Ask A Genius 898: Niches of Persistence
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/02/10
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, I proposed a topic on how evolution finds all niches of persistence. Those are generic abstract terms. I wanted to start with reproduction styles, and I’m speaking more about biological reproduction. So, our species has its form of reproduction, and I’m speaking purely in terms of a continuation of a genetic line. I’m not talking about social aspects; I’m just talking about the forms and mechanics of reproduction. If you look at the animal world and the plant world, there are just an enormous number of ways in which nature has found a way to reproduce. So, at face value, these reproduction styles are so diverse in terms of styles and magnitudes that nature has seen most of the possible niches for persistence for reproductive success.
Rick Rosner: Hold on. So, persistence isn’t the same thing as reproductive success. You have to start with a scatology: evolution is good at what evolution is good at. On this planet, at least, evolutionary processes have created a genetic structure that is good at passing down well-assembly instructions to make roughly the same animal from generation to generation, with variation created for a lot of animals and plants mixing genes by combining a male and a female set of genes. Still, there’s a lot that gets left out. I don’t know of any species that lets you mix three people’s genes to create an offspring or four. You can do four if you do a two by two and then have those two offsprings mate, but only four at a time.
Evolution could improve at creating persistence by having creatures live forever. Some species live for a long time, and you can call them immortal because either the same animal keeps living by making new cells or something or keeps producing more or less exact duplicates of itself. If you probably take a couple of hours and think of a bunch of different ways too, if you somehow have the technology to do it, pass information from generation to generation with variation, but when it comes to sexual reproduction and all the other ways that organisms on earth reproduce, they’re pretty good at filling niches because they’ve had billions of years to develop the technology; the evolutionary technology genes and epigenetics and just everything. So, once you limit the persistence field to reproductive genetics, evolution has covered a lot of ground because it’s had so long to do it and so many animals to do it with.
A hundred years ago, Schrödinger of Schrödinger’s Cat wrote a book called What Is Life. I tried to read it, I started reading it, and I didn’t get very far, but I mean, there’s plenty of stuff that’s persistent, exists for a long time, and isn’t alive. If the universe allows, diamonds can exist for billions of years. It takes around four and a half billion years for a diamond to disintegrate.
Jacobsen: That’s incredible!
Rosner: Yeah, it’s under a lot of pressure, and little carbon molecules very slowly evaporate off the surface of a diamond. There are other crystals that are probably even more stable and can persist for tens of billions of years if external conditions allow.
Jacobsen: So, you’re distinguishing between the persistence of inanimate life and animate life?
Rosner: Schrödinger wrote that book about 25 years before Shannon developed a mathematical characterization of information and information theory. I would think that a modern physicist, a super competent physicist writing about what life is, would get farther in defining it than the uncertainty guy did because its information and entropy, and neg entropy, have something to do with how life is organized over time and being persistent within the lives of individual organisms and also from generation to generation. You don’t have to get that deep; you can look at some of the things… and we did this in like fourth or fifth grade, like, what do you think makes something alive? In fourth grade, we didn’t come up with all this stuff, but it’s being built from the minor structures, which are self-assembled and reproduced. You can make a robot that can create a replica of itself, but the pieces will not be significant. They’re not going to take advantage of all the things that individual atoms can; you’re not going to have microstructures or everything being built up from microstructures.
[Recording End]
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