[FRIAM] FW: Heritability and generative entrenchment

[Nicholas Thompson]

Hi everybody, 

Forgive me for casting such a wide net, but we seem to be skating very
close to what Carl Tollander calls "artificial epigenesis and I want to
keep the conversation as open as possible until I see who is interested.  

David Wilson (attached and below) has taken the discussion in the direction
I hoped it might turn .... that selection might consist of unstable
relations amongst stable arrays. Everybody is talking as if the elements in
the arrays are genes, but there is no particular reason not to include
epigenetic nodes as well.   The implication for my question on inheritance
is that all the chaos in the genetic-epigenitic system is going on a level
BELOW where selection is going on.  This might seem to beg the question
concerning inheritance ... what "force" holds together the stable arrays? 
However, at this early stage of my reading, Wimsatt and Schank seem to be
saying that the stable arrays are high  entropy .. i.e., they hang together
because that's where randomization takes them.  

I am very excited about all of this, as you can see, but as you can also
see, I should shut up and go back to reading before I say more.  Thanks for
your patience.  Be sure to read the message below and the attachment if you
are interested. 

thanks, all, 

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson
nickthompson at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson


> [Original Message]
> From: David Sloan Wilson <dwilson at binghamton.edu>
> To: <nickthompson at earthlink.net>
> Date: 5/21/2006 8:35:45 AM
> Subject: Heritability and generative entrenchment
>
> Dear Nick,
>
> Thanks for your interesting message. I'm sending this reply to you only 
> rather than the whole group--I'll let you be the judge of what the 
> whole group sees and in what manner.
>
> Consider a parameter space with many local stable equilibria.  When a 
> biological system is in the basin of attraction for a particular local 
> equilibrium, it is generatively entrenched and here is a problem for 
> heritability. However, there can still be selection among multiple 
> basins of attraction, providing a concept of heritability. I discuss 
> this in the following paper titled "Natural Selection and Complex 
> Systems: a complex interaction."
>
>
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