Interesting. However, I still don’t see why the filter would work similarly to a chemical reaction. Unless it’s a general law of statistics that any event is always far more likely to have a single primary cause, it seems like a strange assumption since they are such dissimilar things.
Sorry for the delayed response; I don’t come on here particularly often.
The assumptions I’m making are that evolution is a stochastic process in which elements are in fluxional states and there ere is some measure of ‘difficulty’ in transitioning from one state to another, an energetic or entropic barrier of sorts, that to go from A to B (for example, from an organism with asexual reproduction to an organism with sexual reproduction) some confluence of factors must occur, and that occurrence has a certain likelihood that’s dependent on the conditions of the whole system (ecosystem). I think that this combined with the large numbers of physical elements interacting (organsims) is enough to say that evolution is governed by something pretty similar to statistical thermodynamics.
So, from the Arrhenius equation,
k = Ae^{{-E_a}/{RT}}
where k is the rate of reaction, A is the order of reaction (number of components that must come together), E_a is the activation energy, or energy barrier, and RT is the gas constant multiplied by temperature.
The equation is mostly applied to chemistry, but it also has found uses in other sectors, like predicting the geographic progression of the blooming of Sakura trees (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_blossom_front). It really applies to any system that has certain kinetic properties.
So ignoring all the chemistry specific factors (like temperature), the relation in its most general form becomes
k = Ae^-BE
This says essentially that the rate is proportional to a negative exponential of the barrier to the transformation, and small changes in the value of the barrier correspond to large changes in the value of the rate. Thus, it’s unlikely that two rates are similar. I don’t see why two unrelated things would be likely to have a similar barrier, and given this, they’re even less likely to have a similar rate.
Interesting. However, I still don’t see why the filter would work similarly to a chemical reaction. Unless it’s a general law of statistics that any event is always far more likely to have a single primary cause, it seems like a strange assumption since they are such dissimilar things.
Sorry for the delayed response; I don’t come on here particularly often.
The assumptions I’m making are that evolution is a stochastic process in which elements are in fluxional states and there ere is some measure of ‘difficulty’ in transitioning from one state to another, an energetic or entropic barrier of sorts, that to go from A to B (for example, from an organism with asexual reproduction to an organism with sexual reproduction) some confluence of factors must occur, and that occurrence has a certain likelihood that’s dependent on the conditions of the whole system (ecosystem). I think that this combined with the large numbers of physical elements interacting (organsims) is enough to say that evolution is governed by something pretty similar to statistical thermodynamics.
So, from the Arrhenius equation, k = Ae^{{-E_a}/{RT}}
where k is the rate of reaction, A is the order of reaction (number of components that must come together), E_a is the activation energy, or energy barrier, and RT is the gas constant multiplied by temperature.
The equation is mostly applied to chemistry, but it also has found uses in other sectors, like predicting the geographic progression of the blooming of Sakura trees (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_blossom_front). It really applies to any system that has certain kinetic properties.
So ignoring all the chemistry specific factors (like temperature), the relation in its most general form becomes
k = Ae^-BE
This says essentially that the rate is proportional to a negative exponential of the barrier to the transformation, and small changes in the value of the barrier correspond to large changes in the value of the rate. Thus, it’s unlikely that two rates are similar. I don’t see why two unrelated things would be likely to have a similar barrier, and given this, they’re even less likely to have a similar rate.