quote:
In a remarkable passage,. that could serve as a credo for modern formalism as well, Goethe asserts his central claim for internalist primacy, while also specifying the vital, but secondary, role of adaptation. Internal formation acts as a primary source that "must find external conditions." Adaptation may then shape a range of diversity from an underlying form, but the typal pattern cannot be explained by the secondary modifications, and the adaptations themselves can only express a superficial restructuring of inherent order:
Man, in considering all things with reference to himself, is obliged to assume that external forms are determined from within, and this assumption is all the easier for him in that no single living thing is conceivable without complete organization. Internally, this complete organization is clearly defined; thus it must find external conditions that are just as clear and definite, for its external existence is possible only under certain conditions and in certain situations....An animals possesses external usefulness precisely because it has been shaped from without as well as from within, and - more important and quite natural - because the external element can more readily adapt he external form to its own purposes than it can reshape the internal form. We can best see this in a species of seal whose exterior has taken a great deal of the fish character while its skeleton still represents the prefect quadruped (2nd essay on plant metamorphosis, written 1790, in Muller and Engard, 1952,p83).
Goethe's views therefore provide a "test case" for a primary thesis of the book. We should, I believe, recognize the space of our intellectual world as inherently structured, by some combination of our evolved mental quirks and the dictates of logic, into a discontinuous arrary of possible, coherent positions - hence the double entendre in the title of the book. These mental positions express "morphologies," just as organisms do. The chief components of these "morphologies" must reside together and interact to build the "essence" of any powerful intellectual system. The components o fa theory's essence should be recognized as both deep and minimal; with other less important and potentially dispensable principles allied to them in secondary webs subject to "restructuring" by "adapatation." (Thus I advocate a minimal set of three principles for defining the essence of Darwinism, while regarding other components of the ususal Darwinian nexus as conjoined more loo...
But here we find Gould trying to force an intelligibility of his best test case in>>t0 the difference of organic and inorganic biophysics, without relieveing the historical theology of the burden to translate his lofty wisdom and providential care into relative frequencies of material frequency dependence in an actual correalation by assuming the collectivities need not be only arranged in a circle whether or not we have the mathematical purity/mass to integrate the data or not.
As I do not have all of the abilities I need as a physicist and mathematician as of yet I can not be certain that the individuality that BOTH Darwinism and ID relies on, (it would have been a different question (and one I probably would not have tried to answer if the issue was "philosophy of creationism and geneic selectionism")) I can not say if the full resolution that I am working @ is going to come out of society by an individual (me or some else working on similar lines) or by population of newer students in the same objective subjetively replayed by Gould just before his death but seared by the sound of bleating seal at Sea World in the past. Thus without the actual individual it is hard to tell if my ideas on possible taxogeny in plants will work out all of the "poltical" and "national" differences Gould has written on the same subject. I dont know for sure but I surely know some of it. Croizat survives and Goethe does not. It is possible that as I work out the individual values attached to the symbols that the whole physical teleology can not be made to have both extreme ends meet in the circle of this actually but the logic will reside nonetheless and I will be able to show that Gould was over hasty in making a sand castle out of the difference in Paley and Aggasiz's contributions. ID does not individually depart from this goal either, it seemed to me., but Biblical creationism could however. I think the moduluous will still play out in the analysis that this synthesis only pokes at but now, I get ahead of Arach who still wants to say "me too" even though I have posted MuCH information.
The quote is from "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory", Stephen Jay Gould, The Belknap Press Of Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London, 2002 pages 289-290