Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id HAA17570 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Sun, 20 Feb 2000 07:43:27 GMT To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2000 23:41:30 -0800 From: "Scott Chase" <hemidactylus@my-Deja.com> Message-ID: <DFKNMAJOCJNLOBAA@my-deja.com> X-Sent-Mail: off X-Mailer: MailCity Service Subject: Re: Piaget on the phenocopy X-Sender-Ip: 209.240.200.67 Organization: My Deja Email (http://www.my-deja.com:80) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Language: en Content-Length: 2647 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
--On Sun, 20 Feb 2000 12:37:56 John Wilkins wrote: >AFAIK phneocopy is Goldschmidt's term, adopted and popularised by >Waddington. I recently read a volume of Wadd's essays and I recall him >attributing the term to RG. > Well Messerly (who I cited a few posts back) directs us to a couple critiques of Piaget's conception of phenocopies: Jean-Pierre Changeux's contribution in _Language and Learning: the Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky _ and Antoine Danchin's contribution in the same book. I'm linguistically challenged (in more ways than one) so Chomsky et al haven't been on my slate yet. I've got one of Pinker's books though if that counts for anything. I still have no clue how the mind works, but I'm only around half done with the huge book.
Messerly also bring up the recapitulation issue wrt Piaget. No matter where I go I can't get away from this one. He says that Gould didn't interpret Piaget exactly right in _Ontogeny and Phylogeny_.
As far as phenocopies goes and Piaget's work on the pond snail *Limnaea stagnalis* maybe he was dealing with alternative ontogenetic trajectories or something like that. For some reason I want to use terms like cyclomorphosis, seasonal polymorphism or polyphenism, but I'm not sure if these terms would apply in this case (just a spur of the moment hunch). I faintly recall Brian Hall's description of these phenomena in _Evolutionary Developmental Biology_. It seems there's a certain species of moth in genus *Automeris* or family Geometridae if I'm not mistaken where the caterpillars differ in body form depending on whether they've received tannin in their diets. One morph mimics twigs and the other catkins (in oaks?). IIRC one morph appears in spring and the other in summer. Maybe the snails Piaget worked on had the capacity to vary their ontogenetic trajectories already encoded in their genomes. I could be mistaken though, but these ideas popped into my head for some reason. If this conjecture can be refuted I'll be more than willing to do it myself upon further reading. > >[Johnny boy? No one's called me that in 30 years] > > It was probably a hybridization between "Oh Danny boy" and "John boy". The latter was a character on a U.S. TV series "The Waltons", where an entire family lived on a mountain named after them. At the end of the show everybody said their goodnites and this included "Goodnite John boy". This might have been a meme of sorts which permeated U.S. culture for a while. I was pretty young when the series first aired.
Scott
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