Dear John, Thank you very much for this - a great way to start the new year!
I'd like to ask about "communication" - it's a word which is understood in many different ways, and in the context of cells, is hard to imagine. When you suggest that “the unicellular state delegates its progeny to interact with the environment as agents, collecting data to inform the recapitulating unicell of ecological changes that are occurring. Through the acquisition and filtering of epigenetic marks via meiosis, fertilization, and embryogenesis, even on into adulthood, where the endocrine system dictates the length and depth of the stages of the life cycle, now known to be under epigenetic control, the unicell remains in effective synchrony with environmental changes.” It seems that this is not communication of ‘signs’ in the Peircean sense supported by the biosemioticians (Hoffmeyer). But is it instead a recursive set of transductions, much in the spirit of Bateson’s insight that: “Formerly we thought of a hierarchy of taxa—individual, family line, subspecies, species, etc.—as units of survival. We now see a different hierarchy of units—gene-in-organism, organism-in environment, ecosystem, etc. Ecology, in the widest sense, turns out to be the study of the interaction and survival of ideas and programs (i.e., differences, complexes of differences, etc.) in circuits.” (from his paper "Pathologies of Epistemology" in Steps to an Ecology of Mind) Recursive transduction like this is a common theme in cybernetics – it's in Ashby's "Design for a Brain", Pask's conversation theory, and in Beer’s Viable System Model, where “horizon scanning” (an anticipatory sub-system gathering data from the environment) is an important part of the metasystem which maintains viability of the organism (It’s worth noting that Maturana and Varela's autopoietic theory overlooks this). "Communication" would then be much more like “conversation”… etymologically, "con-versare"… "to turn together”… dancing! Does this fit? A further point is to then ask whether a logic of evolutionary biology is a logic of recursive transductions over history. The critical point is what Joseph Brenner argued before Christmas in objecting to Peirce: we struggle to express the specificity and basis for change in our logic. Do we need a different kind of logic? Best wishes and Happy new year, Mark _______________________________________________ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
