Ben: MT: Venter has changed everything
today - including the paradigms that govern both science and AI..
Ben: Lets not overblow things -- please note that Venter's team has not yet
synthesized an artificial organism.
Here's why I think Venter's so important - to quote a post of mine to an
evo-psych group [I also recommend here BTW Dennis Noble's "The Music of
Life" - re "genetic keyboard"]:
"Over and above its immediate, technological significance for Artificial
Life, I see this as the end of an era in science. I think the defining
scientific paradigm of the last 50 years - the genetic code, or program, and
with it the idea that we are determined by our genes - is now dead (or in
its death throes). [I would define genetic determinism BTW as ALLOWING for,
and in no way excluding, environmental influences].
I think the replacement for that paradigm is now clear, even if it hasn't
been exactly defined, and that is - the genetic keyboard. That might not be
immediately obvious. But if you think about it, what has happened - Craig
Venter & co creating a new genome - is an example of the genetic keyboard
playing on itself, i.e. one genome [Craig Venter] has played with another
genome and will eventually and inevitably play with itself. Clearly it is in
the nature of the genome to recreate itself - and not just to execute a
program. (And indeed, had the computational paradigm been properly thought
through, it would have been noted that it is in the nature of programs - as
actually produced and existing on computers - that they are NOT stable
entities but are normally, and more or less demand to be, endlessly
reprogrammed - by the use, as it happens, of a keyboard).
Craig Venter has disavowed genetic determinism: "There are two fallacies to
be avoided," Dr Venter's team write in the journal Science.
"Determinism, the idea that all characteristics of a person are 'hard-wired'
by the genome; and reductionism, that now the human sequence is completely
known, it is just a matter of time before our understanding of gene
functions and interactions will provide a complete causal description of
human variability."
More significantly for EP, Venter has also disavowed natural selection:
"The key problem is that far from being the simple computer code we once
thought it was, DNA is fabulously complex. When I last interviewed Venter a
decade ago, he said our DNA was too complex to be designed by man and
probably even too complex for natural selection. The problem has worsened:
"With the publication now of the full genome, it's clearly more complicated
than ever.
"All our data from the environment and other places is telling us there are
different components to our personalities. Certainly step by step everything's
just a point mutation and things change. But I don't think that can explain
everything. People have this simplistic view of Darwinian evolution as
random point mutations in the genetic code followed by natural selection.
No, I don't think that would have got us out of our genome."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2752196.ece
P.S. I would acknowledge that there is still philosophical/scientific work
to be done - the case for the changeover of paradigms has been not fully
made. But it is now inevitable.
P.P.S. The full new paradigm is something like - "the self-driving/
self-conducting machine" - it is actually the self that is the rest of the
body and brain, that interactively plays upon, and is played by, the genome,
(rather than the genome literally playing upon itself). And just as science
generally has left the self out of its paradigms, so cog sci has left the
indispensible human programmer/operator out of its computational paradigms.
To bring in the Gudrun discussion, you could say that science is about to
tell us that what you - your self - do with your body (as distinct from how
it works) is not science but art (and, let's not forget, technology). The
idea that you are deterministically destined to play only one kind of music
on your keyboard is quite mad - a keyboard, by definition, like your body
and brain, offers you an infinite range of possibilities.
-----
This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email
To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to:
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604&id_secret=90331155-b349d9
