I’d liken it to a chemical reaction. Many of them are multistep, and as a general statement chemical processes take place over an extremely wide range of orders of magnitude of rate (ranging from less than a billionth of a second to years). So, in an overall reaction, there are usually several steps, and the slowest one is usually orders of magnitude slower than any of the others, and that one’s called the rate determining step, for obvious reasons: it’s so much slower than the others that speeding up or slow down the others even by a couple of orders of magnitude is negligible to the overall rate of reaction. it’s pretty rare that more than one of them happen to be at nearly the same rate, since the range of orders of magnitude is so large.
I think that the evolution of intelligence is a stochastic process that’s pretty similar to molecular kinetics in a lot of ways, particularly that all of the above applies to it as well, thus, it’s more likely that there’s one rate determining step, one Great Filter, for the same reasons.
However (and I made another post about this here too), I do think that the filters are interdependent (there are multiple pathways and it’s not a linear process, but progress along a multidimensional surface.) that’s not really all that different than molecular kinetics either though.
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.
I’d liken it to a chemical reaction. Many of them are multistep, and as a general statement chemical processes take place over an extremely wide range of orders of magnitude of rate (ranging from less than a billionth of a second to years). So, in an overall reaction, there are usually several steps, and the slowest one is usually orders of magnitude slower than any of the others, and that one’s called the rate determining step, for obvious reasons: it’s so much slower than the others that speeding up or slow down the others even by a couple of orders of magnitude is negligible to the overall rate of reaction. it’s pretty rare that more than one of them happen to be at nearly the same rate, since the range of orders of magnitude is so large.
I think that the evolution of intelligence is a stochastic process that’s pretty similar to molecular kinetics in a lot of ways, particularly that all of the above applies to it as well, thus, it’s more likely that there’s one rate determining step, one Great Filter, for the same reasons.
However (and I made another post about this here too), I do think that the filters are interdependent (there are multiple pathways and it’s not a linear process, but progress along a multidimensional surface.) that’s not really all that different than molecular kinetics either though.
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.