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Time and Knowability in Evolutionary Processes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Elliott Sober  and
Mike Steel
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Abstract

Historical sciences like evolutionary biology reconstruct past events by using the traces that the past has bequeathed to the present. Markov chain theory entails that the passage of time reduces the amount of information that the present provides about the past. Here we use a Moran process framework to show that some evolutionary processes destroy information faster than others. Our results connect with Darwin’s principle that adaptive similarities provide scant evidence of common ancestry whereas neutral and deleterious similarities do better. We also describe how the branching in phylogenetic trees affects the information that the present supplies about the past.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 81 , Issue 4 , October 2014 , pp. 558 - 579
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Elliott Sober presented this paper in 2012 at the University of Bordeaux, the London School of Economics, and the Institute for Mathematical Philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, and received valuable comments. We are grateful for these and also to Elchanan Mossel for helpful comments. Elliott Sober thanks the William F. Vilas Trust of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Mike Steel thanks the Allan Wilson Centre (New Zealand).

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