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Things and stuff: biological and technological diversity
Qingu
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I recently read The Selfish Gene and Dawkins starts off the book by defining "stability." A stable thing, he says, is anything that is around for long enough that we could give it a name. Another kind of stable thing might be ephemeral, but often forms in the exact same way (like raindrops). I think there's something neat about this idea—I work for an encyclopedia, and you could almost apply Dawkin's idea of a "stable thing" to whether or not that thing deserves an encyclopedia entry (ignoring relevancy and space).
I was thinking about this the other day, and came to several conclusions:
• There aren't that many things in the universe without biological evolution. There's a little more than a hundred stable kinds of atoms. The atoms can combine into a somewhat large number of stable molecules. On a large scale, gravity smooshes this shit altogether into planets and stars—both of which certainly constitute "stable things," and of course there are countless billions of planets and stars. But on a small scale, how much stuff is there without evolution? Geologists study a rather limited number of rocks; chemists and physicists study a limited amount of phenomena as well. But biologists study more than a million known species, and there are probably an order of magnitude more species than that. In any given volume of space in the universe, biological evolution results in far vaster amounts of "diversity" than a space without evolution.
• Biodiversity pales compared to technological diversity. We've been inventing things for around 10,000 years, and manufacturing them for around 200 or so years. In that space of time, we've easily produced 10 million "stable isotopes" of things—individual car models, iPods, chairs, marbles, televisions, desks, lampposts, fans, etc. I live in a big city, and while the urban environment may seem lifeless and completely lacking in biodiversity, it's interesting to see cities as sprawling jungles of another kind of diversity. If we loosely define a "thing" as a stable model that can be repeated, including both species of organisms and technological products, then there are probably more "things" in an acre of city than there are in an acre of rainforest. And this isn't even counting non-material technological products: ideas, songs, jingles, and other nonphysical memes.
Discuss: is this an accurate assessment of the state of diversity in the universe? If so, what are its implications?
I was thinking about this the other day, and came to several conclusions:
• There aren't that many things in the universe without biological evolution. There's a little more than a hundred stable kinds of atoms. The atoms can combine into a somewhat large number of stable molecules. On a large scale, gravity smooshes this shit altogether into planets and stars—both of which certainly constitute "stable things," and of course there are countless billions of planets and stars. But on a small scale, how much stuff is there without evolution? Geologists study a rather limited number of rocks; chemists and physicists study a limited amount of phenomena as well. But biologists study more than a million known species, and there are probably an order of magnitude more species than that. In any given volume of space in the universe, biological evolution results in far vaster amounts of "diversity" than a space without evolution.
• Biodiversity pales compared to technological diversity. We've been inventing things for around 10,000 years, and manufacturing them for around 200 or so years. In that space of time, we've easily produced 10 million "stable isotopes" of things—individual car models, iPods, chairs, marbles, televisions, desks, lampposts, fans, etc. I live in a big city, and while the urban environment may seem lifeless and completely lacking in biodiversity, it's interesting to see cities as sprawling jungles of another kind of diversity. If we loosely define a "thing" as a stable model that can be repeated, including both species of organisms and technological products, then there are probably more "things" in an acre of city than there are in an acre of rainforest. And this isn't even counting non-material technological products: ideas, songs, jingles, and other nonphysical memes.
Discuss: is this an accurate assessment of the state of diversity in the universe? If so, what are its implications?
Qingu on
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Thus I think some of the distribution of diversity you describe is anthropic.
As for implications I'm not sure what you can really draw from it: Life is awesome perhaps? Converting the environment into artifacts is a moral imperative?
You see that science is steadily progressing on a path towards describing things that are less stable to our common senses, requiring special tools to artificially expand the effects of unstable phenomena to the point they become stable to our senses.
My theory of the human mind is that we evolved to do predictions about our surroundings by way of association of stable phenomena with each other. In order to be not just reactive, but also proactive, imagination is needed. However, since our minds work by association, a weaker property than implication, we can easily imagine the association of phenomena that are actually not naturally related.
An associative mind has some advantages over strict implication. You can see this in the complexity of algorithms in computer science. The algorithms needed to solve a system by proper logic are much more complex than those who work by simple association and a few generations of evolution (neural nets).
I mean, take a large amount of sugar in the open. By itself it'll take a couple hundred years to degrade (say, via sunlight exposure) whereas add some E. Coli and those fuckers will take care of it in a few days and turn it into CO2.
There aren't many things in the universe that can survive for a great amount of time without this so called "stability". But then again from the description given it just seems like stability is a word being given to the ability to continue and survive.
what about plants?
like, it's an open system, but they kinda work against entropy to the extent that such a thing is possible. There's less entropy than there would be if the light just heated up interstellar dust a bit, right?