Well, it’s kinda true, right? Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (developing embryos look like worms, then fish, amphibians—they mirror the path of evolution). That’s because it’s easier for evolution to add steps at the end than to changes steps in the beginning. It happens with computers too—modern Intel and AMD chips still startup in 16 bit real mode.
In the coalition of genes that make it into a gamete, newer genes support the old genes, but not vice versa. The genes that control apoptosis (p53 etc.) are obligate mutualists—apoptosis genes support older particular genes, but older genes don’t support apoptosis genes in particular.
Right, the part about layers of more and less conserved genes is true AFAIK. (I think actually ontogeny doesn’t recapitulate phylogeny linearly, but rather there’s a kinda of hourglass structure where some mid-development checkpoints are most conserved—but I’m not remembering where I saw this—possibly in a book or paper by Rupert Riedl or Günter Wagner.)
What I’m objecting to, is viewing that as a growth of a values structure for the values of [the evolution of a species, as an agent]. That’s because that entity doesn’t really value genes at all; it doesn’t care about the payload of genes. Individual genes selfishly care about themselves as a payload, being payloaded into the gene pool of the species; each variant wants its frequency to go up. The species-evolution doesn’t care about that. I think the species-evolution is a less coherent way of imputing agency to evolution compared to selfish genes, though still interesting. But if impute values to a species-evolution, I’m not sure what you’d get, and I think it would be something like “performs well in this ecological niche”—though there would be edge cases that are harder to describe, such as long-term trends due to sexual selection or due for example to any sort of frequency-dependent effects of genes.
Well, it’s kinda true, right? Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (developing embryos look like worms, then fish, amphibians—they mirror the path of evolution). That’s because it’s easier for evolution to add steps at the end than to changes steps in the beginning. It happens with computers too—modern Intel and AMD chips still startup in 16 bit real mode.
In the coalition of genes that make it into a gamete, newer genes support the old genes, but not vice versa. The genes that control apoptosis (p53 etc.) are obligate mutualists—apoptosis genes support older particular genes, but older genes don’t support apoptosis genes in particular.
Right, the part about layers of more and less conserved genes is true AFAIK. (I think actually ontogeny doesn’t recapitulate phylogeny linearly, but rather there’s a kinda of hourglass structure where some mid-development checkpoints are most conserved—but I’m not remembering where I saw this—possibly in a book or paper by Rupert Riedl or Günter Wagner.)
What I’m objecting to, is viewing that as a growth of a values structure for the values of [the evolution of a species, as an agent]. That’s because that entity doesn’t really value genes at all; it doesn’t care about the payload of genes. Individual genes selfishly care about themselves as a payload, being payloaded into the gene pool of the species; each variant wants its frequency to go up. The species-evolution doesn’t care about that. I think the species-evolution is a less coherent way of imputing agency to evolution compared to selfish genes, though still interesting. But if impute values to a species-evolution, I’m not sure what you’d get, and I think it would be something like “performs well in this ecological niche”—though there would be edge cases that are harder to describe, such as long-term trends due to sexual selection or due for example to any sort of frequency-dependent effects of genes.
You may mean phylogenetic inertia.