Change is hard. Evolution is Easy. Episode 1 of many.

ARIEL: Full fathom five thy father lies.
Of his bones are coral made.
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
—The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2

I do apologize for this dull cliche, but I know I'm right about this: change is hard. I don't mean that it's hard to adapt after someone or something forces a change on you. That's true too, but it's not my topic here. I'm talking about this: you want to change, or you need to change, or both. You know what the change has to be. Maybe you know what the first step has to be. It's change, and it's hard.

Call it personal growth or self-improvement, or maybe it's habit-breaking or demon-wrestling. Whole libraries could be stocked with materials on how to change. Even when we know we're loved, and believe we're okay, we can see opportunities and challenges that require us to change.

I won't claim to have deep knowledge of the technical literature on how people manage to change. But I do have several decades of experience in the practice of personal growth and change. I have repeatedly faced my need to change, and one of the first lessons I had to learn was the fact that effecting change is a lot harder than it sounds. It's not that easy to face one's need to change but it's vastly more difficult to make it happen. Change is hard.

But evolution is easy.

Reviewing From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds by Simon Conway Morris: Full series

Full series on From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution by Simon Conway Morris.

Introduction and overview

Chapter 1: The Myth of No Limits — Part 1 — Part 2

Chapter 2: The Myth of Randomness

Chapter 3: The Myth of Mass Extinctions

Chapter 4: The Myth of Missing Links

Chapter 5: The Myth of Animal Minds — Part 1 — Part 2

Chapter 6: The Myth of Extraterrestrials

Final comments and reflections

Confusion and convergence, but no "myth of randomness." Chapter 2 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

The concept of randomness is caught up in evolution, in two broad ways. The first and most famous aspect is the oft-misunderstood randomness of mutation. The second aspect is the role of chance in the trajectory of evolution. It is this question—is evolution predictable, or is it a random "drunkard's walk"—that Conway Morris tackles in the second chapter of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution. The chapter is called "The Myth of Randomness."

The chapter is a chaotic mess and ends without a clear argument, much less a convincing one. Conway Morris wants to tip the scales away from "randomness" and toward "cyclicity." From the second paragraph of the chapter (page 43):

Although through geological time increasing degrees of biological complexity and integration are undeniably the case, superimposed on this is an intriguing cyclicity: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. It transpires that evolutionary history is very far from random.

Rincon Mountain Wilderness

Like he did in Chapter 1, Conway Morris takes a profoundly interesting, long-standing question in science, a question that currently inspires brilliant writing and experimentation by evolutionary biologists, and paints one of the possibilities as a "myth." Like he did in Chapter 1, he erects a strawperson. Unlike in Chapter 1, the strawperson is not a laughable nonexistent entity but instead a fuzzy caricature of a major factor in evolutionary history—the combination of chance and contingency. Fortunately, unlike in Chapter 1, Conway Morris provides a poorly integrated amalgam that few laypeople will understand. Thus, even those inclined to cheer the immolation of the strawperson will find little more than stuff like this (p. 56): "The clear implication is that beneath these entirely plausible factors there are deeper organizational principles at work and of which we know very little at present." That sentence is typical of the chapter, which reaches its nadir at an invocation of "particle physics or the periodic table" as evidence that physicists embrace the notion of "a deeper order of the world" while biologists struggle to do the same. In his ardor to preach on these "deeper" things, Conway Morris obscures the grandness of the question and at times distorts what working scientists know and do. It was on finishing this chapter, a few weeks ago, that I regretted buying and reading the book.

Superheroes and limits: more on Chapter 1 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

Warning: this post includes spoilers for Black Widow, Avengers: Endgame, and Spider-Man: No Way Home. Seems a small price to pay to understand the biophysical limits of the biosphere, but it's your call.

So, are you sure you want that superpower? Have you noticed that superheroes usually have difficult lives and crushing responsibilities? And have you noticed that even the most potent superheroes and their coveted superpowers come up against explicit limitations?

I haven't yet seen Avengers: Endgame (I know! I'll get to it!) but I know this: Black Widow ends with Natasha riding away to the events that end with her sacrifice, events portrayed in Avengers: Endgame. She has some cool superpowers but she ultimately contributed most to the world's salvation by dying.

For me, the hardest MCU movie to watch was Spider-Man: No Way Home. Peter Parker has superhuman strength and dexterity, and arthropod-like agility et cetera, but couldn't protect the person he loved the most. At the end of the movie he arranges to have himself erased from the memory of his dearest friends. I wept through it, not merely because it's sad but because this impossible burden falls on a teenager. The proverb now forever associated with Spider-Man is "with great power comes great responsibility," and this credo angers me every time I hear it. I don't hear the acknowledgement that no kid should ever have to carry that. And certainly not alone.

Superhero stories are never about life without limitations. Indeed the opposite. They are about what happens inside a world/universe that has different boundaries than our own. It's not the boundaries that matter, whether you're a superhero like Natasha, or a "normal" person like me, or a metaphorical agent like evolution.

Reviewing From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds by Simon Conway Morris: introduction and overview

It was the subtitle of this book (From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution by Simon Conway Morris) that reeled me in, combined with my inability to resist reading the thoughts of Conway Morris on what that subtitle advertises: "Six Myths of Evolution." I'm about halfway through the book, and through three of the six myths. It was my intention to start writing about the book when I'd finished it, but now I think it will be more fun to write about it chapter by chapter. Each chapter can stand mostly alone, which helps. But the main reason to do it stepwise is this: although the book is aiming at some larger goal, the fact that this goal is unrelated (so far) to anything resembling a myth means that it will be interesting and/or instructive to see how it plays out.

The first place one might look for the author's intention in discussing "myths" would be the Introduction. Hahaha nope. It's three pages of a bizarre conversation with someone named Mortimer*, in Venice. Mortimer does most of the talking, as one might expect from a sock puppet. Three pages of indulgence about "going off the rails" (but you see, that's good), a fond reference to Teilhard ("a much neglected figure"), a classless swipe at "our materialist chums" (they "never wanted to know what the universe was really like"), and the expected wink at the divine: "...to fool ourselves that the mental world of a chimpanzee is just a dilute version of our minds, or rather a Mind."

Yeah yeah yeah but what are these myths? Mortimer comes close to defining what he means by a myth: "...not fairy tales but areas of received wisdom that are long overdue for careful reexamination."

And that's our first clue — blink and you miss it — that this is not a book about myths of evolution.

Mapping fitness: ribozymes, landscapes, and Seattle

A few months ago, we were looking at the concept of a fitness landscape and how new technologies are creating opportunities for biologists to look in detail at relationships between genetics and fitness. The first post discussed the concepts of a fitness landscapes and adaptive walks, with some focus on the limitations of the metaphor. The second post summarized some recent work on bacterial fitness and mutation rates, with the concept of a fitness landscape as a theme, and the third post reviewed another recent paper, one that described techniques for studying fitness landscapes in detail by linking protein function (which can be screened and/or selected) and genetic information. Here we'll look at yet another approach to the problem, in which the subject of the analysis is not an organism (as in the first paper) or a protein (as in the second paper) but an RNA molecule.

Mapping fitness: protein display, fitness, and Seattle

A couple of months ago we started looking at the concept of fitness landscapes and at some new papers that have significantly expanded our knowledge of the maps of these hypothetical spaces. Recall that a fitness landscape, basically speaking, is a representation of the relative fitness of a biological entity, mapped with respect to some measure of genetic change or diversity. The entity in question could be a protein or an organism or a population, mapped onto specific genetic sequences (a DNA or protein sequence) or onto genetic makeup of whole organisms. The purpose of the map is to depict the effects of genetic variation on fitness.

Suppose we want to examine the fitness landscape represented by the structure of a single protein. Our map would show the fitness of the protein (its function, measured somehow) and how fitness is affected by variations in the structure of the protein (its sequence, varied somehow). It's hard enough to explain or read such a map. Even more daunting is the task of creating a detailed map of such a widely-varying space. Two particular sets of challenges come to mind.

Mapping fitness: bacteria, mutations, and Seattle

Thinking about fitness landscapes can stimulate detailed discussion and consideration of the meanings and limitations of such metaphors, and my introductory comments at The Panda's Thumb did just that. Most notably, Joe Felsenstein pointed us to the various ways these depictions can be employed, and urged everyone to use caution in interpreting them. All too true, but the goal here is modest: I want to discuss the interesting questions that arise when considering the relationship between genotypes and phenotypes, i.e., how a particular genetic makeup influences fitness, whether the genetic makeup in question is simple or complex, and however fitness is conceived. These questions can take further discussion in all sorts of directions, but there are two that I have in mind in this series. First, I want to point to increasing capacity of scientists in their ability to examine these relationships experimentally. Second, I want to highlight the failure of design creationists to address or even to understand such matters.

Mapping fitness: landscapes, topographic maps, and Seattle

The concept of a "fitness landscape" is a fundamental idea in evolutionary biology, first introduced and established during the so-called "evolutionary synthesis" in the early 20^th century. It was the great Sewall Wright who pictured adaptation as a "walk" through a landscape (pictured below), where the walking is done by variants (of an organism or a molecule) and the landscape is a theoretical representation of the relative fitness of the variants. (J.B.S. Haldane did similar work around the same time, but Wright's paper is much better known perhaps because it's more accessible to non-experts. See Carneiro and Hartl in PNAS earlier this year for more.)

It's a simple concept, and a helpful one, though sometimes subject to over-interpretation. And it helps to frame some of the big questions in evolutionary genetics. One of those big questions is this one, stated somewhat simplistically: how do the variants navigate to fitness peaks, if there are fitness valleys that separate the peaks? (The ideas is that fitness is higher on the peaks, and so a population would be unlikely to descend from a local peak into a valley.) In other words, given a particular fitness landscape, what are the evolutionary trajectories by which variation can explore that landscape?