From: Keo Ormsby (chor02@xenomexico.org)
Date: Fri 24 Oct 2003 - 03:54:36 GMT
At 01:26 p.m. 18/10/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>>The point that was interesting, was the argument for cultural evolution
>>using non coded primitive replicators, whatever they may be.
>
>"Non coded primitive replicators" reminds me of "arithmetic without
>numbers" or perhaps "chemistry without elements."
>
>Keith Henson
I don't believe the "coding" part is as essential for a replicator as
numbers to arithmetic.
In the paper by Gabora, she points to the view that primitive replication
was carried out by polymers that only used existing substrates to directly
make copies of themselves. In this sense the replicators only used building
blocks already existing in the primordial soup, but had no influence on the
composition of its surroundings, except perhaps by depleting those building
blocks from the soup. One can easily imagine that certain polymers arose
that were more efficient physicochemically and therefore became more
frequent in the population, so that there was natural selection. This would
be the non coding replication. In the case of modern organisms, DNA doesn't
just wait for building blocks to fall into place, but is actually a
blueprint (code) for actively changing its surroundings into its
replicating machine (organism) that actively collects and synthesizes the
building blocks.
So we have two extremes of a subtly graded continuum, on the one hand,
replicators that float in a soup of preexisting building blocks, and on the
other replicators that are decoded into machines that create the building
blocks. The part that I found interesting is that when you try to make the
analogy with memes, the question arises of which stage is memetic
evolution at? Are memes tossed in a preexisting primordial soup (a
meme-independent preexisting mind)? or do memes construct their own
environment according to some rules (a meme-only constructed mind)? Or
perhaps midway? Of course this question has been raised before, but I
thought (personally) that it was interesting to see that it followed from
this analysis.
Keo Ormsby.
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