Wrong however unnamed
Related to: 37 ways that words can be wrong.
Consider the following sentence (from Internet; but I have heard it before): 'Lichens consist of fungi and algae, but they are more than the sum of their constituents.'
It is supposed to say something like 'the fungus and the alga don't just live very close to each other, they influence each other's habitat(s) and can be considered, for most purposes, to form a physiologically integrated body'. It never actually says that, although people gradually come to this conclusion if they look at illustrations or read long enough. And I don't think the phrase is sufficiently catchy to explain its popularity; rather, that it is a tenuous introduction to the much-later-explained term 'synergism'. A noble (in principle) preparation of the mind.
Yet how is a lichen 'more than the sum of fungus and alga'? I suppose one could speak of a 'sum' if the lichen was pulverized and consumed as medicine, and then its effect on the patient was compared to that of the mixture of similarly treated fungus (grown how exactly?) and alga (same here). It doesn't exist in the wild. It shouldn't exist in the literature.
A child is not bothered by its lack of sense. When she encounters 'synergism', she'll remember having been told of something like it, and be reassured by the unity of science. It flies under the radar of 'established biological myths', because it doesn't have enough meaning to be one.
I picked a dictionary of zoological terms and tried to recall how the notions were put before me for the first time, but of course I failed. (I guess it should be high-level things, like 'variability', or colloquial expressions - 'bold as a lion', etc., that distort and get distorted the most.) They seem to 'have always been there'. Then, I looked at the definitions and tried to imagine them misapplied (intuitively, a simpler task). No luck. Yet someday, something other truly unknown to me will appear familiar and simple.
We can weed out improper concepts from textbooks, but there are too many sources which are written far more engagingly and 'clearly', and which propagate not even wrong ideas. Explained like I'm five.
And never named.
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Comments (27)
I understand synergy as when Effect(A) + Effect(B) < Effect (A & B). Basically, when you get nonlinearity in response.
This would not only be if you try to use it as medicine as you say, but also in their own capabilities.
So in this case, if you consider the algal component of lichen, take them alone, and see where they can live and what they can do, and if you consider the fungal component of lichen, take them alone and see where they can live and what they can do, your results will be (if the claim is correct) that these will not be half as widespread or capable as the two together are.
It seems pretty clear to me that this is what is meant. Does it make sense? Is this also an incorrect statement of biology?
But what effect? You can determine, for example, how much CO2 do the fungi and algae produce when taken together not as lichen, but they won't occupy the same habitats (and so their CO2 emissions will cause different effects in the environment, and totalling them would not be correct). I mean that yes, obviously you will obtain some values, and they even might be lower than for the lichen containing the exact same amounts of both. It just won't have any practical sense.
The effect here is just being able to survive and thrive in a place. Their range and coverage and so forth grow a lot.
Prove it.
Prove what? That that interpretation is what "they" meant or that it is biologically accurate?
The parent says in his final paragraph that he does not know whether it is biologically accurate or not.
The question is not is it whether this is accurate, but rather whether this is meaningful at all. I think it isn't. I do not expect, therefore, that it can be proved, and any other defence seems to me to be circular, but I might be wrong.
Whether 'the range and coverage and total population' is meaningful at all? I can't even understand how this being meaningful could be in question.
No. Sorry. I meant 'whether a comparison between the parameters for the f&a and for the lichen is meaningful at all, given different methods of [sampling, cultivation, quantification] 'searching' for all three, different ways of reproduction for all three, and different dissemination strategies for all three'.
It is sometimes difficult to compare two populations of the same species, for example for orchids. Suppose there are twenty adult-to-senescing plants in the location A, and no young plants visible at all, and ten struggling adult plants plus three possibly young ones in location B. What population has better prospects? The three young plants might actually be underdeveloped adults; the dust-like seeds, however uncommonly maturing, might germinate considerably far away; and both young and old plants can just sit under the ground eating their mycorrhiza for years and be, therefore, uncountable.
Now compare the difficulty of this estimation with the difficulty of the f&a vs. lichen one. The second boggles the mind.
Measuring it would be a ridiculously exhaustive task, but it seems like evolution has already performed the measurement for us.
No, it does not. The less faith people put into the 'evolutionary explanation', the more water it holds. Everything that is not forbidden is allowed; as long as the two versions both exist, there is no better one.
I don't know anything about lichen, but the below is what I assume "more than the sum of" in this context means:
So that means that the complex of f&a acquires different properties, occurs in different conditions, and might - might - have an overall wider 'ecological amplitude'. Which is plausible, but hardly ever proven (I don't recall any direct comparison of rates of reproduction, dissemination, biomass allocation or any other objective measure of population success, not 'body type success', but I have not looked into it.)
This is apples vs. non-apples.
I think it's not so much a sum of properties as a union of property sets. If a system has a property that's not a part of a union then it's "more than the sum of its components". On the other hand I find the notion of something being "more than the sum of its parts" about as annoying as the frequent ads with "1 + 1 = 3 Buy two and get one for free!" equation. That is, very annoying.
It strikes me that you are taking what is supposed to be metaphorical as literally true. As in would you take a saying such as "an apple doesn't fall far from the apple tree" to be dysfuncitonal if "falling" is inadequately defined and "far" doesn't have any metric applied to it?
While "sum" has a technical meaning here it is used more of a standin for more loose category. For example in the same sense that "man + woman = man + woman + baby, ie 1+1=3". In a way even a childless family has pretty different properties than two singles considered as a group. But we don't need to go into concrete some kind of single defined "people sum" to appriciate this fact.
A funny thing is that my sister and I seem to have a sporadic third twin people keep insisting they know. We get to hear about how she's doing: married, smoking, had her hair cut just shorter than 'you' do, cheats on exams... I swear she has a more interesting life!
So I guess 1+1 can at times equal 3...
But the 1+1=3 situation has, thankfully, no continuation in the math course; the notion of synergism becomes itself a matter to understand afterwards.
There is an algebraic analogy that might be useful (or confusing, if you don't know the math involved). In a tensor space, there are elements called pure tensors that can be described by a simple term (rank 1 tensors), while others cannot be described by a such item. In a similar fashion, entangled systems in quantum mechanics cannot be described considering the simple sub-costituents in isolation.
Another, perhaps simpler, analogy is a probability distribution of two dependent variables.
Whenever I read "more than the sum of its parts", I do not imagine the literal sum, but rather that some variables or observables in the system are tensorial in nature.
...I will look up tensors:) I have already tried to understand the piece before, but could not.
Actually, I would appreciate it if you could write a post and expand your analogy to other matters within your interests; it would be great if people grew used to sharing their heuristics without thinking them biases from the outset.
From reading Wikipedia it seems that the definition is wrong in another way: Lichen don't always have algae in them but sometimes only cyanobacteria.
Even without cyanobacteria, 'algae' are paraphyletic, so people are willing to forgive such usage.
I agree. Not all Wittgenstein's ladders are necessary, and they can serve to confuse readers. It's just so hard to tell what's necessary from the inside. And what's necessary can vary with the student.
But the words just don't make sense! And I am somewhat afraid (a little bit) that some of my foundations are just as shaky.