From: Derek Gatherer (d.gatherer@vir.gla.ac.uk)
Date: Tue 11 Oct 2005 - 12:32:53 GMT
At 23:41 02/10/2005, Dace wrote:
> Elsasser wondered if our everyday experience of memory
>involves action at a distance over time. To explain ontogenesis, we need
>only posit that newly developing organisms are influenced, via bodily
>memory, by past, similar organisms, primarily those belonging to the same
>species.
I've read this several times, and really tried to see if I can
somehow make sense of it, but the only conclusion I can come to is
that we must have fundamentally different views on what constitutes
"an explanation". If you really believe in the above, then it seems
to me that you believe in magic. Given that I'm sure you would say
you don't, then it must be a linguistic confusion over the meaning of
the word "explain".
How can you possibly take a term out of psychology, and then propose
that it can explain embryology, and furthermore by a mechanism that
acts at a distance over both space and time? Was Elsasser really
proposing that the embryo of, say, a dinosaur developing in the late
Jurassic is currently, as we speak, exerting some
space-time-independent effect on a vertebrate embryo developing right
this moment?
You see, when I set that against standard developmental biology, I
just can't grasp why a sane reasonable person would choose such a belief.
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