Adaptation and Adaptationism
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Faith, Form and Meaning: a Report on the U.K. Centenary Conference
Faith, Form and Meaning: A Report on the U.K. Centenary Conference Robin A. Hodgkin The United Kingdom Centenary Conference on Michael Polanyi’s thought was held at St George’s, Windsor Castle, in November, 1991. It was planned as an exploration of certain key ideas from the later chapters of Personal Knowledge, and thus to contribute to the current, growing conversation between literature, science and theology in the areas of faith, form and meaning. We were particularly encouraged when three distinguished speakers agreed to come: Professor Stephen Prickett from Glasgow University, Professor Brian Goodwin from the Open University and Professor the Rev’d Dan Hardy from Princeton. Their three lectures, summarised below, sparked off searching and lively discussion in the groups that also met. Important contributions were also made by three Hungarian guests. I Stephen Prickett, in a paper entitled, “Ambiguity and Symbol in Living Language,” placed Polanyi within a tradition which flows through Coleridge and the Romantic Movement and on to Newman. “Anyone familiar with [Coleridge and Newman] will have little difficulty in recognising in Polanyi one of the twentieth century’s most distinguished exponents of that same `fiduciary’ tradition. Both share a common epistemology, believing that commitment is an essential part of knowing, and that such knowledge...belongs to and is inescapably a part of a linguistic community.” Prickett then stressed a number of similarities between Newman and Polanyi, but there were differences too: “The most striking... is that whereas Newman finds his linguistic community in `the community of faith,’ in other words the Catholic Church itself, standing in contradistinction to the World which surrounds it, Polanyi sees no reason at all to cordon off the life and language of the Church from that of the rest of human existence and seems to imply that all language is of its intrinsic nature `fiduciary,’ and ultimately, therefore, pointing towards the existence of God. -
Ideas Theory Policies Experience Discussion Amr Subscriptions
AMRAustralian Marxist Review – Journal of the Communist Party of Australia #66 December 2017 $5 Imperialism and Revolutionary Optimism IDEAS THEORY POLICIES EXPERIENCE DISCUSSION AMR SUBSCRIPTIONS AMR 4 issues are $25 including postage within Australia. Please fill out the form below (or a copy) and send to: AMR Subscriptions, 74 Buckingham St, Surry Hills NSW 2010. Subscription type: New Renewal Gift Commence subscription on: Current Issue Issue number: ____ Optional subscription to The Guardian, the CPA’s weekly newspaper: 12 months: $100 ($80 conc / $150 solidarity) 6 months: $55 ($40 conc / $80 solidarity) Your details Name: . Postal address: . Email address: . Phone number: . Gift to (if applicable) Name: . Postal address: . Email address: . Phone number: . Payment details Cheque / money order (made out to “Communist Party of Australia”) attached. Please debit my credit card Mastercard Visa for the amount: $ _____ Card number: Expiry date: / Name on card (Please print) . Signature:. Payment details can also be phoned or emailed in: Phone: + 61 2 9699 8844 Email: [email protected] Contents Editorial . i Caliban’s children: dehumanisation and imperialism. 1 Beyond media sensation, religion and democracy: A class analysis of political developments in Turkey. 5 On the illegality of war. 10 Richard Levins, ecological agriculture, and revolutionary optimism. 19 The Undesirables – Inside Nauru. 26 Abstracts from World Socialism Research, a new journal from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. 30 Editorial -
The Fourth Perspective: Evolution and Organismal Agency
The Fourth Perspective: Evolution and Organismal Agency Johannes Jaeger Complexity Science Hub (CSH), Vienna, Josefstädter Straße 39, 1080 Vienna Abstract This chapter examines the deep connections between biological organization, agency, and evolution by natural selection. Using Griesemer’s account of the re- producer, I argue that the basic unit of evolution is not a genetic replicator, but a complex hierarchical life cycle. Understanding the self-maintaining and self-pro- liferating properties of evolvable reproducers requires an organizational account of ontogenesis and reproduction. This leads us to an extended and disambiguated set of minimal conditions for evolution by natural selection—including revised or new principles of heredity, variation, and ontogenesis. More importantly, the con- tinuous maintenance of biological organization within and across generations im- plies that all evolvable systems are agents, or contain agents among their parts. This means that we ought to take agency seriously—to better understand the con- cept and its role in explaining biological phenomena—if we aim to obtain an or- ganismic theory of evolution in the original spirit of Darwin’s struggle for exis- tence. This kind of understanding must rely on an agential perspective on evolu- tion, complementing and succeeding existing structural, functional, and processual approaches. I sketch a tentative outline of such an agential perspective, and present a survey of methodological and conceptual challenges that will have to be overcome if we are to properly implement it. 1. Introduction There are two fundamentally different ways to interpret Darwinian evolutionary theory. Charles Darwin’s original framework grounds the process of evolution on 2 the individual’s struggle for existence (Darwin, 1859). -
The Root of Heidegger's Concern for the Earth at the Consummation of Metaphysics: the Nietzsche Lectures
Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 5, no. 2, 2009 TRIBUTE TO BRIAN GOODWIN 1931-2009 Arran Gare Brian Goodwin, the visionary mathematician, biologist, philosopher and teacher, died on 15th July, at the age of 78. Goodwin was not only a founding member of the editorial board of Cosmos & History, he was the patron of the Joseph Needham Centre for Complex Processes Research from which Cosmos & History emerged. He was highly supportive of the research of this group and the aspirations for Cosmos & History, but more importantly, his work itself was an inspiration and a symbol of the bold thinking, transcending all disciplinary boundaries, with a passionate concern to augment life, that both the Joseph Needham Centre for Complex Processes Research and Cosmos & History have sought to promote. Goodwin’s vision was summarized in words recently recorded by an MSc student of Holistic Science at Schumacher College: Nature and Culture are One, Not Two … The Great Work, the Magnum Opus, in which we are now inexorably engaged, is a cultural transformation that will either carry us into a new age on earth or will result in our disappearance from the planet. The choice is in our hands … This Gaian Renaissance will lead to what Thomas Berry calls the Ecozoic Age, in which all inhabitants of the planet are governed by principles of Earth Jurisprudence in an Earth Democracy. We can all experience lives of meaning and know that indeed there is no truth beyond the magic of creative participation in the life of the cosmos that embodies the liberation of Chaos, the abundance of Gaia, and the love of Eros. -
THE DIALECTICAL BIOLOGIST 11 III II I, 11 1 1 Ni1 the DIALECTICAL BIOLOGIST
THE DIALECTICAL BIOLOGIST 11 III II I, 11 1 1 ni1 THE DIALECTICAL BIOLOGIST Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin AAKAR THE DIALECTICAL BIOLOGIST Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin Harvard University Press, 1985 Aakar Books for South Asia, 2009 Reprinted by arrangement with Harvard University Press, USA for sale only in the Indian Subcontinent (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Maldives, Bhutan & Sri Lanka) All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher First Published in India, 2009 ISBN 978-81-89833-77-0 (Pb) Published by AAKAR BOOKS 28 E Pocket IV, Mayur Vihar Phase I, Delhi-110 091 Phone : 011-2279 5505 Telefax : 011-2279 5641 [email protected]; www.aakarbooks.com Printed at S.N. Printers, Delhi-110 032 To Frederick Engels, who got it wrong a lot of the time but who got it right where it counted ,, " I 1 1■ 1-0 ■44 pH III lye II I! Preface THIS Bow( has come into existence for both theoretical andpractical reasons. Despite the extraordinary successes of mechanistic reduction- ist molecular biology, there has been a growing discontent in the last twenty years with simple Cartesian reductionism as the universal way to truth. In psychology and anthropology, and especially in ecology, evolution, neurobiology, and developmental biology, where the Carte- sian program has failed to give satisfaction, we hear more and more calls for an alternative epistemological stance. Holistic, structuralist, hierarchical, and systems theories are all offered as alternative modes of explaining the world, as ways out of the cul-de-sacs into which re- ductionism has led us. -
An Introduction to the Loop Analysis of Qualitatively Specified Complex Causal Systems
Portland State University PDXScholar Community Health Faculty Publications and Presentations School of Community Health 1-2015 An Introduction to the Loop Analysis of Qualitatively Specified Complex Causal Systems Alexis Dinno Portland State University Follow this and additional works at: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/commhealth_fac Part of the Community Psychology Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Citation Details Dinno, A. (2015) An Introduction to the Loop Analysis of Qualitatively Specified Complex Causal Systems. Invited Presentation. Systems Science Graduate Program Seminar. Portland, OR. This Presentation is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in Community Health Faculty Publications and Presentations by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. Please contact us if we can make this document more accessible: [email protected]. AN INTRODUCTION TO THE LOOP ANALYSIS OF QUALITATIVELY SPECIFIED COMPLEX CAUSAL SYSTEMS “Things are like other things; this makes science possible. Things are unlike other things; this makes science neccesary.” —RICHARD LEVINS ALEXIS DINNO, C.AZ.AM., SC.D., M.P.H., M.E.M., I.O.U., ETC JANUARY 9, 2015 ORIGINS OF LOOP ANALYSIS 2 Developed by population biologist Richard Levins in the late 1960s Population dynamics of organisms in changing environments Deviates from Sewall Wright’s causal path analysis from the 1920’s Influenced by S. J. Mason’s theoretical work on signal flow graphs from the 1950’s Published mostly in population biology/population -
European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, VI-1 | 2014 Popular Science, Pragmatism, and Conceptual Clarity 2
European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy VI-1 | 2014 The Reception of Peirce in the World Popular Science, Pragmatism, and Conceptual Clarity Oliver Belas Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/514 DOI: 10.4000/ejpap.514 ISSN: 2036-4091 Publisher Associazione Pragma Electronic reference Oliver Belas, « Popular Science, Pragmatism, and Conceptual Clarity », European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy [Online], VI-1 | 2014, Online since 08 July 2014, connection on 16 March 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/514 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ejpap.514 This text was automatically generated on 16 March 2020. Author retains copyright and grants the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Popular Science, Pragmatism, and Conceptual Clarity 1 Popular Science, Pragmatism, and Conceptual Clarity Oliver Belas Introduction 1 One of popular science’s primary functions is to make what would otherwise be inaccessible, specialist knowledge accessible to the lay reader. But popular science puts its imagined reader in something of a dilemma, for one does not have to look very far to find bitter argument among science writers; argument that takes place beyond the limits of the scientific community: witness the ill-tempered exchanges between Mary Midgley and Richard Dawkins in the journal Philosophy in the late seventies and early eighties; or, from the mid-nineties, the surly dialogue of Stephen Jay Gould, Daniel Dennett, and others in The New York Review of Books (see below and Works Cited). -
John Vandermeer
JOHN VANDERMEER - THE DIALECTICS OF ECOLOGY: BIOLOGICAL, HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL INTERSECTIONS PUBLICATIONS OF ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SPECIAL PUBLICATION NO. 1 GERALD SMITH, Editor LINDA GARCIA, Managing Editor ELIZABETH WASON AND KATHERINE LOUGHNEY, Proofreaders GORDON FITCH AND MACKENZIE SCHONDLEMAYER, Cover graphics The publications of the Museum of Zoology, The University of Michigan, consist primarily of two series—the Miscellaneous Publications and the Occasional Papers. Both series were founded by Dr. Bryant Walker, Mr. Bradshaw H. Swales, and Dr. W. W. Newcomb. Occasionally the Museum publishes contributions outside of these series. Beginning in 1990 these are titled Special Publications and Circulars and each are sequentially numbered. All submitted manuscripts to any of the Museum’s publications receive external peer review. The Occasional Papers, begun in 1913, serve as a medium for original studies based principally upon the collections in the Museum. They are issued separately. When a sufficient number of pages has been printed to make a volume, a title page, table of contents, and an index are supplied to libraries and individuals on the mailing list for the series. The Miscellaneous Publications, initiated in 1916, include monographic studies, papers on field and museum techniques, and other contributions not within the scope of the Occasional Papers, and are published separately. Each number has a title page and, when necessary, a table of contents. A complete list of publications on Mammals, Birds, Reptiles and Amphibians, Fishes, Insects, Mollusks, and other topics is available. Address inquiries to Publications, Museum of Zoology, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109–1079. -
The Spandrels of Self-Deception: Prospects for a Biological Theory of a Mental Phenomenon
The Spandrels of Self-Deception: Prospects for a Biological Theory of a Mental Phenomenon D. S. Neil Van Leeuwen Self-deception is so undeniable a fact of human life that if anyone tried to deny its existence, the proper response would be to accuse this person of it. —Allen Wood1 1. Introduction to the Problems Even prior to a characterization of self-deception, it’s easy to see that it’s widespread. This is puzzling, because self-deception seems paradoxical. Here are three apparent problems. First, self-deception seems to involve a conceptual contradiction; in order to deceive, one must believe the contrary of the deception one is perpetrating, but if one believes the contrary, it seems impossible for that very self to believe the deception.2 Second, a view of the mind has become widely accepted that makes rationality constitutive and exhaustive of the mental; this is the interpretive view of the mental put forth by Donald Davidson and followers.3 According to this view, the idea of attributing irrational beliefs to agents makes little sense, for we cannot make sense of what someone’s beliefs are unless they are rational. But self-deception is highly irrational.4 Third, a brief survey of other cognitive mechanisms (such as vision) reveals that most are well suited for giving us reliable information about ourselves and our environment. Self- deception, however, undermines knowledge of ourselves and the world. If having good information brings fitness benefits to organisms, how is it that self-deception was not weeded out by natural selection? Otherwise put, why does self-deception exist? (For convenience, I shall refer to these as puzzles 1, 2, and 3.) Puzzles such as these make self-deception an intriguing explanatory target. -
The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: a Critique of the Adaptationist Programme
The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme. (Excerpted1 by W. M. Schaffer) Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin. 1979. Proc. Roy. Soc. London, Ser. B, 505: 581-598. An adaptationist programme has dominated evolutionary thought in England and the United States during the past forty years. It is based on faith in the power of natural selection as an optimizing agent. It proceeds by breaking an organism into unitary "traits" and proposing an adaptive story for each considered separately. Trade-offs among competing selective demands exert the only brake upon perfection; non-optimality is thereby rendered as a result of adaptation as well. We criticize this approach and attempt to reassert a competing notion (long popular in continental Europe) that organisms must be analyzed as integrated wholes, with Baupläne[2] so constrained by phyletic heritage, pathways of development, and general architecture that the constraints them- selves become more interesting and more important in delimiting pathways of change than the selective force that may mediate change when it occurs. We fault the adaptationist programme for its failure to distinguish current utility from reasons for origin (male tyrannosaurs may have used their diminutive front legs to titillate female partners, but this will not explain why they got so small); for its unwillingness to consider alternatives to adaptive stories; for its reliance upon plau- sibility alone as a criterion for accepting speculative tales; and for its failure to consider adequately such competing themes as random fixation of alleles, production of non-adaptive structures by developmental correlation with selected features … , the separability of adaptation and selection, multiple adaptive peaks, and current utility as an epiphenomenon of nonadaptive structures. -
A Brief for Relational Evolutionary Thinking in Anthropology Emily Schultz St
St. Cloud State University theRepository at St. Cloud State Anthropology Faculty Publications Department of Anthropology 6-2009 Resolving the Anti-Antievolutionism Dilemma: A Brief for Relational Evolutionary Thinking in Anthropology Emily Schultz St. Cloud State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/anth_facpubs Part of the Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Schultz, Emily, "Resolving the Anti-Antievolutionism Dilemma: A Brief for Relational Evolutionary Thinking in Anthropology" (2009). Anthropology Faculty Publications. 1. https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/anth_facpubs/1 This Peer Reviewed Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Anthropology at theRepository at St. Cloud State. It has been accepted for inclusion in Anthropology Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of theRepository at St. Cloud State. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Resolving the Anti-Antievolutionism Dilemma: A Brief for Relational Evolutionary Thinking in Anthropology Emily Schultz Abstract: Anthropologists often disagree about whether, or in what ways, anthropology is “evolutionary.” Anthropologists defending accounts of primate or human biological development and evolution that conflict with mainstream “neo-Darwinian” thinking have sometimes been called “creationists” or have been accused of being “antiscience.” As a result, many cultural anthropologists struggle with an “anti-antievolutionism” dilemma: they are more comfortable opposing the critics of evolutionary biology, broadly conceived, than they are defending mainstream evolutionary views with which they disagree. Evolutionary theory, however, comes in many forms. Relational evolutionary approaches such as Developmental Systems Theory, niche construction, and autopoiesis–natural drift augment mainstream evolutionary thinking in ways that should prove attractive to many anthropologists who wish to affirm evolution but are dissatisfied with current “neo-Darwinian” hegemony. -
Modeling Experimenting SUBM-2
Modeling/Experimenting? The Synthetic Strategy in the Circadian Clock Research Abstract: In which respects do modeling and experimenting resemble or differ from each other? We explore this question through studying in detail the combinational modeling strategy in the study of the circadian clock. In this area of synthetic biology scientists triangulate experiments on model organisms and mathematical models with a new type of model—a synthetic model. We argue that this combinational strategy is due to the characteristic constraints of the three aforementioned epistemic activities that make them complementary with respect to each other. These constraints are closely linked to the question of materiality. In the case of synthetic biology, materiality clearly matters: it provides the very rationale of synthetic modeling. Consequently, although modeling and experimenting share some common features, there are also significant differences between them and they perform different roles in actual scientific practices. 1 1. Introduction In philosophical discussion, models have been located between theories and experiments, often as some sort of go-betweens facilitating the points of contact between the two. Although the relationship between models and theories may seem closer than the one between models and experimentation, there is a growing body of literature that focuses on the similarities (and differences) between modeling and experimentation. The central questions of this discussion have concerned the common characteristics shared by modeling and experimenting as well as the ways in which the inferences licensed by them are justified. In this paper we will study the different stands taken in the discussion on modeling and experimentation through examining the modeling practice of the circadian clock research in synthetic biology.