Dear Howard, lists - Thanks - I always like discussing with you, Howard (even if not always agreeing) - your points are always clear, interesting, no-nonsense but not aggressive -
Den 27/12/2014 kl. 12.44 skrev Howard Pattee <hpat...@roadrunner.com<mailto:hpat...@roadrunner.com>>: At 06:48 PM 12/26/2014, Frederik wrote: Linear discrete storage is of paramount importance but still only one side of the coin - the other being spatial information, e.g. in visual, continuous icons. One of the early important papers in biosemiotics (by Hoffmeyer and Emmeche, in Semiotica, around 1990) made the point that information inheritance in biology is double. One part is the discrete information in the genes - the other the continuous information incarnated in the structure of the cell. HP: The empirical issue is: How important for evolution are continuous dynamic icons? Of course evolution has discovered all kinds of epigenetic inheritance effects.This has been a hot topic since Lamarck. Today there is even a Journal, Non-Genetic Inheritance<http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/ngi>, (only one issue per year!). A critical review of "soft inheritance" is in Proc<http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1740/2913> . Roy<http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1740/2913> . Soc<http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1740/2913> . B<http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1740/2913> 6/28/2012 by Dickins and Rahman. FS: So here I (with Hoffmeyer and Emmeche) disagree with Howard: the egg cell itself forms part of the inherited information (in gendered organisms) - in simpler organisms, the cell structure is inherited by the simple duplication of it. HP: What structures making up an egg are not under genetic control? Clearly the atoms, C, N, O, H, etc. are not. They are fixed parts of any gene-controlled molecule. But when a cell divides do you want to say carbon atoms in the new cells are inherited? Of course the cell is under genetic control - but the structure of the cell - its organels, its external and internal membrane structures, the complicated network of metabolic processes - are not created by the genes even if controlled by them. The DNA was never there before the cell, rather there is some reason to suspect that (a simple version of) the cell was there before full DNA control evolved. Of course, the atoms are not inherited. The proteins are synthezised due to standard gene decoding procedures. But the structure of the metabolic network into which these proteins flow was always-already there - it is the replication of this structure which constitutes the "analog" inheritance. It is not like the DNA of the father meeting the DNA of the mother, the two mix, and then the combined DNA begin constructing a new cell. The cell was there all of the time, the complicated metabolic structure in this sense inherited via the egg cell. This is not at all to minimize the paramount role of DNA - but to be a central controller, there must be something which is controlled. In any case, this is not the fundamental biosemiotic issue. From the physicist's point of view (e.g., Boltzman, Schrödinger, von Neumann, Wigner, et al) life is a fundamental problem because it increases or maintains intricate, non-statistical structured order in a very noisy universe -- noise which causes all other ordered structures to eventually dissipate, or dissipate faster than life (eventually, nothing escapes dissipation). The first level answer was grasped by Darwin. There must be a heritable memory that maintains structures (growth and metabolism). But this answer still has the noise problem. Why is the memory reliable? The second level answer should be a biosemiotic principle. It is supported by all kinds of evidence:The only sufficiently reliable evolvable memories are discrete linear symbol systems. That is not the only condition. To be evolvable in an open-ended sense, the symbol system must form a language with unlimited expressive power (e.g., Pattee<https://www.academia.edu/2081540/The_physical_basis_of_coding_and_reliability_in_biological_evolution> , 1968<https://www.academia.edu/2081540/The_physical_basis_of_coding_and_reliability_in_biological_evolution> to 2007<https://www.academia.edu/3144895/The_Necessity_of_Biosemiotics_Matter-Symbol_Complementarity>). Hoffmeyer and Emmeche have a point, but the RNA Model<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world_hypothesis> now appears as a good origin possibility. One more question. I can see that the Peircean triad of symbol, index, icon makes sense for weathercocks, but I need examples of how it could add to the current (parsimonious) description of genetic expression in single cells. What are the index and icon vehicles? Frankly, I am not sure. My interest has focused upon signs in the exchange between the organism and its environment (à la Uexküll). A guess would be that the icon is the ACGT nucleotide structure of the relevant gene (embodying the information) while the index is the the actual phase of the metabolic process activating the gene and the corresponding protein synthesis at that particular point of time. Maybe Hoffmeyer or Emmeche can supplement here - Best F
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
