Re: Life without evolution/evolution without life?

[John Kineman <***>]

Again, a useful clarification. I would grant, however, that there may have
been a learning curve involved too - not at all inconsistent with the point
that the subject matter was different in the two books. The contention that
life produces evolution may have arisen, or at least been confirmed, as a
result of his work, whereas the early study of living systems would
necessarily consider evolution as basic. This is pure speculation on my
part, and only Judith has the historical facts - i.e., how much he had this
insight from the beginning and just developed it methodically, vs. how much
was discovered along the way. But either way, there is nothing to criticize
nor any inconsistency - it is a methodical and self-consistent construction
of ideas to a rather astounding conclusion.

A next logical step, which I tried to take in my ontology paper in 1999
http://www.nexial.org/bmi/ISSS99/nmo_isss99.htm is to then say what
implication complexity has on evolution (because it has previously been
treated the other way around). When you do this, you get a strong
Baldwinian process, which was largely ignored by the neo-Darwinists and
only surfaced today because of cybernetics. It is precisely the role of
functional relationship in evolution that becomes important, and it results
in the necessity of functionally determined evolutionary pathways. This can
provide a theoretical basis for cultural evolution and also have strong
implications for all of biological evolution with regard to how the
possibility space has indeed been filled by evolutionary novelty. It
certainly is a great explanation for punctuated equilibria, because you
would expect to get self-reinforcing pathways that stabilize until
something happens that is directly analogous to a paradigm shift which
could be instigated by a functional change rather than only environmental
or genetic change.

At 07:26 AM 3/24/04 -0500, you wrote:
> I don't really understand why this is still confusing. The full explanation
> is right in those two sentences that Howard quoted from my father. See
> interposed comments:
>
> > > Howard wrote: In AS there
> > >is an entire chapter on Adaptation, Natural Selection and Evolution that
> > >Bob begins by saying: "This [adaptation] is an idea utterly basic to the
> > >biological realm, and which is becoming increasingly important in the
> > >understanding of the properties and control of social systems and human
> > >sciences."
>
> Since he believed that Anticipation is every bit as "utterly basic to the
> biological realm" as he stated that evolution is, it stands to reason that
> the book would have a lot of in depth information about associated
> properties of the biological realm. As I said before, the subject matter was
> entirely because of the nature of the book. Similarly:
>
> > > Howard wrote:
> > >In LI Bob says, [evolution] may very well be more a property of a
> > >particular realization of life, rather than life itself. Thus it is that
> > >the word "evolution" has hardly been mentioned in the preceding
> > > pages." Also, in LI the word "adaptation" is not even in the index.
> > >I think most readers would find a significant change in attitude from
> > >an "idea utterly basic to the biological realm" to and an idea "hardly  >
> > mentioned."
>
> If  "evolution may very well be more a property of a particular realization
> OF life, rather than LIFE, ITSELF"... and the book is about Life, Itself
> (the foundational issues, the causes, the fact that, to even address the
> issues, he had to reanalyze and then reformulate the foundations of physics
> and science in general...) it again stands to reason that this book would
> not get into issues of evolution. Evolution, as he defined it, is something
> that deals with changes in organisms over epochs of  time, not in defining
> what life is from a scientific point of view.
>
> This isn't a change in his perspective at all. It's merely an artifact (a
> false positive, if you will) due to the point of view of the observers.
>
> Judith