Re: Aunger vs. Pinker on Galton

From: Scott Chase (osteopilus@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue 19 Apr 2005 - 23:06:55 GMT

  • Next message: Scott Chase: "Re: Aunger vs. Pinker on Galton"

    --- Derek Gatherer <d.gatherer@vir.gla.ac.uk> wrote:

    > At 17:54 16/04/2005, you wrote:
    > >Which eminent evolutionary author is correct on
    > >Darwin's relation to Galton, Aunger or Pinker?
    >
    > I'll check. I've just written in an article I'm
    > doing at the moment, that
    > Galton was Darwin's cousin. That's what I've always
    > believed, but I
    > suppose I'd better make sure.
    >
    >
    Bill posted a link that supports that they were hal-cousins. Unless someone can support that that Galton was Darwin's uncle I'm going to assume Aunger flubbed on this one. Coupled with his explanations of the cellular functions of ribosomes, I'm left scratching my head in amazement. I'd like your's and Chris's input into this. Maybe I didn't dive into cellular biology deep enough where the integral role of ribosomes is unmasked. I always thought that ribosomes were where mRNA is translated into peptides. I pretty sure DNA polymerases play a role in replication, but not ribosomes. I think I had brought this topic up here a while back, but want to make sure I'm not missing something this next attempt at deciphering Aunger's book. I've got the grandpappy's of neuropsych Hebb and Lashley handy, so maybe I'll be quite occupied in the near future.

    BTW, has anyone gone anywhere with Lashley's notion of memory trace redupilcation? I gather that he thought the engram was non-local but still physical. His work pinted to a diffuse sort of memory trace instead of a localized engram. Hebb strats chopping away at field theories and equipotentiality stuff quite early in his monograph and starts in with the Ma Bell
    (ie-switchboard) theories of synaptic connectivity.

    A really interesting aside is that Jack Orbach in his
    _The Neuropsychological Theories of Lashley and Hebb_ talks about (on page 5) how Hebb had used something like the Necker cube to put the organism back into S-R psychology (thus making it S-O-R). Organismic response variation to reversible figures supposedly demostrates that there's more to it than S-R behaviorism would acknowledge. Ironically isn't the Necker cube what Dawkins used as a way of getting his readers to shift focus away from the organism?

                    
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