Andrew Murray and simulating evolution
Another theory lunch, this time with Andrew Murray from the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and co-director for the Bauer Center. Andrew and his lab are simulating evolution in the lab, and he spent some of his talk explaning the rational for this. Field biologists studing evolution in the wild might say that results from the constrained environment of the lab don't tell you much about the real world. Andrew seemed to be saying that the real world is so complex that it's difficult to make any generalizations about what you find there. At least in the lab you can control the environment and therefore know, or have a better idea of what causes the changes you are seeing. I got the feeling that the field has been dominated by field biologists, hence Andrew's need to explain and defend his methods.
In fact, he started the talk with some observations about the field which apply to most subcultures, art included. The folks who make the important contirbutions at the beginning are the ones who define the arguments, but as the culture evolves, as we learn more, those arguments and constraints become dated. They are so entrenched, though, that to change them requires a paradigm shift.
In the case of evolution, Andrew talked about the work of Sewall Wright and R. A. Fisher. They worked in a time before computers when, in general, problems had to be analytically tractable. Nowadays we can use computational power to solve previously unapproachable problems (using numeric techniques). Sewall and R. A. assumed that genotypes could be grouped on a 2-D plane. We now believe it's a multidimensional space; as the number of dimensions increases, the number of possible paths between fitness maximums increases.
Science: Ask general questions, work on specific experiments, and, with luck and serendipity, hope for a general conclusion. (Art: ?)
In fact, he started the talk with some observations about the field which apply to most subcultures, art included. The folks who make the important contirbutions at the beginning are the ones who define the arguments, but as the culture evolves, as we learn more, those arguments and constraints become dated. They are so entrenched, though, that to change them requires a paradigm shift.
In the case of evolution, Andrew talked about the work of Sewall Wright and R. A. Fisher. They worked in a time before computers when, in general, problems had to be analytically tractable. Nowadays we can use computational power to solve previously unapproachable problems (using numeric techniques). Sewall and R. A. assumed that genotypes could be grouped on a 2-D plane. We now believe it's a multidimensional space; as the number of dimensions increases, the number of possible paths between fitness maximums increases.
Science: Ask general questions, work on specific experiments, and, with luck and serendipity, hope for a general conclusion. (Art: ?)
