary theory’. At least none that so effectively account for the facts.
It is often said that there is no single theory of evolution, there are a group of mutually consistent theories. Be that as it may, I think we all understand the point Alan is making.
Evolution is a process whereby life has somehow emerged from a lifeless physical world and there is no overall teleology involved in its diversification. The reproductive processes produce a natural variety of forms which can take advantage of previously unoccupied niches. The basic sequence of events from primal to present are: lifeless minerals, water systems and gaseous atmosphere, followed by the arrival of simple prokaryote life forms, followed by multicellular organisms. Life is solely the product of physical and chemical processes acting on lifeless matter.
In this view life is nothing special, it just occurred because physical matter chanced to arrange itself in a particular way. And consciousness is just a by product of life.
But I suggest that there is an alternative way in which life as we perceive it could have come about.
Arthur Zajonc in the book Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind
Goethe was right. Try though we may to split light into fundamental atomic pieces, it remains whole to the end. Our very notion of what it means to be elementary is challenged. Until now we have equated smallest with most fundamental. Perhaps for light, at least, the most fundamental feature is not to be found in smallness, but rather in wholeness, its incorrigible capacity to be one and many, particle and wave, a single thing with the universe inside.
In the same way that in the above quote light is understood in its wholeness, so can life be understood as a whole. The variety of earthly life forms that have existed through time and space are individual expressions of an ever present archetypical whole. Life is one and many.
Holistic science attempts to get closer to the mystery of the dynamical emergence of the diversity of living forms within the unity of the continuously manifesting whole.
An arithmetical analogy between orthodox accounts of evolution and evolution as the unfolding expression of archetypal forms could be that the former is akin to addition while the latter is akin to division. Novel forms are an extra addition to what came before or novel forms are divided off from what already existed in potential. From the parts to the whole or from the whole to the parts. Which is it? Sense perception points to the former while the mind’s eye, perceiving with the mind, points to the latter. And Goethe was an expert at perceiving with the mind.
Instead of life emerging out of matter in an extended version of the spontaneous generation of mice from mud, it could at least be regarded as a possibility that physical organic life is a condensation or hardening of form out of a more subtle general condition which contained all physical forms in potential. This is analogous to crystals emerging out of solution. The perception of salt in sea water is dependent on the senses of the perceiver. Some forms of life have not descended as completely as others and thus retained more plasticity and because of this they are more adaptable to changes in their surroundings.
Life is and always was everywhere but it is only when it coalesces into gross material forms that it is perceptible to our everyday senses.
Convergent evolution is explicable not just by occupation of similar niches but by similar forms coalescing.
Oh god, don’t let Charlie know about mimicry.
Allan Miller,
One stumbled into a barbecue I was at before Covid (BC) and was convincing enough to cause panic. Managed to catch it in an empty glass and point out it was a fly not a hornet. I wasn’t believed. 😱
Corneel,
It’s worse. This hover fly lays eggs in wasp nests and the larvae are parasites.
ETA oops commensals not parasites
Never heard of them, but I just read they may nibble the wasp brood, so parasite may be right.
Here I am talking about the comparison of individual development.
In angiosperms the bud is a transition stage from the vegetative growth stage to the reproductive stage. The same holds for the pupa in holometabolous insects; the larva is concerned with vegetative growth and the adult insect with reproduction.
Within both bud and pupa the individual organs of the emergent form take shape. The structures which emerge depend on the way that the developmental genes are manipulated. So although modern biologists might not consider these structures and processes homologous they do indeed mirror each other in their formation.
An updating of Goethe’s ideas on plant morphology from 2005 can be found here
Indeed! The two groups of organisms are intimately connected in many ways.
A year or two ago I was on a field trip with a couple of entomologists from the local university. One of them was a specialist on hover flies. He could catch them in mid flight between his finger and thumb without harming them. It was very impressive. The other one said that you can always tell the hover fly specialists because they are the ones with their heads inside their nets.
I’ve never seen any as big as your example up here though. Although for the past couple of years they have appeared in massive numbers.
Hover flies don’t stumble anywhere. They have far to much control over their movements for that to happen 🙂
No. I said that a similarity could be observed. I explained to Alan above the way in which they are similar If we are to agree that they are in some way homologous then it is a homology of process and not of structure.
There are different levels of archetype as there are different levels of homology.
They don’t draw from the same archetype as if it were some remote reservoir of forms. processes and forms are the archetype expressed in a limited way. The primal cell belongs as much to the archetype as the adult organism.
Mutations do not turn one form into another. They are disruptions on the path.
Insects produce sperm and blossoms produce pollen. That is the similarity.
I do not despise the materialist/physicalist viewpoint. I recognise it as necessary but limited.
Being unable to produce pollen is not a limitation of flies, because they produce the cellular equivalent which has the same function.
Well I never! I didn’t know that you thought of Alan as ‘god’ 🙂
I’ll let you into a secret. He’s not really God, it’s all mimicry. 😉
And again you are using a word in your own idiosyncratic fashion. Your use of the word “homologous” corresponds neither to “being derived from the same ancestral structure” nor to “being derived from serially repeated primordia” (analogous to Goethes development of the concept).
To most people, homologous does NOT mean “looks similar”. How do you expect people to understand what you are saying if you keep using your own private vocabulary?
Then next time you write an OP, list ALL of them and add a proper description for each one of them. You cannot expect people to know them beforehand. If you advance them during a discussion like you do now, it looks like you made that up on the spot.
Poppycock. Mutations are changes in a DNA sequence. Spiritualize that!
Flies being unable to produce pollen is a limitation of your theory, which cannot account for preservation of heritable differences. The equivalent function of different types of gamete has been preserved from the common ancestor of vascular plants and metazoans. That is the modern evolutionary interpretation of the Goethean archetype. So far, you have presented zero reason for me to consider your alternative.
Er, cells get pollinated? what?
But he has a beard, right?
I guess simple commensal behaviour could be displaced by out-and-out parasitism if sufficiently beneficial. Watch this space – evolution in action!
When I use the word ‘homologous’ I mean a comparison of things that follow the same logic.Even in the conventional use of the word it can mean different things depending on context.
Goethe did not look to the antecedent as the cause of what comes later, he looked to the archetype which encompassed all the developing forms.
Through further discussion.
Makes little sense to me, Charlie.
You need a different word for “a comparison of things that follow the same logic.” Also you could explain what you mean when you say “a comparison of things that follow the same logic.”
I prefer the OP to lay down basic ideas which can stimulate further discussion, open up new questions, and meander in all directions.
Might I suggest “analogous” would be less subject to mis-interpretation.
DNA_Jock,
Seems reasonable. 🙂
So do you think of recombination as mutations?
Flies produce eggs which contain a unique genomic arrangement. The fertilised egg is the product of material inherited from the parents. None of this contradicts the form expressing the archetype.
It’s not an alternative. That which is needed to provide the material to build and maintain the organism as appropriate is inherited. I believe that the daughter organism takes in and organises the material required to build itself up and it forms itself in accordance with its etheric/life principle. The physical organism is a result of a combination of material forces from ‘below’ and etheric forces from ‘above’. I believe there is a polarity where materialists recognise only one pole, the material pole.
Flies produce sperm which are sex cells and plants produce pollen which are in essence the sex cells of plants. They are just individualised ways of achieving the same ends.
Has he? Is it a long flowing white beard?
CharlieM,
Does he take sugar?
It’s white but about 1cm. I might shave it off tomorrow. Desperate for a haircut though. It’s allowed but I’m still wary.
It’s the evolutionary history eucaryotes share.
Well a lot of observing and concentrating on these processes has helped me to see this connection. It’s particularly striking when comparing butterflies to flowering plants. life cycles, feeding habits of the various stages, physical appearances, sequence of development, sexual reproduction; all these things are indicators.
I agree on sex!
Except of course for the members of the plant kingdom which don’t produce pollen and instead have motile sperm. How does that fit into your broad-brush painting of the subject matter?
Been busy processing broiler chickens so I’ll have to read back through the thread to see your (Charlie’s) response to our previous ‘conversation’.
The formal definition of homologous from the Cambridge dictionary is, “having a similar position, structure, value, or purpose”.
The root of the word comes from the joining of words meaning ‘the same’ and ‘ratio’ or ‘proportion’. So I don’t see any problem with the way I was using the word. The sequence of seed, vegetative part, bud, blossom follows the same logic as egg, growing caterpillar, pupa and adult butterfly and thus in this respect they are formally homologous if not strictly homologous in the biological sense.
I know.
Your
onown link gives more definitions. Read the one relating to biology.No, I do not.
That is because the physical account suffices as an explanation. I don’t see anything useful added by considering an “ethereal pole”. In the OP, you offered convergent evolution as an example where archetypes may provide a more parsimonious explanation than the mainstream evolutionary developmental explanation, but you failed to make your case. I see at least two major problems:
1) You have a poor understanding of biology, so everytime you argue against a competing hypothesis, you fall flat on your face. Not very confidence inspiring.
2) You lack a mechanistic account of how archetypes become phenotypically expressed, which withdraws your hypothesis from empirical verification. That will ring all the alarm bells of any researcher worth her salt.
For goodness sake, Charlie! How did you manage to miss that one?
Second definition:
That would be fine, were it not for the fact that your “basic ideas” are unsubstantiated claims, and the “new questions meandering” thing you making MORE unsubstantiated claims when retreating from your original ones.
The discussion would be much more constructive if you committed to one well thought out topic, with careful explanation of the terms you are using and preferably including a worked out example.
I think you’ll find that spermandeggs produce flies, while pollenandovules produce plants. Gametes are the archetype, not their somatic outgrowths.
Sometimes the haploid not-pollenandovules become plants themselves and then produce spermandeggs by mitosis.
Those archetypes are flexible things 😃
Corneel,
Oh, Bryophytes… 🙄 Yeah, sometimes you get archetype-oscillation events.
Yes they could be seen as analogous. But the point I am trying to make is that these are not just coincidentally similar processes. It is the same general process used by insects and plants, but at different levels and so varying in the details.
Our beard’s are homologous 🙂 Only I like to trim mine back to a No2 every so often.
Yes speaking as a eukaryote, our shared history has a lot to do with it.
After emerging from the seed/egg, the energy of the organism is directed towards vegetative growth. After this there is a period of transformation and from this transformation there emerges the completed form of the blossom/adult insect. At this point the plant puts its energy into preparing for the next generation. The fly goes one stage further. It puts its energy into preparing for the next generation but at the same time it has developed a high level of sentience. It is full of nervous energy.
The fly goes through the same general processes of the flowering plant but at a higher level. It follows the same pattern but adds to it.
I was wondering where you had got to. Welcome back.
I was concentrating on the close relationship between flies and flowering plants. And the richness and variety of life provides many other avenues of investigation. There are two poles, the vegetative and the sentient, and all life forms have their place between these poles so it would be interesting to see where all plants fit in, not just the pollen producing plants.
I’ll need to take a closer look at sperm motility in plants. Although pollen does actively move the sperm. It creates a tube to transport the sperm to the egg.
I already have.
It says:
In the abstract to, On the Independence of Systematics, Ron Brady writes:
Homologies were recognised prior to the theory of evolution proposed by Darwin. The definition given above ties homology to the theory. In fact it is an observation which should remain distinct from any theory as to why it appears.
Good. So changes to the genome can be through organisational processes or by external disruption. When speculating about past changes how do you distinguish which is organisational and which is accidental? The theory demands that all past changes must be accidental and so that has got to be the case!
Just for the fun of it, I started to look for examples of convergent evolution for all the types of organism I have mentioned in this thread. I might just post some of them. They can be found everywhere.
I have a reasonable understanding of biology but its all relative. You’ll need to provide some details of where you think I’ve fallen on my face.
Mechanistic accounts and hypotheses aren’t required when things can be observed directly.
I didn’t. I prefer to use the definition which was solely dependent on observation and not one dependent on a theory.
From my point of view the discussion is constructive and informative. Learning about the natural world is an open-ended process.
I presumed that would be taken as read. I began by talking about stamens and so using the male portion as a specific example. Are you just looking for something to criticise for the sake of it?
Plants are close to the vegetative pole and this shows in their ability grow and regenerate. Lower animals such as certain worm have amazing powers of regeneration. But as life moves towards the sentient pole powers of regeneration decrease. Lizards and salamanders have a fair amount of regenerative abilities, higher animals not so much. Their energies are directed more towards the sentient pole at the expense of regeneration.
Very true 🙂
Do you have any evidence of any four-winged fruit flies occurring spontaneously? I know that Edward B. Lewis, 1918–2004 induced flies to develop four wings.
The achievement of producing this fly took a lot of work. But even then they didn’t have the necessary muscles to be of any use.