The Revolutionary Phenotype

I just bought The Revolutionary Phenotype on Kindle and I've been browsing through it. I'm frankly a little disappointed. It was exactly what I expected. Another Kiplingesque "Just So Story." The author says "By the end of this book we will have made a definitive case that each of the phenotypic revolutions listed above did occur." Well, no. Definitive, as in conclusive, as in no further discussion needs to be had? No. The author has told a story, that's all. It's a plausible story that doesn't contradict any known physical laws, like all the best science fiction. But it remains just a story. It hasn't been tested, hasn't been subject to falsification. I am unbearably tired of these attempts to tell a story regarding evolution and call it conclusive.

I find it very significant that the author refers to the "interests" of RNA molecules. Only conscious actors have interests. Self-replicating molecules have no interests. They don't "want" to keep replicating. They don't "want" anything. Throughout the book, he uses the language of agency. It's very anthropomorphic the way he talks about tricksters and goals and relative importance of different tasks to these non-thinking entities that have no internal notion of their own survival.

He refers to "the rules of evolution": "If Quantum Darwinism is correct, then a replicator was subject to the rules of evolution long before the appearance of life on Earth..."

He defines the first principles of evolution:

1. Some entities make almost exact copies of themselves (replicators);
2. These entities do other things (phenotypic machines).

And his brief definition of the theory of natural selection:

"Across generations replicators occur within restricted restricted environments and produce imperfect copies of themselves. Because the imperfect copies vary across the population, each set of replicators produces phenotypic machines that differ across the population as well. The replicators able to create machines that favor their own replication naturally increase in number. The replicators that produce less efficient machines become less numerous. Accordingly across generations, replicators are served by machines that are increasingly well-suited to favor their copying."

But this all falls back to the fundamental tautology of natural selection. The devil is in the value judgments: "favor" and "less efficient." Simple self-replicating molecules don't "favor" anything and efficiency can only be predicted after the fact -- what survived, survived. RNA doesn't intelligently adapt to changing conditions. It doesn't have "interests."

It's simply a more sophisticated sounding version of the turtle story: "My opponent's reasoning reminds me of the heathen, who, being asked on what the world stood, replied, 'On a tortoise.' But on what does the tortoise stand? "On another tortoise." With Mr. Barker, too, there are tortoises all the way down." -- Joseph Frederick Berg

Where did DNA come from? RNA! Where did RNA come from? Some previous self-replicating molecule! And where did it come from? It's replicators all the way down!

It seems to me that if you get down to a simple enough replicator, you would get to one so simple that it was incapable of making copying errors and still having a functional machine. Each step he describes represents a statistical anomaly that is incredibly unlikely -- "not enough atoms and time in the universe" levels of unlikely, but he expects us to believe this happens over and over and over with striking and necessarily cascading frequency as the self-replicators grow more complex, yet he gives no concrete, testable examples of how this occurs or what the rate is.

"One day [me: it even opens like a Kipling Just So Story], by pure chance, a single RNA molecule developed a small mutation. This mutation caused the RNA molecule to produce a new type of phenotypic machine, one that resembled RNA, but with an additional smattering of oxygen and hydrogen atoms.

"That machine was DNA. 

"Presumably, at some point, the presence of DNA somehow advantaged the RNA replicators that produced it..."

When your entire book comes down to a "presumably" and a "somehow" you're not making a "definitive" case for anything.

The rest is just the same "time and random mutation" claptrap we've been hearing about for more than a century:

"Simply put, the replicators able to create good phenotypic machines replace other replicators by outnumbering them. If you extrapolate this principle over millions and billions of generations you can understand why a bacteria could progressively evolve into a bird."

Well, no, I don't understand that. Birds don't outnumber bacteria. They don't outcompete bacteria. They are food for bacteria. They are not as successful as bacteria at surviving or thriving in any given environment on Earth. All they are is more complex, and nothing the author discusses posits complexity as a good in itself. Complexity just means more points of failure. Birds are far more fragile, more sensitive to changing environmental conditions than bacteria.

I've only lightly skimmed the "Answers" section of the book, but at first pass, the entire section with all its talk of "trickster printers" appears to be just baseless, non-technical, blue sky theorizing about stuff that, when you strip away all the author's language, doesn't really solve or explain anything.

The "Predictions" section isn't even worthy of discussion.