Biology as Dance, Metabiology as Creativity‏

The creative spirit will survive,

factory science will not triumph,

for one simple reason.

Societies that suppress creativity temporarily

gain increased efficiency, but they are 

not flexible enough to deal with a changing environment.

Ultimately they fall by the wayside, like the dinosaurs,

that were replaced by the smarter, more flexible mammals.

Human beings are not especially good 

at anything in particular, but we are

very curious and extremely adaptable.

Like the universal Turing machine,

we are generalists, not specialists.

To survive, a society needs

to impose some coherence,

but not too much, lest it 

do away with creativity all together.

It is a delicate balance,

of permitting some individuals

to break the rules, up to a point.

We are clearly going 

in the wrong direction now

in some societies where creativity

is micromanaged by gigantic bureaucracies.

In my view, our most urgent task today

is to be creative enough to design

a flexible society, a society

in which creativity is somehow tolerated,

not like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World,

which eliminated art and intelligence

in favor of stability:

We must be creative enough to design

a society that permits creativity!

"It is never worth 

a first class man's time

to express a majority opinion.

By definition, there are

plenty of others to do that."

G. H. Hardy,

A Mathematician's Apology

(Cambridge University Press, 1940)

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet,

is a maker of patterns.  If his patterns

are more permanent than theirs,

is is because they are made of ideas.

Nothing I have ever done 

is of the slightest practical use.

---

If people do not believe 

that mathematics is simple,

it is only because 

they do not realize 

how complicated life is.

John von Neumann

Theories are nets;

only he who casts will catch.

Novalis

The same way that von Neumann's mathematics

anticipated biological discoveries 

that were made afterwards, my work,

metabiology, for the math to be beautiful

requires algorithmic mutations, 

not point mutations, high-level mutations,

not low-level mutations.

It is not clear to what extent

algorithmic mutations occur in biology.

So, as my wife, Virginia, 

pointed out to me,

metabiology raises the issue

of how high-level 

the mutational mechanisms

are in actual organisms.

______

*: The Red Queen hypothesis, also referred to as Red Queen's, Red Queen's race or The Red Queen Effect, is an evolutionary hypothesis which proposes that organisms must constantly adapt, evolve, and proliferate not merely to gain reproductive advantage, but also simply to survive while pitted against ever-evolving opposing organisms in an ever-changing environment. The Red Queen hypothesis intends to explain two different phenomena: the constant extinction rates as observed in the paleontological record caused by co-evolution between competing species[1] and the advantage of sexual reproduction (as opposed to asexual reproduction) at the level of individuals. Van Valen's metaphor can be explained thus: as one species increases their fitness becoming better adapted to their environment, other species in which that species interacts with will become adversely affected.

The original idea of the Red Queen hypothesis was given by Leigh Van Valen in order to explain the "Law of Extinction". Leigh Van Valen showed that in many populations the probability of extinction does not depend on the lifetime of this population. In addition, the probability of extinction is constant over millions of years for a given population. This could be explained by the coevolution of species. Indeed, an adaptation in a population of one species (e.g. predators, parasites ...) may change the selection pressure on a population of another species (e.g., prey, hosts), giving rise to an antagonistic coevolution. If this occurs reciprocally, a potential dynamic coevolution may result.

Junkyard tornado discussion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkyard_tornado

The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way [by Darwinian evolution] is comparable to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein. Fred Hoyle The Intelligent Universe 1983

In my opinion, if Darwin's theory is as simple,

fundamental and basic as its adherent believe,

then there ought to be an equally 

fundamental mathematical theory about this,

that expresses these ideas with the generality,

precision and degree of abstractness 

that we are accustomed to demand in pure mathematics.

Gregory Chaitin

"Speculations on Biology, Information and Complexity

EATCS Bulletin, February 2007

Mathematics is able to deal successfully

only with the simplest of situations,

more precisely, with a complex situation

only to the extent that rare good fortune

makes this complex situation hinge upon

a few dominant simple factors.

Beyond the well-traversed path,

mathematics loses its bearings

in a jungle of unnamed special functions

and impenetral combinatorial particularities.

Thus, the mathematical technique only reach far

if it starts from a point close to the simple essentials

of a problem which has simple essentials.

That form of wisdom which is the opposite

of single-mindness, the ability to keep

many threads in hand, to draw for an argument

from many disparate sources, is quite foreign

to mathematics.

Jacob T. Schwartz

"The Pernicious Influence of Mathematics in Science" (1960)

in Discrete Thoughts: Essays on Mathematics, Science,

and Philosophy, edited by Mark Kac, Gian-Carlo Rota

and Jacob T: Schwartz, 1992