Harnessing stochasticity: How do organisms make choices?

Choice in the behavior of organisms involves novelty, which may be unpredictable. Yet in retrospect, we can usually provide a rationale for the choice. A deterministic view of life cannot explain this. The solution to this paradox is that organisms can harness stochasticity through which they can generate many possible solutions to environmental challenges. They must then employ a comparator to find the solution that fits the challenge. What therefore is unpredictable in prospect can become comprehensible in retrospect. Harnessing stochastic and/or chaotic processes is essential to the ability of organisms to have agency and to make choices.

[1]  Patrick Bateson,et al.  The Active Role of Behaviour in Evolution , 2004 .

[2]  D. Noble.  Evolution viewed from physics, physiology and medicine , 2017, Interface Focus.

[3]  B. Swinderen,et al.  Attention-like processes in Drosophila require short-term memory genes. , 2007 .

[4]  Denis Noble,et al.  A theory of biological relativity: no privileged level of causation , 2012, Interface Focus.

[5]  David G. Schatz,et al.  Targeting of somatic hypermutation , 2006, Nature Reviews Immunology.

[6]  B. Hare,et al.  Bonobos and chimpanzees exhibit human-like framing effects , 2015, Biology Letters.

[7]  P. Gearhart,et al.  Does DNA repair occur during somatic hypermutation? , 2012, Seminars in immunology.

[8]  D. Noble,et al.  Was the Watchmaker Blind? Or Was She One-Eyed? , 2017, Biology.

[9]  S. Brosnan,et al.  Monkeys reject unequal pay , 2003, Nature.

[10]  B. Hare,et al.  Chimpanzees and bonobos distinguish between risk and ambiguity , 2011, Biology Letters.

[11]  R. W. Byrne,et al.  Wild chimpanzees’ use of single and combined vocal and gestural signals , 2017, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

[12]  Laurie R Santos,et al.  The evolutionary roots of human decision making. , 2015, Annual review of psychology.

[13]  F. Range,et al.  Domestication Does Not Explain the Presence of Inequity Aversion in Dogs , 2017, Current Biology.

[14]  Denis Noble,et al.  Genome Size and Numbers of Biological Functions , 2005, Trans. Comp. Sys. Biology.

[15]  Bruno van Swinderen,et al.  Attention‐like processes underlying optomotor performance in a Drosophila choice maze , 2007, Developmental neurobiology.

[16]  K. Farnsworth.  How Organisms Gained Causal Independence and How It Might Be Quantified , 2018, Biology.

[17]  P. Bateson.  The Adaptability Driver: Links between Behavior and Evolution , 2006 .

[18]  T. Honjo,et al.  Specific Expression of Activation-induced Cytidine Deaminase (AID), a Novel Member of the RNA-editing Deaminase Family in Germinal Center B Cells* , 1999, The Journal of Biological Chemistry.

[19]  C. Woo,et al.  The generation of antibody diversity through somatic hypermutation and class switch recombination. , 2004, Genes & development.

[20]  Wuyin Jin,et al.  Diversity and Noise in Neurodynamics Across Different Functional Levels , 2016 .

[21]  A Guo,et al.  Choice Behavior of Drosophila Facing Contradictory Visual Cues , 2001, Science.

[22]  P. Bateson.  Adaptability and evolution , 2017, Interface Focus.

[23]  E. Lorenz.  Deterministic nonperiodic flow , 1963 .

[24]  B. Mcclintock,et al.  The significance of responses of the genome to challenge. , 1984, Science.

[25]  J. Call,et al.  Great Apes' Risk-Taking Strategies in a Decision Making Task , 2011, PloS one.

[26]  Martin Heisenberg,et al.  Is free will an illusion? , 2009, Nature.