Roger, good questions,
On 1/15/07, Phil Henshaw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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? [PH] I'm wondering why one would pose that the answer to these questions is whether our own direct observations are plausible, i.e. whether life is plausible, when the actual contest is between the believability of the magical and abstract theories of how the things we all clearly see are to be explained. I think it shows confusion about what the issues are, and probably,... trying to project the unquestionable believability of life onto his statistical model. 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. [PH] Ah yes!, and because we can read the inflection points in the curve of any one measure we can often see when and where it is appropriate to also look at other measures as well, as new features develop. But I think you'll see that the actual discontinuities you mention occur at the particular times when the investigator arbitrarily switches measures, not in the record of any one measure, since the intrusions of new form generally display growth curves that begin imperceptibly. I don't mind changing subjects, as the stories of growth are of gradual changes that become changes of kind, so long as you consider the whole past and future of each new measurable character as a whole event. The hazard to avoid, for me, is just playing hop scotch with trying to connect isolated bits of information as separate causes when distributed processes are what is demonstrably happening. phil -- rec --
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