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Life, Itself has fairly miserly indexing (because he said it was
such a difficult process trying to get that narrative down, make it
comprehensive but keep it focused, and say what he most wanted to say-- he was
burned out at the prospect of going back into it from the
alternate mind-set of indexing and footnoting). Even so, it does
list several page numbers on which to find different takes on my father's point
of view regarding evolution. One of these, on page 275, is 11G. A Word on
Entailment in Evolution, which discusses ideas from Darwin to Haeckel to
D'Arcy Thompson, to Elsasser to Rene Thom and concepts like structural
stability, genotype/phenotype, macroevolution, surrogacy, biogenetic law or the
law of heteroauxesis...
(And there is also an explanation for the fact that evolution is
not exhaustively covered in Life, Itself: "I have discussed this matter
extensively elsewhere (see AS) and will not repeat it here save to mention that
it is a manifestation of structural stability. It asserts that a sufficiently
"small" but otherwise arbitrary perturbation of genome can be offset by a
transformation (similarity) of phenotype alone. The importance of this kind of
proposition has perhaps never been sufficiently appreciated. For it underlies
the universal supposition that we can learn about one species of organism (e.g.,
man) by acquiring data about another (e.g., a rat); that we can use one species
(or even a specimen of that species) as a surrogate for another in phenotypic
terms. And although people collect such surrogate data with great care, the
conditions under which it is permissible, or even possible, to extrapolate from
that data (i.e., to transform it into corresponding data pertaining to another
species) receives no such attention.")
Then, in Essays on Life, Itself, the index yields seven separate
areas with aspects of evolution under discussion. Optimality is specifically
mentioned in one of these discussions-- and is a principle that figures
prominently in my father's views on how evolutionary processes work. Therefore,
if you pursue that subject and see how many references there are in the same
index under Optimality, you will find three times as many... and so on and so
on...
The point being that these concepts are interrelated and won't
always be listed under the heading "evolution" and hence not in the
"contents" section. The index is a goldmine. If you rely entirely on the
"contents" to find different treatments on any given subject, you will miss out
on some extremely useful discussions, so I urge you to give this a try.
Judith
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