On 3/22/06, gnusystems <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > il-young son, > (I'm using that as your name because you didn't sign your message -- ) > > Welcome to the list, and don't worry about being "a novice when it comes to > Peircean literature" -- that's me too! > > [[ Smolin does state explicitly that Peirce anticipated a kind of > evolution of natural laws by "natural selection". The qualifier, > Darwinian is indeed missing however, the common usage of the phrase > seem to lend itself to the interpretation that there is indeed an > implication of associating Peirce with advocacy for Darwinian > evolution (tychism to use Peirce's term) in stabilization of laws of > nature. ]] > > I'm not sure i get your point here, but anyway, part of the problem is that > Darwin (as far as i know) never tried to extend the concept of natural > selection beyond biology into physics and cosmology. Peirce, at least in "A > Guess at the Riddle", only applied the term to the domain of "biological > development", but made it one stop on a continuous journey from logic to > physics. He decribed the course of his thinking as follows (EP1, 252-3): >
I suppose all I meant was that the phrase "natural selection" implies a particular kind of evolutionary mechanism, namely neo-Darwinian. Given the following Peircean quote, perhaps it is not all that implausible if you interpret "to take habits" to mean a kind of selective pressure. I wonder what Peirce would have said about Dawkin's idea concerning cultural evolution. "If the universe is thus progressing from a state of all but pure chance to a state of all but complete determination by law, we must suppose that there is an original, elemental, tendency of things to acquire determinate properties, to take habits. This is the Third or mediating element between chance, which brings forth First and original events, and law which produces sequences or Seconds." > > Maybe. Or maybe the distinction between the two is too fine-grained to show > up in Peirce's vague idea of "evolution" by "habit-taking". > This is true. I'd like a clarification on this notion of "habits". --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
