Why noctogenesis is a flawed concept

In his recent two-part essay on evolution, Lloyd Merriam introduces the concept of noctogenesis as a way in which “Nature.. ..is drawing into time a form that stood timelessly among the possible”.

Here, I will argue that this new concept 1) poses a strawman, 2) is basically a categorical error to begin with and 3) introduces nothing novel but is instead nothing more than a linguistic transformation of key-concepts in evolutionary biology, in a silly game of semantics used to justify an illogical and unfalsifiable conclusion.

Genetic drift cannot be beneficial; the strawman

In preparation (part 1) of his thesis, Merriam refers to the ‘neutral theory of molecular evolution’ to argue that traces of genetic drift are far more prevalent in genomes of different species than traces of natural selection, genetic drift would only lead to genomic noise and that therefore there must be an underlying steering mechanism to evolution - which Merriam presumes to be a quantumprocess.

The idea that genetic drift would only lead to genomic noise is however intrinsically flawed: in drift, the genome accumulates random mutations (noise) that mostly don’t affect survival while functional characteristics are highly preserved by natural selection. At the same time and by the exact same mechanism, at individually very low cost, the product of genetic drift produces natural variation for natural selection to occur or not.

“Conventional theory relies on this undirected wandering to generate a reservoir of genetic novelty that selection might eventually find useful. But a random walk on a flat, featureless mathematical plane goes nowhere in particular. The probability of purely undirected drift blindly assembling the precise co-requisites for a complex regulatory architecture, while avoiding a descent into genomic noise, is staggeringly low." 

In contrast to the abstraction made by Merriam, supposing drift occurs in a mathematically flat plain, the actual fitness-landscape is highly dynamic: things like weatherevents, geophysics and organisms themselves shape the environment in which organisms can survive or perish. The natural variation that comes from genetic drift, is an in situ historical record that dictates the resilience of populations to environmental shifts: it is the inherent flexibility to adapt under natural selection; at population level, the ‘noise’ is actually a functional buffer.

Merriam apparently clearly understands this nuance: “Organisms live and die. Genes mutate. Environments and organisms change. Natural selection operates relentlessly on whatever biological actuality is placed before it.”, but still insists on the inherently faulty analogy of an ecologically flat plane: “.. a random walk on a flat, featureless mathematical plane goes nowhere in particular.” in order to demonstrate his - faulty - principle by - unjustifiably - isolating genetic drift from ecological reality.

Quantum-timesymmetry; a categorical error of quantum-mysticism

In order to explain away the strawman of dysfunctional genetic drift, Merriam uses the fact that subatomic particles behave in strange ways, where time appears mathematically symmetrical - i.e. on the tiniest level of analysis, there appears to be no real past or present -, in order to claim that there must be a timeless process operating at the basis of evolution. 

However, trying to explain biology, which is solidly bound by the vector of time, by invoking the math of quantummechanics, ignores the laws of thermodynamics in order to sway readers with the mystique of a - quantum - level of analysis ill-suited for a proper biological understanding.

Breaking the time barrier: a silly game of semantics

"Nor should we say the teleoverse existed before the physical universe, since before simply sneaks time back into a domain we have just defined as lying outside it. Once a possibility actualizes, of course, it enters time.. ..But the field of possibility from which those actualities emerge has no past-to-future ordering of its own."

When Merriam argues noctogenesis must be some kind of quantumprocess where the normal rules of time do not apply, he introduces something he calls the teleoverse as: 

".. the inexhaustible non-spacetime inventory of biological possibility, encompassing every physically available arrangement, interaction, pathway, regulatory architecture, developmental sequence, organic form, and relationship that can arise within the living world. Not merely every creature that might exist, but every molecular turn, every intermediate configuration, every route by which living matter can potentially assemble and transform itself, all present as pure possibility rather than realized form".

Where something called “expectancy” operates somewhat like natural selection, with the clear distinction that it’s supposed to be a process that - retrospectively - operates from the future, influencing the past:

"Expectancy is not another force, not natural selection masquerading at the quantum level, and certainly not some hidden agent choosing among alternatives. It is the principle by which some possible histories become probabilistically favored over others without any constituent event ceasing to be intrinsically random." 

Although the mechanism is supposed to act independently from spacetime, Merriam argues it does select from “possible histories” in the present and future, while - according to Merriam and I’m with him on that one - “Natural selection operates relentlessly on whatever biological actuality is placed before it”. 

For a process that doesn’t obey time, the necessary introduction of histories, actuality and future contradicts the entire premise.

Meanwhile, in reality, the present “biological actuality” is exactly where “the principle by which some possible histories become probabilistically favored over others” evidently takes place. 

When confronted, Merriam claims his is not a game of semantics but the introduction of truly novel concepts. However, functional analysis does not support his opinion: 

Expectancy as something probabilistically preferring certain genetic routes, performs exactly the same function as natural selection in a dynamic fitness-landscape; the only distinctive part of the concept of expectancy is the teleological (re)direction Merriam proposes.

The teleoverse is functionally indistinguishable from natural variation, but is supposed to exist metaphysically, in a biological nowhere, while natural variation clearly exists in the populations it serves.

By clouding his functional duplicates in a mist of quantumsymmetry, Merriam denies the clear functional resemblance of his new terminology to regular evolutionary key-concepts.

https://noctogenesis.substack.com/p/the-shape-of-possibility?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=9ekgrz