[FRIAM] 1. fun and sandpiles

[Roger Critchlow]

On 1/15/07, Phil Henshaw <sy at synapse9.com> wrote:
>
>  Roger,
>
> So, here's what I think of as a good example of a stupid question.   Why
> does someone introduce the theme of a book with the question of whether
> complex living systems are plausible???    Is that really our problem, or
> theirs?    Do the things we observe really need us to have satisfactory
> explanations for them?   Sometimes I wonder what possesses us to think that
> way!
>

The title of the book is: The Plausibility of Life.  Are you asking why
would anyone write such a book?  Or why would anyone restate the title in
describing the book?  Or why anyone would want to read a book with such a
title?   Or are you wondering why evangelical christians attack the teaching
of evolution in public schools?  Or are you wondering why scientists attempt
to defend the teaching of evolution in public schools?

I don't quite get your observation about discontinuity though.   For me what
> makes discontinuities in growth curves would need to include that strict
> continuity in physical processes is always just a useful idealization
> anyway.    I'm probably just thinking of it from another point of view, but
> I don't quite see your suggestion.   How do you see accretion and
> rearrangement (terms which seem to accurately describe most kinds of growth
> processes) contributing to interruptions of the usual flowing shapes in
> their measures?
>

When I say "discontinuity" I am simply attempting to refer to the changes in
slopes of growth curves which you've been talking about, not in the ultimate
reality of the continuum.  A bad choice of paraphrase.

When accretion and rearrangement leads to the differentiation of tissues in
the development of an organism, or to the evolution of novel tissue types as
organisms diversify into new species, one gets growth processes which
require changes in the measures that describe them.  Instead of simply
counting the cells in the organism, one needs to count cells of different
types, which types have different life histories and characteristics.
Simply counting numbers of cells over time, without attention to the
different kinds of cells, would lead to growth curves with mysterious
inflections.  The patterns of inflections would differ for organisms with
different developmental schemes.

-- rec --


>
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