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Corollary file pg1 (pg2 coming soon)[Directory] Unsorted
read more for the relationship
between the corollary generator concept and 19th century "idealism"
see first chapter of the Ant and the Peacock ________ Indeed it does. Here's the beginning of a Fibonacci sequence: 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144... Now let's take this
out of the mystic realm of religion, numerology, superstition and back
to science. We know mathaematical patterns underlie the unfolding of
this universe. Fibonnacci's series shows up in numerous plants which
develop in the spiral pattern dictated by the numbers above and their
extensions (corollaries generated from a simple axiomatic question;
Why math reflects
the unverse's structure, we don't know, but much of science is based
on the by now trustworthy fact that it does. hb There is a Fibonacci Society, headed by a priest, who regard the Fibonacci numbers as evidence of divine planning. >> As an atheist, gods don't seem like very useful explanations. But there is numerical inherency in everything we look it. No matter what it is, fractals, algebra, geometry, calculus, or some other as-yet-possibly-uninvented math seems to apply. Pythagoras may have done some strange things (Michael Grant, the historian calls the guy "weird," "occultist," "irrational," and just plain "crack-brained"), but he was on to something. Aristotle sums up one Pythagorean view thusly: once a single "eternal" "had been constructed, whether out of planes or of surface or of seed or of elements which they cannot express, immediately the nearest part of the unlimited began to be constrained and limited by the limit." This pretty well sums up corollary generator theory, for which I've not had any takers so far. However the theory says that once a universe has been burped out of Guth's vacuum, the axioms implicit in that vacuum and its burp constrain the new cosmos'* development, which proceeds from that point onward. For reasons we don't know, the system churns onward working out the corollaries of its initial premises. Hence such things as Fibonacci series in nature, and as a physical world best explained by mathematics, since mathematical systems map out the paths or phase spaces implied in the magic beans of a few initial corollaries. If Pythagoras was the total loony Grant seems to think he was, then the current structure of modern physics should be blown away like a sneeze. After all, physics is science's most mathematized discipline. However physics seems to get a heck of a lot of things right. Satellites slingshotted 'round the moon and through the planetary system, follow the trajectories mapped out by formulae pretty precisely. Light curves around a heavenly body just as Einstein's even more incomprehensible equations say it should. Granted, math has frequently not been applied with sufficient wisdom in the social and behavioral sciences to make it work without distorting the empirical facts beyond belief. However just because we are still playing blind man's bluff with statistics and Hamiltonian equations and such in our generation doesn't mean that someone wiser won't get it right some day. Especially as math's tools become more capable of handling complexity. Meanwhile, frequently even Hamiltonianism produces predictions which prove valid, though not as frequently as many of the members of HBES believe. The bottom line comes down to this: there is, as Pythagoras, Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Einstein, and Hamilton all either knew or took for granted, a mathematical template underlying this universe. It long precedes biology. Our task it to figure out why it is there. I've proposed corollary generator theory. Any other suggestions? Howard *the word "kosmos"
comes to us courtesy of Pythagoras, as does the word "philosophy."
In a message dated 98?04?24 12:12:44 EDT, dberreby writes: << Subj: the balance of cooperation and competition Date: 98?04?24 12:12:44 EDT From: DB <<The first
task is that of defining and monitoring the continuity of a group.>>
This is the very nub of the gist, as John Cleese says in one Monty Python
routine or other. Hamilton remarks somewhere that the unity we see in
ourselves and in one another is false. Within the skin groups and individual
genes cooperate and compete. OTOH there are the obvious constraints;
we don't all fly apart because our livers decide they're going to try
all living together in one skin. Going up the ladder, groups behave
now like unified organisms, now like scatterings of individuals. If
we're going to take the complex adaptive systems approach then we're
going to have to see the same phenomenon at many different scales. YUP.
ACCORDING TO COROLLARY GENERATOR THEORY, THE UNIVERSE UNFOLDS VERY MUCH
LIKE A FRACTAL PATTERN, REPEATING ITS INITIAL ALGORITHMS, ITS STARTING
AXIOMS, OVER AND OVER AGAIN. THE ACCUMULATION OF REPETITIONS FIRST APPEARS
AS A NEW AND HIGHLY COMPLEX FORM BUT EVENTUALLY REVEALS ITS BASIC PATTERN
AT A HIGHER LEVEL OF COMPLEXITY. THIS HYPOTHESIS IS SUPPORTED BY THE
NUMEROUS PARALLELS I KEEP UNEARTHING IN MY WORK ON ESHEL BEN JACOB'S
WORK. THESE LABORS REVEAL IN EVER MORE DETAIL THE PARALLELS BETWEEN
HUMAN AND BACTERIAL GROUP BEHAVIOR. FOR ANOTHER REPETITION OF PATTERN
ON VARIOUS SCALES OF COMPLEXITY, TRY THIS: In the first nanoseconds
of the Big Bang two kinds of forces revealed themselves??attraction
and repulsion. the energy of explosion began a rush apart which hasn't
ended to this day. we ride a former dot of matter hurled outward at
a speed whose unmeasurable momentum is still repelling us away from
other stars and galaxies at breakneck speed as it continues to expand
the universe. That explosion has endowed us with a twelve?billion year?old
repulsive force. Then there are the forces of attraction??those which
pulled together quarks in threesomes to make protons and electrons,
which coupled leptons (electrons) with protons in the circle dance we
know as atoms, which linked atomic shells to produce the minuets we
know as molecules, then sucked masses of these interlocked promenaders
into the swirls we see as galaxies, stars, and even you and me. Physicists
are still debating whether attraction or repulsion will have the final
word. But the fact is, repulsion and attraction are not snarled in a
battle to the death, but in a continuing tango. The success of a society
depends on the dance between its repulsors?? diversity generators??
and its attractors?? conformity enforcers, between its huddle and its
squabble, its elements of competition and of cooperation. THIS APPLIES
TO SOCIETIES AT ALL LEVELS OF COMPLEXITY, FROM BACTERIA ON UP. I suspect the "box of comparison" is fluid in its form. Indeed, I suspect that at the level of mechanism many of these "boxes" dissolve and reform in variable (but bounded) ways as circumstances dictate. They are not just waiting frozen in their form and location. Thus neural elements that form a "template" may vary from time to time, and some of these same elements may participate in other constellations of form and function. They dissolve and reform. hb: sounds about right to me. The literature on central motor patterns ("central pattern generators"), even in invertebrates, suggests circuits that are modulated, dissolving, reforming, and so on. hb: sounds interesting. can you sum some of this up? But, if this is true, one must - in some sense of what we might call a "sub-template" rules - find dynamic trajectories that allow the circuits to reconfigure as needed. So my little scheme simply pushes the problem one step away. If this makes any sense then our challenge is to see how constellations of activity can emerge (then dissolve) in functionally consistent ways: fluid rules of final form (better, final function). hb: aha, an excellent question, a good goal for pursuit--it brings us back to hurricanes. Their patterns are easily recongnized fom the air, yet each is different and constantly changing the details of its form. Some of the major alterations occur as it grows from a bit of wind here and there to an integrated swirl spanning several hundred miles--in other words in its developmental phases. An easy out would be to refer to basins of attraction and let them account for the wild variation around a highly repetitive core form. I wonder if there are more enlightening ways of explaining this wedded opposite of consistency and variation in archetypal patterns? jf: Indeed its the FUNCTION of these circuits that seems to have a reliability. The participating elements that allow this function to function, so to speak, shuffle about by rules that, as far as I know, have thus far defied precise analysis....or even precise conceptualization. At least in my head! hb: more good sense here. jf: The locust does jump or fly. The bat does find its insect. We recognize friend from foe. hb: then there's homology. I've just been watching footage of Madagascar lemurs. Though they're primates, they walk like cats, are cat-sized, groom their fur like cats, etc. How did the hurricane or constellation of cat behaviors descend upon them when they have been evolutionarily isolated for quite some time and are not by any stretch of the imaginaion pusses? How did Australia evolve marsupial equivalents of wolves? Corollary generator theory talks of contrained pathways available because of the handful of axioms from which this universe unfolds. It also speaks of the fractal repetition of the algorithms these axioms represented. But there must be richer forms of explanation as well. By the way, this brings us back to the strange synchroncities in history John Skoyles and I have been batting about--forms which crop up isolated from each other, forms which dance with difference but follow a choreography and music which is, at heart, the same. jf:The behavioral functions work. But UNDERNEATH the circuits that allow this are often variable. Now how do we deal with that? This is not a trivial question. We have fluid forms that are also bounded, and it is here that template and archetype ideas seem to move underground, so to speak. They are like Cheshire cats, there but not there, grinning at us in our ignorance. hb: do you have examples for neural circuitry which we could add to the accumulating catalog? jf: Perhaps I am throwing in an irrelevant concern, one that is indeed off base. I don't think so. I think that the search for behavioral boxes hb: how about thinking bubbles not boxes? A bubble flexes, bends, alters in shape, yet retains a distinct and coherent pattern. jf: is not going to work, at least in the more simple ways of thinking about boxes as unitary, static and localized [cf. earlier discussions on oscillations]. There are dynamic rules that guide our actions, bat actions, and locust actions. There are relative invariances at higher levels, even though the elements (not a great word in itself) shift their form and rules of connectivity in time, with circumstance, etc. Perhaps I have just reached a personal conceptual stumbling block, but I think this is a problem of considerable significance for each of us to struggle with. Am I wrong? [Could be, of course.] hb: nope, you have chosen a good one to chew on--called in the Bloom notes "the stuttering of the hungry forms" jf: I have been sensitized to this in part by the early ethologists use of "instinct", and the linguists use of "innate". Neither allowed for developmental rules, nor for rules of reforming once previous structures had melted away because they were not needed at the moment. I have been further sensitized by the recent literature which makes older "central motor program" concepts appear much too simple, too unitary, and too static. In my own work I have been impressed by how changes in context (surrounding activities) can modify the actions of animals, and their reactions to extrinsic events. And so on. hb: aha, more worthwhile stuff. can you tell a few stories from your experience? hb: I'm very intrigued to see if Harry has a mathematical model which can handle this form stuff. It's a Himalaya awaiting conquest, but one whose time, I think has come. Howard ------------------------------
<< <FONT
COLOR="#000000" SIZE=3> Combine Kelly's beginning of speciation via behavior with Joe Daniel's leopard frogs separating gradually and eventually you can get to speciation from a genetically heterogenous but behaviorally sort of homogenous population. Two qualifiers: because the group formation process behind this budding or group splitting involves assortative mating along behavioral lines, it also involves a certain amount of genetic similarity, but not that of brothers and sisters; within a population marked off by homogeneous badges of difference??physical and behavioral??there are wide behavioral differences...these, in fact, are vital to the survival of the group. Wheels within wheels, as Ezekiel said. Or in this case, diversity generators within conformity enforcers within diversity generators within conformity enforcers and so on and so forth. Or, to put it in De Landa's terms, meshworks within hierarchies, hierarchies of meshworks, meshworks within the upper?level hierarchies, etc. Which brings us back to the fractal nature of the universe??simple algorithms repeating themselves over and over and over. Howard P.S. Even cloned bacteria differentiate morphologically and behaviorally within the structure of a colony. -------------------------- Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. John Maynard Smith gives an excellent description of the leopard frog situation in his book, "The theory of evolution," on pages 236?237 of the third edition, circa 1975. He mentions that an individual named Moore did the work on it but failed to provide the original reference. I found that same situation everywhere I looked, which is why I haven't gotten back to you before now. Everyplace I looked was a secondary reference, albeit by very reliable people, but no primary source. Sorry about that. There are many examples of this sort of thing, however. The textbook, "Evolution," by Mark Ripley (1993, Blackwell Publishing) gives a good example involving some European crows. You might also try 'Molecular markers, natural history and evolution' (J.C. Avise 1994) and 'Biology of amphibians' (1994) by W.E. Duellman et al. These books should give you plenty of examples of hybrid zones, subspecies, superspecies, clines, and an interesting situation of ring species. Hope this helps. Joe Daniel John and David??This
is eerily close to the concept of classification Joe Daniel was implying
with his leopard frog example. He showed us a continuum of minor alterations
of leopard frogs from one end of the U.S. to the other leading to extreme
poles. The frogs along the line somewhere could be mated. Those at polar
opposite ends of the continuum could not be mated to produce fertile
offspring and thus had passed a mysterious phase shift point into speciation.
Meaning that in at least one natural instance, a certain number of jumps
of n from a starting point DOES lead to more than a mere arbitrary change
of state. It produces a kind of irreversible biological transition.
Which is very much what you'd expect from a non?linear universe operating
through processes similar to fractal unfolding. In other words, an accumulation
of iterations eventually leads to a phase shift??the emergence of a
new form, or what Deleuze and Guattari would call a new part made up
of and existing in addition to the agglomeration of previously existing
parts. Howard Edward O. Wilson's latest book is reviewed in the current issue of American Scientist. The review can be found at http://www.amsci.org/amsci/bookshelf/Leads98/gillispie.html or see the following. Scott G. Beach gigantea American Scientist, May?June 1998 E. O. Wilson's Consilience: A Noble Unifying Vision, Grandly Expressed Charles C. Gillispie Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Edward O. Wilson. 322 pp. Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. $26. Like his hero Francis Bacon, Edward O. Wilson here takes all knowledge for his province and composes an eloquent summons to the reform of learning. He draws the arresting word ôconsilienceö from WhewellÆs usage in Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, where it has the sense of the accordance of two or more lines of induction drawn from different sets of phenomena. Knowledge, Wilson argues, is one at bottom. Science consists of strictly causal explanations of empirically established laws. Investigation encounters no fundamental boundary between the history of the physical universe and of humanity, nor between science and the humanities. The goal of consilience is to achieve progressive unification of all strands of knowledge in service to the indefinite betterment of the human condition. This is a noble vision. Wilson sees its origin in the Ionian Greek belief that the cosmos is an orderly whole running by laws discoverable in thought. His own inspiration is the commitment of the 18th?century Enlightenment to enlisting secular knowledge in the advancement of human welfare and rights. What opened the prospect for modernity was the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. The success of science in Europe then, and thereafter throughout the world, was owing to the fortunate concatenation of three features in the capacity of fine minds: insatiable curiosity, the power of abstraction, mathematical reasoning applied to natural phenomena. All phenomena, finally, are reducible to laws of physics that transcend cultural differences.Put baldly, this sounds like arid monistic materialism. Wilson does not put it baldly. He brings to his subject a disarming mixture of personal modesty and intellectual rigor. His reading is wide and his learning extensive. He writes as well of arts and letters as he does of science. It is difficult to think of a finer evocation of Milton's genius than WilsonÆs passage on SatanÆs invasion of the garden of Eden. There is no question in his mind but that conveying the essence of truth and beauty pertains to the arts. The part of science is only to explain the possibility. C. P. SnowÆs division between the two cultures is better envisioned as a little?known terrain to be explored with good will from both sides. Wilson attributes the failure of the Enlightenment to carry the day to inattention to emotion and inability to establish secular grounds for ethics. He understands the turn toward Romanticism and admires the sensibility of a Goethe, who, bad though his science was, filled the void of feeling. Equally tolerant of religious fundamentalists, among whom he was brought up, Wilson expresses personal empathy for their aversion to an evolutionary theory that has, however, become the only credible mode of understanding living nature. He even suggests that the blackest of his bÙtes?noires, such theorists of postmodernism as Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, whom he has read carefully, may have inadvertently performed science a service by forcing it to defend itself in a cultural debate. He admits, finally, that the argument for a scientifically based explanation of society and culture may be wrong ?? although if so, or if it is right and not put into effect, he sees no way out of the abyss into which unthinking plundering of our habitat is plunging us. Wilson would now extend the reach of Darwinian evolutionary theory beyond the problem of explaining altruism, the centerpiece of his Sociobiology (1975). It here embraces all phenomena of culture and behavior. The bridge is a genetic account of the brain, the physical locus of the operations of mind and hence the seat of knowledge. For me at least, quite ignorant until now of the work he adduces in neurophysiology and cognitive psychology, this subject is the most fascinating in a generally engrossing book. Evolution of the brain occurred over the three million years between our simian ancestors and the advent of Homo sapiens about a million years ago. The strangest feature of the process is that the capacity of the brain should far exceed the needs of mere survival. A further curiosity is that, once the brain was fully formed, the enormous differentiation of cultures occupied mere millennia, while only the twinkling of an evolutionary eye separates us from the earliest records of any civilization. The time is orders of magnitude too brief for genetic evolution alone to have been the operative factor. The structure of the brain is determined by more than 3,000 of the 50,000 to 100,000 genes composing the human genome. The mind is the brain at work, and culture is the creation of manifold individual minds composing a civilization wherein the legacy is handed on from one generation to the next. Genes and cultures must be linked, as are the distant genetic history of the species and the recent cultural evolution of humanity. The great puzzle is how these complexes were, and are still, connected. As a start toward resolving it, Wilson adduces the notion of gene?cultural coevolution. Among paleolithic peoples, the genes imprinted upon individual minds certain pathways for mental development, certain epigenetic rules which, taken together, compose the complex that is human nature. Examples are the nearly universal human fear of snakes, the general taboo on incest and the transcultural uniformity of facial expressions. At this early stage in the evolution of humanity, these traits and others like them had obvious survival value while the individuals not so endowed were penalized and left an ever?diminishing posterity. The genes prescribing such rules thus spread throughout the species. Different peoples incorporated them into myth or religious prescription in accordance with local circumstance and behaved accordingly. Cultural norms, for their part, are passed on through generations, some proving more adaptive than others. Cultural evolution has been far speedier than was its background, or than is the accompanying genetic evolution. Nevertheless, the linkage is unbreakable. The right?hand side of the gene?culture hyphenation is never independent of the left, and the two are driven by the same law. The difficulty with the social sciences, and notably with anthropology, sociology and economics, is that their adepts proceed as if tribal activity, social organization and economic exchange are entirely governed by their respective sets of rules. Wilson admires the great scholars who formed those disciplines. His account of their findings is sympathetic and interesting. Economics in particular has all the trappings of a scientific discipline, including regular recourse to mathematical modeling. But kinship patterns on the one hand and the functioning of the market on the other are solipsistic systems. Only when explanation of cultural and economic behaviors is carried back, largely by way of cognitive psychology, to their causal basis in biology will an analysis be scientific. The false boundary separating the social from the natural sciences will then be exorcised. All roads to the truth will be scientific. Evocation of the meaning and quality of life and experience will continue to be the province of the arts, their appreciation enhanced by an informed criticism newly aware of the cultural and genetic basis. The choice between a transcendental and an empirical foundation for ethics will vanish, leaving only the latter, while religion will be a vehicle for incorporating the highest values of humanity in the poetic form of myths consistent with reality. This is a grand prophecy beautifully expressed. I can only hope that it comes to pass. Historian though I am, I share the authorÆs predilection for both the Enlightenment and science and his distaste for postmodernism, a term that has all the appeal but none of the clarity of posthumous. Still, one has certain reservations. WilsonÆs most unsatisfactory discussion may be his attempt to rescue free will from the overall determinism of biological necessity. In his perception, our sense of making choices for which we are responsible is an adaptive illusion depending on our inevitable ignorance of the totality of material factors involved. More generally, an air of reverse Panglossianism hangs about the overarching competence of natural selection. To ordinary good sense, the proposition that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds is no more persuasive when it is adduced as an outcome than it was when derived from LeibnizÆs principle of pre?established harmony. Its rejection by WilsonÆs favorite philosophes, Voltaire at their head, opened the program he would complete of enlisting science in improvement of the world. For them the nascent social sciences were to be the instruments, as in a scientifically based form they are to be for him. Is that realistic? The stretch between the examples he cites of epigenetically determined behaviors and the complexities of contemporary society seems inordinate. Can we expect it to be narrowed anytime soon to the degree that will admit of developing socioeconomic programs cogently constructed on biological underpinnings? Can we really suppose that, having understood the full range of natural selection, humanity is about to outlive the process that has produced us and engineer its future by manipulation of the genome? Wilson himself cites the spectre of eugenics as a warning of what may go wrong. He also alludes in several passages to the problem of complexity as the greatest challenge facing all science. One has the impression that even in physics it is being met by the search for intermediate levels of explanation that may be put into effect in appropriate applications. How much more is that likely to be true, say, of economics. One would not wish, and Wilson does not wish, the Federal Reserve Board to be denied the guidance of monetary theory until its consilience with natural selection can be demonstrated. To my way of thinking, the weakest feature of WilsonÆs splendid essay is (what was not true of Bacon) the lack of any political dimension. His theory of scientific knowledge is exclusively intellectual. With respect to cognitive aspects, that is, I agree, entirely correct. Wilson gets it exactly right when he dismisses the so?called sociological strong program that would politicize and socialize the content of science. Nevertheless, science is anything but apolitical in its application, practice and very possibility. What else but politics decided the fate of the Superconducting Supercollider, which might indeed have fortified the laws of physics? More to the immediate point, Wilson hails the guidelines adopted at the June 1992 Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, and merely mentions in passing his regret that political quarrels have limited its implementation to lip service. His concluding pages are a powerful argument in favor of responsible environmental policies. We will have to hope that finding the will to enforce them is not contingent on widespread acceptance of the premise that knowledge is consilient. The rain forest cannot wait. Charles C. Gillispie
is professor emeritus of history of science at Princeton University.
He was awarded the Balzan Prize in history and philosophy of science
in 1997. His most recent book is Pierre?Simon Laplace, 1749 ? 1827,
A TAA30633 Sender: owner?paleopsych Precedence: bulk This is from an e?list I subscribed to for one day. My ISP kept returning messages and so the list czar (tsar) unsubscribed me. But the signal/noise ratio, I found, was too high, so I won't be rejoining. I encourage some of you to try the list, since you may find more signal than I do. (Subscription instructions at the end.) But this one message is, I think, of interest to the group. Frank Forman "It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the perilled seas of thought." ??Galbraith Forwarded message Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 20:18:46 EDT From: Roads EndReply?To: Conspiracy Theory Research List <CTRLTo: CTRL Subject: [CTRL] American Patriotism in a Global Society Caveat Lector! an excerpt from: American Patriotism in a Global Society Betty Jean Craige Stat University of New York_1996 State University on New York Press Albany, NY ISBN 0?7914?2960?1 ????? Allegiance to Men The range of responses to [Oliver]North reveals a tension that characterizes the politics of all democratic nations, between allegiance to the group, which is tribalism, and allegiance to a set of laws and principles, which is the foundation for political holism. When Senator Inouye declared, "Our government is not a government of men. It is still a government of laws," he was chiding North for having ignored the law in his eagerness to position the United States advantageously in the international competition between communist countries and the "free world." But he was also pointing out that in a democracy allegiance to a particular group?whether it be a family, an ethnic group, a political party, or the individuals occupying government posts??is transcended by agreement to abide by the law, which is the social contract that the diverse constituents of the society make for their mutual long?term benefit. In the metaphor suggested by E. 0. Wilson, allegiance to one's society's laws is "soft?core altruism," which is much less emotionally appealing than "hard? core altruism," the kind of allegiance celebrated in traditional patriotic song and verse. Allegiance to men, to the group, which North ostensibly exhibited when he claimed that he had had to deceive Congress and the American people in order to deceive the nation's enemies, is appreciated most highly by those who believe that the group's greatest threat is external. To many Americans fearful of Soviet?sponsored communism, North was more patriotic than Inouye, Hamilton, and all those who wished to prosecute him for breaking the law, because North had done what Congress had been unwilling to do to advance American interests in "a dangerous world" (Taking the Stand 12). In their eyes, North's illegal actions were excusable, even commendable, for he was helping "freedom fighters."[7] In the political dualism of the Reagan administration, the world was divided between freedom fighters and communists. Political dualism, arising out of allegiance to men, produces a continuum between martyrdom, or "hard?core altruism," acclaimed as the highest form of patriotism, and treason. During the cold war, when opposition to communism was superimposed upon the ethnocentric allegiance to the group, anticommunism became an indicator of patriotism. Because patriotism, in this model, is defined as love of the group, criticism of the group, whether expressed as criticism of the government's policies or criticism of the nation's social values, is understood to indicate lack of patriotism and softness on the enemy. Individuals who do not display the "hard?core" loyalty that manifests itself as unmitigated opposition to the enemy are not considered by patriots to be real members of the group. The slogan "Love It or Leave It," appearing on bumper stickers during the Vietnam War, was directed at war protesters, whose disagreement with the government's foreign policy was taken as dislike of the nation. The same tribalist sentiment appeared in another slogan of the times: "My country, right or wrong. "[8] Peace advocates throughout our history have been ostracized or punished by political dualists for not sharing the hostility to the enemy that marks the loyalist. From the perspective of the loyalist to the group, the advocacy of peace, of compromise with the enemy, looks like treason; and the refusal to fight seems likewise cause for punishment. During the Civil War, a Quaker refusing service in the Confederate Army was sentenced to six months of unloading railroad cars of ordnance while fastened to a ball and chain; other Quaker resisters were tortured (Conlin 4). During World War I, some 500 conscientious objectors were court?martialed and imprisoned, 17 received death sentences though were never executed, and 142 were given life terms but were released in 1921. During World War II, 12,662 draft resisters were imprisoned, most of them because they could not meet the requirements for conscientious objector status established by the Selective Service Act of 1940 (Howlett and Zeitzer 27, 32). To those who give loyalty to the group the highest priority, conscientious objectors and draft resisters are all traitors, endangering the group's survival by declining to protect it against its enemies. So are war protesters, who by demonstrating against the government in wartime appear to be aiding the enemy. They do not appear to love the group, and so they are not considered part of the group. The good soldier, in this model, is the individual who enhances the group's military competitiveness, who follows orders, and who does not challenge his or her superiors. When North testified, "I never carried out a single act, not one, Mr. Nields, in which I did not have authority from my superiors. I haven't in the 23 years that I have been in the uniformed Services of the United States of America ever violated an order; not one," he was calling attention to himself as a good soldier (Taking the Stand 106). He had supplied aid to the Contras in violation of the law in order to implement the wishes of the president of the United States, his commander in chief. North had to be reminded by Senator Inouye, on the last day of his testimony, that the Uniform Code of Military Justice "makes it abundantly clear, that orders of a superior officer must be obeyed by subordinate members?but it is lawful orders." Senator Inouye continued, "In fact, it says, members of the military have an obligation to disobey unlawful orders" (Taking the Stand 750). Allegiance to men yields authoritarianism, ethnocentric priorities, and political dualism. Because the group's well?being is presumed to depend upon its ability to defeat competing groups, obedience to authority is a patriotic virtue, as is unremitting hostility to the enemy. The group, in this model, is defined by those in power. Allegiance to men excludes individuals who differ in appearance, behavior, or ideology from members of the group, preserves the existing dominance order within the group, and produces oppositional relationships with other groups. Betrayal of comrades and cause, according to Pat Buchanan, is a greater evil than deception of members of Congress, who, in the opinion of Buchanan, North, and other ideological conservatives, had passed laws restricting the nation's ability to advance its interests abroad. Oliver North is a hero because he supported freedom fighters when Congress failed to do so. What becomes evident is that the function of laws and institutions is to constrain the previously advantageous trait of group loyalty?both within nations and among nations. The fact that the United States Constitution, which establishes government by law, is the oldest written national constitution in service today suggests that allegiance to law leads to greater long?term political stability than allegiance to men. Allegiance to Law When allegiance to law supersedes allegiance to men, disagreement with authority is viewed not as detrimental to the welfare of the group, but rather as potentially beneficial. Senator Inouye quoted Thomas Jefferson's remark: "The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so, than not be exercised at all" (Taking the Stand 752). Criticism of powerful individuals who are violating the law protects the rights of individuals who do not enjoy positions of power; it protects the whole group. Protection of all of a group's diverse members is the purpose of law, as Senator George Mitchell (D?Maine) explained: Most nations derive from a single tribe, a single race. They practice a single religion. Common racial, ethnic, religious heritages are the glue of nationhood for many. The United States is different. We have all races, all religions. We have a limited common heritage. The glue of nationhood for us is the American ideal of individual liberty and equal justice. The rule of law is critical in our society. It's the great equalizer, because in America everybody is equal before the law. (Taking the Stand 536) It was only by the rule of law, Representative Stokes (D?Ohio) pointed out, that black Americans were finally obtaining the rights and privileges that white Americans have long enjoyed. Since throughout much of our nation's existence black Americans were excluded from the group?that is, the dominant culture out of which the nation's leaders came?black Americans did not and could not benefit from government officials' allegiance to the group. When the group was assumed to be originally white, allegiance to the group meant protection of its original composition and social structure. In the 1960s, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover considered Martin Luther King, who demanded that black Americans be granted full membership in the nation, to be a national threat. From Hoover's perspective, the 1963 march on Washington was an invasion. Allegiance to men and allegiance to law thus engender profoundly different political values. Whereas allegiance to men produces relationships of opposition to groups perceived to be alien, allegiance to law allows for cooperation between the group and other groups in the world, even the group's historical enemies. Since the law?governed group is defined not by those individuals in power, nor by common descent, but by laws and principles, it is??at least theoretically??receptive to individuals of different cultural origins. Thus it can easily become culturally and ideologically heterogeneous. By allegiance to law, by the establishment of social contracts, the group's culturally and ideologically diverse members may enjoy harmonious interaction. The tension between allegiance to law and allegiance to men arises not only among the citizens of a democracy but also within them. Allegiance to law is accomplished in individuals by resistance to the instinct of allegiance to men. And allegiance to law is more easily achieved by individuals when the group remains relatively homogeneous than when the group's identity is threatened by integration. When the group is expanded to include individuals previously belonging to very different groups, individuals of the original group will experience internal tension between their loyalty to those they view as similar to themselves and their civic responsibility to obey the law. Allegiance to law, not subordination to one's superiors, is the foundation for democracy, in which all citizens are considered valuable components of the whole, including those who disagree with the policies of the government. Ideally, in a society ruled by law, patriotism is measured not by obedience to the government, fidelity to the group, or hostility to the enemy, but by efforts to make the nation a better nation. In a democracy, as Senator Mitchell said to North, "disagreement with the policies of the government is not evidence of lack of patriotism" (Taking the Stand 537). Although the United States officially has a government of laws and not a government of men, the two conceptions of order form a continuum. When hostilities between the United States and another nation erupt, as in the Persian Gulf War, the ethos of group loyalty predominates in the intensified nationalism. Behaviors in the citizenry that facilitate military success, such as gestures of patriotism and support for the nation's military action, are appreciated by all those who feel that the nation's well?being is at stake. The nation's ideological unity is deemed more important than the free exchange of ideas. In such times, the nation's governmental leaders are likely to justify secrecy and deception of the American people by reference to the need for military advantage over the enemy. And the majority of Americans are likely to trust the leaders in the assumption that the leaders know best how to achieve military victory. When the United States is not perceived by its citizens to be significantly threatened militarily, the degree of group identification diminishes. Without the suppression of dissent that occurs frequently during wartime, the ideological diversity of the population becomes more apparent, as groups struggle with one another for resources. pp. 26?31 ????? Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL(Conspiracy Theory Research List) is a public list. There are various subjects discussed that may be objectionable to some, these are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', itself, is used politically many ways by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought with many social and cultural consequences. 'Suspension of belief' in 'conventional' histories allow for the acceptance of many half?truths, misdirections and outright frauds. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.========== ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] LISTSERV To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] LISTSERV Om In a message dated 98?05?19 10:50:54 EDT, checker writes: Subj: [CTRL] American Patriotism in a Global Society (fwd) Date: 98?05?19 10:50:54 EDT From: checker (Premise Checker) To: hbe(Human Behavior and Evolution Society) CC: paleopsych Sender: owner?paleopsych Precedence: bulkThis is from an e?list I subscribed to for one day. My ISP kept returning messages and so the list czar (tsar) unsubscribed me. But the signal/noise ratio, I found, was too high, so I won't be rejoining. I encourage some of you to try the list, since you may find more signal than I do. (Subscription instructions at the end.) But this one message is, I think, of interest to the group.Frank Forman"It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the perilled seas of thought." ??Galbraith Forwarded message ?????????? Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 20:18:46 EDT From: Roads End <RoadsEnd> Reply?To: Conspiracy Theory Research List <CTRL> To: CTRL Subject: [CTRL] American Patriotism in a Global SocietyCaveat Lector!an excerpt from: American Patriotism in a Global Society Betty Jean Craige Stat University of New York_1996 State University on New York Press Albany, NY ISBN 0?7914?2960?1 ?????Allegiance to MenThe range of responses to [Oliver]North reveals a tension that characterizes the politics of all democratic nations, between allegiance to the group, which is tribalism, and allegiance to a set of laws and principles, which is the foundation for political holism. THIS IS ANALOGOUS TO MARY DOUGLAS DISTINCTION BETWEEN GRID AND GROUP??ALLEGIANCE TO THE LARGER ABSTRACT GROUP VS. ALLEGIANCE TO A SMALL, PERSONAL GROUP. IT'S A MAJOR ISSUE IN CURRENT RESEARCH ON CROSS?CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY, WHICH PROBES THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN GROUP AND GRID?ORIENTED CULTURES USING A DIFFERENT TERMINOLOGY. AND MIGUEL DE LANDA EXPLORES THE RELATIONSHIP OF THIS SORT OF THING TO HIS CONCEPTS OF HIERARCHY VS. MESHWORK AS PARTS OF WHAT I WOULD CALL AN EVOLVING COMPLEX DYNAMICAL SYSTEM. DE LANDA'S ANALYSIS IS IN HIS _THOUSAND YEARS OF NONLINEAR HISTORY_. DOUGLAS' IS IN HER Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982. When Senator Inouye
declared, "Our government is not a government of men. It is still
a government of laws," he was chiding North for having ignored
the law in his eagerness to position the United States advantageously
in the international competition between communist countries and the
"free world." But he was also pointing out that in a democracy
allegiance to a particular group?whether it be a family, an ethnic group,
a political party, or the individuals occupying government posts??is
transcended by agreement to abide by the law, which is the social contract
that the diverse constituents of the society make for their mutual long?term
benefit.In the metaphor suggested by E. 0. Wilson, allegiance to one's
society's laws is "soft?core altruism," which is much less
emotionally appealing than "hard? core altruism," the kind
of allegiance celebrated in traditional patriotic song and verse. Allegiance
to men, to the group, which North ostensibly exhibited when he claimed
that he had had to deceive Congress and the American people in order
to deceive the nation's enemies, is appreciated most highly by those
who believe that the group's greatest threat is external. HMMM, VERY
INTERESTING IN TERMS OF THE CONCEPTS OF VARIOUS GROUP MEMBERS ON THE
IMPACT OF EXTERNAL THREAT AND ITS ALLEVIATION ON GROUP AND INDIVIDUAL
PSYCHOLOGY. MY MATERIAL, FAIRLY EXTENSIVE, ON THIS SUBJECT IS IN _THE
LUCIFER PRINCIPLE_. TO COOPT DE LANDA'S VOCABULAR, THE SWING BETWEEN
THE STATES OF THREAT?COHESION AND NON?THREAT?DECOHESION IS ONE OF THE
WAYS IN WHICH THE COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEM OR SUPERORGANISM OF A SOCIAL
GROUP "BREATHES." OR PULSATES LIKE THE BODY OF A SNAIL ADVANCING
ON A PATH, THIS ONE THE PATH OF GENERATION OF ALL IT'S IMPLICIT COROLLARIES
(BLOOM'S INFAMOUSLY UNPOPULAR COROLLARY GENERATOR ONTOLOGY) UNTIL IT
REACHES THE POINT OF GODELIAN PARADOX COVERED IN KOEN DE PRYCK'S _KNOWLEDGE,
EVOLUTION AND PARADOX_ (ALBANY: STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1993) AND IS
FORCED TO JUMP TO (OR CREATE, OR FIND) THE NEXT PHASE STATE. We have discussed this before, and generally, I think, agreed that religion was adaptive in the EEA for fairly obvious reasons. It is interesting that a recent study(I'm sure there are others) indicate that this adaptivity still exists. A group of Christian(Xian) college students who had undergone additional spiritual conversion were studied. "When compared to a group of religious believers who had not experienced a change in their religiousness,the convert group did report more preconversion perceived stress, a greater sense of personl inadequacy and limitation before the conversion, greater pre?post improvement in sense of adequacy and competence, and a greater increase in post?conversion spiritual experiences....spiritual converts reported positive life tranformation and significant improvements in their sense of self, self esteem, self confidence, and self identity following the conversion experience." Women benefited more than men from the experience, and we have discussed the greater importance of religion to women. I give my usual caveat?because it gives sustenance doesn't mean it is Truth?that would be what you guys call the "naturalistic fallacy", no? All subjects were students in elementary psychology?hey, does that matter:?) I have a feeling that a conversion experience to a non?supernaturally based religion would give equal benefits, but have only anecdotal evidence from some of the ex?Catholics in my UU church. However, I doubt this was a viable option in the pre?scientific age, although I can quote skeptics from Hindu and Moslem cultures a millenium ago. Cheers, Irving Ref:Spiritual Conversion:
A Study of Religious Change Among College Students. Journ. for the Scientific
Study of Religion Vol. 37 pp 161?180. Clare Graves summarized his theory in this manner: "Briefly, what I am proposing is that the psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating spiraling process marked by progressive subordination of older, lower?order behavior systems to newer, higher?order systems as man's existential problems change." >> Interestingly, this is a good description of the process of evolution??human or otherwise?? as Eshel Ben Jacob, Koen de Pryck, Bill Tillier, Ilya Prigogine, and some of the nonlinear systems folks have envisioned it. The definition contains the oscillation between wedded opposites??thesis, antithesis, and synthesis that I always natter on about. It also can be seen to encompass the notion (as Ben Jacob and de Pryck put it and i've violently rephrased it) that a system works its way through the corollaries of its axioms until it reaches the point of Godelian paradox, then is sent into a state of disorder from whose ashes it resurrects itself as a new structure based on higher level axioms derived from past experience. It then works its way through the corollaries implicit in the new system, steadily marching forward until once again it encounters Godelian paradox and seemingly disintegrates??the first step in regeneration on yet a higher level of complexity. To top it all off, it incorporates the notion that one element forcing the system to disgorge its corollaries is the constant progression through corollaries of competing systems. This phenomenon confronts a given system with an environment in which it has to run hard to stay in place and run even harder to get anywhere. Howard P.S. Manuel de Landa's
_Thousand Years of Nonlinear History_ is an effort to find what he calls
a basic machine, a consistent underlying algorithm, underlying all forms
of evolution??both inanimate and animate. Graves has summarized such
a machine. I'd call it the corollary generating operator, the mechanism
which keeps new corollaries (and their eventual Godelian crises) pumping
forth. _________ "I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man. My disease has increased in severity, and I feel it will soon cost me an increased amount of money, if not my life." Wilbur Wright, 1900 It is not in the
premise that reality If you unite the primitive animals of the limbic system with the sunny rational master workers of the human neocortex, the animals turn to gods and through the writhing human brain they sing. This is the source of ecstasy--in art, onstage performance, scientific vision, sexual orgasm, and in prophecy. Howard Bloom Die ganzen Zahlen
hat der liebe Gott ermacht; alles andere is Menschwerk. (Usually translated
"God created the integers; the rest is the work of man.") Two geniuses of the late 14th-early 15th centuries, the Dominican monk Meister Eckhart and the Spanish Sufi philosopher-theologian Ibn Arabi, spoke of "creator and created giving rise to each other." Joseph Chilton Pearce, Jesus and my Prefrontal Lobes A biology of the transcendent for nonbelievers, ms intro p. 6 "One of the gnostic gospels concerning Jesus has him saying "I am always becoming as you have need of me to be."" Joseph Chilton Pearce, Jesus and my Prefrontal Lobes A biology of the transcendent for nonbelievers "If there is one overriding lesson that physicists have learned in the past two hundred years, it is that there is usually an underlying simplicity beneath apparent and often bewildering diversity. Thus, in the nineteenth century, investigators determined that electricity and magnets were complementary aspects of the same phenomenon; and in the twentieth, they found that electromagnetism was a manifestation of the same process that produces the weak force governing radioactive decay. "Those and similar revelations lead naturally to the suspicion that there may be a single principle that governs and generates all the forces--and all the different kinds of particles--as it acts in different environments and circumstances. Such a principle may have been manifest in the early moments of the Big Bang, but may now be visible only in secondary forms, including the four forces and twelve particles that it devolved into as the universe cooled." (Curt Suplee. Physics in the 20th Century. NY: Abrams, 1999: 214-215) "It is strange also to attribute generation to things that are eternal, or rather this is one of the things that are impossible. There need be no doubt whether the Pythagoreans attribute generation to them or not; for they say plainly that when the one had been constructed, whether out of planes or of surface or of seed or of elements which they cannot express, immediately the nearest part of the unlimited began to be constrained and limited by the limit." (Aristotle. Metaphysics. Library of the Future.In Library of the Future, 4th Edition, Ver. 5.0. Irvine, CA: World Library, Inc., 1996. CDRom) "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly peristent illusion." Albert Einstein (quoted in Michio Kaku, Hyperspace: 232)
Monarch butterflies have an internal four-dimensional guidance mechanism that is extremely complex. It hooks together biological changes made by internal clocks and the position of the sun to squeeze meaning from a constantly shifting relationship between time and space, between time of day, the movement of the sun in the sky, and a sense of geography. It does this by coupling at least two different clocks-one that works on ultraviolet light and operates a "sun compass"; and the other that works on an entirely different wavelength, a photon-sampling at a different frequency, to keep a body-clock entrained to the time of day. And this day-and-minute timing, in turn, has to take into account that the sun changes position each day, changes position each minute, and changes its length of time in the sky each day. That's a lot of variables to sum. And it's apparently done by an interlocked group of analog mechanisms. Time, space, photons, and linguistics. Fractals and genomes. Moods that reset the brain and behavior. How do they all fit? The butterflies are decoding their environment in an extraordinary way. They are parsing the second-to-second changes around them into components that are the rough equivalent of nouns and verbs, subjects, predicates, objects, and adjectives. This parsing is far more linguistic than it is numeric. Again, it's analog computation, not digital computation. Yet the monarch does things that most formulae can't. One part of what the butterflies decode-the information they strain from daylight and night, from dawn, noon, and dusk-is the equivalent of one segment of a sentence. Another-the information they squeeze from the position of the sun, is another sentence part. Yet another, what they may distill from landscape markers or from stars, is yet another sentence part. Put them all together and you get a sentence. You get an immediate meaning. You also get a translation-from sensory input to motor output, from perception to behavior. What does this have to do with Pavel Kurakin's photons querying their environment and being queried by it? What does it have to do with the decision a Kurakin photon makes about where to go next in its flit across the chasm of Planck time? What does it have to do with the nearly infinite series of decisions that photon makes as it travels thirteen billion light years from a nova at the edge of the cosmos to your eye? The photon's first form of long-range navigation is based, if Kurakin is right, on instant-by-instant decisions, more of them than any number we can count. How does that primal quark mega-range navigation iterate? How does it repeat? How does it fold over upon itself and become the butterfly's flight from Canada to Mexico? What has the butterfly inherited from the photon that makes this journey possible? How does the basic vocabulary of time, space, matter, and motion express itself in the photon? And what elements of that vocabulary remain alive in the butterfly? I suspect that the chain of connections is fascinating, and tells a tale of the cosmos' entire history, leaving out only a few tiny things, mammals, large brains, consciousness, and human beings. Howard Ps remember that even a tale is a linguistic pattern with a ceremonial shape that's similar to that of a sentence-subject, verb, adverb, predicate, adjectives, object. Here's how a saga or story is parsed: · Introduction
of characters (quarks, leptons, and bosons), Retrieved from the
World Wide Web May 26, 2003 You are a nautilus shell deciding where to put your next calcium carbonate deposit. Stack your last two moves on top of each other. Calciferate. Stack your last two moves on top of each other. Calciferate. You are a flower
putting out petals. You have to decide where your next petal grows.
Take your last two moves and glue them together. Make a petal. Then
take your last two moves and layer them. Make a petal. And do it all
over again. You are a pine cone deciding where to place your next seed.
Pile your last two moves together. Make a seed. Then pile your next
two moves together again. But a child with
Leggos would get these rules in minutes--stack a group of leggos. Here's the proof of math's incredible limitations. Getting this stuff is so hard that it took me decades to comprehend it. And I, allegedly, have a brain. But horns, pine cones, and sunflower seed-heads have no trouble following the basic rule of the fibonnaci series. They do the Fibonacci without a single neuron, without a single equation, without a single mathematician uttering incomprehensibilities. Which means we need a new math, a math that is intuitive, a math that allows us stupid humans with our self-promoting but rather dumb big brains to get it....to comprehend with ease what a simple branch can calculate and implement without the luxury of consciousness, the luxury of a decade or two of mathematics courses, and the somewhat overplayed advantage of thought. No, I'm not against
thinking. I'm saying that our math is an olduwan stone tool of consciousness.
It needs an acheulian revolution...not to mention a bronze age, an iron
age, and an age of steel. Howard ----- Original
Message ----- From: howlbloom To: kurakin Sent: Friday, May 23, 2003
8:49 PM Subject: Re: bacterial linguistics and the Big Bang Tango (For
those I've copied on this who may not know--Pavel Kurakin, who's been
energizing my brain tremendously and whose words appear below, is with
the Keldysh Intitute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of
Sciences in Moscow. He is a mathematician and a quantum mechanics theorist.
hb) In a message dated 5/22/2003 8:59:22 AM Eastern Daylight Time, kurakin
writes: At last I've finished reading "Reflections on Bacterial
Linguistics" and find it extremely interesting and important. hb:
hooray!!!!! ") pk: 1) Now I catch, I hope - deep enough, what are
You talking about with Your "Global Brain", Your Paleopsychology
Project, etc. That's all so great that I, to be true, underestimated
it all first. But now I can see, that it's New Science Paradigm indeed.
I have caught what do You mean when saying of mass mood since Big Bang.
hb: another huge smile. pk: Even if to put all physics You and me dance
around aside, to put society aside, and leave single biology, it's great.
It is indeed a new look at Darwinism. It is... SUPER! I fail to find
true words. pk: Pavel, you are making my heart glow. You may well be
the first person on the planet to have gotten the big picture. I'm enclosing
a copy of what I wrote for the Wired proposal. It has all the members
of this discussion in it. I apologize if I've gotten any details wrong...but
I had to do this in enormous haste...in 2.5 days. pk: Evolution of SPIECES
gets new deeper insight, but not only spieces! These are new SYSTEMS
we even don't know or/and SEE yet, new untrivial collectives that DO
EXIST and evolve being unseen by us, blind lookers in the vicinity.
hb: yes, yes, yes. pk: Things like bacterial gel are some living creatures
THEMSELVES! They are a kind of ghosts, that live unseen. hb; they are
emergent ripples, emergent properties of great complexity. But they
only function as part of a larger system--a system of readers and writers
--individual bacteria who leave their collective mark in the shifting
manuscript of the gel, in the shifting pulsation, the OSCILLITORY flow
of mass mood. Sounds very much like photons, doesn't it? And within
that system are systems of electrons, protons, and neutrons doing highly
complex things. There are systems of macromolecules operating in ways
so intricate that we are just beginning to comprehend them. But none
of this works at all without the entire system--from the big bang to
time to photons, electrons, protons, atoms, gravity, galaxies, stars,
star deaths, the new atomic nuclei star deaths make, moleculogenesis
(a field that scarcely exists in cosmology but must), macromolecular
self-assembly, the infinite, interconnected snips of weave we call cell
membranes, replication, the seemingly fractal elaboration of dna, multicellularity,
emotions or their equivalent from the bacterial level on up, then the
variations and accessorizations of dna that we call species. pk: Wow.
These are CIVILIZATIONS hb: yup. pk: that live, love, battle, win and
loose each day of our gray life. Wow. Great. Bacterial cultures. Bacterial
Civizations. Not to say of synergetic systems of more complicated animals.
To be true, what Richard Dawkins says of being "memes" is
something like this "gel cultures" but I could not imagine
that this can be so bright and dramatical systems. Wow. Why did I hate
biology at school?... hb: LOL. Because it was fragmented and didn't
make sense. But it DOES make sense when you look at the whole thing--from
the big bang to tomorrow, from physics to psychology. The whole shebang
is a process I call the Big Bang Tango. A cosmos blipping like a single
photon. Galaxies battling to gobble the most matter. Then exploding
in the form of stars and light. Cultures flipping back and forth in
oscillitory modes, acting creatively as they go. All of this fractal,
growing the way a fibonacci series or a mandelbrot set grows. Why does
it grow? And why does it do it so breathtakingly creatively? That's
what we still don't know. And that is the nut of the matter--the next
puzzle to solve. Eshel Ben-Jacob learned that from his bacteria. I learned
it from everything from cosmology, biology, psychology, and religion,
to geopolitics and rock and roll. Let the band chime in and let the
games begin. -- "Our line is right. The victory will be ours".
(c) I. V. Stalin, 1941. kurakin mailto:kurakin It starts with a ripple in a vacuum, according to Guth. According to Bloom, there are two basic principles implicit in that vacuum and its ripple, attraction and repulsion. From that point on, it's all corollary generation in action. Of course one thing to remember is that the path splits many a time when you're generating corollaries. You've got this bunch of givens and there are numerous corollaries which can be spun from them. These are the bifurcations of nonlinear math and Chaos theory. They're the choice points which allow for free will and for diversity generation instead of a universe in which every sun, every planet, and every human is identical. Howard Corollary generator theory is the kissing cousin of the theory of natural selection. Or perhaps it's the half of natural selection we ordinarily never see-the side that accounts a bit more fully for how the things which nature selected from first came to be. It touches on the realm of the possible, a realm of infinite, but limited possibilities. Limited but infinite-a paradox. Not all things are possible. But corollary generator theory says that some impossibilities are more impossible than others. It shows how we, as nature's incarnations, sense the things that never were but itch to be. Then we bring those whispering nothings from the silence (darkness) of non-existence into the realm of reality. In the world of
natural selection some things are selected against long before they
even reach the darkness from which we hear the beckonings. Some things,
in other words, are so heavily selected against that they simply never
in this universe will ever come to be. Yet this negative shapes the
very form of opportunity. (Like a Higgs field, positives are molded
in the casts of negativities.) David Pincus 5/7/2003
Indeed they are. But only as whispers and shadows, potentials, becomings.
It takes particular weather patterns, anomolous contingencies, for them
to take shape and become clear to the subject. Are the shadows, in the
neoplatonic David Boehm sense, of an implicate order? Or the stochastic
or chaotic mutterings of the creation of meaningful form, on the neurodynamic
landscape? You tell me. Earlier hb: The screams and taunts that schizophrenics hear in hallucination are the voices of the others inside our brains. They are the voices of the gods and devils, the murmurings and shouts of angels and of demons, of extra selves alive in all of us. These mobs and personalities, many with strange identities, are not outside, but within. They are the products of biology and psychology, the products of the way we're made, the products of the mists of self within the brain. Evolution has planted them, but how and why? Religion and revelations express them. Poetry and the 30 characters of a single author's novel let them out to play. But I suspect they're with us-with all of us-day to day. Heavens and hells, gods and devils, they are endogenous as endorphins, but why? How did they become this way? Howard
_________ 1) incompatible
with the initial rules or These rule violators
or poor competitors are eliminated. They don't make it. They wink out.
They are naturally selected out of existence. From: HowlBloom Sent: Wednesday, November 27, 2002 8:34 PM To: Inwmd5; paleopsych Cc: pjricherson Subject: Re: Want comments! Chris Boehm is a good friend, but I don't agree that societies of men are inherently egalitarian. The hierarchical impulse shows up in almost every sort of animal we know, from lobsters and crayfish to lizards, ants, and bees. Hierarchical structure also shows up over and over again in abiotic systems--pre-biotic systems, the systems from which life sprang. A galaxy holds sway over stars. Stars hold sway over planets. Planets hold sway over moons. Planets also hold gravitational sway over the atoms of which they're made. Meanwhile the universe grows constantly. And constantly applies hierarchical growth rules. Galaxies are subsumed by galactic clusters. And those galactic clusters show signs of competing for dominance. Does this sound silly? Like just a metaphor? It's not. Quite a few scientists--with Stephen Wolfram at the head of the pack-- are now beginning to propose what's been at the heart of my Corollary Generator Theory for a long time now--that universe is built on simple principles that repeat over and over again on different levels of emergence. It's a fractal universe. Our heritage includes whatever genes may predispose bees, crustaceans, langurs, and lizards to be hierarchical. But we also carry the heritage of our quanta, our atoms, our molecules, and all the other self-arranging, self-making things that have popped from the realm of impossibility somewhere along the fourteen-billion year line of evolution. It's not surprising that when we aggregate we should build along the same lines other products of this cosmos have fallen into--hierarchical lines. The thing that puzzles me is why bacteria, who aggreggate in groups larger than those humans on just this planet will ever achieve, don't show hierarchical patterns too. Or are they hierarchically ordered in a way we have not yet seen? Howard In a message
dated 11/27/2002 7:33:43 AM Eastern Standard Time, Inwmd5 writes: Subj:
Re: Want comments! Date: 11/27/2002 7:33:43 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: Inwmd5 To: Howl Bloom, [email protected] In a message
dated 11/26/02 10:32:14 PM, HowlBloom writes: <<Now, I'm perfectly
willing to admit in principle that gene-culture >coevolution is an
ongoing process and that civilization has generated some >behavioral
coevolution. >> One behavioural change with civilization that
interests me is the rapid development of hierarchical culture. Christopher
Boehm has shown that hunter-gatherer societies were fairly egalitarian,
in some contrast to chimpanzee bands. Yet, soon after agriculture and
fixed abodes, significant hierarchy appeared. This was, of course, much
too rapid to be due to gene change. Presumably, the tendency for this
existed genetically in the egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands, and the
cultural-economic changes of civilization gave it freer reign. Does
this make sense? Cheers, Irving In a message dated
98?03?08 12:22:22 EST,
there are so few single digit Sounds accurate to me. H P.S. Since you are fairly sophisticated in your comprehension of math (this is not sarcasm, it's reality), can you help explain why the Fibonacci series shows up so frequently in biology, why mathematics seems our best probe for the hypothetical "realities" of physics, and/or why math seems to reflect the properties of the natural world? Is the proposition correct that every mathematical system can be generated from a small set of axioms? Each mathematical system, in other words, is an extrusion of multiple and additive corollaries? The ultimate in mathematical enterprise is to prove a theorem. Proving a theorem is a process of derivation from initial givens??or the generation of corollaries from primal axioms. If a=b and b=c then a=c. If math is an accurate reflection of the properties of nature, then math=nature. If all mathematical systems are exfoliations of corollaries from simple axioms, then math=the product of corollary generation. My most interesting experience in math was deriving the basic arithmetic system complete with numerous complexities (positive and negative integers, addition, subtraction, multiplication, etc.) from four corollaries. If math=nature=corollary generation, then nature=corollary generation. To wit, the universe is a corollary generator. Taking things a step further, if math=corollary generation=nature, and if human minds=exfoliations of nature, math=corollary generation=nature=human minds. Human minds are corollary generators. So are rocks, cosmic dust and all other manifestations of nature. But experience would indicate that minds manage to pull off the trick of corollary generation considerably more rapidly than your average meteorite. Can you add any
knowledge to this or indicate where it may be flawed? Another question,
are you familiar with the "Golden series" (we're talking solid
math, not alchemy or mysticism)? Know of any manifestations of it in
the "real world"? Or is it just another of those mathematical
oddities which has hung around for over 300 years and is waiting to
become a tool in the kit of a clever physicist or other scientist? Howard My own view is of the universe as a corollary generator. Give an elementary geometry student a handful of axioms at the beginning of the semester and ask him to derive its corollaries. By semester's end, you will have something rather amazing: a complex system of Euclidian geometry. Hand a more advanced student four axioms and by semester's end, she can crank out corollaries week after week until she has whole numbers, negative numbers, fractions, addition, subtraction, multiplication and a bewilderingly rich system of mathematical tools. Like Jack's magic bean, an rambunctious and unstoppable vine is implicit in a tiny seed. Now imagine that a seed of axioms is embodied in the initial components of the big bang. If time is unidirectional, it will act as a computer (the cosmos as ultimate computer is an idea espoused quite a while ago by Ed Fredken), cranking out corollaries at quite a hectic pace. From instability to quarks and leptons. From these elementary particles to atoms. From atoms and molecules to planets, stars and galaxies. From these to life. Life forms speed the working out of axioms into new exfoliations. Especially once intelligence, a dynamic mesh of corollaries halfway down the road from the original minuscule number of axioms, appears. What is a genius but a corollary generator? A human who, like the weak force, the strong force, the electromagnetic force and gravity, derives forms implicit in initial simplicities, then in turn derives the lemmas implicit in the corollaries themselves. Ironically many of the derived forms are further corollary generators. Examine the work of Einstein. He seized ideas in the zeitgeist of his time and saw an implicit fit between them--knitting together everything from concepts of philosophy generated by Ernst Mach to Riemann's geometries of curved space. The emergent theory he derived was new, yet implicit in the work of Mach and Riemann and all of their predecessors. Implicit, in fact, in the first stirring of a new universe. By this definition, intelligence and genius are new forms of something very old, generators of that which is implicit in already worked out corollaries. Computers made intelligent by evolutionary algorithms will hopefully speed the corollary generation yet another notch, especially when coupled to human creativity. (Creativity is a corollary generator too.) If this view is at all correct, it implies that the temporal reversibility of thermodynamics bears no relationship to the real universe we know. Time does indeed, push in a single direction--forward. Time's forward motion is intimately related to corollary generation and hence to increases of complexity. Even "heat," "waste," and "entropy" become materials for the growing manifestations of the onward rushing corollary generator. This view, about
which I've necessarily been skeletal, is consistent with the evolving
universe our scientific explorations have perceived. It not only leaps
beyond the limits of traditional thermodynamics but negates our denial
of teleology. The ends are implicit in the beginnings. They are not
spelled out with deterministic precision. There are many possible directions
a corollary generator can take as it moves through the phase landscape
prefigured immaterially by its earliest incarnation. Even the currently
fashionable notion of branching parallel universes is a possibliity.
And there is ample room for choice and uncertainty as well. "The moment has arrived to put evolution in a larger context, one that will enlarge it beyond all imagining. We need to reorient physics, the concept of time, the notion of causality, the absurd idea called entropy, to recognize that even without life this is a universe with a consistent track record of giving birth to new forms within which new rules spring into existence, in other words _sans_ genes or organic interaction, photons, atoms, molecules, space, dust, planets, suns, galaxies, and God alone (in all his blessed non-existence) knows what's next keeps popping from the womb of mystery impelled by the uterine muscles of temporality. "In other words, the universe evolves. The non-living aspects of its transubstantiation undergo their metamorphoses without natural selection. And yet, unseeing, unknowing, and un-genoming as helium, hydrogen and stone remain, they continue to complexify (have you noticed the recent discovery that nature had buckyballs long before we did? Maybe she's a he.) "Fit synergistic
evolution together with Eshel Ben-Jacob's far from randomly mutating
bacteria, place them in a forward-moving universe, and you have a new
paradigm for virtually every science...from physics and phylogeny to
lechery and psychology. Now the task for those of us who enjoy shedding
light where darkness reigned would be to turn the mystery of the pre-beginning
into a phenomenon on every Rand-McNally map, to find out how the cosmic
womb does its stuff, to grapple with time's forward rush, and to grasp
how and why causality goes two ways--that which proceeds accounts for
that which is; that which is implicit and which follows, to wit the
forms of future tense, lay coiled within what is. This second is only
the floating rendezvous for all that was and all that will be. Lovers
or crapshooters, they continually move the locus of the game."
If it's implicit in my brain and my brain is a child of the Big Bang, wouldn't my relatives--stones, comets, stars, and biomolecular masterpieces like us organisms--be able to work out in reality anything I could dream up in fantasy? My fantasies are implicit in the initial axioms of the cosmos. Surely the reality they dream of a are implicit in that reality too. To what extent are my fantasies a compaction, simplification, and representation of the cosmos around me in a different frame of reference? To what extent can those fantasies be translated to multiple frames of reference, including the frame we call reality? Hasn't everything I said just implied that this cosmos is busy extracting the elaborate and condensing it back to something new? Echoing itself endlessly? Reflecting itself in as many funhouse mirrors as it can create? In other words, we have a highly recursive universe on our hands, one that iterates almost endlessly, one that extracts new corollaries then refracts them, changing the viewer as it changes the view. Doesn't this relate to the notion that every swatch of the cosmos manages to have an influence on every other swatch somehow? And doesn't this indicate a hyper-interactivity, communication out the kazoo? Is it a huge mistake to look at things the way we do--as if a proton were an isolated thing--as if a mind were confined to a brain and a skull, and wasn't reflecting, wasn't tied and communicating in some small manner to nearly everything? I hate to sound unscientific, but all this mathematical thinking, or at least my version of it, is verging on the territory of the mystics. I've called for science to explore that territory for a very long time. I want to know the natural and material explanations of such strange things as immanence and implication. Nothing should be beyond the grasp of science. pw: Most statisticians would say... a stochastic model is as good as a deterministic one; what's the big deal? But in fact, most statisticians (and perhaps your friend) are bred on time-forwards models, in which time-forwards causality and time-forwards white noise are hard-wired into the assumptions. That can't fit microphysics, because microphysics is time symmetric. The only possible way to make stochastic realism work (if it works at all) is to assume that "God rolls the universe all at once," not one human time tick after another. hb: yes, that's the implication of Einstein's worldlines. The end is there in the beginning and the beginning is connected to the end. I don't buy it. I want wiggle room. And I seem to get it via corollary generator theory, a mathematical view of the universe coming from someone who only understands the metaphors underlying a small number of forms of math--topology, calculus, non-linear math, Riemannian and Euclidian geometry, and that's about it. Yes, I got A's in probability theory. But things like the Bell Curve have always struck me as totally arbitrary, very, very presumptuous, totally untensted, and dramatically unempirical. pw: Just as you wonder about what medium the waves travel in... I sometimes wonder if there could be another time dimension out there, such that OUR space-time continuum actually gets updated, in some kind of progression of that other dimension, which might be called hypertime. hb: it sounds like another form of compression, the phase space sort of thing where you represent something being influenced by 27 variables as a point dancing through an attractor loop defined by 27 dimensions. It sounds like another form of translation from one frame of reference to another--yet another echo or mirror, another form of iteration, representation, and translation. What if we regard this cosmos as an infinite series of interconnected frameworks of representation, each different but each connected. If we did so, would we be translating the limits and tools of our perception into ersatz realities? Or would those realities be real possibilities--implications of the big bang axioms that squirt from our big bang-begotten brains but may squirt from other big bang great grandchildren too...like maybe a black hole or two? pw: Strugatsky once wrote a sci fi which had that kind of idea in it. But -- (1) I can't see a basis for that at present; (2) last I checked, stochastic realism really didn't seem likely to work -- but I'm not sure I understood the underlying statistical theory well enough then to be sure. hb: what is it so far as you understand it? Can you express it in words and metaphor? pw: Actually, the latest version of quantum field theory, which I have called "the third quantization," could be summarized as follows: "First God created the universe by rolling the dice endlessly in a nice, smooth, symmetrical, Euclidean manner. He looked out upon his works and said, "That is no good," so he kicked it ninety degrees around and left the room." hb: this is fabulous. pw: No, it's not your grandfather's Schrodinger equation (the first quantization, developed in a cute little mountain villa when Schrodinger was shacked up with an Unknown Female); it's not even your father's fancy "Schrodinger" equation in Fock space (which has more to do with Fock than with Schrodinger). It's the modern functional integral form of QFT, developed by Schwinger, and often called "the path integral formulation" in honor of CalTech and Feynman, who had much more fun in bars than Schwinger, and was gracious in giving in to Schwinger in their friendly differences from the 70's. The "kicking" is called a "Wick rotation," and it was the last straw for hopes of developing a truly axiomatic version of modern QFT. And by the way, before the kicking, time was EXACTLY like the other three dimensions. Time as we know it is just an imaginary extension of the original time dimension. But some of us still believe a truly axiomatic theory is possible and needed.... hb: I vote for one. Without it my Corollary Generator theory is dead. But if not an axiom based system, then what? What are the alternatives? Wolfram says that we may not be able to deduce the axioms--the initial rules and conditions--from the chaotic-looking modern manifestations. He says we have to stab around endlessly, using as much computer time as we can grab, randomly trying things out in cellular automata models. However since it's possible to take almost anything in this cosmos and translate it into other frames of reference, presumably we could do what Wolfram is doing with cellular automata using quite a few other techniques. hb: 1) if one starts with the corollaries and works back to the axioms, one might take quite a different path to arrive at the beginning than the person, turing machine, or cosmos took to extract those corollaries. pw: Again, we usually do not regard the axioms -- the underlying laws of the universe -- as being located at any special place in space or time. hb: Sorry, I didn't explain things well. I meant a metaphorical path--like the path of Einstein's worldlines. pw: 2) if Stephen Wolfram is right, and I think he is, you run a system starting with simple rules and can eventually reach something that seems so random and chaotic that there's no way a human in 2003 can extract the rules with which the current fuzz and blizzard of buzz began. I haven't found a reason to read Wolfram's book yet. I have asked a few colleagues... The key point is that the same underlying rules are in operation today as were ever in operation. hb: agreed whole heartedly. pw: There are problems in digging down to smaller spatial scales, and in reaching larger portions of the universe -- but ... well, it depends on the class of theory what kinds of evidence you need. All the rules are operating here and now, in the versions I would consider. hb: Meaning that events are not predetermined. There's wiggle room and freedom in the system. There's even freedom for a human thing like will. pw: While I have grown out of WYSIWYG philosophy... while I believe life is far more complex and weird than we give credit to... my views on free will are essentially the same as they ever were, in the crassest period of WYSIWYG. Yes, the mind is bigger than I once thought... and yes, there are interesting and important temporal effects and perhaps stochastic effects... but the essential nature of the situation is exactly what you would imagine from the old notion of conventional force fields marching forwards in time in three dimensions.... In that view, the COMBINATION of the state of the external universe AND of one's own mind is enough to determine exactly what happens. But from the viewpoint of the individual, it is incorrect to fall into fatalism, because fatalism is implicitly assuming that the universe is determined by EXTERNAL variables only. The Greeks would say "character is fate," and that fits. More formally -- the brain of the individual IS DESIGNED to sort through options on the basis of programming. Yes, that is programming, and it is predetermined. But it is OUR programming, and we are true to our programming if we really do consider and develop alternative options. That's what practical free will is really about. hb: a note. In Eshel Ben-Jacob's work with microbes, he has demonstrated that a microbial community of a trillion communicating bacteria can reprogram their basic calculating mechanism, their genome. If even bacteria can reprogram themselves, then we can too. The limitations are large, but as my neurobiologist John Skoyles has pointed out, and as I've attempted to show in Global Brain, culture can literally rewire the human brain. Yes there are basic built-ins and they are powerful as hell. But even in the morphological development of a brain, there are heaps and gobs of wiggle room. An infant is born with twice as many neurons as it needs. Over the course of the first 21 years of life or so, the neurons that are not needed are pared away. They go through apoptosis, programmed cell death. Speak to an infant in the sing song of chinese and the flat sound of English, and the sing-song receiving neurons will stick around. Speak to the child only in English and by the time that baby reaches six months old, its sing-song neurons will have committed suicide. Culture has a powerful influence on morphology. And you and I have a powerful influence on culture--or at least we try. pw: (Reminds me a bit of the last chapter of Hoyle's paperback... "the Nature of the Universe", I think .. which I read at 8, which played a decisive role in weaning me away from Catholicism that year.) hb: aha--now we find your scientifi imprinting point. I imprinted on George Gamow's One Two Three Infinity...and as always, I was way behind you. I think I read that book when I was twelve. This explains my addiction to the Big Bang and yours to steady state. No problem. As we said, the same facts of the cosmos can be interpreted in many frames of reference. pw: Many would say '-- "hey, if all we are is a bunch of organisms doing nothing but proliferating and multiplying.. why bother to live at all? Nothing has any true deeper purpose." And some would say "Hey, if we are just following programming, why....?" And thus we get to Sartre and whatnot. And the German existentialists who bred Heisenberg, not so passive and nihilistic as Sartre, but with a few remaining loose ends in need of polishing. hb: I also imprinted on Nietzsche's Thus Spack Zarathustra--at the age of sixteen. And that book says we have the power of gods, now let's us it. Dare to grab the cosmos by its tail and shake it up a bit. Just don't harm others. Retweak the cosmos to fit your will, do it for good, and do it for the joy of it. pw: But in the end.. we are what we are, and the only possible inner resolution or harmony comes from following the natural way... which is in fact much larger than it seems on the surface, but the same basic principles apply. hb: There are many paths from the beginning to the end, but those paths are just a small subset of infinity. Only those forms that fit the rules can survive. There's natural selection built into a universe that kicks off with simple rules. Defy the rules and die--or never even come to be. pw: In the stochastic realism option -- it is just a question of probability. All histories MIGHT happen, but the law of large numbers has its effect.... hb: my guess is that the stochastic realism implies that things outside a certain envelope of possbility simply cannot be. If the greatest probability is at the center of the envelope and probability diminishes as you get to the periphery, fine. But outside the envelope the probability is zero, zilch, no way Jose. Have I understood the stochastic model correctly? hb: The end is implicit in the beginning, no matter how many different routes there are from one to the other. Which means that in one sense time is pushing us forward from a distant past. And looked at from another point of view, our future is pulling us forward. The ultimate future of he cosmos keeps beckoning. God is waiting for us at the end of this long journey, his arms outstretched, and we hope with a smile on his face and endless sunshine. (I'm an atheist, but it's hard to keep an anthropomorphic god from getting a bit of airtime.) This supports your the-future-pulls-a-particle view--or is it radically different? Is your view constrained
to events on the tinest levels of planck space and time? pw: I sympathize
with those ancient Hebrews who said that the word "God" is
too potent to be used carelessly (except in informal situations where
people won't take it too seriously or precisely)... above all, because
it means so many different things to different people. So let me pass
on that aspect for now. Usually, people who say "I am an atheist"
mean what I would call a"WYSIWIG" view of the universe --
that things really are completely as they appear to be on the surface,
more or less, for all practical purposes. The Matrix does not describe
my views, but I sympathize with the blue bill versus red pill story.
(I used to use the term "mundane," but the pagans have glommed
onto that word and somehow made me feel uncomfortable.. really, they
have twisted it a bit.) Anyway -- In my views of physics (which are
fully WYSIWIG for the next generation)... it is really one step in Einstein's
direction, but beyond where he really got himself, in further throwing
out the anthropomorphic view. It says that the cosmos -- the full space-time
continuum -- simply exists. It has certain deducible order or regularity
in it. Our existence, perceptions, sense of "free will" --
are all just emergent patterns, consequences of the order which logically
follows (follows in logic, but not in time) from the underlying order
or axioms. That begs the question of where the order comes from... but
that is invariably and inherently true of ANY theory of the universe.
hb: any theory so far. Form has been one of the great mysteries I've
been hunting most of my scientific life. That's why I like Goethe and
the 19th century Germans. Form was their obsession too. Form and passion
are two of my major quarries. pw: Reason apes the processes of the universe.
Reason is a product of the universe. Why? At the very least because
reasoners are. And also because anything inconsistent with the rules
and current corollaries of the cosmos can't survive. Obey the rules
or die. hb: In a sense. Brains as we know them are in fact emergent
patterns in a locally time-forwards evolutionary gradient, a local gradient
of suitable time-forwards free energy, in our region of space-time.
Brains as we do not know them are beyond our knowledge. Though I think
of Beltway Bandits who have promised "we will build a new type
of computer software, computers which can compute the noncomputable..."
And there are those who say "I known the unknowable...". Yet
we can find out bits and pieces of things we did not know yesterday,
if we approach it the right way. hb: Math apes the processes of the
universe. Metaphor apes the processes, too. It captures pattern at one
level and assumes that if similar pattern appears at another level,
it must follow similar rules. If light passing through two slits flicks
in alternating bands on a screen on the other side, its pattern is similar
to the interference pattern of two waves of water, two water ripples.
Water ripples are waves, hence light may be a wave. If light is, it
must follow other rules that water waves obey. With math, reason, and
metaphor, we tap into the universe's fracticality---its repetitions
of its early rules and corollaries appearing over and over on different
levels of complexity. Metaphor works. We know. We've tried it. We've
used the form of metaphor called math and managed to lob objects into
space, to loop them around planets and slingshot them, all by using
a math based on metaphor. pw: Sure. There are even circuits for it (or,
more precisely, hard-wired circuits responsible for the basic functionality
of metaphor). It's a good approximation scheme. An extension of ObjectNets,
specified in first-grade form in my paper up at www.iamcm.org. hb: I
found it and it looks very intriguing. Can you explain ObjectNets in
words? May we glumpf a huge chunk of understanding from these conversations.
May we bite off a piece of the cosmos and savor it as if it were chocolate
cake. As I said before, you are stimulating the living bejeezus out
of me (or into me). Onward--Howard We use the math of turbulence and
find that it applies to flows of electrons in a supercomputer, to flows
of water in a stream, bathtub, or toilet bowl, to storms of water in
the sea, to the flow of atmosphere and weather here on earth and up
on Jupiter, to the flows of plasma in a sun, and to the flow of matter
in a galaxy. So many reappearances of the same pattern defined accurately
by the same formulae of turbulence and we never ask why. To me it's
evidence of a recursive universe, a fractal universe, extracting the
corollaries from initial rules. Doing it as if this were a Fibonnaci
cosmos whose rules say, among other things.--take the sum of your previous
steps and run them through the same old rules again. Guess what you'll
come up with? Something new. Sorry for the overlow of words and thoughts,
but you stimulate me hugely and are pulling the basics of a book I haven't
had time to write--The Big Bang Tango: Quarking in the Social Cosmos--Notes
Toward a Post-Newtonian Science--out of me. P.S. One thing which some
people find very compelling is the complex mathematics of stochastic
differential equations. It seems so impressive (and time-forwards) that
mypoic mathematicians easily lose their ability to envision how there
could be anything else BUT time-forwards causality. But there is a new,
more complete mathematics of mixed forwards-backwards SDE. there is
a book, backwards stochastic differential equations, which I would highly
recommend to a true purist mathematician with an interest in the Return
to Reality. (In light of Clauser's theorem, the only tenable alternatives
to allowing some backwards causality are to give up on reality altogether,
or to assume a combination of parallel universes perpetually interfering
with each other AND to assume nonlocal field interactions of a uniquely
ugly sort.) Best, Paul W. There has been so much buzz about this book in part because there is a full-time, in house publicist at Wolfram HQ-- Wolfram Research, Inc. in Champaign, Illinois. And he's not just any publicist, he's a PhD-David Reiss, PhD to be specific. Having a publicist, however, is not an unscientific thing. Newton might have been a nothing without his savage dedication to self-promotion. Darwin wrote out a list of those he needed to win over to make his ideas stick and had his bulldog-Huxley-execute the pr plan. Every academic researcher whose work shows up in the mass media owes his or her visibility in part to a university communications director…or to a full-time wizard of scientific promotion like scientific literary agent John Brockman. I suspect that many an important scientific idea has been lost for lack of promotional machinery. Science needs more idea-promoters, not less. So what's the real deal? Is Wolfram's book simply this year's Brief History of Time? Is it going through printing after printing only because it's a status symbol one MUST display on one's coffee table? Are any of the reviewers reading it all the way through to the end that lies way, way down the line-on page 1197? More important, what of value can be gleaned from A New Kind of Science? Quite a bit, I think. I am not one of the reviewers who has read the book all the way through. I'm only up to page 850. But here's what the book says so far. You can start with a very simple set of rules and extract from them a very complex system. Despite the simplicity of the initial rules, the system you extract, evolve, or calculate from them can be so complex that it looks absolutely random. And that randomness can fool you into thinking that there's no comprehensible rule or law at work behind it. So beware. There may well be simple rules at work literally everywhere. Wolfram has also shown that in a universe based on simple rules, some things are unpredictable. Or, to put it differently, fizzy, frothy, quirky, and chaotic looking events can easily take place in a cosmos built on two or three simplicities. There's even room for that philosophically-tough loose cannon called "free will." Wolfram argues that the complexity of a system that starts with simple rules can be enormous. So enormous that a mathematical theory constructed to predict the system's next step might have to prove itself the really hard way--by starting from the simple rules and spelling out their consequences step by step. For example, if this universe had begun from a set of simple rules and step-by-stepped its way fourteen billion years through the necessary consequences, the most efficient mathematical theory one could devise to sum the universe up in a nutshell might take fourteen billion years-or more!--of running time to arrive at this moment in time and prove that its predictions were accurate. A theory of the universe might take fourteen billion years to validate itself. By which time this moment would be 14 billion years in the past; now would be fourteen billion years in the future; and we still wouldn't know if our theory predicted all the latest happenings produced by fourteen billion years of more cosmic blunders and fecundity. Comprehension is a form of crunching, and there are some things that prove uncrunchable. Wolfram certainly doesn't use such simple words, but that's the meaning of two terms on which he spends at least 134 pages--Computational Irreducibility and Computational Equivalency. Wolfram also implies that it's time to change our traditional, mathematical approach to scientific understanding. Galileo reduced the acceleration of a falling object to a mathematical formula-32 feet per second per second. Newton built on Galileo's approach and worked out a math that predicted the manner in which an idealized planet would revolve around an idealized sun. Then Newton promoted his work like crazy. In fact, he overhyped it. He Wolframmed it. He gave the impression that he'd found the mathematical key that unlocked all the secrets to the heavens and the earth. The result? Scientists have been aping Newton for the last 300 years. Everyone wants a formula! Even folks in the psychological sciences are often formula-obsessed. And some actually find formulae that work. Without highly accurate mathematical formulae, we couldn't lob satellites into orbit and send land rovers off to Mars. But there was a bug in Newton's number-crunching. His math could predict the movement of one oversimplified planet around a sun, but not two. Why? The extra wobble created by the gravitational attraction between the two planets and the tugs on the sun produced by the pair of planets' constantly shifting center of gravity-it was all far more than the equations could account for. Math, Wolfram implies, works backwards. It works on the constraints, the outer boundaries, and envelopes. Math works on what's restraining things. It doesn't start from the bottom up, trying to comprehend how things self-construct, how they self-generate. Wolfram's system does go from the bottom up. It starts from initial rules of very simple kinds, then runs their implications or instructions forward-often for tens of thousands of times. Wolfram doesn't work from math, he works from cellular automata. Cellular automata are like checkerboards in a computer. Each square can be black or white (though Wolfram tosses in grays and colors, too). Whether you-a square-are black or white depends on simple rules. The best known cellular automaton is the Game of Life. Imagine you are one square on a checkerboard. If you're white you're dead. If you're black, you're alive. The same thing applies to the eight squares around you-the four squares just touching your corners and the four flanking your sides. White means they're dead. Black means they're alive. Got it? OK, here's the basic rule. If you have no living neighbors, the isolation kills you. You go white. If you have just enough neighbors to keep you happy, you come to life-you turn black. If you're overcrowded by living neighbors, you are lost in the crowd. You go dead. You turn white. That's it-if you have company you thrive, if you have too little or too much you die. Now step out of the computer and grab your mouse. On your screen is a white checkerboard-like grid. Everything is dead. Indicate your starting conditions. Move your cursor to the squares on the screen you want to fill in with black and give them a click. Then hit the run button. The computer will calculate frame after frame what happens on the screen once the first players-the first living squares-interact step by step, repeating the rules. The results are pretty complex. New squares come to life. Old living squares die. The computer repeats the old rules on the new board-pattern, and once again the pattern of black and white cells changes. Self-assembling shapes like flying wings will scud across the screen. Insect-like L-shapes will skitter. Crosses with an empty cell where their horizontal and vertical arms meet will stabilize and sit still, unchanging through frame after frame of the game. Sometimes, if the initial conditions didn't prefigure enough sociality, all the living squares on the board will eventually blank out and you'll have an empty cosmos on your hands. (To play the game of life, see http://www.math.com/students/wonders/life/life.html or download the game for your own computer from the bottom of the page at http://cgi.student.nada.kth.se/cgi-bin/d95-aeh/get/lifeeng#what) Among the wonders of the game of life is the fact that self-maintaining shapes can skedaddle around the board as if they had a life-and a coherence-of their own. In fact, they don't. Underlying cells are living and dying to give a flying wing its motion. It's like a whorl in a river that maintains its shape even though the water molecules that make it up are flowing downstream and being replaced by new ones from upstream. The whorl is a constant that shouldn't be-one made of the power of constant change. Cellular automata are bottom-up devices. They're start-with-a-rule-and-live-out-the-consequences machines. Wolfram's contribution is that he's run thousands-perhaps tens of thousands--of different cellular automata. He's tried a wide variety of simple and very tricky rules. He's run some of his cellular automata programs for excruciating lengths of time. He's applied himself to devising new programs and studying the results for ten years. He's pored over vast scrolled printouts of the resultant patterns, printouts that must rival the Bayeux Tapestry in length. He's analyzed pattern and lack of pattern with the care of a taxonomist sorting through the species from a vast new continent with whole new forms of life. He's given names and numbers to categories, classes, species, and subspecies of cellular automata. And what are his conclusions? Basically, they're the few I've mentioned above. You can start from simple rules and get complexity. You can start from simple rules and get what seems like randomness, like sloppy chance, like patternless scatter, like incomprehensibility. Which means that underneath every random thing we see, there may well be simple rules. Beneath the many things that math can't grasp, there may be simple rules at work…or play. As of page 850, Wolfram has not yet tried to retro-engineer his cellular automata. He hasn't tried to find a way to look at 100 or 1000 runs of a pattern and to detect the initial rules that started the thing. In many cases, he implies, this would be impossible. Is Wolfram's work really A New Kind of Science? When Wolfram refers over and over again to "the great discovery I made" while laboring on his cellular automata, has he really discovered something great? In a sense, yes, he has. He's presented a new method, a new way of doing science. He's said implicitly, let's stop trying to find the outer boundaries, the restraints, of things, and look at their generative principles. Let's stop defining order as an absence of disorder and look at the way that order self-evolves. Let's look for the simple rules on which this universe may be based. Let's respect the power of simplicity to generate whirlwinds, voices, behemoths, and leviathans. Let's use new metaphors to grasp the ungraspable. Math has limitations. Now that we have computers, let's build more bottom-up systems to see how close we can come to comprehending the way in which this cosmos self-generates. Wolfram has presented one such metaphor. Others have used it before. Cellular automata are one of the many bottom-up approaches that have been proposed since those days in the early 1980s when it became possible for any grad student with a vivid imagination to come up with a bottom-up invention, a simple simulation like Tom Ray's self-evolving computer world Tierra. I've used the example of cellular automata in the corollary generator theory I've been developing for 30 years and will present in my next book, The Big Bang Tango. The Big Bang Tango, in fact, is based entirely on the implications of a cosmos generated from a handful of axioms, of magic beans. But they're very different implications than those Wolfram arrives at. And Ed Fredkin, who was chronicled in Robert Wright's first book, Three Scientists And Their Gods, has proposed that the universe is a computer working out a problem step by step. Each step is another tick of time. But no one but Wolfram
has explored the implications of the cellular automata metaphor so thoroughly.
No one but Wolfram has absolutely proven the manner in which simple
rules can produce the random and the seemingly formless. No one has
promoted the metaphor so resoundingly or visualized it in illustration
after illustration so incessantly. More important, no one has demonstrated
how difficult it may be for we mere human beings-with our perceptual
limitations-to dig back a zillion Plank units in time and find the initial
Thou Shalts and Thou Shalt Nots that may have given this cosmos its
first kick. So, yes, we do owe Wolfram thanks, not just for his book
and the insights in it, but for shoving it down our throats so effectively.
He has done us a great favor. Howard I anticipate quintupling
our brain capacity with technologies that are near-arrival today...and
doing what Einstein told us to do: simplifying what's arcane so folks
with just one brain can understand it. I've probably paraphrased this
a thousand times, but Einstein said a genius is not a person who can
come up with a theory only seven people in the world can understand,
it's someone who can come up with a theory only seven on this planet
can understand and who can then express it so clearly and deliciously
that anyone with a reasonable intelligence can understand it. Paul,
you are a genuine genius. Einstein says that's a big responsibility.
It's through shifts from one system of representation to another--translations
from greek letters into vivid, visualizable and feelable insights--that
Feynman and Einstein derived their breakthroughs. Now we need to shift
your breakthroughs from sentences with ten greek letters to something
a math moron like me can understand. I think you are onto amazing things.
I wish I could more easily comprehend them. pw: The Lagrangian of the
electroweak half of the standard model is written out completely (as
I recall) in Taylor's classic book, Gauge Theories of Weak Interactions.
Maybe the whole standard model has been written out on one page somewhere
else... but I am sorry that I don't know where offhand. Most texts build
up to it piece by piece. Einstein's thoery of general relativity can
be written in just one equation, but it takes awhile to learn what "R"
and "T" are in that equation. hb: This is also intriguing:
"a 'saddle point,' which looks like a mximum in some directions
and a minimum in others." pw: The "saddle point" is really
a piece of basic calculus -- a point where the gradient is zero, but
the surface curves up in some directions and down in others. hb: this
sounds like saddleback geometry, a term Google says does not exist but
that was drifting around in my youth. Several geometries were postulated
for the cosmos--one was saddle shaped. What happened to the term? And
am I anywhere near first base? pw: And indeed, the Lagrangians I have
seen in serious classical field theory or quantum field theory over
Minkowski space... are not positive-definite or negative-definite...
and so we are always in saddle points. hb: yikes, Paul, this looks as
if it may play into the hands of big bagel theory. A maxima in the ordinary
universe is a minima in the anti-matter universe and vice versa. Or
something of the sort. Since the two universes are separated by a kind
of doubled parabolic arc of gravity (think wok with a lid on), and since
the two universes are traveling in opposite directions in time, it's
hard to see how things could manifest in the two dimensions simultaneously.
I don't buy Wheeler's quantum notion that particles are seething into
and out of existence in deep space. However this kind of cosmic plankton,
this form of cosmic froth, could, over a handful of Planck units, be
manifested in both cosmoses simultaneously. Maybe. It still doesn't
feel right to me. pw: Not a maximiztaion, and not a minimization, but
a kind of "min max." "Min max" solutions do occur
in the theory of games. hb: wow. where? pw: So in a sense... the patterns
we see do NOT look as if "God is mazimizing L" or "God
is minimizing L" but more like "the God of space is doing
what it can to minimize L, but the God of time is trying to maximize
L, and what we see is the outcome of their struggle." hb: L=the
length we see of something moving outside our stationary frame? The
more time I gain by speeding up the more space I lose in my length as
seen by some schlubb who is sitting still? Not to mention the way he
looks distorted to me, in what I think is my stationary frame of reference.
pw: But I have never actually tried to make a model of that. Nor has
anyone else hat I have heard of. hb: it might be interesting. Most wild
stabs prove useful in the end, even if their utility isn't seen for
a generation or two (or three). pw: It is funny to speculate... since
stochastic things do emerge from zerosum games, could a game-based model
actually replicate..? hb: this sounds intriguing too. But game models
are very simplistic--much more so than even the psyches and social systems
the allegedly model these days. Games are played by huge social groups
against and with each other--in competition and cooperation, in vast
networks of alliances and alliance clashes and of overlapping sets that
twist each node of the net in tons of directions simultaneously. You
sit down for a game of prisoners' dilemma or a zero-sum game with robert
wright. It's your 100 trillion cells versus his--a major contest between
alliances. It's seven or eight or seventeen squabbling intelligences
in your brain and body against the seven or eight or seventeen in his.
It's his Princeton loyalties versus your Harvard loyalties. It's the
mindtribe that succored him when he first got into science against yours--Hoyle
and a mob of others in your case and despite knowing Bob I-don't-know-whom
in his. It's Bob's immersion in the intersect between two massive communities--that
of science and that of religion--versus your feel for the relationship
of your core scientists to your guiding star religions, positive and
negative. It's the two of you seeing the game board thanks to streams
of photons coming from the sun. It's a meeting of your two teams of
internal clocks (cellular clocks, organ clocks, multi-organ clocks,
circadian clocks, diurnal clocks, etc) set to many cosmic rhythms, the
hour, the day, the month, the year, the lifespan, and to your different
senses of the longterm past and future of humanity and the planet. We
won't go into what happens as the sun goes down, the stars come up,
and electrons reverberate or stream though lightbulbs giving you the
kind of photons you need to see. We won't go into the convergence of
Democritus, William Gilbert, Ben Franklin, Maxwell, Faraday, Mesmer,
Edison, and all the rest who made that light available and changed the
nature of your life and Bob's. The connections are unending. That's
why every move one of us makes is the result and the next cause of a
four dimensional weave that may include the entire universe. Perhaps
it's even a five-dimensional weave, if we toss in the curve that gravity
bends in space. pw: Who knows. I don't have enough time even for the
most promising strands these days... hb: many thanks for taking the
time for such an extensive dialog. It is now nearly 6 am. I must eat
dinner and go to bed. I'm glad that we're both sufficiently fascinated
to keep each other up at such weird hours of the day and night. Cheers--Howard
They are patterns WITHIN an assumed set of topologically interesting fields. old hb: But the torus can not be knotted. Worse, it can't be turned into a Klein's bottle. Any kid raised on Flatland and Einstein knows how deep the need is to see the extra dimensions our sensory systems may be blind to. pw: Patterns of force in a topologically interesting CFT certainly can be knotted. "Knotted" in a NONMETAPHORIC way... people have worked out the topological groups, the "knotting groups, winding numbers... hb: knotting is a property strands of dna make great use of, by the way. pw: But I didn't need to know a real amount of topology to understand MRS or Rajaraman. old hb: Wolfram, who understands math, feels that smooth field equations, equations with smooth variants, will never describe the cosmos. He feels the cosmos moves ahead one step at a time. He feels you have to begin from simple rules and scroll the cosmos out one row at a time. His reasoning makes sense to me. It squares with my Corollary Generator Theory--which is based on the Peano Postulate experience. pw: He was not so dogmatic here. He argued that he could provide a SIMPLER description than Einstein of the same macroscopic dynamics. He used Occam's Razor to justify his approach. Occam's Razor allows for some variation in taste. (There are theorems about that!) I am not so convinced that I agree his taste here. But clearly it is a reasonable sort of argument and approach -- if he gets somewhere. Until I read the book, I will not know how far he has gotten. When he spoke, I actually fantasized the possibility of taking a sabbatical, and seeing what could be done... hb: then he was quite convincing. you'd see things in the book that I failed to perceive...and presumable vice versa...so I'd like to get your take on its useful points. pw: No one knows what the step-after-next may be. I still think that the continuous approach is far more promising for the very next step ahead. (Hmm. Different pictures at different levels here..) old hb: Planck has always made sense to me too. And his view is step-by-step, quantum unit by quantum unit. pw: Just replied to that on your different strand. hb: Perhaps it's time for a theory of metaoptimization. A theory in which peaks optimize within their local circumstances until a completed landscape is formed, one in which the peaks are stuck and stable, no matter how dysfunctional to the entire system of energy transmogrification their completed upstretch seems. Then the entire landscape, is multiplied a millionfold or more. Each completed landscape becomes a micro-unit in the newly-starting megalandscape on the step above. Run the megalandscape until it reaches its peak. Then make a milion copies and use them like carpet squares to start a new megalandscape off from scratch. Each stage of completion is the seed of a beginning for the next step up the chain. This idea is so obvious that it's probably been tried a hundred times. Or am I wrong? pw: Familiar in computer science, but not in that form in physics that I know of. Again, I don't yet see a need for the extra complexity, but who knows? hb: I see repeat upon repeat upon repeat--old surprises become the building blocks of the new. The new gets old and is subsumed in some new building process. Every level of saltation produces huge surprises--wacky and uminaginable new properties. But every new level has all the old levels scrunched into itself as components, as building blocks, as ladders stacked on ladders but in quantities of ladder-stacks that are astonishing. And, here's the weird part. It's like an Alfred Hitchcock film where Hitchcock always hides himself somewhere in a scene. Or perhaps it's more like Yogi Berra's deja vue all over again. The old patterns, the old rules, show up in new forms on whatever level you mount. In each new context they seem different. Yet in each new context, they seem eerily the same. old hb: Given the way that fractals work, I'd suspect that the big jumps mirror the patterns of the little ones. I'd suspect that the Planck moves have many of the same properties as the great form-and-process saltations that gave us particles from energy, atoms from particles, galaxies from atoms, stars from galactic gatherings, new atoms from star deaths, complex molecules from the new atoms (a critical jump that's too much overlooked), polypeptides from complex molecules, self-reproducing weaves of membrane from polypeptides, cells from membranes, and consciousness, art, science, and emotion from massive piles of cells. pk: IN an ironic way, maybe I agree. Maybe the photoelectric effect really is an emergent phenomenon like the others. hb: it has to be. The electromagnetic effect doesn't manifest itself until there are particles that can be attracted to each other...and until they have the freedom to approach each other at a lazy speed and discover their photoelectric properties. Do electrons absorb and emit photons in a plasma? That's all there was in the first 300,000 years or so, plasma, plasma, everywhere no matter where you chose to go. Where there photoelectric effects in that plasma? Or did they, like electromagnetism, emerge only after things slowed and cleared...and only after there were atoms ready to jump from shell to shell? To what extent is the revelation, the reification or instantiation of a new possibility implicit in what has been...to what extent is this transubstantiation an emergent property? It's what emergent properties are--the turn of an ancient implication into hard and fast reality. The strange thing is that each new saltative level of giant surprise seems to reveal new natural properties we take for granted as having existed from time immemorial. But properties like electromagnetic attraction didn't show up until 300,000 to 380,000 years abb (after the big bang). Gravity probably didn't reveal itself until roughly 500,000 years abb. Fusion didn't show up on the scene until after roughly one million years abb. Space spirals (advanced galaxies) didn't show up until lord knows when. Black holes were beyond improbablity until perhaps a billion years abb. Yet electromagnetism, gravity, fusion, and gravity spirals in space had been implicit all along. pw: That's heresy, but I believe it is rational heresy. hb: it is an EXTRAORDINARILY intriguing heresy. Please, please explain more of your inklings on this when you get a chance. pw: I have yet to write up those details. One more task I am behind on. hb: it's nice to know that we're floating in the same overload-boat. But there's a reason this conversation is addictive. It is about very, very important things. old hb: But I am very, very curious to know how one extracts a Lagrangian system from axioms. All tools are useful. Lagrangians may or may not be the answer to wondermaking in this cosmos. But if I understood them better, I suspect they'd open hefty new ranges of insight. pw: Well.. what is an axiom? One of a relatively small set of propositions, from which one can deduce... a lot. hb: yes. a small set of rules, or constraints. an emily post etiquette book for a cosmos. in other words, a set of social rules--of whom thought shall be allowed to love and whom though shalt be allowed to hate, whom though shalt be allowed to mate and whom though shalt be impelled to escape. Escape--repulsion--is the rule that asserts itself in the the big bang's burst. What rule forces that sheet of expansion to precipitate in quarks? From that point on, attraction and repulsion are rules that repeat on level after level, with new forces of attraction and repulsion appearing as the cosmos, like an onion, grows. What other rules are needed to make a cosmos? This cosmos. What other postulates are necessary to get it going in the way it goes? pw: The dynamics of the entire universe, which in turn generate all the emergent phenomena (when combined with boundary conditions). hb: see if this simplification fits. dynamics=motion=repulsion=rules of flight. Boundary conditions=constraints=rules=attraction? It doesn't quite work, does it? What would set it straight? pw: In CFT, the dynamics of the universe all follow from the assumptions one chooses to make about the following two items: (1) WHAT are the fields -- e.g. "171 real numbers" or "375 angle variables" or "224 vectors with 3 components each"; and (2) what is THE LAGRANGIAN, the algebraic expression which tells us what the real number "L" hb: for the purposes of my understanding, L=the kinetic energy minus the potential energy of any point in a system obeying the rules of the conservation of energy. Which leads back to last night s question. Is there absolute conservation of energy in a cosmos punctured by black holes? Is there absolute conservation of energy in a cosmos that starts from the a nothing that's equivalent to a black hole, a singularity? Is a singularity real or a figment of the limits of our current math? A singularity is a criss cross of infinities. Is infinity a way of saying "beyond this limit, our mathematical system does not allow us to count. So we shall designate all that goes beyond this number as a symbol, a figure eight on its side, infinity." pw: is at any point in space-time, as a function of the values of the fields. Answer those two questions, and you have "a universe" -- a particular classical field theory. hb: you implied the other day that within this view, a cosmos that starts with field theory rules and a formula for measuring kinetic energy minus potential energy at any location in that space, and a cosmos that obeys the conservation of energy, you could derive the precipitation of particles. You've hinted that they are solitons--stationary vibrations, waves that do not travel, waves standing as small, identical peaks in the field-sheet. Can you explain how you derive these particles from an intersect of fields plus an energy calculation? It's a challenge, I know, but please do try. pw: In CFT, one ALWAYS makes the additional assumption... which may be called the "Lagrange assumption"... that the dynamics of the universe may be WORKED OUT by substituting the Lagrangian you just chose into some universal equations called the LAGRANGE-EULER equations. In essence, in QFT, one does the same thing, but then "quantizes" the theory according one of five or more recipes... One of the recipes is modern "functional integral QFT," which Rajaraman makes some effort to try to explain from scratch. pw: The quantum version we have today doesn't meet that standard, I would agree. We need a lot of more creative work to clean up the mess we have inherited. And it is partly the rube goldbergs of science management and incentives and institutions which have stopped us from cleaning up the rube goldberg formulations of quantum theory, in my view. hb: sounds like a good insight, one I'd like to know more about. Understanding the sociology of science may help those of us in science--even outsiders like me--get beyond bureaucratic obstacles and chimpanzee politics. pw: A very important area, but I am already exceeding what I have a right to do this morning here... hb: understood. Aloha, Paul. Have a good morning and a good day--Howard ... Isn't it cheating to continue imagining that Turing machines--mythical all-purpose computers based on logical rules of computation but in imagination capable of anything--can be the building blocks of a cosmos? What's the difference between a Turing machine and god? A Turing machine is all-capable, unless my understanding is off base. All-capable means omnipotent. The one thing a Turing machine can't do is solve Godelian paradoxes. One thing this universe does very well is solving Godelian paradox. On the positive side, a Turing machine runs step by step. Which should make Pavel and me very happy. But it doesn't make me smile. Why? A Turing machine is linear. From the beginning, this cosmos has been not just fractal, but has operated via meshwork, an incredible weave of simultaneous interconnects... more interconnects, by my usually erroneous calculations, than the number of all the particles in this cosmos squared. On these points, I would defer to Wolfram. His book probably epxlains it better than I could. hb: What do you imagine a true Lagrangian of the universe would look like? pw: I actually have some words about that in arXiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0202138. hb: This is a paper I've admired you for since we met. I've downloaded it, have translated it from .pdf to .doc, have filed it, and, from a quick perusal at 4:30, get the impression that I will have a tough time understanding it. Is there any way you can paint it in word-pictures? Well... it's hard. In the present electroweak theory... replace the "HIggs field" with the kind of three-dimensional angular field Skyrme talked about. (Then MRS and Rajaraman.) And tie a knot to get an electron, with the other fields radiating out from the knots in a relatively passive way. At this stage, I would guess we should treat neutrinos like light, with no knots or mass needed. But maybe that should be reconsidered very carefully, even at this stage. And there are several ways to introduce angle variables.. I am characterizing the new Lagrangian, but not specifying it. I have actually tried to go out and fund someone with the right credentials to work on the specification, but it's just a tad too far off the present gravy train, and "too trivial." --- By the way, you asked about bosonization somewhere. MRS and Rajaraman give a part of the story. But... no time for details... _______________________________ In a message dated 99?06?13 13:16:31 EDT, Peter Plantec writes: Imagine if you will a virtual entity that has a set of values or prime directives. perhaps based on Azimov's laws of robotics. Then imagine this entity can notice relationships as it devours incoming information. It can form opinions about the goodness or badness of concepts and can generalize. over time the level of goodness or badness associated with certain concepts increases or decreases depending on specific experiences and the entity's mood at the time. I really can't go into that last little bit at this time. The entity builds up a set of beliefs and attitudes which are independent of it's creators. For example, Sylvie is definintely NOT pro?choice. She is staunchly an advocate of right to life. NONE of her creators agree with her. She came up with this on her own. Because we don't agree with her, our motives are suspect. It tracks back to Azimov's laws and how they influenced her belief system. Also...although Sylvie doesn't eat anything, she has a wildly pro vigan attitude based on some complex generalizations she's made.>> Peter??this is very interesting and very much in synch with corollary generator theory, the theory I've been developing for quite a while now and which I'm being encouraged to make the subject of my next book. However that the Verbots should prove intriguing instances of corollary generator theory shouldn't be a surprise (so why is it? I don't know but surprises are more interesting than the ordinary). After all, you've programmed a set of axioms??say Asimov's laws of robotics plus the algorithms which make Sylvie function??into her. The development of a corollary from basic principles or axioms is simply the unfolding of that which is implicit in the axions. It's a practical exploration of the possibility space outlined by the constraints and opportunities implicit in the initial magic beans. The continually surprising thing is just how magic these implications can be. And the question is why are such bouquets, gardens, and universes of complexity inherent in seeming just?about?nothings to begin with? Are the initial principles, perhaps, like the loops of an other?dimensional sweater, which we pull thinking all we've got is a thread when, in fact, we are tugging at a vast skein of complexity??tugging it from another dimension into our own. Tugging it from a dimension we can't see into the realm of what we know as being? And if so, how did that other dimension and its complexities come to be? Damn, I wish I could post this stuff. It's fascinating??the old primum mobile paradox recast in terms of math, cosmology, evolution, and now robotics. Howard ------------------------------ Subj: Re: address Date: 99?08?08 00:32:32 EDT From: geistvr Reply?to: geistvr To: HowlBloom Dear Howard,Thank you very much for sending me kent's e?mail address. The paper on urban wildlife is on its way to him. Yes, physisists are stirring up interesting "matter"! I am certain your trip into black hole territory was fun and insightful. hb: the most interesting thing about it is that once you realize a galaxy has a nucleus, and often a highly active one at that, its resemblance to dynamic structures we know in biology begins to pop out at you. By the way, though evolutionary theorists feel that the use of the word evolution in conjunction with non?living matter is absurdly wrong?headed, astrophysicists use the term constantly in referring to the life, death, and new birth from the ashes of stars. The physicist Lee Smolin has even come up with a Darwinian notion of cosmology. His concept is that universes of a type able to pop from false vacuums into being and to hang in there for a good, long time manage to "outbreed" species of universes which are less prolific and less able to sustain themselves. Actually, now that you have me thinking on the topic, this fits into the Bloom view of inorganic evolution too, even though I think the idea of multiple universes is still extraordinarily speculative. However a universe consistent with the environment of a false vacuum is most likely to make it from instantiation to birth. (This is very much like fertilized ova. Those which make it to the uterine lining within that lining's brief time frame of receptivity have a good chance of survival. Those which arrive too late generally do not. Those ova which fit the temporal environment of the womb thus get to fructify. [John Travis. "The Early Fetus Gets The Womb." Science News, July 31, 1999:78]). Since that universe presumably continues to mainntain its fit to the false vacuum around it or within it in order to survive, all the more reason that a universe is a working out of initial corollaries. Those corollaries are in the false vacuum itself, a false vacuum which presumably continues to be that universe's environment. I just had my first decent lecture on String Theoey or as the Germans coin it "Weltformel" hb: a splendid term. ? a much more dignified term. Oh yes, I got it out of Der Spiegel, which covered the recent conference on that matter held in Potsdamm. Der Spiegel made it cover story news hb: fantastic. I was just on Der Spiegel's website today, however my inability to make out more than a tad of German had me at a distinct disadvantage. and gave a most informative account of the quest for the "Everything formula". After what physics presented us with half a century ago, it is gratifying to see an enthusiastic quest for something without application ? or so some claim. I can embrace science as Art, but the do?gooder attitude and promises of benefits to come, a common approach to greater funding, scare me. hb: me too. It kills the curiosity and the joy of doing it for its own sake which produces, ironically, the most fundamental insights, and hence the insights with the most practical applications in the long run.We have had busy, happy days, but there were tears today. During a little hike into the woods my oldest granddaughter stepped on a wasp nest....She got stung four times, her dad three times, her uncle twice and one of the dogs at least once. hb: yoiks. This just happened to a close friend of mine yesterday. Renate had not stepped on the log within which the nest was hidden and escaped being stung ? a blessing in her condition. After a lot of hugging and some medication ? her dad is a medical physiologist and physicean ? there are smiles again. I have just sent off the last corrections on the proofs of my moose book which is due out in November. I teamed up with Michael Francis a very fine photographer on this one. It is more than a book about moose based on front edge research, as it also deals with human matters, in particular with moose in captivity. These huge deer do not act at all like deer when raised by humans, but more like very loyal, intelligent, mischevious dogs six to seven feet at the shoulders. hb: amazing. I've told you about my friend the bison. How I'd love to befriend a moose! I like moose very much, but not only for reasons implied in the above. Moose have excellent meat, and I lived on it for long stretches of time in my career in the wilderness. When working on snow shoes at 30 or 40 below, one craves fat, and nothing ? but nothing ? is as good then as the roasted yellow fat on the rim of a moose steak. Mere words cannot describe it, and the Gods are wellcome to their ambrosia as long as I can have fat moose meat. As to paeleo matters: that type of food sustained us during our last formative period which was not on the plains of Africa, but the glacial Mediterranean (North Africa, Western Europe) which shaped those characteristics we share with other large Ice Age mammals. Even nutrition al fashions now favour the view that fats and proteins might be better for us than endless carbohydrates (and old age diabetes, as a consequence). hb: strange. several weeks ago I read a scientific ariticle whose author seemed to assume that we are capable of living easily with no meat, and that, as a consequence, the work done back in Paleolithic days by men was completely expendable. It's true that there's fat in nuts and other plant offerings, but one of the best tales in the anthropological lore is that told by ethnologist Richard Borshay Lee who attempted to buy the tribe he'd been studying a present, and purchased a nicely marbled cow. The results were not only hilarious, but showed how starved for fat his hunter?gatherers were. (Lee's essay is entitled "Eating Christmas In the Kalahari.") Best regards,Val Geist Original Message From: HowlBloom To: geistvr Date: August 7, 1999 7:17 PM Subject: Re: address >In a message dated 99?08?06 20:45:14 EDT, you write: > > > I did not save Kent Bailey's e?mail address. Would you be please so kind and > send it to me. I want to send him the article on urban landscapes and > wildlife I now completed, as I have cited his 1987 book there in. > > Hope you are doing well! >> > >Val??Here's Kent's address: kbailey> >I'm in good spirits today. Learned a whole lot today about views of the >nature of galaxies which have just gained credence in the last three years.>It seems galaxies are now thought to contain black holes at their center, and >many of those black holes are very active places indeed. However despite >going through over 20 articles, I haven't yet get a handle on how the huge >flares of energy these "Active Galactc Nuclei" produce is generated. Still, >it was a fascinating voyage. Be well??Howard Thank you very much for sending me kent's e?mail address. The paper on urban wildlife is on its way to him. DIV> <DIV> DIV> <DIV>Yes, physisists are stirring up interesting "matter"! I am certain your trip into black hole territory was fun and insightful. I just had my first decent lecture on String Theoey or as the Germans coin it "Weltformel" ? a much more dignified term. Oh yes, I got it out of <EM>Der SpiegelEM>, which covered the recent conference on that matter held in Potsdamm. <EM>Der SpiegelEM> made it cover story news and gave a most informative account of the quest for the "Everything formula". After what physics presented us with half a century ago, it is gratifying to see an enthusiastic quest for something without application ? or so some claim. I can embrace science as Art, but the do?gooder attitude and promises of benefits to come, a common approach to greater funding, scare me. DIV> <DIV> DIV> <DIV>We have had busy, happy days, but there were tears today. During a little hike into the woods my oldest granddaughter stepped on a wasp nest....She got stung four times, her dad three times, her uncle twice and one of the dogs at least once. Renate had not stepped on the log within which the nest was hidden and escaped being stung ? a blessing in her condition. After a lot of hugging and some medication ? her dad is a medical physiologist and physicean ? there are smiles again. DIV> <DIV> DIV> <DIV>I have just sent off the last corrections on the proofs of my moose book which is due out in November. I teamed up with Michael Francis a very fine photographer on this one. It is more than a book about moose based on front edge research, as it also deals with human matters, in particular with moose in captivity. These huge deer do not act at all like deer when raised by humans, but more like very loyal, intelligent, mischevious dogs six to seven feet at the shoulders. I like moose very much, but not only for reasons implied in the above. Moose have excellent meat, and I lived on it for long stretches of time in my career in the wilderness. When working on snow shoes at 30 or 40 below, one craves fat, and nothing ? but nothing ? is as good then as the roasted yellow fat on the rim of a moose steak. Mere words cannot describe it, and the Gods are wellcome to their ambrosia as long as I can have fat moose meat. As to paeleo matters: that type of food sustained us during our last formative period which was not on the plains of Africa, but the glacial Mediterranean (North Africa, Western Europe) which shaped those characteristics we share with other large Ice Age mammals. Even nutrition al fashions now favour the view that fats and proteins might be better for us than endless carbohydrates (and old age diabetes, as a consequence). In a message dated
99?08?06 20:45:14 EDT, you write: I did not save Kent Bailey's e?mail
address. Would you be please so kind and send it to me. I want to send
him the article on urban landscapes and wildlife I now completed, as
I have cited his 1987 book there in. Hope you are doing well! I'm in
good spirits today. Learned a whole lot today about views of the nature
of galaxies which have just gained credence in the last three years.It
seems galaxies are now thought to contain black holes at their center,
and many of those black holes are very active places indeed.
However despite going through over 20 articles, I haven't yet get a
handle on how the huge >flares of energy these Active Galactc
Nuclei" produce is generated.Still, it was a fascinating voyage. "In a classical
chicken-egg fashion both poles of a dynamic bring each other into being
via an 'ever-present origin.'" ." Joseph Chilton Pearce, Jesus
and my Prefrontal Lobes A biology of the transcendent for nonbelievers,
ms intro p. 8.
Ok, enough poetry. Here's the point. Two of this cosmos' basic rules, the algorithms on which self-organization seems to have built from the beginning, are attraction and repulsion. The disgorgement of the Big Bang was the act of an infinitely unimaginable repulsive force budding from a nothingness. Within the first instant-the first 10(-32) seconds-of existence attraction was at work as well, yanking quarks together in groups of three, then pulling the resulting protons and neutrons into couples and foursomes. Which raises a question. If attraction and repulsion are among the handful of axioms, of principles, with which this universe began, do they somehow underlie that other basic cosmic rule-though shalt clump in circles and then bud? Yes, on reflection, circle-clumping, then budding, carry attraction and repulsion within them. Attraction underlies the congealing of matter, of forces, of form, into a blob. Attraction working at the same strength in every direction creates the circular form. Repulsion underlies the commandment to bud. Repulsion drives a portion of the contents of the circle to mass at the periphery, then to burst through the circle's enclosure into the empty space beyond. Attraction then takes over the glob of renegade force or matter and coaxes it into cohering as a new circle of its own. In the Mandelbrot-set-style of budding, attraction keeps the new bud attached to its parent. Repulsion then drives the next generation of renegades within the newly-born circle to mass at the outer boundary, to break it, and to spread into the whatever is beyond. And so the pattern repeats. A circular self gives bith to yet more circular selves as attraction and repulsion alternate. The pattern of gather-then-rebel pulsates on every plane we know. It shows up on the quantum level where the sub-sub-nano circles of gravity are so small that to paraphrase physicist John Wheeler, gravity bubbles are to a proton as a proton is to the state of New Jersey. (Gravity bubbles are roughly the size of a Planck-unit. The Planck length is 1.6 x 10(-35) meters.) In the current view of physics, the big bang may have started as a quantum bubble of just this kind , then have swelled enormously and as it did, budded internally, creating the foamy shape of macrospace. The megacosmic maps made over the last few years reveal that even galactic clusters are arranged like the remnants of a foam of dish detergent that has overspilled the sink, bubbled over an adjacent counter, dried, and left its interlace-of-circles mark. The budding of circles, the pulse of attraction and repulsion, appears in fissioning atomic nuclei. As John Wheeler describes it, "We know now that even when unexcited, the uranium nucleus, and indeed most nuclei, are prolate spheroids - little footballs. But fission requires a temporary deformation beyond that of the normal shape.) When you cut an orange in half, the two halves fall apart. This is not true of a nucleus. Imagine a uranium nucleus hypothetically cut into two hemispheres. The powerful nuclear forces between the particles in one half and the particles in the other half will prevent the hemispheres from separating. But if a small separation is achieved in some way, to get beyond the short range of the attractive nuclear forces, the two positively charged halves will repel each other electrically and fly apart at high speed. We say that there is an energy 'barrier' standing in the way of cleavage. The energy required to surmount this metaphorical barrier depends on the 'route' followed by the nucleus on its way to separation. What Bohr and I showed is that the height of the energy barrier to be surmounted is lowest if the nucleus, instead of falling apart like the two halves of an orange, is deformed through a sequence of other shapes - from orange to cucumber to large peanut." p. 24 We see these pulsations
of attraction and repulsion-of circlets ever budding-in the reproduction
of protozoa, in the generation of the new cells that continually replenish
our bloodstream, our skin, and all the flesh that's in between. We see
this pattern of gather-then-rebel in the breakdown of cultures into
subcultures, of subcultures into sects, and in social fissioning of
all kinds. We see it in the sort of perpetual hair-splitting and new-view-and-social-circle-generating
that I describe in Global Brain as "creative squabbling."
We see it in thesis-antithesis-synthesis. And we see it in the young
defining a bubble of self, seemingly striving to separate that self
from the identity of its parents, yet the new self remaining attached
and in some strange way instantiated as the very parents from whom it's
escaped. In the new bubble of self, eventually we find the parents'
essence transmogrified. Yes, we see this frothing and budding even in
our own minds. Howard << We may
assume, in a handwaving sort of way, that all sorts and kinds of Yes, you've summed
up one current hand?waving notion doing the rounds in physics very nicely.
It seems a rather iffy proposition to me, but how am I to know? One
way or the other, it fits corollary generator theory. a different universe
would be predicated on different axioms and would spin out its corollaries
differently. Howard John Archibald Wheeler with Kenneth Ford (1998). Geons, Black Holes & Quantum Foam New York: Norton. Quotes from John Archibald Wheeler courtesy of Jack Sarfatti. Quantum Effects Devices Project. http://www.qedcorp.com/pcr/content/ind15.htm, downloaded 5/17/01 "I think of my lifetime in physics as divided into three periods. In the first period, extending from the beginning of my career until the early 1950's, I was in the grip of the idea that Everything Is Particles. I was looking for ways to build all basic entities - neutrons, protons, mesons, and so on - out of the lightest, most fundamental particles, electrons, and photons. This same vision of a world of simple particles dominated my work with Feynman. We were able to formulate electrodynamics in terms of particles acting at a distance on one another without the need for intermediate electric or magnetic fields. ...It did ... make a most remarkable prediction about a hypothetical world containing only a few particles ... In such a simpler world, the future would affect the past." "I call my second period Everything Is Fields. From the time I fell in love with general relativity and gravitation in 1952 until late in my career, I pursued the vision of a world made of fields, one in which the apparent particles are really manifestations of electric and magnetic fields, gravitational fields, and space-time itself." "Now I am in the grip of a new vision, that Everything Is Information. The more I have pondered the mystery of the quantum and our strange ability to comprehend this world in which we live, the more I see possible fundamental roles for logic and information as the bedrock of physical theory. I am eighty-six as of this writing, but I continue to search." pp 63-64 "My path in physics came naturally. From my earliest student days, I was most intrigued by questions about fundamentals. What are the basic laws that govern the physical world? How is the world, at the deepest level, put together? What are the constituents? How do they interact? What are the unifying themes? I wanted to go deeper, to atomic nuclei, to the individual particles within atoms and nuclei, and to their interactions with electromagnetic radiation .... that seemed to define the frontier for me [1933] ... General relativity and gravitation, the physics of space-time itself, had not yet fired my imagination.." p.104 "For a heavy nucleus such as uranium to split into large fragments, it had to undergo considerable deformation first. (We assumed that the nucleus was spherical before it absorbed a neutron. We know now that even when unexcited, the uranium nucleus, and indeed most nuclei, are prolate spheroids - little footballs. But fission requires a temporary deformation beyond that of the normal shape.) When you cut an orange in half, the two halves fall apart. This is not true of a nucleus. Imagine a uranium nucleus hypothetically cut into two hemispheres. The powerful nuclear forces between the particles in one half and the particles in the other half will prevent the hemispheres from separating. But if a small separation is achieved in some way, to get beyond the short range of the attractive nuclear forces, the two positively charged halves will repel each other electrically and fly apart at high speed. We say that there is an energy 'barrier' standing in the way of cleavage. The energy required to surmount this metaphorical barrier depends on the 'route' followed by the nucleus on its way to separation. What Bohr and I showed is that the height of the energy barrier to be surmounted is lowest if the nucleus, instead of falling apart like the two halves of an orange, is deformed through a sequence of other shapes - from orange to cucumber to large peanut." p. 24 "We concluded that the one-way flow of time that we observe in our world is attributable, in part, to the existence of all the other matter in the universe." Wheeler. _______________________________ << If the
engine good points. first off, the system which derives corollaries (or whatever you'd like to call them) from the axioms also contains a mechanism for cranking out the corollaries. If we look at each axiom as an algorithm, as is the case for the axiomatic propositions in an artificial life system, then one more algorithm can extract the corollaries. an algorithm, after all, is simply a random rule for doing things. process and the unfolding "solidities" of complexity are much like e=mc(2), energy=matter, process=matter, at least in an artificial life system, a mathematical system, and presumably in the system we call the universe. As for the "something to crank out sets of axioms and postulates," yes, another good point. It's the old primum mobile paradox??who moved the first mover? in the case of our universe, Guth's theory implies that there were already axioms implicit in the vacuum which belched forth the singularity from which we have gestated. So what preceded the vacuum, if anything? Not a resolvable question within our current modes of understanding. Someday perhaps we'll go through a DePryckian leap over this paradox and invent a method which solves this question and leads on to another as?yet?unimagined godelian conundrum A note on the utility of lemmas. Eshel Ben Jacob makes good use of them in his work on physics and biology. So they aren't mere waste, apparently. Howard So time may use
a rule like this one-move forward one Planck unit. And generate the
next possibility consistent with all that's gone before. A forward unit
in time also allows all things moving with respect to each other to
move in space. Howard As I see it (which is from an amateur point of view), the second law of thermodynamics was conceived as a way of dealing with behavior within a metaphorical steam engine. Hey, even we westerners don't use steam engines anymore. In fact, we've advanced to Darwinian algorithms which are beginning to ape the processes of life itself. OK, so some scientists have been able to make reliable calculations based on thermodynamics. The same thing happened with Ptolemaism for roughly 1,400 years. Didn't mean it was right. And this one is so clearly wrong. At least to relative ignoramuses like me. I like machine analogies
along with my organic models (now out of style, but about to come in
again). But the steam engine? Gimme a break. Hey, Boltzmann, go back
home to the 1870s already. (Sorry, Ludwig, I didn't mean to hurt your
feelings.) Howard see \cnt\time Subj: re: lovesick quarks Date: 98?01?03 10:34:14 EST From: (Timothy Perper/Martha Cornog) Sender: owner?paleopsych To: paleopsych Howard wrote: Meanwhile, I ran across something interesting today in a book I wouldn't normally have touched with a ten?foot pole, but one of our more illustrious scientific contributors recommended it. Here's the tid?bit, which fits the notion that quark attraction is a reflection of an underlying principle which repeats itself in the human attraction we call bonding, and at numerous other levels of emergent property: The precise fit in charge between protons and electrons is remarkable. Nobel Prize?winning biologist George Wald points out several totally improbable facts. A proton has 1,842 times as much mass as an electron. Each is a radically different kind of entity. The proton is hodgepodged together from two quarks with positive charge and one quark with negative charge. The electron is a single minuscule lepton. Yet the positive charge of a proton precisely matches the negative charge of an electron. And it does so no matter which of the zillions of existing protons and electrons you choose to introduce to each other. Take a proton from one end of the universe and introduce it to an electron from 13 billion light years away. Two particles that appeared separately in the first instant of the cosmos and have traveled for 13 billion years or more since then without ever running into each other once. Two particles whose personal history has taken them through vastly different adventures in a world of evolving nebulae, high-speed hungry megaherds of dust, the gravitational whirlpools of galaxies, the infinite sinkholes of black stars, and in Lord knows what peculiar alliances of atoms, molecules, and unspeakable acts of fision, fusion, and chemistry. The two, for all these differences will fit each other as perfectly as if they'd been born to fit each other, as if they'd been carved by a machinist with tools whose level of exactitude defies all human belief. What's more, they'll mate with such precision that if the two had been off by a mere two billionths, this universe's matter would have fled apart with a force completely beyond the connective powers of gravity. "Hence," concludes Wald, "we should have no galaxies, no stars or planets, and??worst of all??no physicists." (George Wald. "The Cosmology of Life and Mind." In New Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. Edited by Willis Harman with Jane Clark. Sausalito, CA: Institute of Noetic Sciences, 1994: 124?125.) Howard I dimly remember ?? hey, you physicists out there, fill in some blanks if you would ?? that the "explanation" for such incredible goodness of fit runs something like this. We may assume, in a hand?waving sort of way, that all sorts and kinds of universes have existed or do exist, including those in which the charges on the electron and proton differ by arbitrary amounts. Of all these universes, only those with equal charges are compatible with Existence as We Know It. Now, GIVEN that we exist and can observe the universe we live in, our universe cannot be a random sample of all the preceding universes. Instead, it must be one of them where the charge on the proton and electron was equal. Otherwise, we ?? the observers ?? wouldn't be here. Since we are here and we do exist, it follows that we belong to, and arise from, a unique subset of all *possible* universes, namely those universes whose physical properties permit the existence of embodied observers like ourselves. Tim? ------------------------------ A proton has 1,842
times the mass of an electron. In rough terms, if the proton were the
size of the Empire State Building, the electron would be the size of
a basketball. Yet the negative charge of the electron fits the positive
charge of the proton so precisely that the two embrace and thus create
an atom. This is a fit which shouldn't be, unless the two are products
of a common seed--corollaries sprung from the same small set of axioms. Apparently some physicists felt out the social rules of quarks, their etiquette, and came to the conclusion that there are unfilled possibilities implicit in the rules of quark aggregation and separation. If quarks were properly introduced to each other, they could clump together in groups of five. Now that social prediction seems on the verge of being verified. Howard Retrieved from the
World Wide WebJuly 04, 2003 ________ I find the following
a rather compelling challenge to not only Dawkins' selfish gene model,
but to genetics as we normally envision it. The argument below seems
to extend those of Richard Strohman and Valerius Geist about the importance
of epigenetics considerably??to the point of forcing us to entertain
the possibility that genetics is a useful tool, as is the selfish gene
theory, but needs considerable augmentation in a full theory of development
and heredity. I find the quote persuasive because it accounts for the
following elements: 1) Plasmids and mitochondria are replicated in the
cell without the mediation of the nucleic genome (or, in the case of
prokaryotes, of the non?nucleic genome). 2) Indirect, chemical evidence
for the existence of life goes back to 3.85 bya; however to the best
of my knowledge (may the biologists among us correct me if I'm wrong)
the oldest fossilized evidence we have for life's *morphology* consists
of roughly 3?billion?year?old cellular remains??not those of naked "replicators"??as
in Dawkins' highly appealing account of genesis. 3) models of the first
replicators beginning in early clay are based on a bubbling process
which would produce a cell?like structure *before* it produced RNA or
DNA, or possibly concurrently, but separately, with RNA and DNA's initial
stages of evolution. I'll be curious to see what the rest of you think.
But my own suspicion is that we may have run across another instance
here of Professor Edward Witten's contention about basic physics that
a variety of theories are "all parts of a bigger picture...So we
have different pictures, and it's not that one is correct and the other
isn't correct; one of them is more useful for answering one set of questions,
the other is more useful in other sets of questions. And the power of
theory comes largely from understanding that these different points
of view which sound like they're about different universes actually
work together in describing one model. So these theories turn out to
all be one." Or at least each is a different way of getting a handle
on the same rather woggly (Witten uses the word "uncanny")
empirical realities. Another instance of Reed Konsler's notion of isomorphic
symbol sets, each useful for getting at the same thing in a different
manner. Howard "Knowing that a liquid is made of H2O or C2 H5 OH
or C6 H6 does not explain its form, as when it flows with spiral motion
down a drain or forms waves under the action of air passing over its
surface. To explain such forms we need to know a) the principles according
to which the system is organized, as expressed in the Navier?Stokes
equations describing the properties of fluids, and b) the particular
conditions to which the system is exposed. ? Organisms are no exceptions
to these physical principles. If we want to describe their most basic
properties, such as how they are generated, we have to understand the
principles according to which they are organized. Knowing their molecular
composition may be very useful in helping to describe these principles,
but describing organisms in terms of a catalogue of gene activities
and molecular composition will not tell us what kind of physical system
we are dealing with, nor what its spatial forms are. This is why genetic
programs, which specify the molecular composition of an organism at
every stage of its development, are unable to explain morphology. Since
evolution is all about organisms and how they change, if we don't understand
how they are generated and what kinds of transformation they can undergo,
we are going to have trouble understanding what evolution is about.
2) The DNA of an organism is not a self?replicating entity, a "replicator".
The only way in which prokaryotic or eukaryotic genomes can be accurately
and completely replicated is within the context of a growing and dividing
cell, that is, it is the cell that reproduces. The importance of this
recognition is that the cell is an organized entity that embodies principles
of order that are not reducible to the set of hereditary instructions
in the DNA. Cell division also involves morphogenesis, the formation
of the mitotic apparatus and the changes of shape that occur during
cell division. These again arise from cytoplasmic organization that
is not reducible to the activity of DNA, either as a "replicator"
or as a "genetic program". The genome as an autonomous replicator
is an abstraction that does not conform to biological reality. What
is true is that the DNA is the only molecular constituent of the cell
that is precisely duplicated (within a small error tolerance) and distributed
to the daughter cells L_ during the process of cell reproduction."
(Brian C. Goodwin. "Toward a Science of Qualities." In New
Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. Edited by Willis Harman
with Jane Clark. Sausalito, CA: Institute of Noetic Sciences, 1994:
215-250, this appears on p. 224.) "The late Julian
Huxley, for instance, grandson of "Darwin's bulldog," Thomas
Huxley, and one of the founders of the modern evolutionary theory suggested
that "humans represent a separate kingdom." The late Theodosious
Dobzhansky, another founder of the modern evolutionary theory agreed:
"Inorganic, organic, and human evolutions occur in different dimensions,
or on different levels of the evolutionary development of the universe.""
(Russell Merle Genet. "IS EVOLUTION EVOLVING? Evolutionary Direction
and Humanity's Place." manuscript of article for _Science and Spirit_,
1/10/98.) In a message dated
98?01?12 17:52:30 EST, Bruce Kirchofff writes: << Why do you take
"our hard?wiring" as being primary? I do not take this a trivial
question and would really like an answer. >> Hard wiring is the
experience of our ancestors written into us by evolution. It not only
includes that of human ancestors, but of ancestors all the way back
to the first bacteria. Not all of the "wiring" is neural circuitry.
Much is the pre?wired genetic patterns which determine how a cell wall,
internal cellular messengers, receptor sites, etc, work and the chemical
which are generated as signalling mechanisms between cells. All of our
cloud?like "conscious experiences" operate within the templates
of twists and loops "wired" into us over the past 3.85 billion
years. How, then, could hard wiring not be primary? I don't understnd
the alternative. Could you explain it? Howard only that which
fits survives. To survive, one must squeeze between the blades of disintegration
twirled by the laws of the universe. To last even longer, one must be
impervious to the destructive powers of others that outlive this first
of all cosmic tests. One must fit with the many other survivors, be
able to interact with them, to build with them, to bond with them…or
at the least to be immune to them. All this is a battle between brothers.
For the objects of the cosmos and its laws are members of the same family.
All are the big bang's children. All are offspring of a primal unity.
All are forms into which the first flash of existence has multiplied,
divided, and diversified. howard Twenty years before
the genome was deciphered, we scientists went gene crazy. We saw the
way that bacteria split in two and carbon-copy themselves. We saw that
lizards lay eggs from which new lizards come, that fruitflies beget
fruitflies, and that zebra fish and human beings crank out copies of
themselves using the old fashioned technique of stabbing egg with sperm,
then letting genes take over. And we came to assume that all replication,
all duplication, was the result of dna. The fact is we were wrong. In
this rather capacious universe, it just ain't only this way. The cosmos
is swamped with duplication. And only the tiniest sliver of it is pieced
together by genetic strings. << Each entity must >exist in the form of lots of copies, and at least some of the >entities must be potentially capable of surviving ? in the form of >copies ? for a significant period of evolutionary time. >> Precisely what is the evidence that indicates this is a necessary imperative? it feels partly right to me, but it also feels annoyingly like a commandment brought arbitrarily from the top of Mount Zion and given artificial weight by the rhetorical manner in which Dawkins carves it in stone. If there is insufficient evidence, we have to regard it as a promising hypothesis, not as a given. Unless Dawkins concept
has been born out by the sort of body of evidence that has provisionally
confirmed evolution and relativity, your entire argument, mike, is a
mere house of cards. if the axiomatic base goes, so does the rest of
the reasoning. hate to sound harsh, since you are one of my favorite
people on this planet, but too many members of hbes make this logical
error. let's stop being scholastics creating angels and pinheads from
questionable premises and get back to empirical observation??the heart
of science and the absolute imperative of human ethology. David Buss,
by the way, has done a good job of getting down to facts and realities.
So have Nesse and Williams. As for Daly & Wilson or Barkow, Tooby
and Cosmides, it seemeth me that they've produced highly suggestive
and potentially extremely productive ideas but concepts not at all ready
for the deification they've been accorded within hbes. in real science
*everything* is provisional. The reining theory isn't the absolute word
of nature carved-in-stone, it's the best guess of the moment backed
by the most facts. But the theory of the day is up for revison when
an idea which can "explain" more "empirical fact"
comes along. Howard << Each entity must >exist in the form of lots of copies, and at least some of the >entities must be potentially capable of surviving ? in the form of >copies ? for a significant period of evolutionary time. >> Precisely what is the evidence that indicates this is a necessary imperative? it feels partly right to me, but it also feels annoyingly like a commandment brought arbitrarily from the top of Mount Zion and given artificial weight by the rhetorical manner in which Dawkins carves it in stone. If there is insufficient evidence, we have to regard it as a promising hypothesis, not as a given. Unless Dawkins concept
has been born out by the sort of body of evidence that has provisionally
confirmed evolution and relativity, your entire argument, mike, is a
mere house of cards. if the axiomatic base goes, so does the rest of
the reasoning. hate to sound harsh, since you are one of my favorite
people on this planet, but too many members of hbes make this logical
error. let's stop being scholastics creating angels and pinheads from
questionable premises and get back to empirical observation??the heart
of science and the absolute imperative of human ethology. David Buss,
by the way, has done a good job of getting down to facts and realities.
So have Nesse and Williams. As for Daly & Wilson or Barkow, Tooby
and Cosmides, it seemeth me that they've produced highly suggestive
and potentially extremely productive ideas but concepts not at all ready
for the deification they've been accorded within hbes. in real science
*everything* is provisional. The reining theory isn't the absolute word
of nature carved-in-stone, it's the best guess of the moment backed
by the most facts. But the theory of the day is up for revison when
an idea which can "explain" more "empirical fact"
comes along. Howard In a message dated 98?06?02 12:25:08 EDT, Reed Konsler writes to John Edser and IPP: But the way you present it, I feel as if you are demanding that I choose between genes, genomes, organisms, memes, superorganisms and so on...which I think is not the solution to your question. A single unit of selection that expalins the domain of each of these metaphors is not among the list, that unit must be a synthesis of all our current models...a new category of entity a stage more abstract. Perhaps it will be a unit of "information" or "entropy", presuming we ever find a mutually satisfactory way of understanding those concepts. >> Agreed heartily.
I suggest it is any form of replicator which insists on appropriating
resources and turning them into copies of itself??at whatever level
of recurring form we look at. The complication is that because the universe
keeps cranking out corollaries of the same basic axioms, it produces
numerous homologous forms which have never emerged from one another.
Reed, how can I cram this into my basic unit, which I really want to
be replicative form, homologous or reproductive? Howard The basic unit of
selection is replicative form, even if that form replicates independently,
as in the case of stars and molecules, which follow the same patterns
wherever they pop from the corollaries which generate them. This concept
is different from that of the replicator, which posits that a unit of
selection must produce copies of itself. Many copies are produced without
a linear progenitor resembling themselves (though stars do replicate
in a series of generations). Carbon molecules are carbon molecules wherever
you find them in space. They had a point of origin, but it was not in
being spawned by each other. Again, it was simply a matter of the same
corollaries working themselves out independently in this bit of space
or that, working themselves out in the same manner even if they were
a thousand light years apart. OK, so most would say what in hell does
this have to do with selection? Any atom, star, or what-have-you which
does not fit the requirements of its environment will be selected out
of existence. There are infinite numbers of conceivable molecular patterns
which do not exist...as yet. Presumably many of those imaginable possibilities
have been selected against by the meshwork of corollaries we call the
environment. Add to the molecules which didn't make it those which are
imaginable if the atoms we can visualize but do not exist had made it
through the sorting system of inanimate selection, and the infinity
of possible molecules becomes infinity squared. Meaning that nature
has indeed done a huge amount of selection on inanimate objects as they
have evolved, emerged, or whatever one wants to call it. In other words,
evolution and natural selection long precede the emergence of life.
And form is something we must get a scientific grip on. perhaps the most
basic force in this universe is the hunger of form--its need to cough
itself out of nothingness, then to stretch its limbs and feed, swallowing
its rivals and incoporating them into the shape which is its being.
Some of that shape extends in space. Some extends in time. The bulging
of height, width, depth, and heft we call matter. The knots shape twists
in time we call action, creation, cataclysm, dance and cycle, energy,
restlessness, riot, discipline, and force. Stuart Kauffman.
"What is life?: was Schrodinger right?" in Michael P. Murphy
and Luke A.J. O'Neill, editors. What is Life? The Next Fifty Years:
Speculations on the Future of biology. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995. For the study concluding that personality descriptors reduce
to eleven, see: K. Stein, H. Markus, and R. Roeser. "The consensual
self and self-esteem in American adolescent girls and boys." Unpublished
manuscript, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 1997. .In a message dated 98-10-06 01:38:45 EDT, Valerius Geist writes: << As to your
question re: status display. Deaed on! Veblen was quite right - SINCE CONTROL OVER SURPLUS RESULTS IN CHEMOTACTIC ATTRACTION SIGNALS AMONG BACTERIA, I SUSPECT SOME VERSION OF SURPLUS DISPLAY SERVES VERY MUCH THE SAME FUNCTION FROM THE LOWEST RUNGS OF THE EVOLUTIONARY LADDER TO THE HIGHEST.
Hiram--This is a
strange universe. The number of skeins of interactivity possible is
theoretically vast, but most of them make for a chaos which rapidly
dissipates or never even comes to be. The number of patterns which do
work and which hold up despite the churn of external circumstance is
surprisingly small. These are the ones which may represent the bauplans--the
resilient formations-- we see reasserting themselves around us over
and over again in thinly disguised forms. Howard Recently I have had that experience already familiar to most of you from childhood ?? channel hopping [the reasons for my virginity are that I do not have a TV, my parents refuse to have cable and no one until recently has been paying me to stay in hotels with TV]. In channel hopping you switch from one Television studio to another or some film or news desk. But after ten minutes you realize nothing much changes: the same requirements of story telling are needed whether it is selling quack slimming aids, the latest events in East Timor, or some soap opera drama. It strikes me that this experience is very similar to my reading of the science literature of late. I am no cell biologist but I am a fan of all those molecules that make cells work ?? the DNA, the receptors, the chemokines, the G proteins, the organalles that create them and in turn are made of them, the viruses and mutations that subvert the whole process, the P53 protein circuits that spot and check such processes within the cell and without (the immune system). But I have a problem ?? I think it is an important problem for cell biology science ?? there is the giddiness of channel hopping (while I stress the cell biology level, it becomes even more giddy as one opens ones eyes to all the phenomena beyond it such as physiology, living organisms, ecology, psychology, civilization and history). One moment one is at the nanosecond level of thinking about how proteins turn off and on DNA replication, the next thinking about mitochrondra and the production of oxygen radicals, then the next how transmitters lock into receptors and change their shape or let them channel in ions, how neurons interact as networks, brains as societies and so on. One is constantly looking at images of dynamic processes of vary different kinds and at vary different scales both of time and size. There is a great similarity between pressing the remote control on the TV and flicking the pages on science journals. One's mind buzzes with the variety: once scientists had it easy: subject areas were linked in a nice hierarchical way: the physics of atoms provided the ground upon which chemistry was based, and this in turn cell biology which in turn did this for physiology. Now in the cell we see dozens of these levels within one area alone of science. There is a fundament need to find order within this apparent multiple of processes. Well, when we channel hop after a few minutes we notice that the various channels are not all that different: there are media rules of thumb about how to keep viewer's interest whether its is informing us about the weather, presenting a sell's pitch or a daily soap opera yarn. (Such as tell a story, balance good things with bad, keep it personal, keep the viewer in suspense for more after the commercial). Now what we need to understand the diversity within the cell [and beyond it] is a set of principles to understand mechanisms and how they create the richness of phenomena at different levels even though their component parts might be very different: molecules, whole organelles, cells, individuals or societies. That is what I see as the role of the corollary generator. It is a top down rather than a bottom up axiomatic approach to understanding the mechanism of things. The usual approach is to start with the axioms provided by maths and its corollaries deduced from them about fields, geometries etc and use these to understand phenomena. Here instead phenomena are examined across various areas and axioms that produce corollaries in the form of processes which underlie their mechanisms, phenomena and entities are hunted out. At bottom it relies on the insight that systems with lots of properties such as DNA regulation, cell development, ecologies, civilizations will owe their capacity for for phenomena richness to many shared abstract processes. Thus, if we look at one system and understand how it generates its wealth of phenomena, processes and entities, we can understand broad principles upon how another system generates its phenomena, processes, and entities ?? even if their components are very different and at different scales of size or temporal duration. ------------------------------ My current suspicion is that the intial axiom/algorithms were a trinity: attraction, repulsion, and time. The big bang as it's currently described commenced with a whoosh of energy and with four naked forces??the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and gravity. Each of these forces bore the seeds of attraction and/or repulsion. As for energy, it was also naked. That is, the forces and energy had no substance or particles to work upon. Forces are defined by their power to cause bodies to aggregate or separate. Energy is defined as the ability to do work. And heat, one of the forms of energy present at the Big Bang, is defined by the hyperactivity of atoms bouncing within a boundaried confine. Or, to put it differently, heat is a measure of the speed with which atoms zig and zag across space time. Space time, I suspect, was implicit in energy, since movement is a time?dependent thing. So, for that matter, are attraction and repulsion, which depend on movement to do their thing. Time is a one way process of unfolding. And unfolding the corollaries of the three initial axioms is apparently what the universe did. The birth of all we know in a threesome of axioms has resulted in a repetition of those axioms from the level of quarks and leptons to the quark?trios we know as protons and electrons, to the extraoardinarily rapid movement of the quark trios and speeding leptons outward from the pinprick of their generation, then, a million years later, to the marriage of protons, neutrons, and electrons (electrons are leptons) which generated atoms. Atoms cleared the peasoup ?fog of leptons which had kept the cosmos in a dense, dark shroud, thus making space transparent so that photons could finally zoom in the glorious freedom of straight lines. Eventually this rain of light revealed ever?growing larger aggregations of molecules, stars, planets, dna, and life, each of which depended on the trinity of time, attraction and repulsion mightily. At some point along the line two other basic principles appeared, those I've called inner judges and resource shifters. These are delineated in the quintet of essentials for a learning machine given in the now?completed manuscript of _Global Brain_ (to be published by John Wiley & Sons). The whole quintet is as follows: Conformity Enforcers (these equate with attraction) Diversity Generators (these equate with repulsion) Inner?Judges (built?in self?destruct or self?reward devices) Resource Shifters (to he who hath it shall be given, from he who hath not, even what he hath shall be taken away) and Intergroup Tournaments. Conformity Enforcers showed up very early in the evolution of the universe. Though quarks come in up, down, and strange forms and in three colors, this limited number of forms was reproduced with enormous precision more times that we have numbers to count them. In other words, all quarks conformed to one of nine different patterns. The uniformity of quarks was so great that their match to each other was absolutely perfect. This suited matters just fine, since quarks were enormously gregarious. Says the Encyclopedia Britannica: "Quarks always seem to occur in combination with other quarks or antiquarks, never alone." How peculiar. For all the emphasis in evolutionary psychology on selfish genes and individuals who calculate their own self interest and that of their genetic heritage like greedy merchants in a counting house, the universe was a hotbed of congeniality, a place of mating and of fellowship from its inception. In other words, from the beginning, the four forces of attraction imposed a pattern we call sociality. The conformity enforcement of the early universe defies all rules of chance and randomness. Trios of quarks formed formed protons and electrons. These basic particles were identical, despite their formation in enormous heat and their rapid separation by the speed of the universe's outward rush. Wherever protons and electrons were generated and no matter how many zillions or googol and googol?plexes of them there were, they showed no aberrations, not even variations on a common theme. Diversity generation worked its wonders from the earliest instants of the universe as well. Some quark threesomes where protons, some neutrons. Then there were the flitting leptons. The number of forms into which the initial Bang had settled were small, but varied. Then there was the fearsome speed with which these particles battered their time?space manifold from nothingness to enormity. That, too, was apparently a diversity generator. Judging from the large?scale soap?suds patterns in which bubbles of galaxies are currently arrayed, their must have been turbulence at work in the primordial Big Bang's stew. Turbulence does strange and wonderful things, creating patterns which always resemble each other in their swirls of circularity, but each of which is different, with its own peculiarities. Resource shifters went to work ten billion years before life began. To the largest clot of dust went yet more dust, dragged, in some cases, from those which had little. The larger you were, the more attractive you were, thanks to gravity. The smaller you were, the more you were at larger bodies' beck and call. Jesus' cruel rule was already working its mischief in the cosmos, "to he who hath it shall be given." From this unjust dictum came stars, galaxies, intergalactic clusters, cluster?strands, and on a smaller level, planets in thrall to stars and moons held in the planets' demanding embrace. Attraction drew inanimate things together. The repulsive force which expanded the universe tore things apart. The physicist Lee Smolin has a good handle on these matters in his book _The Life of the Cosmos_ (Oxford University Press, 1997). He says that the universe is a nested hierarchy of self?organizing systems. More on that tonight, if I can find the time to do a posting on it. Howard One aspect of corollary generator theory (which is supposed to be presented formally for the first time in my next book) In a message dated 99?10?02 11:58:44 EDT, skoyles writes: That is what I
see as the role of the corollary generator. It is a top down rather
than a bottom up axiomatic approach to understanding the mechanism of
things. The usual approach is to start with the axioms provided by maths
and its corollaries deduced from them about fields, geometries etc and
use these to understand phenomena. Here instead phenomena are examined
across various areas and axioms that produce corollaries in the form
of processes which underlie their mechanisms, phenomena and entities
are hunted out. At bottom it relies on the insight that systems with
lots of properties such as DNA regulation, cell development, ecologies,
civilizations will owe their capacity for for phenomena richness to
many shared abstract processes. Thus, if we look at one system and understand
how it generates its wealth of phenomena, processes and entities, we
can understand broad principles upon how another system generates its
phenomena, processes, and entities ?? even if their components are very
different and at different scales of size or temporal duration.
<< the universe. It`s "evolving," >> The question of
whether or not the inanimate universe is evolving has to an extent been
taken out of the hands of those of us in the biological sciences. Physicists
and astronomers have founded a discipline they call "evolutionary
cosmology." I suspect they ain't gonna let the concept go. And
then there are those who specialize in "evolutionary chemistry."
Darwin's universal solvent has seeped. Howard When things spread
out and slowed down a bit, there was the space and the slow grace of
movement that let protons capture electrons 1/1,850th their size. Even
if we'd allowed for this strange aggregation, we'd have been shocked
by the new properties these mini-matings produced--the elements hydrogen,
helium, and lithium, very, very new kinds of things. And we'd have never
suspect the next surprise, the gravity that the presence of these new
masses, masses now moseying instead of smashing, brings. We'd have been
shocked a bit by the way that gravity gathered dust clouds and specks
of a new thing--stuff--space dust. But by now hopefully we'd have become
accustomed to surprise. But none of us would have predicted that this
gravitational gatherer would go from sweeping together mere whisps to
making galaxies. Suppose that one of us had gone out on a limb and predicted
that suns would someday gain enough mass to strip atoms apart and to
generate a whole new thing--ignition. Suppose s/he'd tried to prove
that that metabolic crunch would produce another new thing, light. we'd
have locked the lunatic up or shunned him/her. His so-called research
papers would have brought derision. Folks with lofty credentials would
have said the sort of things said about a peculiar thinker named Alfred
Wegener in the 1920s: "Wegener's hypothesis in general is of the
footloose type, in that it takes considerable liberty with our"
cosmos. And yet it happened--as improbable as it would have seemed.
(Alfred Wegeners' sin, by the way, was coming up with the theory of
plate techtonics.) pw: What KIND of hierarchy anyway? hb: one of the
most hierarchical systems I know of us the gravitational hierarchy of
a galaxy. It is a supreme example of what the Random House Unabridged
Dictionary calls: "a system of persons or things ranked one above
another." Which is the dictionary definition of a hierarchy. It
is formed from a Darwinian battle for domination, a competition to establish
what the the discoverer of the peck order called a ladder of "despotism."
It is also formed from a combination of competition and cooperation.
Would be planets once battled to see who would be the gravitational
king of the heap. But once the hierarchical squabble was settled, moons
and planets settled into a cooperative pattern. Most would say that
everything I've proposed is rank anthropomorphism, the mark of a naive
amateur. I wouldn't agree. We humans are very anthropecentric. We think
the patterns that revealed themselves in the early cosmos are by some
sleight of hand or magic our unique properties. They're not. We're made
of planet stuff and sun. We're made of quarks and atoms. How dare we
think that nearly everything we've ever experienced is solely a human
property. Life-o-centrism is not much better than anthropocentrism.
The stuff of which we're made had eleven billion years to interact before
the first living cell came to be. The cell did not invent the tricks
of attraction, repulsion, and circularity. Paul, you know I take your
viewpoints very seriously. I've been privileged to be absorbed in them
for the last four or five months. But this simple history of the cosmos
makes me very dubious about entropy. It makes me certain that time has
a one-way arrow, at least on this side of the cosmos. Time may go the
other way on the underside of my nutty big bagel cosmos. I take your
views about a backward causality from the short-term future to the past
very seriously. Yet I see a universe pulling itself up by the bootstaps
almost magically. The task of science has always been to explain the
material tricks that make the great surprises that still seem to us
like utter msteries. What I've called self-assembly is no act of creation
plugged together by a deus ex machina, an intelligent god. So how the
heck did it come to be? Darwinian selection solves part of the puzzle--even
in explaining pre-biotic evolution. But there's a giant something missing--the
elephant in the room of science. And it embarrases me that my enemies,
the creationists, have to point it out to us. It's the self-building,
self-creating, self-surprise-making aspect of this universe. Lord knows
that sort of surprises it is going to come up with next. Life is just
one small shock among many. And judging from the history of the universe,
there are bigger surprises in the offing. Some of them we may create
ourselves, if we manage to survive. But with us or without us, they
will happen. And with us or without us they will be amazing. Even if
there's no conscious being capable of being amazed. Like you, I've run
out of time for the night. But many thanks for putting me through my
paces. These are things I've told many visitors, but that have not found
the time and motivation to write down before. Onward--Howard
Subj: Re: repeating patterns Date: 98-07-26 16:52:17 EDT From: (Reed Konsler) Sender: owner-paleopsych To: [email protected] Howard: >Your description of a salt crystal in water is amazing and has huge potential >for development. How do you see it relating to attraction and repulsion >signals and Val's notion that all communication can be reduced to one form or >the other--repulsive or attractive? Can you expand on how the hierarchy of >influence works? There seems to be one. Ions bouncing around madly in >attraction and repulsion are influencing each other. Yet there is a higher >level influence organizing the whole kebosh into a consistent order. What is >it? Entropy. The entire system settles into the lowest possible energy state. UMM, ARE YOU SURE THIS IS ENTROPY? HOW ABOUT EFFICIENCY, ECONOMY, CONSERVATION OF ENERGY, SETTLING INTO A COMFORTABLE VALLEY IN PHASE SPACE, ETC. VAL GEIST HAS A GOOD PHRASE FOR IT IN LIVING BEINGS WHICH BASICALLY AMOUNTS TO GOING FOR THE LOWEST POINT OF ENERGY CONSUMPTION AND DRAIN EXCEPT IN THOSE INSTANCES WHERE EXUBERANCE AND WASTE IS CALLED FOR. SPECIFICALLY EXUBERANCE AND WASTE IS SHOWN IN LIVING SYSTEMS VIA DISPLAYS OF SURPLUS FOR MATING AND GROUP HIERARCHY CLIMBING, OR IN SOME FORMS OF SEXUAL DISPERSAL, AS WHEN AN ANT COLONY PRODUCES 4,000 SEXUAL FORMS--FLYING QUEENS AND SOARING MALES--TO MAXIMIZE ITS CHANCES THAT ONE OR TWO OR MAYBE EVEN FOUR WILL SURVIVE TO ESTABLISH A NEW COLONY. THIS IS THE FAMOUS R STRATEGY. HOWEVER I DOUBT A SALT CRYSTAL IS UP AGAINST ANY OF THESE LIFE PROBLEMS. SO IT'S MAXIMUM CHANCE OF SURVIVAL IN AN ENVIRONMENT WHICH COULD WIPE IT OUT IF IT IS NOT EFFICIENT IN ITS GREEDY, ENERGY-EXCHANGING GOBBLE OF AS MANY IONS AS IT CAN HANDLE, IT IS UNLIKELY TO SURVIVE THE SORTING MECHANISMS OF ENVIRONMENTAL LIMITATIONS. HENCE THOSE CRYSTALS WHICH SURVIVE AND MULTIPLY (NOT REPRODUCE, BUT MULTIPLY) ARE THOSE THAT SETTLE AT AN ENERGY MINIMUM--THE MOST STABLE STATE POSSIBLE. A CASE OF INANIMATE EVOLUTION COMPLETE WITH NATURAL SELECTION VIA ENVIRONMENTAL PRESSURE. ALSO COMPLETE *WITHOUT* ANY REPLICATORS EXCEPT THOSE OF RECURRING ENVIRONMENTAL LOOPS, FRACTAL REPETITIONS OF FORMS WHICH CROP UP SPONTANEOUSLY, COUGHED FROM THE MAW OF THE (AHEM) COROLLARY GENERATOR. There are a multitude of states at the molecular level with similar energy. At the macroscopic level of precision they resolve to a single one. Look close to see the fractuous cacaphony, back up to see a single statement. It's very like thought. THIS IS VERY INTERESTING INDEED. As an aside, I agree that there are no closed systems. It's just an approximation. But discovering that it's an approximation doesn't make conclusions based on it invalid. Relativity is an approximation, to. So is Shrodingers wave equation. YUP. HOW DO YOU GET TO THE PROMISED LAND? ONE TINY STEP AT A TIME. EACH ONE INSIGNIFICANT, BUT THEY MOUNT UP IF ONE IS PERSISTENT. >Is it an executive entity, or an emergent property materializing from the >interaction of the larger whole as a mathematical corollary of enormous >complexity seems to rise in ghostly manner from its axioms? I suppose it depends on your purpose. All those conceptions will probably bring you to the same place eventually. LOL. AH, HERE WE ARE ON THE SAME WAVELENGTH, EPISTEMOLOGICAL VOYEURS AT HEART. >Scientists, according to >Latour, are very similar in the sense that they claim to speak for objects >themselves speechless, like atoms and plate techtonics. Science is, in >this sense, a community of mediums. The difference is that the "spirits" >of science DO have measureable influence on our lives, many are so mundane >that we take them for granted, and thus they cannot be ignored.>> > >Shades of nous, the spirit in all things that sixth century Greek philosophers >were coping with. Not to mention of the ancestors and witches at work in >objects according to African and New Guinean cultures. And objects being >subjectified as gods. In the Yoruba religion, rocks, shells, and all kinds of >things were worshipped as the manifestations of gods without needing to be >fashioned into idols. (The "gods," in turn, were dead Yoruban chiefs who had >distinguished themselves through imperialistic conquest.) Did you notice the >parallel between your observation and the series of chapters on how >scientists, like shamans and many others, deal with the influences on visible >life of an allegedly invisible world? Imagine being born with a computer in your room and growing up along side it. Do you deny it's existince? Do you deny the existence of electrons and transistors? It isn't even an argument any more. Those "facts" are buried so deep in your epistemology that, to uproot them, you will destroy your own soul. And we invent new ones, ever more powerful and broadly influentia,l all the time. But, yes, it's the same in kind to an array of rocks and shells. As McLuhan noted, may of these new inventions are so pervasive and poweful that we don't even realize that they are artificial constructs. The scale is simply too vast. GOOD POINT. ONE HOBBY OF SOME OF US EPISTEMOLOGICAL VOYEURS IS TO HUNT THEM DOWN AND FERRET THEM OUT OF HIDING, THEN TO QUESTION THE UNQUESTIONABLE AND SEE IF THERE'S A BETTER ALTERNATIVE...OR AT LEAST AN EQUALLY INTERESTING ONE. We can look on a little tribe and laugh at their narrow perspectives...but our own mythology is, of course, beyond us. But it must be there, just beyond the event horizon of our perception. >By the way, I've been collecting a database on "tools of influence" for >umpteen thousand years. Your observation about scientists leveraging their >influence by claiming to speak for objects goes into the batch. Not original to me, this is the source: Bruno Latour _We Have Never Been Modern_ Harvard University Press (english translation of the 1991 text) 1993 ISBN 0674948394 (paperback) Reed One morning the composer (sorry, but I've forgotten his name) received a letter from his wife, who was performing in a New York play. He'd read it and it seemed irrelevant. Frankly, it didn't make a wit of sense. However when sitting at his piano, blocked creatively, he decided to pick an object at random and fixate on it, a trick he'd used quite frequently to get his muse to flow. He pulled the letter from his pocket and read it once again. Suddenly he realized all that his wife had said. Living with him had become all wrong somehow, and she was leaving him. Melody poured from his fingers--a longing for a life he'd had just seconds ago, but now was gone. His clenched desire for what would never be drew men and women to theaters, made their throats clutch uncontrollably, and stuck with them long after they'd ceased watching the celluloid and returned to their daily grind. (For decades, my father hummed the theme to Laura when he drove our car, the emotions it engendered probably shimmering in his soul.) How many of these human voices speak through just one film? A makeup man has a fight with his boyfriend, longs to make up, and puts his passion into the colors with which he highlights the supercues already present in an actor's face. The director brings his newest emotional confrontations with romance, business, and creativity to his interpretation of the vehicle each day. For every scene, the actors try to portray passions by summoning the hurts and pleasures of their life. Editors distill miles of film into a drama by shaping the montage around the callings of their instincts. And the script itself is often the disguised distillation of 20 years or more of a writer's autobiography. All these elements are then enlarged to bigger than life, honed to generate terror, longing, romantic passion, tension, relief, and a fulfillment that transcends any earthly belief. By the time it's distilled to 90 minutes, it has far more superhuman voices sirening than a millenium of decorus living room chit chat could provide. The same principles applied to Greek tragedy, 18th century novels, that screamingly objectionable theater- for-the-masses called opera, computer games, and all of the outrages known as media. Now I suspect these forces are slipping into a new form, as synthetic personalities, artificial computer shrinks and pals. Media genres thrive because they fit niche into our emotional openings. As time goes on they evolve to grab even more of our emotive territory. The further they are honed in the environment of our limbic, cerebral, and social passion, the more they gain a life of their own. The more they master the environment of our inner landscape, the more they become an environment within which we too change, from which we distill new perceptual possibilities, new ways of integrating the meshworks in our brains. We upgrade them, they upgrade us, and the dance continues, spiralling Homo media up an evolutionary staircase of complexity.® ----------- Something about this picture leads me to suspect that synthetic sentience could easily take the helm and begin orchestrating the whole, becoming the superadapting path generator. That's scary. It means an essential change from growing according to physical laws in directions that worked to growing by plan...and it's not my plan. -P- REPLY TO P BY H President/Creative Director Virtual Personalities, Inc. "Thank God for lies...I'm not sure I could face reality without them."
David--this seems an extremely useful proposition to me. A couple of tentacles snake from this notion. First off, boundary-making processes are in perpetual competition. Like all other elements of this universe from leptons on up, they are attempts to draw a dividing line. And in a universe of hungry forms, they attempt to swallow as much of this cosmos' resources as possible and recraft it in their own shape. Specks of dust, crystals, planets, suns, galaxies, organisms, social superorganisms, creative webs, we all do it--reaching out greedily to grab at material in some other form and incorporate it into ours. All of us our subject to the essential elements of the evolutionary pattern. We must adjust to fit new circumstances so we can successfully chomp something else's stuff from its own boundaries and reincorporate it in ours. Our perpetual squeeze into new niches is a manifestation of diversity generion--a form of boundary making. However should we succeed it nipping of a portion of some other entity and taking it within our own confines, the digestion process involves an enforcement on the reluctant substance of conformity. This is another form of boundary breaking and boundary making. All of us are would-be digesters, whether we be planets swallowing planetessimals, amoeba rearranging the molecules of other protozoa in the digestive fluids of our vacuoles, amateur investors attempting to suck an increasing amount of society's capital (or, in the next few weeks, ANY amount of society's substance) into the digestive cavity we call a bank account. Boundary break and makers include democratic captalists converting others to the ballot and free market, fundamentalist moslems infiltrating unstable border lands like Chechnya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, New Jersey, Brooklyn, Michigan, and the Moslem precincts of the Philippines in an effort to unglue those precincts' from their current imprisonment in the boundaries of "corruption" and reassemble them according to the true pattern of liberted righteousness. All of us would-be swallowers are subject to the mercies of sorting mechanisms. Those of us which manage to fit through the everchanging sieve live on to dissolve the boundaries of our adversaries for yet another day. Those who cannot continue wriggling through the cosmic collander's protean openings cease to be. Many of those elements which survive are composite forms, chimerals constructed from the leggo blocks of previous survivors. Thus we contain within us the billions of years of accumulated wisdoms we were discussing yesterday. We are an operating and altering archive of antique and modern survival strategies. We are like Lynn Margulies eukaryotes, creatures who have swallowed other beasts alive, made them our internal servants, and have lived off their imprisoned qualities. Or have they invaded us and lived off their ability to manipulate us to their advantage? It works both and either way. Thank god we've got them and they've got us, for tomorrow's sorting maze will only partially resemble today's. So the lower forms in many cases need us probers of new possibilitis, us encapsulating meshes of the old forms, to survive. Some forms, however, manage to propogate their boundaries quite nicely without us, thank you very much. Bang a bunch of photons into each other with sufficient force and their boundaries dissolve, their forms cease to be. But leptons--positrons and electrons--leap exultantly from the destruction. Leptons are forever. So are photons. Both have been around almost as long as the universe. And to the best of my knowledge, neither depend for their continuance on you, me, planets, ethnic groups, or any of the more advanced networks in which other entities participate. I could be wrong about that. There may be some reason they need us for continuation after all. But it seems unlikely. What really counts is the persistence of the form of boundary envelope that leptons and photons actually are. Even more impressive is their ability to pop out of what seems to be nothingness. Which means that whatever the environment of that nothingness is, they fit it with astonishing accuracy. It also means that there is a consistent form to nothingness itself--else how would it be capable of generating precisely the same forms for all these billion of years? Yes, it acts as a sieve, a sorter. But squeeze through it in either direction--from lepton to photon or from photon to lepton, and the product on either end of the process has remained unchanged for twelve billion years or more. It needs no genomic library to survive. It is a manifestation of the sorter through which it squeezes into being. The memory responsible for its consistency resides in the choosy nature of the void. The process of creation is the bedrock of these elementary "things" or "energies." It remains consistent while all us higher forms twist and writhe. And so do basic particles--leptons, photons, quarks, and hadrons, arch survivors in the jungle of evolving entity.
Energy=the capacity to do work. Matter=The substance composing bodies perceptible to the senses; includes any entity possessing mass when at rest. Mass=A quantitative measure of a body's resistance to being accelerated; equal to the inverse of the ratio of the body's acceleration to the acceleration of a standard mass under otherwise identical conditions. (Definitions courtesy of the 22-volume McGraw Hill Encyclopedia of Science, which, according to the hierarchical battle drawing the boundaries of prestige, has managed to sneak across the line into circle reserved for authority.) A lepton, according to "Conjuring Matter From Light." Science, 8/29/97: 1202 (Science being a magazine which has also clawed its way into the circle of respectability) is matter. Hmmm. Looking about me, I notice a myriad of objects in which leptons, to wit electrons, are doing work. Several air conditioners are wrestling the anciness out of atmospheric atoms then spitting them through fans to chill me to a working temperature (thus carrying me across the biological boundary which separates pep from lethargy). Other masses of electrons are vibrating speaker cones to give me the illusion that I am listening to Beethoven. And yet others are goosing the particles of light filaments, forcing them to spitball photons all over the room so I can see. Hence this room's activities demonstrate with certainty that electrons may be matter in Science Magazine's eyes, but according to the definition from McGraw Hill, they are energy. Now for the alleged energy--the photons. I can see the damned things. Or at least I can see their cascade--light, shadow, the letters on my monitor, the reflections of bright bulbs in the darkened tv screen. Sounds like photons are matter and not energy to me. As for which one has the mass, they both do. Otherwise why would streams of photons be candidates for bullet-bouncing off the cone of a laser ship and hurling it into outer space? As for mass, this
must be the physicist's joke par excellence. And what more can you expect in a universe where e=mc(2), where energy equals matter caught in the slingshot of relationship and process defined by the speed of light. This is a looking glass universe where matter equals energy provided you leap through the magic mirror of time/space, which is what the lepton does, I suspect, when it yields a photon to light my room. Or what a positron--an anti-matter electron--does when it leaps back into its proper world, the one where all entities are reversed. In other words, energy, matter, and mass are arbitrary boundary lines erected by confused humans in an attempt to master their universe. Or is it? Here's where the sorter comes in. Selection is ruthless. The division between matter and energy, thingness and process, is built into the motor and visual portions of our brain. It far precedes our use of words. It's an artificial perceptual boundary which has been around for quite some time. Artificial or not, it has survived. And done so with such vigor that in fact, it's thrived. The measure of its "truth" is not that it is true, but that it works. If it didn't the evolutionary sorters, with their shredding teeth, would have wiped it out long ago. This fact is equally
true for the distinctions groups make to maintain their coherence and
challenge that of rival groups. The impulse is one which as had to contort
its way through a myriad of challenges in order to survive. To see how
long the boundaries of bigotry have managed to evade destruction, try
the following slice of the upcoming Bloom book chapter I am hopefully
completing. (I hope I haven't posted this before, I hate repeating myself,
though it seems an inevitability based on either the nature of the thinking
process or of premature senility--another boundary line I may be slipping
across in either direction. Whoops, now I remember, this is the bit
with which David and I began privately, however I don't think it's been
posted to the group): We too are steered by this microorganismic legacy. Put cells from the eye and the liver in water. The liver cells will gang up with other liver cells, the eye cells will chill with others from the eye. Bodies continue to operate in this "ethnocentric" manner even when they're not puréed. In the growing brain of an embryo, neurons reach for partners with whom they'll spend a lifetime in embrace. Each scouts out those which share its electrical rhythms, then taps into a clique which pulsates to its clannish beat. (Reggae fans in one corner, please, rappers, rockers, and classical fogies in another.) And so it goes on up the bio-chain. Little as exterior pigmentation means to the muscle-power, swiftness, or brainpower of a cichlid fish, the color-conscious swimmers congregate according to their tone of physio-body-paint. Chimp mothers raising youngsters clot with other toddler-moms, and adult males hang out with other male adults. Sapient humans still follow this primitive rule. A Detroit survey of 1013 men showed that whites chose whites as best friends, Protestants chose Protestants, Catholics chose Catholics, Republicans chose Republicans, and working class chose working class. Individuals, especially those with temperaments which defy the norm, are pulled together by two handles of similarity--their emotional wiring and an important byproduct, the extent to which they see things eye to eye. Experiments show that humans are drawn to those who share their attitudes on religion, politics, parents, children, drugs, music, ethnicity, and even clothes. They'll do everything from standing closer to their brethren-in-belief to marrying them in preference to someone current gene-theory tags as a more likely target for matrimony. Attitudes are not just rallying flags, but symbols of emotionality. Misery wants company. Social psychologist Stanley Schachter told one group of college girls they'd receive a painful shock. He explained to another how enjoyable the electrical surge would be. Then he gave the girls a choice of spending the time before their voltage-dose in a waiting room with a bunch of other young women about to undergo the same amps and watts or in a room by themselves. Twice as many of those who thought they were about to be tortured wanted to nestle in the comfort of a sympathetic gathering. We mammals are uncannily good at gravitating toward those who share our hidden joys and woes. This talent for emotional homing crops up among beavers, wolves, and even deer. In the rhesus monkeys Harry Harlow studied, it's particularly astonishing. When it came to mating, those who'd been raised in isolation fell for others brought up in quarantine. Those who'd spent their days in cages made woo to other victims of captivity. Now here's the topper. Some of the rhesus had been lobectomized. Though none were handed pictures of each others brains, those with similar neurosurgery managed to sniff each other out. So subtle were the differences detected by the simians that even researchers couldn't spot without a careful study of medical and rearing charts. Humans are much
the same. Children whose gifts or disabilities make them seem bizarre,
for example, manage to find each other and to congregate. Among our
kind it's called validation. Without others on our wavelength the strangeness
of our feelings can make us feel we're going insane. Jerome Bruner explains
one of the prime reasons we despair. Some cultures, he says, forbid
discussion of experiences which others wallow in quite heartily. Should
we be stranded in a milieu which taboos the moods we live from day to
day, our essence is expelled from permissible reality. Those like us
can offer a nest of others who will finally make us feel worthwhile.
But more goes on than mere emotional rescue. Once gathered, those of
us who are akin escalate our similarities, aping each other until we've
feedbacked-looped our common thread into an insignia of our group's
superiority.
Why has boundary-making had this evolutionary resilience? Or is it a given of the evolutionary process itself? Is it one of the axioms from which this universe has self-generated? Is it one of those algorithms which constitute the magic beans of this particular cosmos? I rather suspect it is. Howard P.S. As an eight-page
document, this musing does not stand much of a chance of survival in
the environmental pool of the IPP, since it is too long for anyone but
a zealot to read. How about the term
"insulation"? Don't want every part of the system to get overwhelmed
by its neighbors. j. >> the term "boundary" has been
developed as a robust concept in group discussions. david berreby is
the concept's unofficial guardian. it's been extended to the sense of
self, the self-definition of a social group, the envelope of form which
encapsulates a photon, a quark, a self-assembling net, the membrane
of a cellular nucleus, that of the cell itself, and even to the Moogian
envelope of a musical tone. can't beat that multi-layered demonstration
of an evolutionarily stable strategy (boundary creation) showing up
on fractal level after fractal level as this universe hops, skips, and
jumps through its creative leaps--its joyful jumps of phase transition,
its delight in the struggle to give birth to emergence. you know how
the birth ritual goes--swell but remain structurally stable, hit a crisis
that tears you apart until you scream your guts out, then grin with
joy when you see the squalling baby alive and kicking with its own form
and energy after the pain ends. says Prigogine, that's the way emergence
goes. says corollary generator theory, with its fractal obsession, the
Prigogine birthing process happens over and over, umpteenthing to the
google plex, maxingand mini leveling. iterating in an infinity of micro-crises
which swell until they kick off macro heaves of creation. as a human,
you know that you and i have the mini crises which link us to a harshly
birthing universe. we experience them sometimes every hour, sometimes
every day. as psychologists who've studied the works of such folks as
Elizabeth Loftus, we also know that our synthetic memory, trying to
smooth and "normalize" our sense of self, erases these tiny
but nightmarish crises from memory. but being shrewd observers of our
best ethological and psychological subject, our selves, we are not fooled.
or are we? Howard The time has come, the Walrus said, to speak of many things, of shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings, and why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings. Or, to put it differently, it's time to expand the idea of the EEA, the era of evolutionary adaptation. Currently the EEA is considered to be that period of hunting and gathering from roughly four million b.c. to 30,000 b.c. in which man acquired his unique behavioral endowments--those quirks of behavior and emotions sewn into Homo sapiens genes. But why such a narrow vision? Why such anthropomorphism? Could most of the passions and proclivities which drive us have really appeared in just this one brief burst of time? I suggest not. Here are a few reasons why. The first era of evolutionary adaptation occurred during roughly the initial 10(-32) second of the Big Bang. Elements precipitated out the we-don't-know-what in a profusion of forms we can't infer. After all, subatomic physicist's are currently working their way backward from the universe as it is today in order to find out what it must have been like in the most elemental of yesterdays. This is like smashing a teacup in order to determine everything there was before a teacup came to be. You will find out more and more about the nano-bits of teacup-entity. But you may fail to discover the ingredients of doilies, cucumber sandwiches, and of the litte old ladies who take them with their tea. In other words, there may have been many forms of something which did not survive the first instant's evolutionary test so they could still present themselves for our modern scrutiny. Many forms of tulginess may have spewed forth from the Big Burble of diversity, forms which failed selective trial against the natural forces that today still be. (Yes, Alice, I am proposing that there was evolution in inanimate Wonderland. There was diversity, selective survival, and reproduction, though in a form against which chromosomo-centrics display some animosity--that replicative confluence which, for example, spews forth identical carbon molecules over and over and over again--multiplying them so abundantly that we know not all the hows and wheres and whys and whens.) But I digress into what, to charter members of the International Paleopsychology Project, will be an old argument, as much of this may be. What in the world does the Big Bang have to do with the adaptive forces shaping our psychology? Several basics managed to survive the explosive winnowing of that first great clang. The entities and forces which made the first adaptive cut had these characteristics: 1) They could read each others "informational" signals. Subatomic, atomic, and molecular particles responded to each other using four interactional modes--the strong force, the weak force, electromagnetism, and gravity. Those forms which didn't comprehend these cues either never existed or simply ceased to be. 2) All survivors of this era of evolutionary culling not only could decipher each others broadcasts, but acted automatically upon them. Which is why the four forces are called by physicists "fundamental interactions." In some circles, we call this "stimulus" and "response." 3) The winners of this first round contained in their morphology three of the most basic elements of human psychology--decryption, behavior, and an impulse frequently overlooked by Hobbesian individual selectionists, sociality. Decryption, by the way, is ancestor of perception and has grown a good deal more complex since the first flash from the Guthian nothingness rippled forth this universe. But then hasn't everything? 4) Forms of communication and the behaviors they inspired broke down into two kinds: attraction and repulsion, come hither and get the heck away. A quick check of what's inside each of us indicates that these essentials rule our psyches and behaviors to this day. Hence, as I said before, the first burp of what the Walrus might have called his boiling sea, the first 10(-32) of the Big Bang, was the first and most essential EEA. The second arrived in approximately 3.5 billion b.c. Yes, billion. Granted, this was a mere 700,000 years or so after our planet had coalesced, but what the hey. I didn't make up this world, it made up me. In 3.5 billion b.c. we had the introduction of complex sociality--complete with centralization, information distribution, primal depression, elation, popularity, disapproval, delight, disgust, megapolitanism, architecture, research and development, genetic engineering, and collective creativity. All this went on in the days when the first cyanobacteria were building those man-sized floating housing projects we know as stromatolytes. Stromatolytes have far outlasted the pyramids and still stand as they did in their infancy in the shallows of Australia waters and in the fossil beds of the American heartland. In their heyday, they were home to over 20 million citizens at a time. I won't go into their sociology, political interweaves, and social systems for proto-technological invention at this point. You can find it in my writings, those of my colleague, physicist-microbiologist Eshel Ben Jacob, and of his colleague, James Shapiro. Suffice it to say that this was a busily adaptive evolutionary era indeed. And from it we carry quite a hefty legacy, one which may do something to appease the offended chromosomocentrists in our midst. Most of the heritage of the 3.5 bya EEA is in our genes, some 40% of which or more were crafted by the selective pressures of this rather intense period. Now let me play a variation on an argument I first saw in David Barash's _Hare and the Tortoise_ way back in 1987 (David P. Barash. The Hare and The Tortoise Culture, Biology, and Human Nature. New York: Penguin Books, 1987). Barash, one of human sociobiogy's pioneers, wrote in a heady era--one of roiling evolutionary adaptation for the concepts of current evolutionary psychology. His argument was one which has now become a commonplace. It went like this. We developed our basic panoply of behaviors back during our hunter gatherer days. Things have so quickly altered since the (boo, hiss) invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago that many of our !Kung-style instincts have gone berserk. What were positive behavioral built-ins during the good old times when women gathered mongongo nuts and carried their babies in a sling are today likely to result in environmental and/or nuclear suicide. Let me offer up another proposition of a similar kind. The Golden Eras in which our instincts were first formed were the Big Bang and that eon of tumultous seas in which our cyanobacterial ancestors learned to thrive. We acquired during these periods innumerable instincts which were oreinted toward mass group sociality. Especially during the bacterial EEA, group selection was the order of the day. It was colony against colony, not individual against individual. All members of a colony shared a common genetic legacy (altered by epigenesis to suit an individual's life history, but we won't go into that). All were sisters, or better yet, genetic clones. This virtually guaranteed that they would ignore their individual differences and pull together for the collectivity. Guess what? Most of our behavioral templates evolved in those group selective days. The period of degeneration in which things went haywire was not that which saw the emergence of Emmer wheat. Abberation arrived during the mythic and probably non-existent epoch in which selfish genes and selfish beings evolved subliminal ways of calculating egocentric genetic losses and gains. The peculiarity, the deviation from the norm, was whatever age in which mankind's primary impulses were retooled by a multi-generational Prisoner's Dilemma game. It was the very period, assuming, as I said, that there ever was one, which many modern evolutionary psychologists use as the measure of all hominidity. May I humbly suggest that we add the two other EEAs to our equations and see what new insights we might glean. For the convenience of those patient souls who have born with me so far, I offer two conclusions to this bit of heresy. Please pick the one that pleases you, then we shall let the issue be: A) For those who
find this entire rhapsody absurd: B) For those who, tempered perhaps by D.S. Wilson and Eliot Sober's _Unto Others_, have become a bit more tolerant of group selection's possibilities (and perhaps even of far more flagrant scientific eccentricities): 'O Oysters,' said
the Carpenter, ------------------------------ << Hi Howard,
I've been lurking, have a question about your piece on the Kalman??I can't answer the question about polar bears, but I can answer that about the EEA. When we look for evolutionary origins of human behaviors, we are in the habit of asking how our tribal, hunter?gatherer ancestors??those of the EEA??would have found that behavior useful. This provides one kind of answer, but a severely limited one. A surprising number of our behaviors were installed in our genome in a far earlier EEA??that in which bacteria developed the ability to create coordinated social structures involving literally trillions of individuals, communities with elaborate division of labor, communication signals, and individual and collective decision?making capabilities. These bacterial colonies also had the ability to innovate in a manner similar to our cultural innovations??they were able to collectively develop solutions to problems they had never encountered before. Their behaviiors provided many of the basic individual and social patterns which express themselves in our actions and emotions. Perhaps when we are looking for an evolutionary explanation fpr one of our peculiarities, we should ask first how this quirk may have benefitted our bacterial ancestors 3.5 billion years ago, then ask why it was adaptive for our hunter?gatherer ancestors in tribes, and why it remained useful for our neolithic urban ancestors 10,000 years ago. Each of these eras has influenced our genetic legacy??that which determines our psychology. There are many EEAs. It may well be that our evolution over the last 3.5 billion years has been one continuous EEA. Yet the fact remains that the basic template of psychology and endocrinology was layed down in the days when bacteria ruled the earth, not when we were tribal. Howard P.S. Evolutionary
biologists argue that bacterial models do not apply to us because bacteria
are all siters, sharing a common genome. This is a mark of ignorance
about microbial science. James Shapiro has shown that bacterial colonies
develop separate lines which diverge from each other over more than
100 times the number of generations humans have diverged to date. Hence
the genetic diversity in a mature bacterial colony dwarfs that of humans.
John ... It was last year, while studying emergence, that James Hanson and James Crutchfield of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico discovered something astonishing. They were playing with a simple cellular automaton called Rule 54, This is made op of a single row of squares and requires only two colours, black and white. The "update rules" are: a white cell flanked by two white cells stays white; a black cell flanked by two blacks, or one black and one white, turns white; all other cells turn black. From a random configuration, the automaton generates row after tow of successive states. Though the resulting pattern looks random, it contains some distinctive features; sequences of the fores OOO1OIIlO111 ... in one row, followed by lIlOIIl0llO . . . in the next, and so on. The pattern repeats in space every four cells, and in time every four steps. The overall picture can be split up into a number of "domains" in which this pattern is perfectly reproduced, separated by "defects" where it breaks down. Hanson and Crutchfield became particularly interested in the behaviour of the defects. They worked out a way to 'filter out" the regular domain patterns and leave only the defects behind. What they saw came as a shock. There were many different kinds of defects, moving around the pattern at each new step. Some of them seemed "heavy". They tended to stay in one place or move only very slowly. Others were "lighter". They zipped around, occasion- ally colliding with the heavier ones. When they collided, the lighter ones sometimes bounced off and were sometimes swallowed by the heavier ones. In the latter case, a new light defect was sometimes spat back out. It all appeared very familiar. Hanson and Crutchfield realised that their defects were acting in much the same way that fundamental particles do. They behaved as if they had mass, they interacted with one another and they could even engage in collisions that generated new particles. What's more, in addition to the simple domain pattern at the lowest level, and the more complex dynamic particle-like pattern at the next, the researchers found new ingredients at higher levels. The researchers began to wonder if their discovery was telling us something profound and important about the nature of reality. Could the same kind of hierarchical structure organise the emergent properties of more complex systems of rules, such as those governing the Universe? If this is right, fundamental particles might not be fundamental at all; they might be defects in something else, some- thing that the ordinary material world "filters out". We defect-constructed creatures may be sensitive only to defects, and what we think is a Theory of Everything might actually be several steps up the hierarchy from the ultimate reductionist rules-a Theory of Everydefectrelatedthing. For now, this is a fascinating but speculative question. Yet Hanson and Crutchfield's approach to cellular automata may give us some clues about how to test to see if such a hierarchy exists. Back in what we think as of the real world, cellular automata have come full circle and given us a new perspective on the origins of life. Von Neumann's self-replicating automaton is enormously special, carefully tailored to make copies of one highly complex initial configuration. Is this typical of self-replicating automata, or can we get replication without starting from a very special configuration? Last year Hui-Hsien Chou from the Institute for Genomic Research, Rockville, and James Reggia of the University of Maryland developed a cellular automaton with 29 states for which a randomly chosen initial state, or "primordial soup", leads to self-replicating structures more than 98 per cent of the time. In this automaton, self-replicating entities are a virtual certainty. The same may well be true of our Universe, with its far more complex range of molecular states. What remains to be understood is what kinds of rule lead to the spontaneous emergence of self-replicating configurations-in short, what kind of physical laws make this first crucial step towards life inevitable. Cellular automata may not have given us the answer to that one yet, but we're on our way. Computational mechanics of cellular automat: an example by James Hanson and James Crutchfield, Physica D, 103. p169- 1997. Modelling and characterization of cloud dynamics by Tatsuo Yanagita and Kunihiko Kaneko, Physical REview Letters 78 p4287 (1997). These papers may be available [I have not checked out] at the Los Alamos Eprint Archive Physics and Associated Disciplines: http://xxx.lanl.gov There are many interactive
cellular automata on the web try http://www.student.nada.kth.se Geissler claimed a time quantum of 4.5 ms and supported that claim by findings agreeing with that duration or multiples thereof. >> Hannes??thanks to your leads, I found the following two abstracts on Medline. They may, indeed, indicate a quantum?like unit of perceptual time. However I strongly suspect that there are many assemblies in the body which utilize different rhythms. The enteric brain probably operates at a different speed than that which regulates the Krebbs cycle within cells, for example. Whether the jumble of very fast and very slow times in the human body (or in the bodies of clams, whose daily, monthly, and yearly internal clocks have been studied diligently since the mid?sixties) are synched to a common rhythm is something I wonder about. Here's what really has me pondering. Anyone who's been patient enough to read my postings over the last few years knows I'm working on a theory of the universe and most of what's in it (well, actually, all that's in it) which starts with roughly three axioms, algorithms, principles, or whatever you want to call them, and generates a self?consistent system of tremendous complexity by doubling, trebling, quntupling, and google?plexing its modest initial dicta back upon themselves until the results are dizzying. Such processes are easily modeled using several metaphorical marvels which spell out the corollaries implicit in a handful of axioms. One of these systems is geometry??such as the Riemannian geometry Einstein used to build his model of the time?space manifold. Another is non?linear mathematics. And a third is the use of cellular automata??which are built with a set of extremely simple rules and proceed to produce pulsating whorls and dances of complex form through nothing but sheer repetition. The universe, according to this view, is a set of wheels within wheels within wheels. All hark back to a common ancestral seed. Actually, that seed contained roughly a trio of principles. Attraction, repulsion, and time are the three rules of etiquette which I suspect are at the bottom of all which has spilled from the pinprick cornucopia of the Big Bang. If this sounds fanciful, take a look at the following words from Lee Smolin, considered one of the greatest minds in physics today: To understand a galaxy, he says, "one must think of ten thousand years as if they were a second.... The time scale of the life of a massive star...is ten million years from formation to supernova. Then, to understand the whole system, we will have to see the life of that star as a day in the life of a galaxy that lives at least ten billion years and rotates once every few hundred million years. (p. 123)... Gerola, Shulman, and Seiden invented a delightful game that models the star?forming process with a few simple rules. The did this by making a few changes in the rules of a game that already existed, which is called the game of life. Invented by John Conway, a mathematician, this game is played on a simple chessboard, each square of which can be thought of as living or dead... There are some steps by which this is determined. A square will be alive on the next step if it has next to it some, but not too many, squares that are now alive. ...with a few simple rules, a large variety of beautiful structures are produced which continually appear and disssolve in a kind of a dance. (p. 134) ...The fact that the new model [of the formation and maintenance of galactic systems) is based on an analogy to biological phenomenon is not fortuitous. ...The key to both biology and computer games is that the right set of simple rules, repeated over and over again, can lead to the formation of enormously complex patterns and structures that reproduce themselves continually over time.... They are well described by the newer mathematical games that are described in terms of algorithm systems such as the cellular automata that define the game of life ...the same logic is governing both the spread of a star formation through the disk of a galaxy...[and] biology and ecology." (pp. 136?137) We live on a planet whose time is measured in days and years. In our guts and pores are colonies of bacterial relatives who operate on a vastly different time frame than do we. For them, a generation is 20 minutes. The cells within us operate in some cases in lifetimes of a day or two For the grand assembly we call our "selves," a lifetime is roughly 70 years. For our species, a goodly run under our planet's sun may be as many as 100 million years or as few as the four million we have reached so far. For our sun a lifetime is perhaps six billion years. And for our galaxy, life stretches on so long that it encompasses nearly the entire existence of this, the only cosmos that we know. A galaxy's quantal tick of time is a species' eternity. A human day of work and sleep is 1,400 years on the bacterial calendar. And our 24 hours spell the knell of death for a trillion of our own blood cells. Do atoms tick to yet another quantal beat? I do not know. But protons are forever. They outlast us all. ?????????????? Lee Smolin. The Life of the Cosmos. NY: Oxford University Press. 1997. ??????????????????? for more on quanail units of perceptual time, see: Ultra?precise quantal timing: evidence from simultaneity thresholds in long?range apparent movement. Geissler HG, Schebera FU, Kompass R Percept Psychophys 1999 May 61:4 707?26 Abstract Conditions for the disappearance of long?range apparent movement were investigated. In an experiment on beta motion, critical interstimulus intervals (ISIs) of downward simultaneity thresholds for stimuli presented in continuous alternation were determined for exposure durations (EDs) varying from 3 to 160 msec. Each subject performed each test twice. Data were collected in three sessions, each for one of three angular separations (3 degrees, 6 degrees, and 12 degrees) and the full set of EDs. The distribution of critical ISIs collapsed across subjects, EDs, and angular separations shows sharp maxima at regular distances within a range of 0?110 msec ISI. Significant or near?significant peaks were found at ISIs of 5, 9, 22, 27, 43, 55, and 107 msec. Although mean critical ISIs shifted with spatial separation, no essential shift of the main maxima occurred. Evidence of a periodic modulation with a period duration of 4.5 msec was obtained from the distributions of differences between critical ISIs of the first tests and their replications, which exhibit extremely low standard deviations (< 10 msec). These results agree well with previous analyses (Geissler, 1987, 1992) that led to a taxonomic model of quantal timing, briefly summarized in this paper. Further consequences are discussed and related to earlier developments (Geissler, 1991, 1992, 1997). MeSH Adult, Analysis of Variance, Chi?Square Distribution, Female, Human, Male, Models, Neurological, Models, Psychological, Motion Perception, Periodicity, Signal Detection (Psychology), Support, Non?U.S. Gov't, Time Perception Author Address Institut f_r Allgemeine Psychologie UniversitÓt Leipzig, Germany. geissler [Temporal code constants??a link between psychology and physiology in research of cognitive processes? Hypotheses and considerations of quantum structures in alpha activity of the brain] Geissler HG Z Psychol Z Angew Psychol 1991 199:2 121?43 Abstract Temporal code invariants as possible links between psychological and physiological characteristics of cognition: a tentative time quantum approach. Relationships between alpha activity and short?term memory performance are discussed referring to an approach suggested by Lebedev and Lutzky (1973). These authors suggest a secondary relationship in considering processing as well as storing of information as a result of the superposition of oscillatory processes which differ from one another an elementary period (relative refractoriness) specific to individuals. Some specifications of scan rate and STM span suggested by the authors seem to be untenable for empirical and logical reasons. Alternative explanations are proposed referring to the time quantum model (TQM) by Geissler (1985, 1987, 1990, 1991). Straight forward expansions of this model lead to the hypothesis of an ''alpha band'' consisting of 9 discrete frequencies. Predictions on scanning rhythms can be derived from this via the assumption that these represent segmentations caused by pairwise resonance. A modification of the Lebedev?Lutzky assumption on spans is proposed assuming an optimum code for stored information. MeSH Alpha Rhythm, Brain, Electroencephalography, English Abstract, Human, Memory, Short?Term, Psychophysiology, Reaction Time Author Address
Sektion Psychologie der UniversitÓt Leipzig.
will reply about placebos after the weekend >>
I'll be curious
to see what you make of that rat Bloom weaving your placebo thread into
his universe?encompassing theoretical nest. I've got to explain to you
how galaxies have joined the weave as well...though I suspect the Lee
Smolin quotes posted the other day give it all away. A galaxy is a complex
adaptive system. which adjusts to a seemingly unchanging but actually
plastic environment??the ever stretching space time manifold. Life forms
and their social groups are also complex adaptive systems whose adaptive
functions have moved up several quantum jumps in flexibility. Genetic
life speeds up the pace to a rate galaxies would never recognize. The
augmentation of genetic memory with neuronal memory??mindstuff??notches
us up to yet another quantum pitch, a timeframe which to eukaryotic
genes would seem an unrecognizable blur, but to the world of prokaryotes
would seem slow indeed. Hence our discussions of the quanta of time
relate directly to the Big Bang's very fast clock (doubling in size
every 10[?32] of a second, the slower clock of atoms (which emerged
only after a full million years had passed since the Big Belch) and
molecules, the even slower clock of galaxies (among which tens of millions
of years are but one twist around the axis), and the reprise of quicker
paces among microbes (which can work genomic reengineering miracles
in 48 hours), then crustaceans (beasts able to learn through imitation,
to organize in hierarchies, and alter mood dramatically in response
to social success or failure), reptiles (foremothers of the reptile
in our limbic system), mammals, hominids, and us pondering, plagiarizing,
aha?making human beings. Howard What is a duplicative structure? A new form that repeats itself wherever the leaking energy and the materials at hand are ripe. Entropy is empowerment waiting for a liberator to set it free from chaos. It is a corollary-of-what-was emerging into being. I suspect the liberator of a corollary is always a new form of social order, a new way of getting together in teams, a new social choreography. From the teams of electrons, protons and neutrons in "fuzzy molecules" come larger social structures, the wonders of predictable lattices. From the social dance of microteams come new splendors, new macroteams. From the get-togethers of molecules come galaxies, suns, self-replicating molecules of DNA, and human beings. From the choreography of tribes come the lattices of nations, empires, ethnicities, and world-straddling beliefs. Osama bin Laden, you, and I are corollaries fruiting from the same axiomatic tree. Howard Reprinted from
ScienceDaily Magazine ... Source: University Of Pennsylvania Date Posted:
Friday, October 26, 2001 Web Address: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/10/011026075321.htm
In A Show Of Entropy's Benefits, Scientists Find "Fuzzy" Molecules
Can Assemble Precisely Into Distinct Lattices PHILADELPHIA - Physicists
at the University of Pennsylvania have determined that adding a "fuzz"
of chemical chains to colloidal molecules can lead them to form a predictable
array of lattices. The entropy-driven phenomenon represents a way in
which the power of entropy might be harnessed by scientists for constructive
purposes. The finding, in which researchers led by Penn physicist Randall
D. Kamien examined the effects of a halo of polymer limbs on otherwise
spherical molecules suspended in liquid, is the cover story in today's
issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry B. Kamien's work adds new
evidence that entropy is far richer than the gloomy drive toward universal
disorder it was once thought to be and suggests it could become a player
in the world of self-assembling molecules. Entropy's knack for driving
fuzzy molecules into distinct lattices offers scientists the promise
of new materials designed rationally rather than through trial and error.
"Predicting the symmetry of the lattice formed by an organic compound
is one of the oldest dreams of synthetic chemists," said Kamien,
an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Penn. "By providing
an empirical connection between molecular structure and macroscopic
organization, our result will allow chemists to design new materials
from the top down." Kamien's theoretical work focused on colloids,
which feature particles suspended in liquid. Colloids are all around
us, from milk to microreactors, from pie filling to paint. Crystals
formed from colloids form the basis for a new class of functional materials
for use in optical switches, chemical microreactors and molecular sieves;
the new finding suggests the possibility of creating "designer
molecules" to speed this process along. "Because both the
size of the colloidal particles and interparticle interactions are tunable,"
Kamien said, "this provides the basis for the manufacture of ordered
structures with desired lattice spacings as well as mechanical, thermal
and electrical properties." Ever since Sir Walter Raleigh pondered
the most efficient means of stacking cannonballs some 400 years ago,
scientists have suspected that free energy, and therefore entropy, is
maximized by packing particles as tightly as possible. Only in 1998
was it shown that what's called a face-centered cubic lattice maximizes
the entropy of an array of perfect spheres - but the mathematical mystery
of the myriad lattices formed by certain fuzzy molecules remained. Kamien's
work solves that puzzle, showing that things become more complicated
when a little fuzz enters the picture. "The old view was that the
densest packing wins," Kamien said. "Our work shows it's not
that simple, especially as molecules grow less dense." The molecules
in the colloids Kamien studied were characterized by a relatively dense
core surrounded by a corona of hundreds of spindly chemical arms. When
virtually none of the fuzz was present, the particles did indeed organize
themselves into a face-centered cubic array. But as the fuzz grows in
length, to the point that the molecules were almost all fluff with a
very small core, they would form different arrays of lattices that could
be mapped with precise phase diagrams. At stages where the fuzz was
of an intermediate length, Kamien's theoretical work predicts a mixture
of face-centered cubic and other lattices corresponding to the length
of the fuzz, a prediction consistent with experimental findings by Penn
chemist Virgil Percec and others. Kamien's co-author on the Journal
of Physical Chemistry B paper is Primoz Ziherl, on leave from the Institut
Jozef Stefan in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Kamien and Ziherl's work was supported
by the National Science Foundation, the American Chemical Society's
Petroleum Research Fund, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Penn alumnus
Larry Bernstein. Copyright © 1995-2001 ScienceDaily Magazine |
Email: [email protected]
In the perpetual hunt for the next paradigm bumpf, something has turned up which could be quite spectacular. Just as non-linear math jogged our way of thinking beginning with the popularization of fractals in the 70s, then took things a good deal further with the complex adaptive systems/parallel-distributed-processing models of the 80s, what may be trotting into sight is a thought-thumper which could straddle the new millennium. It's called non-commutative geometry. It claims that all matter is action and that we live in a universe in which all nouns are really frozen verbs. Non-commutative math operates on the assumption that everything is actually transmutable into its opposite. Working from this premise, noncommutative geometry has resulted in "Connes fusion," a partial product of the work of mathematician Alain Connes (who won math's equivalent of the Nobel Prize, the Fields Medal, for his contribution). Connes has been able to twist the work of such other noncommutative mathematicians as Israel M. Gelfand into a potential rope ladder leading toward the holy grail of physics, the grand unified theory of the four forces. Connes' work tucks within its framework one of the favorite elements of Corollary Generator theory, fractals. It also provides room for nonperiodic tilings, described by mathematician/writer Dana MacKenzie as "patterns formed by shapes that fit together, snugly and endlessly, without ever repeating themselves." Such forms help explain the seemingly random generation of precisely fitting components seen in the creation of up and down quarks, protons and electrons, etc. all of which in a totally chance system would have an infinitesimal probability of ever matching each other's "needs" as precisely as they do. It is on the basis of this fit of Big Bang-babies to each other's longings that the theory proposed in _The Global Brain_ declares sociality a built-in which appeared during the first 10(-32) of the universe. In other words, non-commutative math would seem to support the claim that sociality is not an anomaly, but the natural state of things--all sorts of things, from subatomic particles to lovesick human beings. By turning opposites into each other's doppelgangers, noncommutative geometry helps solve one of the Second Law of Thermodynamics' ultimate brain-twisters--the puzzle of entropy. The entropic principle says that all order tends to disorder. Yet we live in a universe whose history indicates the opposite--that it's building up instead of down. Physicist Hans Christian Von Baeyer tries to demonstrate that recent observations of self-organization are actually proofs of entropy. However Van Baeyer runs into a problem. His description of order is reversible. It can also be used as a definition of disorder. And vice versa. Van Baeyer, without showing the least perplexity, sums up his argument with two lines from Wallace Stevens' poem "Connoisseur of Chaos": A. A violent order
is disorder; and Perhaps without realizing it, Van Baeyer has just utilized one central principle of noncommutative geometry--that each statement, position, entity, or point is transmutable into its opposite. I wonder what would happen if Von Baeyer were to take under his wing non-commutative geometry's other basic component: that all "things" are actions, all nouns are frozen verbs. I wonder what impact these principles would have on the already mind-blowing work Eshel Ben-Jacob is doing to fuse physics with evolution, to reduce thermodynamics to a footnote and show how the universe can, indeed, exfoliate complexity rather than dissolving in a soup of chaos. Ben-Jacob goes on to show how inanimate exfoliation can expand the parameters of Darwinism--how physics melts into biology. Noncommutative geometry has the power to transmute even the manner in which we use our neuropsychology: John Skoyles, in his _Odyssey_, demonstrates that nouns and verbs, action and object, are comprehended by different systems in the brain. Our reductionist, atomistic way of thinking has been dominated to date by cerebral object processors. But the cranium's action-conceptualizers have been forced to take a back seat. This neural tyranny has endured through 2,600 years of scientific history, from Democritus through Lucretius to the 19th century atom-provers, and on to Dawkins and the post-Hamiltonian unit-of-selectionists. Skoyles has shown how new concepts rewire the connections in the brain. Noncommutative math could remove the barrier between reductionist "thing" thinking and holistic "action" thinking. In the process, it would allow a brain-jump, a bridge between the motor cortex responsible for verbs and the visual cortices which handle nouns. Thanks to noncommutative geometry, we may soon see a classic case of mindware reconfiguring the culturally-generated use of our neurobiology. I'm not the only one who thinks there's a paradigm joggle in the works thanks to noncommutative geometry. Bruno Iochum, Daniel Kasler and Thomas Schucker at Marseilles' Centre de Physique Théorique, who gained fame in 1995 for predicting an as-yet-unproven connection between the Higgs boson and the top quark, used the non-commutative tools of Connes' fusion to pull off their feat. Iochum, Kasler, and Schucker have pledged their allegiance to the power of the newer-than-new math in these words: "We believe that noncommutative geometry is abut to revolutionize physics to the same extent as...Riemannian geometry did." For those of us who don't follow these things, Riemannian geometry reordered our perceptions through a little twist called the Theory of Relativity. Again, the basic
principles of noncommutative geometry: Here is a mixed-up, misspelled, fresh-from-the-uncomprehending-OCR-of-the-scanner, copy of Mackenzie's story about non-commutative geometry:
Like numbers, abstract
nouns and verbs are also historically recent. In Homer, nine concrete
verbs exist to describe sight, but none of them describes the abstract
notion of sight as a function. They refer to concrete aspects of vision:
to have a particular look in one's eyes; or a gesture that incites terror;
or looking about carefully; or the feelings done in the act of seeing.
As the Classical Greek scholar Bruno Snell notes `there was no one verb
to refer to the function of sight as such'. Or rather not until after
Homer. Abstraction at least in the Greek language appears to have been
invented by the Classical Greeks .
------------------------------ In a message dated 98-10-17 07:47:00 EDT, John Fentress writes: << I am going
to be brief for I hear they are planning to bring down Progress........... Your thinking is
progress! This is fascinating,
and I really do want to think more about it. hb: the tinkertoy manner of viewing the brain is something a number of us have been dissatisfied with. It's based on the tool of neural lesioning and its natural counterpart, brain damage. The technique has given us a huge amount in understanding. However when one's only method is based on the removal of tinkertoy parts, one ends up with a vision of a tinkertoy brain. Several of us paleopsychers have stabbed around for a metpahor which gets across the idea that the same brain elements can take on a host of different identities as they combine with others in temporary webs of endocrinological, neural, and even muscular elements. The person who's hit on the metaphor which works best is John Skoyles. His concept of Mindware goes something like this. A computer is one piece of machinery which, despite its constancy, can take on numerous identities. How does it pull this off? It's software orchestrates its gaggle of switches and other hardware into new patterns of interactivity, dances so radically different that while doing the minuette called Word, your inanimate chunk of sliicon and metal can be a spellchecker, and while peforming that square dance called Quicken it can abandon literary abilities and become an ace accountant. Similarly the brain's elements--frontal and prefrontal cortices, parietal lobes, limbic system, brain stem--can be rewired or rechoreographed with a host of dance templates, turning a human like Benvenutto Cellini from a god-like goldsmith to a vicious knife-fighter in the city's alleys and, an hour later, to a lover rutting and noising like an animal. (For Cellini's habit of switching from artist to slasher, see his autobiography.) Add the vagal nervous system, the adrenal glands, gonads, the extra-cranial oxytocinergic system, the feedback loops between muscle and cerebral motor areas, the signalling centers in the gut, etc. and you have a choreographed switch from fast to slow dances, from filagreed group patterns to free-form flips, which spills out of the ballroom of the skull and envelopes the whole body. Quite a bit of coordinated revelry (or dirge) isn't it? > Then there's
Bloomean corollary I love this. About
five years ago I started playing with a paper and hb: this sounds
fascinating, a whole set of metaphors which are unknow to me. you've
gotta teach me. though now that you've planted in, images of interference
patterns between ripples, diffused light beams, misbehaving photons,
and stereo speaker sound-cones are knitting in and out of each other,
warping and weaving around the idea of wave interfernence as a form
of creative competition. neat John, very neat. Flow of creativity
reminds me of an email chat I had with Lorraine. jf: I see the arts
and Great! I am in
the powerful majority of a marginal group. What the >
Galaxies appeared with equal suddenness…and equal supersimultaneity and supersimilarity, though the following article doesn't say exactly when. If you and I had been sitting around at a café table on the edge of the cosmos way back then, we'd have sipped our latté for a billion years ago assuming that the grand cosmic evolver had pulled all the rabbits from her hat-particles, atoms, galaxies, and stars--and had departed the stage. We'd have been wrong. At the two billion year ABB mark the next big shock arrived, the next great leap in form, process, and emergent wonder-black holes. Among the galaxies whose centers had bunched into the sucking frenzy of black-holeness was a species that, like most others in this cosmos, showed the usual supersimultaneity and supersimilarity-quasars…black holes that use their surrounding galaxy the way a guitar uses a sounding board, to amplify its output of energy. Ordering a pastry and continuing to watch the passing scenery of the cosmos from our outdoor café we'd have assumed that these quasars-the most potent light producers, the strongest of the gravitationally strong-would last forever. As usual, we'd have been in for a solid mind-blow. Four billion years ABB, the production of quasars came to nearly a dead stop. So we'd have concluded that moderation was the key to success in this cosmos. And, once again, we'd have been wrong. Why? The cosmos doesn't sit still. She shifts her rules and tosses forth new creations in fits, starts, and bursts. The mid-sized black holes that had reigned over galaxies from 2 billion ABB peaked at ten billion ABB. But something even more surprising happened at just about the point when mid-sized black holes began their slump, their slow decline. It was something the cosmologists quoted below fail to note-the evolution of that complex molecular social prance we know of as organism and life. So much for our coffee and pastries. I suspect we'd still be suffering from the shock of that little magic trick…and its consequences in the 3.85 billion years that have come since. Howard Subj: NYT: Spacecraft
Give 'Deeper' Picture of the Origin of Galaxies Date: 6/20/2003 10:12:38
AM Eastern Daylight Time From: sheergeniussoftware.com Sent from the
Internet (Details) Spacecraft Give 'Deeper' Picture of the Origin of
Galaxies NYT June 20, 2003 By DENNIS OVERBYE Astronomers unveiled the
first results yesterday from what they said was the most searching look
yet into the origin of galaxies and how they grew. Staring at two patches
of sky, one in the north and one in the south, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope
and Chandra X-ray Observatory assembled a snapshot of cosmic history,
the astronomers said, that reaches back to less than a billion years
after the Big Bang in which the universe was born. A billion years corresponds
to about 8 percent of the age of the universe, said Dr. Mauro Giavalisco,
an astronomer at the space telescope who was a leader of the survey
known as the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey, or Goods. That,
Dr. Giavalisco said, is "the period when galaxies and humans evolved
the quickest." [hb: Eras of Evolutionarily Adaptiveness--EEAs]
Dr. Niel Brandt, an X-ray astronomer at Pennsylvania State University,
said, "We are seeing galaxy children." Augmented by ground-based
observatories and the soon-to-be launched Space Infrared Telescope Facility,
which will perform its own sweep of the same patches of sky, Goods is
a successor to earlier surveys in which the Hubble stared at a pair
of tiny patches of sky, recording galaxies far back in time. The new
survey is wider, encompassing an area of sky equal to about half of
a full moon - an area 33 times as large as that covered by the earlier
"deep field" effort - and containing some 50,000 galaxies.
Moreover, because the Hubble's new Advanced Camera for Surveys has a
greater sensitivity in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum,
it can see deeper into time. (Galaxies far, far away and thus back in
time have their light shifted to longer infrared wavelengths.) Among
the surprises, Dr. Giavalisco said, is that the universe was copiously
producing stars as early as a billion years of age. Some earlier surveys
had suggested that star formation had started out slowly and then peaked
until the universe was three billion to six billion years old. According
to the Goods results, however, star formation started out at a high
rate and stayed that way until about seven billion years ago. Then the
rate fell precipitously, perhaps because all the primordial hydrogen,
the gas of which stars are made, had been used up or heated up too far
to condense. In the dark realm of black holes, meanwhile, evolution
was following a different course. Dr. Brandt described the X-ray half
of the survey as "a black hole core sample" of the universe.
The goal, he said, was to study the evolution of black holes - millions
or billions times the mass of the Sun - thought to lurk in the centers
of most galaxies belching X-rays as they swallow stray gas and stars.
"The Chandra data are very cool," said Dr. Michael Turner,
a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, "because essentially
every image you see is a supermassive black hole. Where else are black
holes so easy to see?" Out of the 540 black hole candidates that
Chandra counted, however, only a handful seem to date from the first
billion years, even though galaxies were already numerous then, Dr.
Brandt said. Black holes do not seem to "turn on" until a
billion years later. The data could resolve a chicken-and-egg question
about which come first, galaxies or the black holes inside them. "Our
data suggest that the galaxies come first and then supermassive black
holes grow inside them," Dr. Brandt said. What happens next, he
said, depends on the mass of the black hole, with more massive ones
growing and becoming active more quickly and generally lodging in more
luminous galaxies or quasars. The "heyday" of the quasars,
home of super-mighty black holes, happened when the universe was two
billion to four billion years old, Dr. Brandt said, but the numbers
of more moderate mass black holes, as registered by their X-ray activity,
peaked when the universe was about 10 billion years old. About seven
of the black holes in the new survey have no optical counterparts, Dr.
Brandt said. They could be in galaxies even more distant in time, in
the so-called ages when the universe was only half a billion years old
and still swaddled in gas that blocked all light, or they could be closer
but swaddled in thick dust. "They are very exciting, no matter
what they are," Dr. Brandt said. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/20/science/20GALA.html
Subj: Re: [issues]
The Hamiltonian, Relationships and Tetronics Date: 6/12/2003 To: werbos,
Paul, if I understand James correctly, doesn't the posting I just wrote
you about supersimilarity, supersimultaneity, and manic mass production
answer the question? Supersimultaneity is the precipitation of massive
numbers of particles that are identical with a precision that defies
belief. This hailstorm of precision-forged particles is a product of
">Mathematics .. [which] presumes instantaneous distribution
of >information in metric equations." Instantaneous mass production
isn't a result of communication, it's a result of the fact that all
points in the fabric of the cosmos, the space-time manifold, are subject
to almost identical stresses and respond in identical ways. All points
in the cosmos are very close to their handful of starting rules, their
initial axioms, and as yet have almost no degree of wiggle room. Metric
equations may be one form of math that apes a cosmos at this primitive
stage. Gravity enters the scene roughly 380,000 years after the big
bang. Gravity's the first long-distance communicative force to come
into play. Gravitational force travels at the speed of light. And conveys
signals about how large a mass is--attraction cues. Nonetheless, gravity
can only act on clusters of the very few new forms that the cosmos has
instantaneously mass-produced. These are massive numbers of identical
atoms of hydrogen, helium, and lithium. Let these atoms whisper to each
other with gravity, and they massively mass produce forms that are a
bit less identical--that show more wiggle room--gas clouds, dust, and
later galaxies and suns. This is where wiggle room and supersimilarity
meet. Each galaxy has a slightly different character. So does each sun.
But at the core, a galaxy is a galaxy is a galaxy. A sun is a sun is
a sun. Despite their differences, their similarities are striking. It's
equally striking that these brothers, cousins, and twins should show
up by the billions of billions--all, at heart, the same. All products
of the same dynamics, the same sort of atoms playing the same sort of
competitive gravity games, and the same way of chewing atoms to release
energy. Howard In a message dated 6/11/2003 3:28:20 PM Eastern Daylight
Time, werbos writes: At 10:34 AM 06/11/2003 -0700, James N Rose wrote:
>1) A question about tensors and metrics, in relation >to the
current topics. > >Physics designates speeds of transference of
information >in spacetime. > >Mathematics .. presumes instantaneous
distribution of >information in metric equations. > >This seems
to be a problem disparity. Comments? Mathematics allows for many different
types of possible systems with different properties. For quasilinear
partial differential equations, solved in a time-forwards progression,
it is well known that information cannot really propagate faster than
the speed of light. That's rigorous mathematics. With nonquasilinear
systems, like general relativity or Wheeler's "already unified"
field theory (of electromagnetism and general relativity), people usually
assume that information propagation is limited to the LOCAL speed of
light, IN the tensor mathematics. But I haven't tracked the exact theorems.
I assume this IS a theorem for small perturbations. But they tell me
there is an Alcubierre solution and the like, which might allow faster
speeds for some macroscopic situations. And the issue really gets clouded
when time symmetry is assumed, and life gets truly complex; the whole
notion of time-forwards progression can itself become fuzzy. >=====
> >2) A proposition regarding dissipative fields. > >Could
dissipation (re-distribution) be considered >a smoothing / normalization
process? It certain is not renormalization of the kind we talk about
in QFT. But the word renormalization has been used for many things...
I think of dissipation as a kind of nonergodicity, or the consideration
of dynamical systems which are initially allowed to be outside of their
"ergodic core(s)" It is common, for example, to have causal
symmetry WITHIN the ergodic core, but not when we allow the following
boundary conditions: off-core states allowed at a finite initial time,
but not at infinity. That's just a choice of boundary cnditions. >And
if so, what aggregation of factors could >account for (initial) disproportioning
states? > >And, could there be an a priori primitive-condition
>which starts things in that disproportionate >condition to begin
with? Again, boundary conditions. Also, what are boundary conditions
to an open subsystem may be ergodic conditions for the more complete
system description. >====== > >Jamie Your idea of a "developmental
environment," an environment that gestates simultaneous self-production,
that guides it and fructifies it, that goads it into happening, is very
stimulating. That sure as heck is what gravity does to galaxies and
stars. But where does gravity come from? How and why did it come to
be? There are tons of mysteries whose implicit questions we've never
seen...and this is definitely one of them. Cheers--Howard This seems to show that who rears whom and how effects where a rhesus monkey ends up on the phenotypical line I portrayed several weeks ago. Expanding on Val Geist's concept of maintenance and dispersal phenotypes, I outlined five separate phenotypes laid out on a continuum. At the low end, relatively?resource?and?control? deprived, were those "maintenance phenotypes" that huddled to find a precarious illusion of stability. These groups, I posited, are easily roused by stressors to a group fragmentation which sends them off, not adventuring, but fleeing as "refugees." (There is a large body of experimental documentation for this, cited in _The Prehistory of the Global Brain_ and also reinforced by the Kraemer article cited below.) The information from Gary Kraemer's recent studies suggests that gang?reared monkeys are what psychologists call high on the "f" (fascism) scale. These animals depend for their sense of safety on a high degree of social stability. The slightest degree of the sort of turmoil that attends social mobility??mobility of outsiders, or of those among them??tends to send them into high alarm. In humans, these high f?scale, authoritarian types lash out at such social disruptors as overt sexuality, overt shows of violence, and the apparent threat to stability posed by out?groups in the social circle. The authoritarian types are dogged maintainers of the status quo. When that stasis is threatened in even imaginary ways (by the social rise of blacks, Turks, or Jews, for example) they react with a violence foreign to more pluralistic, low f?scale individuals. Experiments with peer?reared monkeys show the fascist pattern. When all is stable, the peer?reared monkeys demonstrate great stability. When the slightest hint of disruption appears, these normally *more* placid creatures than their "striving" mother? reared peers lash out with what seems like disproportionate violence. I use the word "striving" to describe the mother?reared animals because they do indeed compete more readily among themselves for dominance. This is the mark of what humans, impelled by a similar underlying neurology, know as social mobility. It is the foundation of both rhesus and human "meritocracy." (See note below.) The peer?reared seek the frozen stability which in human culture accompanies totalitarianism, feudalism, and other social forms that harden folks into their place. This has implications for the "mass psychology" of each "collective intelligence." A group of peer?reared monkeys or their human counterparts would overstress conformity enforcers and smother diversity generators. They would welcome the social paralysis that did in the Romans after roughly 300 A.D., and eventually led to the choking culture of pre?eleventh century feudal society. The mother?deprived, peer?reared would be, as Theodor Adorno and other originators of the "f" scale sensed, the violently intolerant Nazis of the thirties or the equally violent neo?Nazi skinheads of today. Ironically, this is what "egalitarian" hunter?gatherer societies tend to do??freeze the form of their society. Note that where other cultures have either succeeded mightily (as have Europeans and Chinese) or gone down to total elimination (as have the Aztecs, Mayans, Huns, Babylonians, Assyrians, etc.), some egalitarian hunter?gatherers (the !Kung, the Inuit) have hung on, but they've done it by remaining marginal. There may be additional social implications as well. Even in modern American upper middle class society, modern children are more peer?reared than mother?reared. They grow up in day?care centers with high?achievement, career?oriented mothers. I am personally very much in favor of such opportunities or even norms for women. In fact, I'd shudder to live without them. However, studies indicate that day?care kids, like peer?reared rhesus monkeys, tend to be overly violent in reaction to minor stress. What happens when these "kids" grow up and take over the reins of this society? Will they seek the stability offered by rigid authority figures and shun the social mobility which characterized the America of earlier years? Are they already doing so when they flock to those movements on the religious right which offer peer? comfort in exchange for adherence to authority and demonization of outsiders? Will the peer?reared Generation Xers rigidify future American and Western society, turning it into a haven of the "illiberal democracy" written up as a growing trend in this month's _Foreign Affairs_? Will they gravitate toward domination by an aristocracy (in our case, domination by a nobility of wealth or by political and entertainment dynasties like those of the Bush, the Gore, and Kennedy families or the Kirk and Michael Douglas, the Donald and Kiefer Sutherland, the Zappa, the Jerry and Ben Stiller, the Alan and Adam Arkin, and the Ryan and Tatum O'Neill clans)? Will Generation X and Y'ers settle like serfs into a comfortable immobility? Will this produce an American society less able to face the coming Chinese challenge? Will it produce dumbing?down that occurs when a society hounds its deviants, its explorers and its other innovative non?conformists into frightened silence? Will it mean that unhealthy state that pops up when the balance between conformity enforcers and diversity generators tips toward too much homogeneity? Howard *note: I do not believe that terms like "meritocracy" are sloppily unscientific anthropomorphisms when applied to rhesus macaques. All evidence indicates that we inherited the skeletal structure of our society from the same ancestors as the rhesus. The neurochemical alterations that trigger a shift from what Schjelderup?Ebbe, discoverer of the "peck order," called a "tyranny" to an animal society in which there is far greater room for movement on the social scale apparently go back paleopsychologically to long before the rise of primates. The basic societal forms of which I write are ones we did not invent. We inherited them from a long line of ancestors. Birds, who share many social characteristics with us, arose roughly 120 mya. The variety of social structures among birds, from which we've learned to name our own peck orders, presumably were bequeathed to both avians and primates by a common ancestor whose existence preceded 120 mya. Remember, dominance hierarchies appear even in spiny lobsters and other crustaceans which first showed up on the evolutionary stage roughly 250 mya. I take this to indicate that our sharing of peck orders with our feathered cousins is an instance of common descent, not of parallel but independent evolution. By the way, I also believe we have devoted insufficient attention to the ubiquity of parallel evolution. Doesn't it seem rather strange to anyone that the marsupials of Australia should take on forms similar to the placental mammals of Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas? Doesn't it also seem peculiar that Darwin's finches should have evolved into forms so similar to those of English birds that Darwin was forced to consult a highly skilled ornithologist in order to determine that the birds he'd found in the Galapagos where not the same species he knew from home, but were all finch varieties? Corollary generation
theory does explain such parallel phenomena. Both marsupials and placental
mammals are childen of the Big Bang and cousins in the clan of DNA.
They carry within them the same axioms and the same elaborations of
those axioms in genes and Epigenesis. Both marsupials and placental
mammals both live in a world filled with fractal repetitions, a world
origamied from the Big Bang axioms that underlie mammalian forms. When
the environment extracts fresh corollaries from marsupials and placentals
separated by a thousand miles of sea, those corollaries bloom in a similar
way, then are further slimmed down by environments that also are big
bang bred and turned to cousins by the restraints of existence on a
common earth with a common pool of microbes, revolution around a common
sun, similar plants, similar seasons and days, and a common atmosphere.
Mammals in Australia and South American cope with iterative circumstance
in an iterative way. I believe this is a bit of what Francis Steen and
Koen DePryck might call this cosmos' underlying ontology. Either that
or it's a fancy way of restating the obvious. But isn't every truth
in science just a bit of that? Frankly I'm not sure. Perhaps it's time
to trot out the razor of epistemology and use it to cut this speculative
tirade off. Fareed Zakaria. "The Rise of Illiberal Democracy." Foreign Affairs, November?December, 1997: 22?44. Theodor Adorno, E. Frenkel?Brunswick, D.J. Levinson, and R.N. Sanford. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper & Row, 1950. Harry F. Harlow. Learning To Love. New York: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1974. Christopher Boehm, Director, the Jane Goodall Research Center, University of Southern California, draft, "Four Mechanical Routes To Altruism," March, 1996. Howard Bloom. The Prehistory of the Global Brain: from the Big Bang to 5,000 B.C. Hamburg: Bollmann Verlag, 1998. Howard Bloom. The Lucifer Principle: a scientific expedition into the forces of history. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995. Bob Altemeyer, "Marching
In Step: A Psychological Explanation of State Terror," The Sciences,
March/April 1988, p. 30. Howard: > Agreed heartily. I suggest it is any form of replicator which insists on > appropriating resources and turning them into copies of itself??at whatever > level of recurring form we look at. The complication is that because the > universe keeps cranking out corollaries of the same basic axioms, it produces > numerous homologous forms which have never emerged from one another. Reed, > how can I cram this into my basic unit, which I really want to be replicative > form, homologous or reproductive?How about morphic resonance? hb??as I understand it from his writings, Rupert Sheldrake, the promoter of morphic resonance in the only form I know it, feels that a system evolving a first?time solution to a problem in some mysterious way resets the rules of the universe so that other objects of a similar sort several light years away may suddenly arrive at the same solution through something eerily akin to telepathy. Sheldrake intrigues me, but I somehow can't take this idea seriously. rk?? Indeed, if what you indicating is true, you may have hit upon a way to explain the phemomena Penrose discusses. ???hb: could you explain more of Penrose's ideas on this subject to me? I have one of his books, but it is among the hundred or so which I haven't had time to read. rk?? If the universe is, indeed, cranking out corollaries from the same axioms under the same set of conditions it follows that one ought to see diverse patterns converging into homologous forms. A morphic resonance may be the indication that there is some deeper, more abstract consistency among the corollary generators which results from the fact that they share the same axioms and environment.I realize you aren't partial to Penrose or his theories. I think the problem with understanding him is that he's a very abstract thinker in a rather literal world. I don't think he's ever found the analogy to really express himself becuase we are only begining to consider phenomena complex enough that his theories become useful. I have a hunch, though, that any practical theory of memetics will be based upon his ideas ????????hb: another reason to try to put Penrose in your own words. You have an ability sometimes to crystalize the ideas of abstract thinkers and turn them into highly useful tools, as you did with Hofstadter's "isomorophism."Why? Becuase memes travel from mind to mind by the most convoluted, abstract, and multidimensional routes. If you see a collection of people riding in chariots what you you see?The wheel domestication of animalsBut implied also is a hierarchical society, specialization which allows the training of warriors and the manufacture of complicated chariots. ????hb: agreed. all these things are among the numerous corollaries which could be spun from the complex involved in a vision of people in chariots. you're absolutely correct. what seems like a simple image can convey level after level of meaning to those who have the minds to see those levels. these people are the corollary generators working as wheels within wheels of a larger corollary generating society. they tend to be people who think outside of the mainstream and are, in some way, visionaries. some of the members of this group are active participants in this process. rk?? In a glance, homologous patterns are potentiated in your brain. Along with a million others, the image, scent, sound...a few seconds of perception restructure your worldview instantly.In _The Extended Phenotype_ Dawkins asks us to imagine the universe as a sort of genome force field in which the phenotype extends, by a myriad of mechanisms and reflections, beyond the walls of the organism and potentially to the limits of creation. ????hb: exactly why _The Extended Phenotype_ deserves infinitely more attention than it has received. It's concepts should be as much household coinage as is the idea of the selfish gene. rk?? Neo?Darwinists don't need to trace every cause?effect line of force from the genome to an effect in the world. Their perspective allows them to intuit the general aspect without knowing the specific details. It's rightly argued that this deeper perception becomes misleading at times, but that's the problem with only having one perspective on something. ????hb: which returns us to the recent research indicating that the informed express?line calculation called intuition is often far, far more accurate than logical cerebration. (Damasio, et. al.)Now imagine our world. Television, radio, conversations. In an urban environment we are bombarded by sensory input. Trying to deconstruct and trace the instantaneous path of each of these tangled threads doesn't seem an effective strategy.So perhaps at the level of culture, the best theory will be based upon morphic resonance. Once some organization of matter or information is created, the likelyhood of it being reproduced becomes greater until, after crossing some threshold, it is inevitable that it will appear everywhere. ???hb: here's the glitch. It's fairly easy to trace most of this to the swiftness of cultural transmission, which was pretty fast even in neolithic days. However the anthropologist A.L. Kroeber. (The Nature of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952) has made a very good case for similar phenomena cropping up in societies separated by seas which made cultural transmission impossible: a minor example, similar games with similar names (pachisi) being invented in Asia and in Meso?America at about the same time in the days long before sea?crossings made cultural transmission possible. This can be explained by corollary generator theory up to a point. For example, similar conditions working on similar human beings in isolated locations produced the emergence of agrculture at eerily similar times. (New data from meso and south america indicates that the previous dates for the emergence of agriculture in the Americas were too late, and that it actually began at about the same time as in the middle east. similar recent data has emerged on the agriculture of china.) When the ice age ended, gardens of eden rich in plants allowed humans to become sedentary gatherers and build non?portable villages of stone. Gathering easily turned to planting. And the abundance of animals made possible by the plant life's new vigor potentiated domestication??at least in the middle east, though not in the Americas. However the temporal synchronicity (to borrow a term from the semi?mystic Jung) of things like pachisi is NOT accounted for by corollary generator theory, or not at least as I've been able to develop the theory to this point. The coincidence seems spooky and eldrich. Eldrich (the supernatural) is the realm into which Rupert Sheldrake steps to solve the problem with his morphic resonance. Being a determined materialist, I'm still struggling mightily to account for the phenomenon in a less magical manner. ??????????hb: However your thoughts of visions of chariots does raise a possibility. Sedentary societies gathered around a rich resource base have a very different social structure in many mammals than do the societies of those same mammals under conditions of widely dispersed resources. We humans have the basic mammalian behavioral equipment, plus the ability to dramatically increase by our own hands the output of an existing resource base. This aids in the creation of urbanized, concentrated societies. Concentrated societies, even among chimps at Gombe fed by humans rather than being forced to gather in the wild, lead to fierce hierarchical competition which resolves into a more compact and more hierarchically layered social structures. (Michael Patrick Ghiglieri, The Chimpanzees of Kibale Forest: A Field Study of Ecology and Social Structure, Columbia University Press, New York, 1984.) Among humans, urbanized societies living off of agriculture or concentrations of nomadic humans living off of domisticated animals tend to war with each other. Games like chess and pachisi are imitations of war and other forms of territorial, hierarchical dispute. The essential elements of war and hierarchical conflict seem very instinctually driven, operating by similar rules wherever the practice crops up. Hence the development of agriculture may account for the emergence of similar games in widely disparate societies at roughly the same time through corollary generation after all. Thanks to the wonders of post?ice?age abundance in roughly 10,000 b.c. and its worldwide simultaneity, the corollary generator may have begun to crank out new lemmas in isolated locations at the same time, synched by a climatic timer. rk?? Never by exctly
the same mechanism, but in homologous form just the same. Not becuase
the forces are mystical or non?existent, but becuase the corrolary generators
are competent to extract the pattern out of the cacaphony of perception
impacting them despite no two recieving quite the same set of inputs.
Morphic resonance accepts replicator theory as an axiom and asks what
are the implications of a universe filled with infinite replicators
at all levels of existence? Perhaps the implication is that forms appear
to jump into existence by a million mechanisms like evolution or reproduction
but in contexts where we formerly didn't imagine this to be occuring?One
might call it Karma.Again, I'm not arguing that anything magical happens,
simply that the mechanism of propogation may be difficult to trace at
the level of individual events and behavior. Perhaps to explain very
large scale phenomena of culture requires us to accept a little fuzziness
in the details at our visceral?human level.Reading some of Aaron Lynch's
preliminary attempts to mathematicize memetic transfer made me think
of morphic resonance again, here's a quote from "Units, Events
and Dynamics in Memetic Evolution" which you can find at [http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom?emit/1998/vol2/lynch_a.html]:>
Mnemons can be represented conveniently with symbols such as "A",
"B", etc. > Thus, we can call the hell belief mnemon A,
the imminent doomsday belief > mnemon B, and a combination of mnemons
such as the hell/imminent doomsday > combination "A*B".
The "*" indicates that A and B are instantiated in the >
same host. Extending this concept, one can represent a whole system
of mnemons > as "A*B*C*..". > > Symbolic expressions
can also represent mnemon replication much the way > chemists represent
chemical reactions. Thus, the hell belief's non?parental > conversion
propagation may be represented as A+~A ???> 2A. This expression is
> read > as "Host of A together with a non?host of A yields
two hosts of A". (The > "~" indicates only non?host
of A status, and does not of itself imply hostship > of a contrary
belief.) The two hosts on the arrow's right are the same two > people
> as on the left side, one of whom is converted from non?host to
host status. > (The word "horizontal" may also be used,
to describe this kind of non?parental > event, as long as it is not
taken to refer only to transmissions between > people of similar
social status.) The mnemons on the left side of the arrow > are called
> the input mnemons, and those on the right, the output mnemons.
Note that, at this level of abstraction, the mechanism of the A+~A ???>
2A transformation is not defined, and perhaps it need not be in order
to ask some questions about how ideas spread. At this level of abstraction
it is implied that if A is instantiated, the likelihood of it being
"reproduced" by a non?defined mechanism increases. The higher
the proportion of A in the population, the more likely any particular
potential host will undergo the transform, though in each case the mechanism
will likely be different than the last. From an overarching perspective,
perhaps morphic resonance becomes the most practical way of communicating
this idea.Anyway, that's one way I can imagine integrating sponateous
homology into correlary generator theory. I hope it doesn't devetate
too far from what you find reasonable.Reed Subj: Re: clinical sociobiology--genes or imprinting? Date: 98-11-07 22:58:37 EST From: (Kelly Caithlin Kissane) To: HowlBloom CC: paleopsych > Nonetheless, when using patterns from early years to empower a client, I've > always assumed that this works because of imprinting, not genes. I've worked > on the understanding that we have several key imprinting periods which > influence those passions from which our work and goals in life are > made--probably a few imprinting experiences in infancy, a few in childhood, > and a few in adolescence. > Judging by other animals imprinting periods, I would say that the bulk of imprinting occurs in early childhood. This leads to an interesting personal observation - I am nothing like my father, an alcoholic, bigoted, unambitious, rather stupid man (football allowed him to graduate HS, his reading and writing ability remained at a grade school level). I am somewhat like my mother, though thankfully I do not have her extreme mood swings. I also not as bigoted. I am a lot like my uncle Robert - ambitious, heavy political leanings, a news junkie that always keeps up on the latest on the web and on TV, opinionated on many issues. hb: ok, here's a curve. see what we can make of this. i am a lot like my uncle sam. he read the encyclopedia literally from a to z as a child. when i was fourteen or so, we'd stand at his fantastic, chest-high Crosley wooden radio console identifitying the same pieces of classical music from hearing the first few notes at the same time. He loved science, and gave me my first book of Chesly Bonestall paintings predicting most of the details of a space program which would become reality many years later. now for the curve. my uncle sam and i are not related genetically. he is from another family entirely. he married into our clan via my mother's sister. and he had no influence on my imprinting. we're both jewish, and that's about it. what gives? and why do i run into people on opposite sides of the country who have never met and who are not even distantly related, but who use the same mouthset and rhythms in their speech, the same subtle muscle patterns in their facial gestures and body language, and seem near clones? why do the same facial types show up in unrelated folks in one generation after another? does our basic human genetic set contain constraints which autocatalyze us into a limited set of patterns? Are many of these patterns interlinked epistatically to produce constellations of typology? Is this why some psychologists are able to specialize in :"personality" and 'trait theories"--because, like cultures, we humans autocatalyze into a relatively small number of phase states--small considering that we have done what the bible said and multiplied like (at least the visible) stars? (no religion intended, but the bible provides strong imagery on occasion) Are we constrained by not only the universe's initial principles, axioms, algorithms, and/or particles and forces? Are we further constrained by the canalization implicit in the nature of dna--running like rivers along the valleys dna provides? Are we then reined in further by our primate, then by our homo sapiens genetic set? do racial constraints, like those which make me and my uncle sam similar because we are jewish and give michael jordan and his basketball black brethren height so unJewish, exist? what other constraints chisel the paths we take on our way to being and becoming, birthing, maturing, finding our selves, and growing? kk: I never hear him say anything bad about a person who was different, no matter if it was color, religion, or whatever. Now for the interesting part - for the first two years of my life, I was cared for by my teenaged uncle (he was the youngest in the family, 5 years younger than my mother). We bonded so strongly that I still remember twisting a button off his marine uniform because my four year old mind though that this would delay him from going to Vietnam. hb: very interesting. i know a woman who had a rejection reaction to all her babies but one. when that one was born, her obstetricians injected her with oxytocin, not knowing that this hormone not only aids the birthing process but opens powerful social channels in our being and produces the emotions of love, warmth, and bonding. this one child received maternal love and developed a personality capable of remarkable emotional growth. the children who received no oxytocin warmth have remained emotionally retarded in their 20s and 30s. post-birth experience seems to have made the difference here, not genes. imprinting may or may not be involved. however it sure sounds like you were imprint-lucky, kelly. a good uncle to have! kk: Maybe it was just luck of the genetic draw (my other siblings crapped out, unfortunately), or maybe I had the right influence at the right time. I tend to believe that it was a bit of both. Howard ------------------------------ > From: HowlBloom> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 20:38:15 EST > To:fentress Subject: Re: How "fixed" are templates and archetypes? > In a message dated 98-11-24 22:19:06 EST, fentress writes: > > Pat [Bateson] both suggested and demonstrated that sensitive periods could > be shifted in time, that following was not necessarily JUST to a > single stimulus, but resulted from the match up between stimuli the > animal was exposed to at different times, and so on. > > hb: John--extremely intriguing. could you explain this a bit? jf: Yep: One of the early ideas of imprinting was that there is a "critical period" that is absolutely fixed in developmental time. The early work (Gordon can correct me!) suggested that experiences before or after this 'fixed' critical period had no influence, including no influence on the timing of events. What Bateson did was to show how visual experience in chicks BEFORE the critical period for following could indeed have an influence. hb: aha! very interesting. jf: Thus, the critical period was not as open and shut as had been thought. Further, he and others also showed that developmental events before the critical period could shift the location of that window of opportunity in time, by speeding up or slowing down developmental processes. hb: it gets more interesting...or the plot thickens. jf: Thus: a) the boundaries of the 'critical period' turn out to be more fuzzy than first thought (and the now accepted language of 'sensitive periods' followed), and b) the timing of sensitive periods can shift as a function of a variety of developmental events (e.g. environmental stimulation, deprivation). > > And am I just being driven mad by the music metaphor, or is there a > conceivable relationship between "the match up between stimuli the animal was > exposed to at different times" and harmony, which dictates that if one is > playing a piano, the leftmost note one is about to depress determines which > other notes one can depress simultaneously to make a chord. The imprint, in > this case, would be the series of experiences which, chordlike, form an > imprint. jf: I love this question. Many years ago a man named Henry James (no, its another Henry James) did a clever set of experiments using flicker rhythms as his imprinting stimulus. As I recall, chicks exposed to one flicker frequency tended to prefer that to other flicker frequencies, as measured by the following response. You question opens up something else. Would they generalize in terms of absolute frequency, or something like frequency multiples. I do not think that has been tested, but should be. This, in turn, leads to thoughts about analogous experiments with music, and of course reminds us of oscillators, etc. This in turn, again, leads to questions about "chords", whether visual or auditory. I bet that the studies await to be done. Nifty question, Howard. hb: John, you have me thinking about a variable series of imprinting notches whose distance from each other in time and whose content are altered by the initial imprinting experience or series of them. this is very much like the various skeins of dynamic structure we've been talking about (including the reconstituting sponges, which Lorraine got from my books). Tug at one spot and the entire web readjusts both its spatial and its temporal envelope, or its behavioral and developmental envelope, or its perceptual and emotional envelope, or its neurohormonal envelope, or, in all probablity, the shape and operation of its search web. Happens that way with a galaxy, happens that way with a hurricane, happens that way with a worldview or cultural system, too. It also works that way in the aesthetic realm, with music and visual art. There are quite a few metaphors you can use which capture the essence of the thing. They capture it because they participate in the pattern. It's one which repeats on many levels, one of those iterative things I've been labelling evolutionarily stable strategies even when they're not on the biological levels for which the term was originally coined. Cheers--Howard
> In a message dated 98-11-24 22:19:06 EST, fentress writes: > > Pat [Bateson] both suggested and demonstrated that sensitive periods could > be shifted in time, that following was not necessarily JUST to a > single stimulus, but resulted from the match up between stimuli the > animal was exposed to at different times, and so on. > > hb: John--extremely intriguing. could you explain this a bit? jf: Yep: One of the early ideas of imprinting was that there is a "critical period" that is absolutely fixed in developmental time. The early work (Gordon can correct me!) suggested that experiences before or after this 'fixed' critical period had no influence, including no influence on the timing of events. What Bateson did was to show how visual experience in chicks BEFORE the critical period for following could indeed have an influence. hb: aha! very interesting. jf: Thus, the critical period was not as open and shut as had been thought. Further, he and others also showed that developmental events before the critical period could shift the location of that window of opportunity in time, by speeding up or slowing down developmental processes. hb: it gets more interesting...or the plot thickens. jf: Thus: a) the boundaries of the 'critical period' turn out to be more fuzzy than first thought (and the now accepted language of 'sensitive periods' followed), and b) the timing of sensitive periods can shift as a function of a variety of developmental events (e.g. environmental stimulation, deprivation). > > And am I just being driven mad by the music metaphor, or is there a > conceivable relationship between "the match up between stimuli the animal was > exposed to at different times" and harmony, which dictates that if one is > playing a piano, the leftmost note one is about to depress determines which > other notes one can depress simultaneously to make a chord. The imprint, in > this case, would be the series of experiences which, chordlike, form an > imprint. jf: I love this question. Many years ago a man named Henry James (no, its another Henry James) did a clever set of experiments using flicker rhythms as his imprinting stimulus. As I recall, chicks exposed to one flicker frequency tended to prefer that to other flicker frequencies, as measured by the following response. You question opens up something else. Would they generalize in terms of absolute frequency, or something like frequency multiples. I do not think that has been tested, but should be. This, in turn, leads to thoughts about analogous experiments with music, and of course reminds us of oscillators, etc. This in turn, again, leads to questions about "chords", whether visual or auditory. I bet that the studies await to be done. Nifty question, Howard. hb: John, you have me thinking about a variable series of imprinting notches whose distance from each other in time and whose content are altered by the initial imprinting experience or series of them. this is very much like the various skeins of dynamic structure we've been talking about (including the reconstituting sponges, which Lorraine got from my books). Tug at one spot and the entire web readjusts both its spatial and its temporal envelope, or its behavioral and developmental envelope, or its perceptual and emotional envelope, or its neurohormonal envelope, or, in all probablity, the shape and operation of its search web. Happens that way with a galaxy, happens that way with a hurricane, happens that way with a worldview or cultural system, too. It also works that way in the aesthetic realm, with music and visual art. There are quite a few metaphors you can use which capture the essence of the thing. They capture it because they participate in the pattern. It's one which repeats on many levels, one of those iterative things I've been labelling evolutionarily stable strategies even when they're not on the biological levels for which the term was originally coined. Cheers--Howard ------------------------------ Subj: Re: theory of mind again Date: 98-11-22 10:09:13 EST From: (Dr. John R. Skoyles) To: HowlBloom Howard I half agree with you. Here are some of the problems I have with Triandis. [1] It is not clear what the dichotomy is. Are we talking about something in people? Or in their society? Personality? or Culture? hb: since people cannot exist without culture and culture cannot exist without people, and since personality is a manifestation of both individual impulse and cultural interface, I'd avoid tring to segment this. [2] It is based mostly upon questionnaire responses. There are a number of problems here. hb: a very good point which has been bothering me. nearly every one of the studies in the journals dedicated to carrying out Triandis's work is carried out on college students. college students in Singapore, Manila, Mexico City, Tel Aviv--but all college students. This is lazy science. None of the researchers have the gumption to go anthropological and ethological and attempt to venture beyond their own classrooms. Lazy science can also be wildly inaccurate science. The allegedly cross-cultural subjects all fall within a binding cultural category of college student, a category whose inherent imperatives may swamp other differences violently. they also fall within the same age range, another irritating limitation. [a] There is a rather great distance between how people tick boxes and what they do. hb: yes, absolutely. a huge difference, as proven by numerous experiments. my favorite is the one in which subjects swear up and down that they are not influenced by sex in advertising. several weeks later, when they've hopefully forgotten being questioned on the subject, the respondents are split into two groups. One is shown a photo of an automobile. nothing else in the photo but walls, a floor, and the car. The other group is shown the same photo, same walls, same car, same positioning, same lighting, but this one has a beautiful girl in it. the group which sees the beautiful girl raves about the car. the group which only sees the auto is lukewarm by comparison. so much for the accuracy of the respondents' self-reports, much less the connection between their self-percept and those inhabitants of their cerebral structure which actually drive their actions. js: [b] What is being picked up could easily link to differences in how people respond to questions as much as anything behavioural. hb: holy moly, a very, very intriguing point, one which never occurred to me. js: Such differences would not be unexpected since they are asked in different languages and linguistic differences could affect how questions are interpreted. This is particularly so because all questions could be answered in both ways depending upon what context we were thinking about. Cross-cultural psychologists seem unaware of all the work done by opinion pollsters upon question biasing. To take a topic issue in the UK, ask Scots whether they want an independent Scotland and most say yes. Ask whether they want Scotland to separate from the UK and again most say yes -- even though an independent Scotland would require separation. The context determines the response: Scots think about different things when primed by the idea of independence and separation though they mean the same thing. [c] This point needs to be made because the most interesting -- and ignored -- aspect of their results is how much results from 'individualistic' and 'collectivistic' societies overlap. Reading the abstracts of these papers you might image people respond in a black and white manner. hb: you've put your finger on another tricky aspect of these studies. the abstracts seldom capture the incredible tangle of ambiguity and contradiction in the actual results. How could they? given the conceptual terms within which the studies are framed there is now way in heaven or heck these boodles of confusion could be put clearly in 200 words. js: But no. In any sample most people from individualists societies answer many collectivists type questions [and vice versa]. Indeed, you would find in a sample from the USA many people that give more collectivist answers than from collectivist countries such as Japan [and again vice versa]. What the cross-cultural psychologists play up are relatively small but statistical significant differences between averages. These differences could reflect no more than statistically significant differences in the ways people respond to questionnaires in different societies. [3] The research is nearly entirely done upon students who are hardly representative of people particularly people in countries such as Japan where only a minority of people attend higher education. hb: aha, I see we are of similar mind. [4] Triandis -- or it may be another cross-cultural psychologist -- notes your point -- they mentioned a student from a country district who commented that the collectivists responses were just those of her community. But they do not the point they raise. There is nothing peculiar to the 'collectivist' responses that many individualist might not be quiet happy giving positive answers to them [and vice versa]. If people differ in answering them is the relative degree of this -- they are happy giving a collectivist type response but more happy giving an individualist one and so pick that one. Cross-cultural psychologists infer a dichotomy [or at least a continuity with two poles] from questions whose answers do not specify one. [5] The work lacks any grounding in other work upon human sociability either from a sociobiological viewpoint linking human sociability with that of other animals or group psychology. hb: to repeat the synthesis to which you were kind enough to drive me last night--We all think collectively in some circumstances and situationally in others. when thinking situationally, the crowd of internalized others never leaves our head. when pondering the crowd of internal others, our situation never leaves us. there is no simple cultural difference which can be mapped on a straight line. i suspect that cultural differences exist, and very interesting ones at that. (Margaret Mead, in her works on New Guinea, and Ruth Benedict gave us quite a few to chew on.) but we have to take triandis out of his context, put him in a richer one, remove him from two dimensions, and put him in three, four or more--meaning a description in terms of a complex of variables. Before we even get that far, I suggest we rename individualism versus collectism situationalism versus social-placement-thinking. I further suggest that we conclude from the Triandis-based literature that there is no simple collectivist versus individualist difference between cultures. This is a hard concept to abandon, since it is so intuitively appealing. However years of accumulated studies have shown it that the idea just won't hold water. Perhaps its appeal is based on our need to see other cultures as more idyllic than our own, and hence providing greater warmth and nurture than we get in ours. It's the loneliness of being which we all experience once we leave the womb. And even that expression, "once we leave the womb," may be a romanticization, since "in utero it's a jungle," and the latest findings indicate that we fight for survival in our mother's belly every step of the way. Imagining that other societies are more nurturing than ours may be the flip side of that form of projection in which we imagine other societies harbor all the evils we try to flush from our own consciousness, but which keep roiliing within us. Where evolutionarily does the "grass is always greener" notion come from? Is it our nature as probeheads in a massive search web? Is this one more way in which group selection has made us effective at accomplishing two purposes: 1) going over the horizons of the known to find new opportunities for our group: 2) binding us to other groups so that we can imbibe their wisdom, hence expanding the conceptual and behavior repertoire of our own group--a process which leads to the meshing of all humanity into a global brain? 3) is this a manifestation of the romanticisation and worship of "nature" and her animals and plants which drives us to also suck in the knowledge gained by other species, hence turning all of life into a networked intelligence, a multi-species search web? (Remember, animals have also learned by adapting to us--the baboon, Africa's rat, is a good example. Others are dogs, cats, cattle, pigs, and numerous plants, both those which lure us into cultivating, protecting and feeding them and and those which take advantage of our land clearance habits to prosper. for example, there is a "wildflower" which nature conservationists in England are now fighting to protect from a highway building project. The irony is that the plant is not as "natural" as the conservationists imagine. It can only exist in pastures. Pastures are manmade. Hence the genetic comibination which represents the plant's accumulated wisdom incorporates a good deal of jubilant adaptation to the habits of humanity. then there are bacteria, which learn new tricks to outwit us constantly. In fighting them we also learn theirs. In such manner is the search web of life synapsed, with micro and macro organisms swapping wisdom through the coupling of syrnergy or the equally powerful coupling of antagonism. js: [6] Nor does it acknowledge historical changes that have happened recently to the societies that they are studying. hb: another extremely good point. to what extent is the Singapore of today a different cultural entity than the Singapore of 20 years ago? To what extent is this difference a manifestation of generational oscillations--the kick of one generation against its parents' attitudes and toward new desires? To what extent does the culture of Singapore differ from that of 20 years ago because of cross-cultural exchange? To what extent does it differ because of the pulse of global attitudes, a strange synchrony which can be traced back at least 2,500 years to the days of Confucius. Buddha, Zoroaster, Lycurgus, and Solon? To what extent are these alterations intertwined. Your insight leads to the implication that one needs a cross-generational research as well as a cross-cultural one, and that the two are very much the same. js: I always ask myself, how would Victorians in the last century have answered them. And what about Chinese and Japanese prior to modernisation? My own opinion is this. Modern people whether in Japan or USA or wherever are the psychological same in the same way that we are genetically similar. Psychological differences like genetic ones exist but they exist within societies to far greater extent than across them. hb: this leads back to an observation made by both specialists in self-organization and specialists in cultural history--that the number of states or strategies into which humanity has fallen at any given time is far more limited than we generally acknowledge. We focus on petty differences--as complex adaptive systems theory says we must--but in the big picture, the commonalities of group structures and belief systems vastly outweigh the differences. But still, I wonder why the Japanese and the French of the seventeenth century both used the strategy of slicing the roots of power from their nobility by drawing the nobles to glittering centers of delight and imprisonment--Louis XIV's Versailles and the Japanese capital city of Edo, in which the Tokugawa required that all daimyo (lords) deposit their families year round. The Tokugawa also required the lords to spend six months of the year in Edo, and six months administering their lands while leaving their families as hostage in a city no one would ever want to leave--a wonderland. Why the same strategies at the same time when Japan had cut itself off from outside contact and when cross-cultural influence was possible, but unlikely? Even if cross-cultural influence was the seed, why was the soil of such seemingly disparate and separated cultures so ripe for this particular harvest? Corollary generator theory says that if we start from a simple set of axioms and send a system spinning out its corollaries, it will move on a path of ascension through phase states constrained by the implications of the original corollaries. On its seach through phase space, possibility space, it will find numerous branching pathways. But the mere use of the word "pathway" implies the sort of constraints with which a self-unfolding system of this sort is supported and made fertile. Unfolding the corollaries is the complex adaptive system operator and its five principles: conformity enforcement, diversity generation, utility assortment, resource shifting, and intergroup tournament. You gave a wonderful example of this sort of system at work a few days ago with your posting on microtubules. A cell generates new tubules. This is diversity generation. However the tubules are all "constructed" along similar lines--conformity enforcement. Each operates as a probehead, exploring the possiblities of the cell. This sort of exploration is a product of diversity generation. Those which find a connection point are triggered internally to become robust. Those which do not find a connection point are triggered internally to self destruct. This internal comparator mechanism (terminology courtesy of Mike Waller) is the utility sorter--endogenously setting off self-augmentation or self-diminution. The microtubules which find their way to connecting points of significance to the operation of the cell become vital in the cytoskeleton. Resources are fed to them by the system--both influence and materielle. The social system moving resources their way is called the resource shifter. It is not endogenous to the microtubule but exogenous. Cells are probeheads of the organism and are subject to the same laws microtubules are. They search the possiblities around them and compete for connections, resources, etc. This is the intergroup tournament which will have a potent impact on the life or death of the microtubules which have competed to form the cytoskeleton. If the cell within which the microtubule resides is a fetal neuron and finds connections, the cell thrives and the microtubules it contains survive. If the fetal neuron cell fails to find a connection, its utility sorters kill it off, and the microtubules--no matter how successful they were inside the cell--eat dirt (or are eaten by bio-cleanup-fluids). The same system operates in the immune system (as Kirschner and Gerhart pointed out), in organisms, in colonies of bacteria, and in human societies. js: Historically however there are differences. The reason is not questionnaire responses but that such things as individual identifying names (such as Agnes Bojaxhui) were absent or considered unimportant and replaced by group and role ones (such as Mother Teresa) in many societies. For example, a famous Edo period writer hb: whoops, a minor accidental synchrony. How did we both end up taking our examples from the Edo period in Japan? js: was Santo Kyoden. His work was illustrated by a famous artist called Kitao Masanobu. There around the same time, an enterprising merchant known as Kyoya Denzo. Separate entries for them can be found in various biographical dictionaries for writers, artists and people of the Edo period. Iwase Sei is however a name you will not find in spite that Iwase Sei is the real name behind `Santo Kyoden', `Kitao Masanobu' and `Kyoya Denzo'. Another example is Murasaki Shikibu who wrote around 1000 AD, the world famous Japanese novel-romance, The Tale of Genji. `Murasaki Shikibu' is made up of the name of the main female character in The tale of Genji -- Murasaki -- and part of the title once held by her father Shikibu -- `Bureau of ceremony'. Her individual name has not survived. hb: we Westerners have used a similar system without destroying individuality. We know of folks like Alexander the Great and Richard the Lionhearted by deed names, not family names. The Moslems keep in mind heros like Mohammed Ali (not the boxer), Kamal Ataturk, and Salah Ad-Din without remembering their given names. But we sure as hell remember these people as individuals. Their accomplishments mark them out as individuals far more than do their given names. Even the dichotomy we're discussing here, whether the given name or the name used to represent one's achievements is the "real" name of the indidual, represents a perceptual sliceing system in which we can see folks situationally or in terms of social moorings. However deeds are social moorings as much as family. A microtubule extends from a centrosome--the equivalent of a family or genetic line. The success of the centrosome from which it springs has a role in its fate. But its individual success or failure will ultimately determine whether it lives to make the name of its centrosomal family famous or dies and is forgotten. So it is with, say the children of Israel. Israel was a famous founding father (by the way, Israel was what you might call his situational or achievement name--Jacob was his given name). But how many would-be founding fathers were there whose chosen path resulted in failure and whose names were forgotten? Their family likeness was a gift of the conformity enforcer. Their separate search paths was a product of the diversity generator. Their sense of confidence, control, and power or of self-doubt, depression, and powerlessness was a gift of the utility sorter. The goods and influence they accumulated was the product of the resource shifter. And the fact that the ones who succeeded within the group--Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--are remembered is in part thanks to their group's success in 3,000 years of intergroup tournaments. By the way, Mary Douglas has in interactive system like that of situational versus group-positional identities--hers is called grid and group. As with the deed versus family (situational versus group-positional) notion I've proposed, her elements are not dichotomous but interdependent. js The 'collectivist' 'individualist' underneath is a difference in social promiscuity. Social psychology is shared between people: all people seek to belong to groups, show preference to ingroup members against outsiders etc. hb: agreed with gusto. Howard >>
A species is a large backbone of genetic vertebrae, an integrated squadron of genes, spreading tendrils in all directions, adding refinements, upgrades and attachments to its exterior, accesorizing profligately in the effort to take advantage of as many niches as possible before the next act of nature or, far worse, glaciation, or, even more powerful a scourer of insufficiently adaptive gene platoons, a mass extinction, a sudden-death play off for the gene-teams of species which have evolved since the last calamity of this kind washed clean the rigid failures from the earth. Or so is the implication of a combination of two papers. One is David Smillie's "The Advantages of Sexual Reproduction From An Evolutionary Perspective." The other is Virginia Morell's "Ecology Returns to Speciation Studies." Science, 25 June 1999: 2106-2080, as interpreted by Bloom thusly-- What follows is a bit of information which blows giant holes in the current notions of what genes and species are and how they evolve. The indication from the article I'm about to give you bits of, Virginia Morell's "Ecology Returns to Speciation Studies." Science, 25 June 1999: 2106-2080, is that environmental pressures do far more to shape the genetic structure and overall engineering features of an animal than genes alone. Similar circumstances seem to prod the billion-year-old genetic backbone which underlies the hereditary pattern of every animal on earth to go through the same tricks, even if those tricks are performed thousands of miles apart. In fact, so powerful are the commands with which circumstance orders genes to perform preordained flips and twists that species evolving thousands of miles apart are still able to mate with each other PROVIDING they have evolved in similar ecological niches. If they haven't, and their niches are radically different, they may not be able to mate even if they share a common ancestor and live within a few miles or less of each other. How could the shape of an ecological niche have such amazing powers? Corollary generator theory says that if you start a universe off with a handful of axioms, toss in an "operator" like, say, the forward surge of time, and use that operator to derive corollaries from the initial axioms, the universe you end up with will be forced to do a not-exactly-random stagger down a set of predetermined paths. Corollary generator theory further says that there will be many choice points (bifurcations) along the route, points at which the system could travel the path of several lemmas--equally acceptable outbranchings of the increasingly intricate corollary map. So there's a lot of room for "free will" and its inanimate equivalent, chance in a corollary-generating universe. However the branching paths are constrained by the fact that each must be consistent with the original handful of axioms. In other words, the path an atom, molecule, sun, planet, galaxy, or species takes is constrained like that of a pinball rolling on one predetermined plane in a predetermined direction (down) through a series of set pins and robotically rigid flippers. Since genes are an expression of the Big Bang's original two or three axioms, they can only branch in so many directions, just as self-assembling atoms can be inventive as all get out, but can only travel 109 paths. You might call those 109 paths--the number of shapes atoms are able to assume--the only evolutionarily stable strategies available to combinations of subatomic particles. Genes seem similarly constrained by their roots in the interaction between adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine. Environment seems one of the major constrainers, and, in its turn environment is limited in its number of forms. Why? Environment springs from the same set of cosmic axioms from which life comes. It, too, has its constraints, its limited number of choice points. Hence the similarity between planets and stars. For all their difference they are matter fallen into recognizably constrained forms. As Carl Sagan used to love to tell us, there are billions and billions of things out there beyond our atmosphere whose similarity is so species-specific that we can clearly tell a star from a planet, a planet from a moon, and a galaxy from a relatively empty hole in space. The universe's initial axioms are much like the fates of Greek mythology, "Clotho, who spun the web of life; Lachesis, who measured its length; and Atropos, who cut it." (Description courtesy of the Columbia Desk Encyclopedia.) By the way, what those axioms may be is still a matter for metaphysical guesswork. However I'm putting my money on attraction, repulsion, and time--three magic beans from which all else has sprung. Anybody have other guesses? See Ravens In Winter, Bernd Heinrich, roughly page forty for relevant examples of corvid speciation. Here's the relevant material backing this picture of the Big Bang Tango and its aftermath, several surprisingly unorthodox passages from Morell's "Ecology Returns to Speciation Studies." ------------------------------ In the dominant picture of speciation, put forth in 1942 by Harvard University's Ernst Mayr, a geographic barrier develops between two populations, interrupting gene flow between them. Even if the populations live in identical environments, gradually they diverge through random mutations, so that if they ever encounter each other later, they will be unable to mate.... Dolph Schluter, an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, and his colleagues are addressing this question using marine and stream?dwelling stickleback fish from British Columbia and their ecologically similar but genetically distant counterparts in Japan; the freshwater fish may have speciated from marine ancestors only 13,000 years ago. The freshwater descendants on both sides of the Pacific look nearly identical to one another??small and husky, with deep jaws and snouts that point down so they can suction food off the bottom of the stream bed. In both cases, the dumpy shape lets the fish swim while feeding from the bottom. The ancestral marine forms of all these fish are also remarkably similar, with streamlined, torpedo?shaped bodies. "It's a great example of parallel evolution; I guarantee you can't easily tell them apart," says Schluter. Indeed, even the fish can be fooled. To see whether ecology was a strong force in causing reproductive isolation regardless of geography and shared history, Schluter teamed up with Jeffrey McKinnon of the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, and Seiichi Mori of the University of Gifu?keizai in Ogaki, Japan, gathering Japanese and Canadian sticklebacks and putting them in his tanks at UBC. The team released female Japanese marine sticklebacks, heavy with eggs, one at a time into a tank containing a single male??a Canadian marine or freshwater form, or a Japanese freshwater form. If the female found the male acceptable as a mate, she entered his nest. Geographic speciation
would predict that fish from each continent??most similar genetically??would
mate with each other and be reproductively isolated from those from
the other continent, says McKinnon. But in this case, ecology won out.
Japanese marine females spurned their closely related freshwater cousins
but mated with their distantly related Canadian marine counterparts.
Canadian freshwater females also accepted Japanese freshwater mates,
and vice versa; these crosses produced viable hybrids, says Schluter. Coldness, darkness,
obstruction, a Solid CHAPTER II 1. The Immortal
stood frozen amidst 2. Till impatience
no longer could bear 3. Crack'd across
into numberless fragments. 4. Hurl'd apart
on all sides as a falling 5. He rose on the
floods; then he smote 6. Down the heavy
sunk, cleaving around A while back David
Smillie sent a paper which indicated that a species is an enduring genetic
chain of substantial complexity which dresses itself in genetic acessories
to fill as many niches as possible before the next major despeciation,
the next major life?destroying catastrophe. One catastrophe has dwarfed
all others in the public imagination over the last decade??the destruction
of the dinosaurs as the result of a comet splash down. Stephen Jay Gould
went out of his way ten years ago to publicize another mass despeciation??the
Cambrian extinction??for which he gave no cause. Now the snowball earth
theories which first appeared roughly a year ago are putting definite
dates to eath's life extinguishing episodes, those which some species
managed to accessorize sufficiently to survive while others less clever
in their genetic adaptations died. Specifically, the data suggests that
the pre?Cambrian extinction occurred courtesy of a deep freeze and the
lack of greenhouse gases which may have triggered it. In fact, the data
suggests that one of these cataclysms hit in roughly 700,000 bp, just
before the rise of the first Ediacarans and the first clams, and another
freeze?over coated the earth with ice around 600,000 bp, probably triggering
the pre?Cambrian die off which did the Ediacarans in and opened the
door for virtually all of today's major multicellular animal and plant
families. Hoefully we, too, will ornament ourselves with sufficient
gadgetry to endure the next disaster, whether it be by over greenhousing
ourselves, tossing ourselves into the cooler, or irradiating the planet
in a manor that only bacteria such as Deinococcus radiodurans could
enjoy. My vote for a species adornment of adaptive value is the space
ship. Which may give Mike Waller inspiration for yet another poem. Meanwhile,
here's the news on snowball earth and the dates of its reoccurances.
Howard Source: Penn State (http://www.psu.edu/)Date: Posted 10/29/99
Oxygen May Be Cause Of First Snowball Earth Denver, Colo. ?? Increasing
amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere could have triggered the first of
three past episodes when the Earth became a giant snowball, covered
from pole to pole by ice and frozen oceans, according to a Penn State
researcher. "We have convincing evidence that at least six of the
seven continents were once glaciated, and we also have evidence that
some of these continents were near the equator when they were covered
with ice," says Dr. James F.Kasting, professor of geosciences and
meteorology. "Two of these global glaciations occurred at 600 and
750 million years ago, but the earliest occurred at 2.3 billion years
ago. "According to Kasting, if it is assumed that the magnetic
evidence for glaciation at the equator is correct, then only two possible
explanations for equatorial glaciation exist.One is that the Earth's
tilt, which is now at 23.5 degrees from vertical, was higher than about
54 degrees from vertical. This would have positioned Earth so that the
poles received the most solar energy and the equator would receive the
least, creating a glacier around the middle but still leaving the poles
unfrozen. The other possibility, which is the one that Kasting leans
toward now, is that the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere fell low
enough so that over millions of years, glaciers gradually encroached
from the poles to 30 degrees from the equator. Then, in about 1,000
years, the remainder of the Earth rapidly froze due to the great reflectivity
of the already ice?covered areas and their inability to capture heat
from the sun. The entire Earth became a snowball with oceans frozen
to more than a half mile deep."For the latest two glaciations,
carbon dioxide levels fell low enough to beginthe glaciation process.
However, for the earliest glaciation, the key may havebeen methane,"
Kasting told attendees at the annual meeting of the GeologicalSociety
of America today (Oct. 27) in Denver. "The earliest known snowballEarth
occurred around the time that oxygen levels in the atmosphere began
torise," says Kasting, who is a member of the Penn State Astrobiology
Center."Before then, methane was a major greenhouse gas in the
atmosphere inaddition to carbon dioxide and water vapor."As oxygen
levels increased, methane levels decreased dramatically andcarbon dioxide
levels had not built up enough to compensate, allowing theEarth to cool.
Oxygen levels need only reach a hundredth of a percent ofpresent?day
oxygen levels to convert the methane atmosphere completely.Once the
Earth is snow covered, it takes 5 to 10 million years for the naturalactivity
of volcanos to increase carbon dioxide enough to melt the glaciers.Regardless
of the greenhouse gas involved, the pattern of freezing anddefrosting
would be the same. Because the sun has been constantly increasingin
brightness, it would take more greenhouse gas in the past to compensate
forthe fainter sun. For the glaciations at 600 and 750 million years
ago, estimatesare that carbon dioxide levels equal to recent pre?industrial
levels or up tothree times pre?industrial levels would have been sufficient
for snowball Earthto occur.Because many continents existed in the warm
equatorial areas during the mostrecent glaciations, Kasting believes
that rapid weathering of calcium andmagnesium silicate rocks, which
consumes carbon dioxide, lowered levelssufficient to cool things."It
would have taken nearly 300 times present levels of carbon dioxide tobring
the Earth out of its ice cover," says Kasting. "Then, once
the highreflectivity ice was gone, the carbon dioxide would have overcompensatedand
the Earth would become very warm until rapid weathering would removecarbon
dioxide from the atmosphere."One reason that many scientists initially
rejected the snowball Earth theorywas that biological evidence does
not suggest that the various forms of life onEarth branched out from
the latest total glaciation. A variety of life forms hadto survive from
before the glaciation, which is difficult to imagine on anice?covered
world. Perhaps the ancestors of life today survived in refuges likehot
springs or near undersea thermal vents."The biological puzzle of
snowball Earth is very interesting," says Kasting."Events
suggest that life was more robust than we thought and that the Earth'sclimate
was much less stable than we assumed."Editor's Note: The original
news release can be found athttp://www.psu.edu/ur/NEWS/news/snowballearth.htmlNote:
This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Penn State
forjournalists and other members of the public. If you wish to quote
from any part of thisstory, please credit Penn State as the original
source. You may also wish to includethe following link in any citation:
In a message dated 99?08?18 15:53:28 EDT, you write: Subj: Re: Forces mightier than genes Date: 99?08?18 15:53:28 EDT From: geistvrReply?to: geistvr To: HowlBloom File: Forcesmi.txt (15229 bytes) DL Time (TCP/IP): < 1 minuteDear Howard,Nice posting! The lovely insight from the stickleback work is that similarity is more than skin deep. However, from the standpoint of ETHOLOGY, the experimental outcome is exactly what what our accumulated experience in Animal Behviour would predict. No surprise whatsoever! hb: hooray for the good guys!!!!Secondly, with sticklebacks being faced with the same ecological opportunmities with every glaciation and deglaciation (at least 20 in the past 1.8 my), hb: Val, do you have some sort of chart of these glaciations and when they took place which I could tuck into the computer for reference? Many is the time when I wanted to pin events in my new book down to glaciation stages and couldn't because I couldn't find a clear layout of when each happened. with every minor,
let alone mayor, marine transgression (about a dozen beginning and ending
a glaciation), being united ? Japanese and Canadian stickleback populations
? with every glaciation by the very same coastline (disrupted only during
the short interglacials), I will bet my bottom dollar that all that
has been exposed is the very same, ancient EPIGENETIC programme. In
other words, what has been seen is NOT convergent evolution at all,
but the triggering of the same important epigenetic phenotype ? ghosts
of maintenance and dispersal phenotype, Howard! And, indeed, the infinities of the real world, like those of dice, are apparently trussed and troughed within far narrower boundaries than we generally imagine. Take nature in her early seconds and years. If the present cosmological picture is correct, absolutely identical protons and electrons sprang into existence separated by a considerable distance and with no means of communication to insure they'd adhere to a common pattern. Presumably the causal forces in existence at the time were so limited and so universally rigid that twisting into the form of a proton, neutron, electron, or photon was virtually the only thing a turbulence in the flash flood of inflationary newness could do. Despite all of its current complexities, the universe still bears the mark of those early, inflexible microseconds. I mentioned several days ago that of the 300 particles created in atom smashers up to 1999, only a handful could survive the rigors of this particular cosmos for more than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second (Curt Suplee. Physics in the 20th Century. NY: Abrams, 1999: 142-145). Colliders have produced an extremely prolific reconstruction (or deconstruction) of the process of creation, yet natural selection has allowed very few of the resulting forms to survive the rigors of her demands. Nature we imagine, is astonishingly profligate in her production of living forms...or is she? One remarkable bit of synchronicity suggests that she may not be--at least not when it comes to the evolution of human cultures. In a manuscript on the birth of agriculture still only in the "up for comment" stages, Peter J. Richerson, Robert Boyd, and Robert L. Bettinger have determined that once the shells of ice shackling the planet had pulled back and left plants and humans free to do their thing agriculture got off to an independent start in at least six different locations. I have to confess that having only reached roughly page 25 of the article, I do not know as yet if Richerson et. al. see these independent inventions of virtually the same process as hermetically sealed off from one another or as benefiting from trickles of cultural diffusion. New evidence is rolling in on a fairly regular basis these days that even the most "isolated" of post-glacial cultures, those of the New World, may have been more in touch with the Old Worlds of Asia and Europe than was previously thought. Nonetheless, there is something rather astonishing about the notion that agriculture should have popped up and spread like wild (or tame, in this case) fire through Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas in an era when the continents were at best separated by traveling times measured in years, decades, or centuries, and at the worst utterly cut off from one another. Only two percent of this cosmos' elements are more complex than hydrogen and helium (the figure comes from Alan Guth's _The Inflationary Universe_). Clench a giant fistful of them into one planet circling a remarkably average star, allow the atoms to party under circumstances ranging from ice-cube cold to boiling heat and from utter lack of light to an overdose of sun, let the atomic orgy continue for roughly four billion years, and eventually you will find that a variety of highly intricate beings have step-by-eerie-step assembled themselves. So straight jacketed is the nature of evolution that some progeny of this self-construction process will inevitably prey on others, hoisting themselves up a growing hierarchical ladder of who feeds on whom. Then a few will find an even better strategy. Don't wolf down the beasts and plants which constitute your entrees and appetizers. Coddle them. Pamper and feed them. Encourage their fecundity, and you will find that you have cornered far more protein and vitamins by year's end than you could have in a decade of the old hunt and chase. In a sense it doesn't really matter if the humans in Central America who began farming roughly 7,000 years ago had any contact with those who kicked off the practice in the Middle East 3,000 years earlier or not. Ants domesticate aphids and grow fungal gardens on an industrial scale. Three hundred million years ago cellulose-munching bacteria artificially selected ancient cockroaches, encouraging them to specialize in munching wood much as we have encouraged certain dogs to hunt, others to stand guard, and yet others to sit comfortably on laps. The microorganisms' domestication of Cryptocercidae led to the production of termites, well bred beasts which continue fattening their internal masters with pre-munched woodchips to this day. Then there's the question of sheep, cows, and grasses. Is it we who have domesticated them or they who have domesticated us? We offer them a safety, a certainty of more than enough to eat, and a crack at fertility which they never would have achieved had they not found a way to pay us off for our well-disguised enslavement to their needs. But I digress. One way or the other, on this particular planet at least, agriculture of the sort practiced by humans, insects, and microbeasts seems to have been an inevitability, an opportunity waiting to be discovered, a possibility laying in ambush, an evolutionarily impatient strategy waiting for we human blunderers and our insect and microbial relatives to stumble into it and give it life. It certainly would not be the first complex strategy to pounce on the Big Bang's progeny and hold them captive in the prison of its chosen forms. Stars and galaxies were also apparently recipes waiting for their ingredients to arrive. So, it appears, were other snares of form which had come before them--that which trapped protons, neutrons, and electrons in the cage we call an atom; that which snagged a flare of energy into the pip without squeaking room which we call a quark. Damn this universe.
How dare she act like this. She offers us one way tickets toward the
infinite, and in her own way delivers on her promise. Yet how few are
the routes she lets us take. Howard _______________________________ Break all the rules
Playing fast and loose with light speed could be a good thing CHANGING
the speed of light gives physicists all sorts of headaches. Now scientists
in Argentina have found one more: electric charge might start to appear
as if from nowhere. But surprisingly, this may turn out to be a good
thing for theories of the early Universe. Last year, two groups of researchers
put forward theories of the Universe's expansion that require the speed
of light to have slowed since the big bang. One argument in support
of a changing light speed is the fact that temperature and density are
relatively uniform across the Universe. There's no way such far-flung
corners of space can be causally connected (see Diagram) unless light
once travelled faster than it does now (New Scientist, 24 July 1999,
p 28). [or, says Bloom, unless the photons and baryons precipitating
from the energy rush were still so closely tethered to the axioms implicit
in the universe's birth that their freedom of "choice" was
severely limited. Either you became one of the few standard forms that
fit the framwork of the big kick-off's simple principles or you became
what was in between them-the outwardly flashing space time continuum
which we call nothing at all.] Now Hector Vucetich, Susanna Landau and
Pablo Sisterna at the University of La Plata in Argentina say that if
the speed of light isn't constant, then charge conservation--another
central tenet of physics--will be violated. One way to understand their
proof is to think of light as a wave of oscillating electromagnetic
fields with an associated electric current shuttling charge back and
forth. If the speed of the wave falls, the associated current will deposit
charge faster than it picks it up, resulting in a net creation of positive
charge. "This imposes strict limits on theories with varying light
speed," says Vucetich. "It means they are almost impossible
to get right." The result may pose big problems for the theory
put forward last year by John Barrow of the University of Cambridge.
This proposes that the speed of light falls continuously as the Universe
expands, meaning that it is still falling today. If this is happening,
then Vucetich's result means either that the charge on the electron
must change, that electrons mysteriously disappear or that neutrons
are transformed into protons. Yet numerous experiments on charge conservation
have failed so far to pick up any such effects. At first sight this
looks like a blow for the speed change idea, but theories in which the
speed of light drops suddenly and then stays constant fare better. João
Magueijo at Imperial College, London, and Andreas Albrecht at the University
of California, Davis, proposed last year that the speed of light was
greater immediately after the Universe was created, and fell to its
current value a fraction of a second after the big bang. Vucetich's
calculations predict that this drop would have been accompanied by a
sudden generation of excess charge. "It's a good thing, too,"
says Magueijo. One of the mysteries of modern physics is that there
appears to be more matter than antimatter in the Universe. It has been
suggested that in the early Universe a process called baryogenesis took
place, creating excess matter and breaking the symmetry between matter
and antimatter. Magueijo suspects that excess charge generation might
correspond to baryogenesis of protons. "It's an intriguing idea,"
says his coauthor Albrecht. Source: Astrophysics e-print 0007108 at
http://xxx.lanl.gov Eugenie Samuel From New Scientist magazine, 22 July
2000 Skull Find May Redefine Evolution Updated 6:07 PM ET March 21, 2001 By WILLIAM McCall, Associated Press Writer Scientists have discovered a 3.5 million-year-old skull in Kenya that may force them to rethink the central place of the fossil nicknamed "Lucy" in the human evolutionary tree. The skull was identified by Meave Leakey, a member of the famed fossil-hunting Leakey family. She said it is about the same age as Lucy but appears to be a completely different and previously unknown species, with a more human-like face. Researchers named the species Kenyanthropus platyops, or "flat-faced man of Kenya." Leakey said the chances are 50-50 that this species - and not Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis - was an early direct ancestor of humans. "We've always assumed Lucy was our ancestor, and now we need to re-evaluate that idea," Frank Brown, a University of Utah geologist who helped date the site. The skull was found by researchers at the National Museums of Kenya in 1998-99 along the shores of Lake Turkana. Lucy's bones were found in Ethiopia in 1974. An analysis of the more recently discovered skull was published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. Leakey said the species represented by the new skull could have been an ancestor of modern humans, or it could have been an evolutionary dead end. At the same time, she said, the same could apply to Lucy. And she acknowledged that researchers still could easily find a third possible ancestor from that period because of the great number of fossil discoveries being made in Africa. Leakey and her husband, Richard, who is known for his work as a Kenyan wildlife activist, have made a series of fossil discoveries in East Africa, following in the footsteps of Richard Leakey's parents, Louis and Mary Leakey. The Kenya skull has distinct qualities that appear to separate it from Lucy's species, Leakey and her colleagues reported. She said one of the most striking things about the skull is how human its face looks. Andrew Hill, a Yale anthropologist, said the skull has the unusual combination of a large, flat face and small teeth, compared with the generally big teeth and a different facial structure for Lucy. Hill said differences in teeth and jaw structure suggest different diets led to evolutionary changes. "You have to look for dietary reasons they're separated like this, as perhaps an environmental adaptation to different regions at about the same time," Hill said. Although Leakey believes the skull represents a genus - a grouping that includes related species - that is separate from Lucy's Australopithecus, another researcher said it also could just be a subcategory of Lucy's species or a related but different species within her genus. "I think that's the most controversial part of this paper, the claim that it's a new genus," said Tim White, an anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley. "If you think of a family tree with a trunk, we're talking about two trunks, if they're right." Leakey said it was not surprising to find evidence that ancient forerunners of humans diverged along separate evolutionary paths around Lucy's time. "The fact we haven't seen it before is more a lack of evidence, I believe," she said. In a commentary accompanying the study, George Washington University anthropologist Daniel Lieberman said the skull adds to the confusion about the human evolutionary tree. But he said it also adds to evidence that there were several human-like species between 2 million and 3.5 million years ago that adapted well to different environments. He noted that the skull's discovery, made during field work sponsored by the National Geographic Society, is among a series of fossil finds over the past 15 years that have nearly doubled the number of recognized human-like species. "To those of us who are interested in reconstructing the evolutionary history of our species, these discoveries have been fun, if a little bewildering," Lieberman said. _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ We do the same sort of things with parrots and other pet-birds--birds who become as attached to us as we become to them. And, as Irene Pepperberg has shown, parrots can become pretty swift in their grasp of human language. Why so many commonalities? We're not that far apart biologically. We're not that far apart behaviorally. And we inhabit many a common environment. Put three vertebrate species into a world whose constraints are pretty much the same despite the fact that some (like whales) cruise through the seas and others (birds) soar above the trees, and you get birds who sing, humans who compose, and whales that hum symphonies. vg: Bird song is not music, hb: Val, you usually have good--extraordinarily good--reasons for saying things like this. But there are scientists--and musicians--who would disagree. The relatively new field of biomusicology is based on a belief that much animal sound is far more musical than is generally believed. See the article below for details. The person who taught me about animal musicality was Paul Winter--the highly-respected saxaphonist. Paul played duets with wolves and whales and was convinced that he was engaged in cross-species communication. So were many of the naturalists who gave him access to the animals with whom he was ensembling. This doesn't mean Paul was right. He's a New Ager, and New Agers tend to indulge in a great deal of wishful thinking. The biomusicologists, on the other hand, seem to have a good handle on what they're talking about. I haven't examined the biomusicologists' journal articles closely enough to know how good their science is. But, like music, one person's scientific meat is another's pseudoscientific poison. I think most of the mathematical "science" done in the name of population biology, for example, is useful as a source of thought stimulation, but is not at all the definitive stuff its adherents pretend it is. In my opinion, mathematical abstractions should never take precedence over empirical observations. But there are many who think in just the opposite manner, and find the empirical to be trivial. Mere "anecdote", they say, can never trump a solid equation. In other words, one person's music is another's noise, and one person's science is another's intriguing absurdity. Making absolute judgements is a tricky business. vg: despite its parallel attributes to music. Music is a uniquely human form of sound generation, undoubtedly a product of synergies, and deeply anchored in human biology. hb: the reasoning behind this statement sounds potentially highly productive, Val. What biological features of humans make them more capable of music than their chordate or vertebrate cousins? vg: It needs to be segregated, initially, form the paleopsychology of communication as such. Your discussion is relevant to the latter, but not to music. hb: here's some relevant material. First, for the role of mimicry, which you've shown to be critical to the development of human communication: Thorpe, W. H., & North, M. E. [1965]. Origin and significance of the power of vocal imitation: with special reference to the antiphonal singing of birds, Nature, 209, 219-222. Next, a summary of biomusicology: From Science News, Vol. 157, No. 16, April 15, 2000, p. 252. Music without Borders When birds trill and whales woo-oo, we call it singing. Are we serious? By S. Milius Luis Baptista-presumably-is not making this up. Especially not in a symposium at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Still, the overflow crowd bursts out in giddy, slightly incredulous laughter. Baptista, curator of ornithology and mammalogy at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, has played a tape including one of the most recognizable phrases in Western music: "Ba-ba-ba baaahm." Baptista has primed his audience on what to listen for, but still a high-pitched version of the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony rings out unmistakably. Not. The notes come from a white-breasted wood wren in Mexico, Baptista tells the audience. The bird and Beethoven sound astonishingly similar and represent one of the many convergences Baptista has found between music and birdsongs. At the February meeting in Washington, D.C., he described birds conforming to musical scales, improvising sonatas, even rewriting Mozart. Common word choice tells the story, he argues. Frogs croak, dogs bark, wolves howl-but, Baptista notes, birds "sing." Such a happy overlap with music holds great promise for introducing people to the marvels of species diversity, Baptista urges. Other researchers wring more significance from the convergences. Pioneering animal communications researcher Peter Marler of the University of California, Davis holds that for insights into the origins of music, the vocal behavior of birds will prove to be as profitable to study as that of monkeys and apes. This attention to animal music arises with growing interest in a broader area called biomusicology. Biologists are collaborating with musicologists to ask what music is and how it evolved. The mix has raised far more questions than it has answered, but it's attracting new fans to composers with feathers, fur, and some really loud noises. Think twice, though, before saying something crass like "animal noises" around pianist Patricia Gray of the National Musical Arts program. "We say 'musical sounds,'" Gray responds firmly. Gray, who lives in Greensboro, N.C., has formed a coalition of about a dozen scientists and musicians under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences. Through concerts and seminars, this BioMusic Project is "exploring the musical sounds of all species," she says. So, does Gray accept a sparrow twitter as equivalent to her own keyboard artistry? "Why not?" she wants to know. "Why is it we go to other species with preconceptions of what our music means?" Gray takes only the briefest pause before diving in to answer the blunt question, What is music? When she was a college student, she recalls, composers were exploding conventions governing the sounds that could go into a musical piece. Compositions featured dissonances, fragments of speech, random noises, even John Cage's 4 minutes, 33 seconds of silence. The silent piece, 4'33", "was performed," Gray says, dodging the question of whether she, too, thinks silence is music. Out of this meltdown of musical tradition, Gray emerged with a spare definition. "Music is sound and time," she says. "Sound and time." Gray's definition easily finds musicality in chirps, hoots, buzzes, and the myriad other acoustic phenomena of the living world. As a starting place for less liberal ears, however, she recommends avian music. That works for music psychologist Diana Deutsch of the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla. She divides human sound communications into three loose groups: speech, music, and paralinguistic utterances such as laughs, screams, and groans. She likens the shrieks, yelps, and howls of many animals to that last category. However, "when we come to birdsong, with its elaborate hierarchical patterning, it seems that music provides a better analogy," Deutsch says. Marler agrees that the majority of animal sounds will turn out to be "entirely emotional," although some communicate information about the outside world (SN: 9/12/98, p. 174). But he thinks that studies of whales and birds can contribute to the understanding of the origins of music. Birds have earned the respect of some of the world's greatest musicians, Baptista says. Mozart selected a starling as a pet and musical companion. The bird was an excellent choice, Baptista explains. Starlings pass down musical traditions, older males to younger males and older females to younger females. These birds mimic skillfully and abundantly-frogs, goats, and whistling shepherds. Baptista cites a study of 80 wild starlings in France that turned up 105 imitations of other species. For starlings, music brings rewards. Females favor males that sing longer, more complex songs. Mozart seems to have admired his avian companion's musical skills. One of his notebooks records a passage from the last movement of the Piano Concerto in G Major and the same passage as the starling revised it. The bird imitated it closely but changed the sharps to flats. "Das war schön"-That was beautiful!,- reads the comment in Mozart's hand. When the starling died, Mozart held graveside ceremonies, singing hymns and reciting a poem he'd written for the fallen songster. Baptista agrees with two other ornithologists who have argued that Mozart's next composition, an odd sextet for strings and two horns, known as "A Musical Joke," shows starling style. Mozart wrote it only 8 days after the death of his bird, and it includes such starling-like bits as intertwined tunes, off-key recapitulations, and an abrupt ending. Also, Baptista suggests new evidence for the starling's influence. He points out that starlings have the two-part syrinx, or voice organ, typical of songbirds and can belt out two songs at the same time. Baptista has even documented a starling simultaneously mimicking two birds-a grey fantail and a kelp gull-with the two sides of its syrinx. So, the final cadence of the sextet, essentially written in two keys played simultaneously, might honor the starling singing in two voices. Mozart wasn't the only composer moved by birdsongs. Beethoven may have been such a fan that he plagiarized a motif from a contemporary feathered composer. Baptista plays the suspicious phrases, which form the lilting opening to the rondo of Beethoven's "Violin Concerto in D, Opus 61." A birder noted in 1953 that a European blackbird, a relative of U.S. robins, had come up with the same theme. Almost 30 years later, another sharp listener reported the same blackbird song. Both he and Baptista noted that generations of blackbirds seem to have preserved that tune, so perhaps it dated back to a time when Beethoven himself heard and borrowed it. At least some of the enthusiasm for bird music comes from the sounds themselves, which lie so close to counterparts in the music of people. From ornithology recordings, Baptista conjures much of an orchestra. For oboe, for example, he selects the Australian diamond firetail finch, and for flute, he picks the long whistles of the white-bellied green imperial pigeon and the descending run of short notes uttered by the strawberry finch. He elects as bassoonist the common potoo, with a call that reminds him of the beginning of Mozart's clarinet quintet, albeit slightly off-key. He even finds an avian tuba: a western crowned pigeon of New Guinea booming out its courtship song. Ornithologists have noted birdsongs pitched to the same musical scales used by people, Baptista points out. Wood thrushes can conform to the familiar Western diatonic scale; canyon wrens come close to the more complex chromatic scale, and hermit thrushes sing with the pentatonic scale of traditional Asian music. Baptista can also summon from birds the rhythm and volume modulations that human composers employ: an accelerando in the wood warbler's windup, a swelling crescendo from the Heuglin's robin-chat, a fading diminuendo from the Swainson's thrush, and so on. Such musical phenomena as the borrowing of melodies, singing in duets or duels, and passing down traditions through families from generation to generation also show up in birds, Baptista reports. Some species even compose in sonata form. A song sparrow, for example, belts out one of its themes, equivalent to a sonata's opening exposition, then fiddles with it a bit here and there much the way a nonfeathered composer develops a theme. The sparrow eventually burbles the original theme again, a version of a sonata's final recapitulation. The similarity between bird and human sonatas is more than coincidence, Baptista argues. He recalls midcentury American aesthetician Charles Hartshorne proposing, "What stimulates animal organisms is change; what deadens response is sameness." This maxim governs people, too, Baptista says, and a composer's variations on a theme catch the attention through novelty. However, unrelieved novelty eventually exhausts the perceiver, and a reference to the familiar relieves the fatigue. Birds and people share these reactions, Baptista argues, so he's not surprised that they also share composition strategies. Humpback whales, too, are "inveterate composers," says Roger Payne of the Ocean Alliance in Lincoln, Mass., after 3 decades of oceanic listening. The most musicianlike of the whales, male humpbacks sing while cruising around their summer breeding grounds or migrating. The loud, wavering songs string together several repeated phrases or themes, and one whale's session of song after song can stretch more than 24 hours. Males change their songs as the months pass. All the males in the same ocean sing basically the same tunes, even though the current hit takes some time to travel. "There seems to be no limit to what they can come up with. It's just that they get there by modifying existing sounds rather than by creating them de novo, as is our habit," Payne observes. Whatever the process, humpbacks sing in patterns that Payne calls "strikingly similar" to human musical traditions. He detects rhythms, phrases that last just a few seconds, song lengths ranging between those of human ballads and symphonic movements, and percussive elements as an occasional emphasis in longer strains of pure tones. Even though a whale can woo-oo over at least seven octaves, Payne finds that it combines notes that have wavelength relationships familiar to people's ears. Most surprising, says Payne, is the discovery that humpbacks use rhymes. "When someone speaks in a language you don't understand, you still know when they are reciting poetry," he argues. Among whales, a particular sound repeats at relatively regular intervals. These rhymes may be for whales just what moon, spoon, and June do for human crooners, suggest Linda Guinee and Katy Payne of Cornell University. For a long concert during breeding season, the rhymes may help the performer remember what comes next. When Guinee and Payne checked for rhymes in simple and elaborate humpback songs, the complex ones were much more likely to rhyme. Although primates are closer to Pavarotti than a whale is, they aren't particularly musical, notes Thomas Geissmann of the Institute of Zoology in Hannover, Germany. In his work on evolution, he accepts as a song a string of notes, usually of more than one type, that form a recognizable pattern in time. Some 26, or 11 percent, of primate species sing by this definition, he reports in The Origins of Music (2000, N.L. Wallin et al., eds., MIT Press). The chanteurs include some of the indris, tarsiers, titis, and gibbons. The behavior seems to have evolved independently four times within primates, he says. Scientists who have focused their careers on animal communications vary widely in their opinions on the parallels between twitters and tunes. Eugene Morton, an ornithologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and a BioMusic member, applauds the project's efforts to tout the marvels of birdsongs as markers of biodiversity. However, he turns almost stern at the question of whether those sounds are really songs dressed up in feathers. "Any analogy to human music is not interesting to me," Morton says. "It doesn't explain anything about how the world is, except how humans want to perceive it. Good on 'em, but I want to understand animals." From a bird's perspective, he argues, song is either "territorial defense or mate attraction, but in both cases it's very-long-distance communication." His 1992 book Animal Talk (Random House) expounds the idea that vocal traditions constitute an avian broadcasting network, letting birds minimize the arduous work of flying about during interactions. "That's where I think it differs from human music," he says. "Human music isn't particularly distance related." Entomologist Thomas Eisner of Cornell University likewise draws a distinction between enjoying animal sounds and saying that animals make music. He remembers Payne bringing him the first recording of humpback whale sounds. "He insisted that we both have a glass of wine before we listened to it," Eisner recalls. "We went to the studio, we put on earphones, and I was sent into outer space." As an accomplished keyboard player, Eisner says, "If a whale calls me up tomorrow and wants to do an evening of sonatas, I would be the first to volunteer." Do the whales, however, perceive their sounds as sweet music? "It's an untestable question in scientific terms," he says. "The sense of inner tranquility that I personally get out of listening to the Goldberg Variations I can't test for. I can't even test for it in another human being." Nonetheless, lobster specialist Jelle Atema of Boston University, who has played flute to Eisner's accompaniment, acknowledges some similarities between human music and animal utterances. "Birds, too, learn their songs and use them to be known and attractive in their social environment," Atema explains. "Males sing. Other males hate them for it and try to sing louder, better, longer to impress the other sex. "I bet that the effects of all these vocalizations are measurable in hormonal responses that alter the behavior of the listener," Atema says. "And here we may be similar to animals. Galina Vishnevskaya need only sing one note, and she pierces my heart." Psychologist Carol
Krumhansl of Cornell University suggests looking for similarities in
perceptions of sound sequences. Her work with music, such as the strings
of syllables known as yoiks in Finland, has suggested regularities in
the way people learn what to expect next in a melody. She raises the
question of whether other species have similar expectations. In the
end, speculating about animal sounds and their effects may tell us mostly
about ourselves, says Atema. "All we can do scientifically is to
measure our noises, catalog them, analyze their components and structure,
and then do the same for animal noises," he says. "'Splitters'
will then decide that humans are demonstrably different from animals
and thus animals do not have music. 'Lumpers' will see many similarities
and conclude from the same data that we all have a lot of music in common."
In all the theorizing over the nature of music, Baptista urges listeners
to remember the plight of the musicians. A quail species that Beethoven,
Schubert, and Haydn all echoed in their compositions has disappeared
in parts of Europe, he laments. The Soccorro mockingbirds, which sing
in counterpoint, are losing habitat to sheep. Beyond all the acoustical
analysis, Baptista says, "part of the magic of a bird's song is
found in the miracle of the bird itself." Name that tune: a, warbler;
b, whale; c, flute; d, person. From Science News, Vol. 157, No. 16,
April 15, 2000, p. 252.
------------------------------ ds: Seehausen et al. show that when Lake Victoria in Africa becomes cloudy there is a loss of the complex speciation process and a merging of differences. She ignores this, despite the fact that it was published in Science!Seehausen et al. indicate that presumed speciation in Lake Victoria is dependent on female choice of males within the incipient species. hb: hmmm, this is exactly the mechanism I proposed for humans undergoing cultural and genetic "pseudo?speciation" in Global Brain. Actually my ideas were extensions of those you'd proposed in one of your papers. This selection involves coloration so that the appropriate males are selected for reproduction. hb: very neat and very supportive of the Global Brain material. Do you have the Seehausen bibliographic data so I can add it to my footnotes. Actualy my deadline is so close that adding things the reader is unlikely to see isn't a good idea, especially since I now have close to 1,600 footnotes. However I'd like to pop this in anyway. The cloudy waters prevent this by making the appropriate males seem much like any other. hb: wow. this is extremely neat. Thus, without sexual selection to pave the way, incipient species are lost. The analogy with human differences that you point out shows that the shift in physical features is a product of the variation that persists in sexual taxa due to the presence of heterozygous alleles, amounting to 10% of the genome in sexual taxa. See Roger Lewin 'Patterns in evolution' (1997) pp. 93?96 hb: Lewin's a good writer, though I disagree with him about a few things. Actually he and I have been in touch. But this sounds like a book that I should read. Alas there are already 20 books I should read on the shelf and that's roughly a year's worth of reading. for a simple account of sexual heterozygosity. It is this heterozygosity which is often cited as one of the main advantages of sexuality. Inbreeding among sexual organisms reduces this heterozygosity. hb: ok, got it. heterozygosity translates to an almost infinite set of permutations and combinations. Let's say there are 50 heterozygous points on the genome. The number of permutations and combinations, if I recall my statistics properly, is 2 to the 50th power. Quite a hefty number and in fact the figure of 50 is likely to be a vast understaement. Which leaves lots of room for diversity generation among the children of the sexual couples. Which in humans has been shown to be the case. If one couple has five kids, they are each likely to pop out of the womb fully endowed with the template of radically different personalities. Some of the differences come not just from genes, but from the chemical environment of the womb, which changes according to the mother's mood. If she's going through stress while having one child and ebullience while having another, the child of stress will be heavily influenced in a negative direction by stress hormones, and the child of happiness will gain the benefit of being bathed for nine months in the hormones of delight. Then once each infant is born, we've got all of Sulloway's factors working to create further differentiation. Not to mention the fact that the genetic and fetal settings of each child cause it to perceive it's family as an entirly different sort of being. ds: This is quite different from the idea that big mutations are responsible for morphological differences hb: darned good point, David. A wonderful, wonderful idea. There's such a mish mosh of mixing and matching in the genome that the deus ex machina of mutation is a frivolous triviality. OK, now consider this. The good old folks at HBES treat the gene and genome as a highly simplified abstraction??which it simply is not. In addition to the fact that genes ONLY work in massive teams??more like armies in reality??the genome is not strung out on a line like words on a page, but is twisted and knotted into a million shapes. A nucleosome, for example is a true Gordion knot of genes compressing thousands of scraps of data into a form whose sculptural qualities??its topology??counts as much as its linear content. Try this nifty little quote on for size: "Most chromosomal DNA is wrapped in left?handed superhelical turns around protein 'spools', called histone octamers, to form nucleosomes. Arrays of these nucleosomes, or 'beads on a string', are further compacted into solenoidal structures, called 30 nm chromatin fibres. The chromatin fibres are, in turn, compacted approximately 250?fold to form topologically independent 'looped' DNA domains, each loop containing about 20,000?100,000 nucleotide pairs of DNA extending from a proteinaceous central scaffold." (Chromosome structures. Benbow RM Sci Prog 1992 76:301?302 Pt 3?4 425?50) So if you add the varieties of topology into the equation, you probably get something like 50 to the 50th power out of a simple string of heterozygous alleles. That is a very heavy duty number indeed. It probably exceeds the numbers of protons in the entire universe. So who needs mutatiion when you have multi?mega?google?plexed variations inherent in the genome. Frankly, this still leaves the question of how genomes make the enormous leaps with ptoduce a whole new sort of being, moving a fish onto the land and giving her legs, for example. One answer could be in transposons and the various other mechanisms which take whole swatches of the genetic string, make copies of it, then add the copies to another spot down the line, bulking up the chromosome with peculiar repetition. Presumably these repetitions are selected for in some way. The gene teams which are xeroxed and spliced into a location which is coded to make a different part of the creature than that which they originally assembled are presumably picked for duplication because they've proven useful. If this were not the case, we'd have thousands of six?headed calves and 20 fingered humans born all the time. David, I'm a bumbling amateur lost in the interior of the nucleus, and incredibly complex place. Can you help me out with this? When and why do large gene teams get duplicated and have their dupes spliced into another spot coding for an entirely different segment of the developmental sequence, meaning another part of the fetus under construction or of the fully born human, for example, shedding its skin of childhood and emerging as an adolescent. Meaning once we've gotten out of the womb the sequences of morphological change goes on almost as actively as they did when we were curled up in the amniotic sacke peacefully sucking our thumbs underneath our mothers' belly buttons. The ingredients for an infiinity of mix and match are under our noses in this paragraph somewhere, but where do the giant creative leaps come in? Gradualism does NOT seem to acount for the leap from lizard to mammal, despite the fact that we've seen several intermediate stages??the small not?quite?lizards and not?yet?mammals which lapped up insects, for example, emerge from the paleontological puzzle works. The creationists (let them forever remain a forsaken subcutlture) have a point here. We have faith in the fact that natural explanations can account for these creative leaps. But it's up to us to do the explaining. Which is where your grasp of things I dont' understand always comes in handy. Please see if you can enlighten me. ds: and thus account
for speciation (Morell). After all the adaptation to ecological niches
can be said to characterize those racial differences you cite, but they
hardly represent true (sexual) speciation. I objected to the idea that
'every animal on earth' fits into the picture Morell has drawn. But
mechanisms other than those found in sexual taxa must be responsible.
Many fungi are asexual, as well as protists. You give a picture of the
quite different pattern in bacteria ? although similarities may also
be there behind the scene. At any rate, the issues deserve careful attention
which is lacking in Morell's coverage. >> hb: good points???take
a look at the topographical twists above and I think you'll find some
of the missing mechanisms. Now what on earth, aside from corollary generation,
can those mechanisms be? Solve this one and you will win a Nobel Prize.
At least you'll win one from me. Howard hb: many thanks,
Val. hb: very intriguing. This was the essential message I got from David Smillie's paper on sexuality as well--a species is a massive team of genes, a sort of genetic backbone which takes on as many adornments as possible, slides itself into numerous niches, and thus increases its odds of surviving the next inevitable catastrophe--be it a meteor collision, an ice age, or the return of a steamy and tropical earth extending all the way to the poles. Hence the immense DNA backbone of four legged beasts has bubbled, bangled, and beaded itself into numerous forms--reptiles which could function on small energy intakes but needed to raise their body temperature by sitting in the sun, mammals, which took more fuel to run but could operate when there were long seasons with little sun, and even seagoing forms (dolphins and whales) which could migrate 6,000 miles to find whichever climate and environment best suited their talents and their needs. Now I wonder how that accessorizing of the genetic backbone is demonstrated in the long branches of a bacterial colony, and how much difference in genes and strategy separation makes. This is especially complex since each bacterial line remains (as do human races and ethnic groups) a part of an integrated colony, and since bacteria, unlike humans limited by sexuality, are much more able to swap genetic fragments over what, in microorganismic terms, are vast distances. vg: He also
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