The year 87, is the same year my project at Cornell fell through and I was involuntarily confined, apparently within Richard's Faraday cage, "in the day."
My interest has always been in herpetology. As a child of a grandfather who’s specialities were fruit fly genetics and ornithology, I found in the attic, a simple figure that had connected invertebrates to amphibians to reptiles with TWO side branches, one for birds and the other for mammals. I began to become better able to visualize the forms of reptiles and amphibians and suggest possible transitions between living morphic differences than he was when describing and dealing with with fish and birds. I later extended this
a posteriori activity to fish, while I was in Africa in 86’ with a grad student from Cornell.
In school I learned the obvious explanation that Lamarck was wrong and Darwin was correct and Weismann, who cut off the tails of mice “proved” it. I also could not understand why the Cave-Salamander of Europe had “political” implications. When at Cornell I noticed that “dialectical materialism” was something on the surface of this whole problem or issue. I tried to understand why so many “authorities” said that there was a problem with “Lysenko.” This was during the time that Communism was being leveled.
I began to read a lot of Croizat’s work because I had had an interest, in two different aspects of biology, one of which was to see if algebra could used to separate out and sort different geographic distributions into classes. Croizat claimed that he could see regularities in distributions. I had more or less assumed, that if like looking a wandering stars, one looked at data of racial differences, one might be able to make a “Copernican revolution” in evolutionary theory if what Croizat called “tracks” could be better objectified. It was always curious to me, that Croizat had thought for a time that Gould was going to be on his side, but latter turned against his stewing juices, just as he did with Matthew, Darlington, Mayr and later with Nelson.
The other object of my studies was begun in 70s when President Carter called for the need in the US for “more energy.” I had reasoned, “if my grandfather is correct and evolution occurred by “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” or whatever that was supposed to mean or have meant, that creatures have maintained the DIFFERENCES in their forms of many, many years, then there must be some kind of “energy” stored in the differences of the (at least two )branches (two of which ramify WITHIN the REPTILES and extrovert GOING OUT the Amphibians) from some common anscestor." I was never thinking, in the subject of extracting energy from form, back to the origin of life but only to the, vertebrate-invertebrate change.
Now to the video,
“genetics and the computer” vs “genetics and the engineering laboratory”
My first interest listed above can be worked on, with a proper discipline of the computer and the second with engineering. It doesn’t matter to me that that Reckenburg got the idea from bird wings. I had had an idea about Penrose tilings from echinoderms, similar enough for my own critical notions.
“don’t simply mimic natural design, they have evolved”
Ok here we go, later Dawkins uses the difference of Darwinian design and Human design. So it becomes inscriptable what Richard means, {the bird has a “natural” design, Darwinian design (step by step process of change and replacement), Human design (whatever the Engineer makes)}.
(as an aside- Dawkins wanted his biomorphs on the computer to “reach out” and “control something in the real world”. I find this thought biologically to be the same as Stuart Kaufmann’s motivation to develop catalytic sets from lights that blink on and off in binary- so for me Dawkins’ Darwinian design, either by computers or airfoils, is actually a reference to chemical aggregation and dissagregation. This might be objected to by some readers but it is not what is most controversial in my abbreviated post above.)
“evolve the ideal shape”
If it is possible to extract energy from the already branched differences of trait-outlines then the motion of the machine necessary to do this work, must be in a directum opposite to that shown in the video, FROM rather than TO a plane surface, or more accurately in rays beyond the locus of some actual physical symmetry
Now, according to Gould (SETHp185)
quote:
I doubt that we can take this analysis much further, Historians often err in trying to wrest consistency from great thinkers at all costs. Some issues are too difficult, too encompassing, too important, too socially embedded, or just too devoid of evidence, for resolution even by the finest scientists. Darwin never consolidated his contradictory ideas about progress (see Chapter 6), and Lamarck never found a thoroughly consistent way to fulfill his desired argument for a full separation between two foces pulling evolution in orthogonal directions - up the ladder of progress, and sideways into lateral paths of adaptation. Lamarck may never have completed his scheme with success and consistency, but he made his desires clear to the point of redundancy. Lamarck’s two-factor theory holds the distinction of being both the first evolutionary system in modern Western thought, and a strong argument for causal hierarchy. The two levels - in strong contrast with modern theories of hierarchy - are both causally distinct and contradictory for Lamarck, thus inspiring Darwin’s legitmate disparagement.
I am forming an opinion that Gould’s adumbration is illegitimate no matter how disparaged Darwin may have been or became. What Stephen said was(SETHp181),
quote:
Lamarck therefore proposes two distinct sets of forces to construct what he regarded as the two preeminent features of life - progress in a linear order, and adaptation to environment. The interaction of these sets - not the causes or properties of either one -establish the foundation of Lamarkism, properly defined in his own expansive terms.
I had tried to indicate in my consistency seeking post above in this thread,
these sets {photon-electons}+{subducted plate metaphoric rock differences in bonds and hardness BETWEEN sedimentary on one side and igneous on the other} and the motion that results in the case this IS the cause (kinematics with biological activity of translation in space and form-making). While these sets might be “logically opposed” as Gould continues to narrate an “ideal” matching of pattern or shape in the relation of behavior to development of living creatures IS NOT. This is what I propose biologically to sustain notions of energy transfer from life to machine. I might be wrong in fact, but I hope I have made my desires better understandable.
I think in Richard’s difference of Darwinian and Human design lay the two ends of the ladder that Gould asserted diversely towards Darwin rather than Lamarck. As to how well the notion of “orthoselection” fares “at all costs” would depend on the actual sets. Lamrack had the same “fork” I found in my Grandfather’s attic. I simply have been eating all this time and never realized it was a “silver spoon.” What for most other biologists is the top and bottom, is life and death of non-living thing,s but is for me a continuous motion in a discontinuous space--of at least forked bird legs;
that makes some kind of trapezoid out of herpetological grades.
I can go through the rest of the video concept by concept if that will help.
This message has been edited by Brad McFall, 04-29-2006 08:04 AM
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