[FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Hi, everybody, 

 

I am striving mightily to get my brain out of the corvid19 cesspit, and
Stephen and Glen have been helping me, in part by talking about an old
wrangle that Stephen and I have shared over the role of selection (if any)
in evolution.   In these arguments, I have always felt that Stephen has
strived to maneuver me into the sights of his largest gun, but, whenever he
fires it, the shells seem to go whizzing by me as if fired at somebody else
entirely.   So this letter is written primarily to Glen and Steve, but I
post it here because I think some few of you (Dave?) may have something to
say about what I say, here.   

 

I have often said that FRIAM saved my intellectual bacon.  I say this
because when I came to Santa Fe in 2006, it was to help my wife help my son
and his wife raise my infant grandchildren  -- clearly not a full time job.
I justified the venture to my provost with vague hope that I would attach
myself either to the evolutionary psychology group at UNM or to the Santa Fe
Institute or both.  In fact, neither panned out.  

 

And thus, cast loose in Santa Fe, I fell into the arms of Stephen, Carl, and
Owen, and .   FRIAM.  The attached abstract of  piece I never wrote (because
I never could dragoon Gillian Barker into writing for me) reveals the state
of my mind at the time.  I was clearly already teetering between
selectionist and systemist thinking.  It had dawned on me during my previous
sabbatical down the corridor from Lyn Margulis that any theory of natural
selection required as a precondition additivity of variance, and nothing
that we had learned about epigenesis in the previous gave us much hope that
additivity of variance was a likely condition of inheritance.  So, if
additivity of variance was not an obvious consequence of epigenetic
relations, it must somehow be an achievement of them.  Two possibilities
occurred to me at the time: one is that genetic mechanisms were themselves
selected for "fairness" - a selectionist explanation; or, that fairness
somehow fell out of the underlying chemical and biological structures - a
systemist explanation. 

 

This is already enough biography to choke a horse, so I shall wrap up, here.
Suffice it to say that, when Stephen showed me Wolfram's book I was stunned.
Here was a demonstration of how simple rules could generate complex
structures without any nudges from any selection mechanism.  Could
additivity of variance and, therefore, natural selection, itself "fall out"
of chemical and energetic relations.  Could systems coddle natural selection
the way rear flank downdrafts coddle a tornado.   Could we have natural
selection for free. 

 

Only in my late 60's at the time, I harbored the illusion that I myself
could be come a master of the art of computation.  Alas, that ship had
sailed.  So, now you see me.  "I yam what I yam," as Popeye used  to say.
But one thing I yam NOT is the ferocious adherent to genic selection theory
that Stephen needs me to be if I am going to be felled by his biggest gun. 

 

And now I have to cook dinner for my 13 and 17 year old grandchildren.  The
oldest is learning rendering from Stephen.  Life will go on!

 

Ever grateful for your assistance, 

 

Nick 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20200426/66069949/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve.doc
Type: application/msword
Size: 30208 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20200426/66069949/attachment.doc>