Thank you for those kind thoughts. Perceptual Control is a central concept of the essay. Was my discussion of it clear and persuasive?
Of course you have my “permission”. That’s why I started this thread!
Intracellular chemical communication features strongly in one part of the essay, and I’d like to learn more about it, but not until I get the essay out and read widely.
I had no trouble following the chronology. IMO, the format is excellent.
For other readers:
“Perceptual control”
The phenomenon of control
The phenomenon of control is important in Psychology. Even a cursory glance through academic journals reveals a large number of references to the term ‘control’, as exemplified by E. A. Skinner (1996). Terms such as perceived control, locus of control, cognitive control, subjective control, and vicarious control speak directly to the phenomenon.
If we include implicit references to control, such as self-determination, self-regulation, agency, learned helplessness, and emotion regulation, the number
of references grows exponentially.
This process begins even at the single cell stage and can be observed in the behavior patterns of the paramecium and the slime mold.
From tedcloaks’ essay:
Organic reproduction enables a concurrent trend: wrapping the cooperating macromolecules in a membrane, thus creating the self-replicating cell.6
As enabled by the microtubules forming the cytoplasm and cytoskeleton in every Eukaryotic organism on Earth.
In the brain, microtubules number in the hundreds of billions and form a data processing network involving as many as 1000 trillion synaptic connections.
1000 trillion synapses
On average, the human brain contains about 100 billion neurons and many more neuroglia which serve to support and protect the neurons. Each neuron may be connected to up to 10,000 other neurons, passing signals to each other via as many as 1,000 trillion synapses. May 30, 2019
[1906.01703] Basic Neural Units of the Brain: Neurons, Synapses and Action Potential
The usual, standard way of describing that activity is to state that a particular perceived sensory “stimulus” triggers a particular motor “response”. If the question arises of why that stimulus triggers that response, the answer is framed in general terms of heredity or learning which has, presumably, set up a sequence of neurons and synapses linking sensory cells to motor cells – in very complicated networks, of course.
The neurons produce “action potentials” for various response behaviours.
But that explanation skips accounting for the ability of most animals to adjust their behavior in response to small and large differences and changes in the environmental situation. Nor does it explain how the animal “knows what to do.” It also fails adequately to describe non-movement behavior, such as an animal remaining stationary to conceal itself, or supporting itself against gravity.
AFAIK, this is a hardwired response system originating from the “fight or flight response action”
The missing element in such explanations is a set of perceptual control systems (Powers 1973, Powers et al. 2011) governing movement (or lack thereof) in animals, probably since the Cambrian era or even before. Although the downward movement has been scarcely perceptible, it is resisted, tending to restore the match.
This remarkable survival mechanism allows the brain to “accentuate” shadowed threats that may be hidden in the shade of the forest.
This optical illusion will not allow you to observe objective reality, no matter how hard you try, even when aware of the mental optical trick.
An evolutionary introduced false perception!
The resulting constant negative-feedback loop continues to run, keeping hand and mug apparently steady, until you decide to do something else with the mug; i.e., until you change the reference signal. (Try framing that behavior – yes, behavior – in conventional “stimulus à response” terms.)
I recommend reading Anil Seth for the actual feedback mechanisms in play.
Evolution by natural selection long preceded reproduction; indeed, the mechanisms of reproduction evolved from non-self-replicating macromolecules. · Behavior has led evolution from the beginning – action first (and still) by macromolecules, then by cells, then by multicellular organisms.
Macromolecular action continues to take the lead, in change both evolutionary (phylogeny) and developmental (ontogeny). Biological activity is never planned or designed, outside in; it’s always inside out.8 ·
See “microtubules mechanics”
The behavior of organisms, from the very earliest, has been the control of perception by action, by means of control systems, later linked in hierarchical networks, matching perceptual signals to reference signals.
I believe this rests on the physics of “differential equation”
Powers: “We are assuming that memory is recorded in the form of a physical change in a molecule.” (1973: 207). Marx and Gilon (2012, 2019) have shown that a memory can be stored biochemically in the extracellular matrix of a single neuron.
Stuart Hameroff demonstrates that memories are phosphorylated in “pyramidal neurons”, consisting of the “Purkinje neurons” that have pyramidal microtubule arrangement.
Artwork by Dave Cantrell and Paul Fini, Biomedical Communications, University of Arizona.
Elements of control systems are probably found in the earliest eukaryotic cells, and even in bacteria (e.g., Marken and Powers 1989). It seems certain that the basic animal control system was well established with the very earliest multicellular animals, roughly one billion years ago. If the phylogeny of the control system paralleled the adaptive trend of other basic animal features such as the reproductive system, control system genetics has likely been remarkably stable.
Again; see “microtubules”
In effect, the primordial cellular control system served as a template/ancestor for the evolution and proliferation of control systems and hierarchies in all animal species
Tubulin filaments were already present in Prokaryotic organisms.
It is possible that the self-organization of tubulin filaments was instrumental in Abiogenesis itself.
Six million years or so ago, our four-footed ape-ancestors lived in the African forest. Although they came down by day to forage, at night they made their sleeping nests in the trees to avoid predation by large carnivores. But in part of their terrain, long-term reduction in rainfall slowly turned the forest into open savannah. Over the generations, to forage, apes resident in that part had to travel farther and farther between smaller and smaller groves of trees.
Standing and moving on their hind legs, although initially clumsy, made it easier to carry food, young, and perhaps sticks as weapons and tools, and also made it easier to scan above the savannah vegetation for predators, food sources, and each other.
Suddenly (geologically speaking), certain DNA mutations which had heretofore been useless or worse now sequentially became adaptive because they incrementally improved the apes’ ability to walk upright, by making changes in the bones and muscles of their pelves, their backbones, their feet, their skulls, etc. An ecological niche for an upright walking ape had opened, and this adaptive trend filled it, in just a few thousand generations – or so we can phrase it. I suspect that many cases of punctuated equilibrium are in fact just adaptive trends.
more…
https://www.tedcloak.com/
I believe that before those evolutionary changes a rare beneficial mutation fused 2 ancestral chromosomes into a single much larger chromosome (2) and is the demarcation point where human species was created and split from the common hominid ancestor.
This can be demonstrated by the fact that humans are the only great ape with 23 pr. chromosomes, whereas all other apes have 24 pr. chromosomes.
Human Chromosome 2 is a fusion of two ancestral chromosomes
Alec MacAndrew
Introduction
All great apes apart from man have 24 pairs of chromosomes. There is therefore a hypothesis that the common ancestor of all great apes had 24 pairs of chromosomes and that the fusion of two of the ancestor’s chromosomes created chromosome 2 in humans. The evidence for this hypothesis is very strong.
Let us re-iterate what we find on human chromosome 2. Its centromere is at the same place as the chimpanzee chromosome 2p as determined by sequence similarity. Even more telling is the fact that on the 2q arm of the human chromosome 2 is the unmistakable remains of the original chromosome centromere of the common ancestor of human and chimp 2q chromosome, at the same position as the chimp 2q centromere (this structure in humans no longer acts as a centromere for chromosome 2.
Conclusion
The evidence that human chromosome 2 is a fusion of two of the common ancestor’s chromosomes is overwhelming.
