From: Dace (edace@earthlink.net)
Date: Mon 24 Oct 2005 - 21:03:10 GMT
Derek,
> At 23:15 14/10/2005, Dace wrote:
>
> >See Hill, Miroslav, "Adaptive state of mammalian cells and its
> >nonseparability suggestive of a quantum system," Scripta Medica, 73 (4):
> >211-222, October 2000.
> >http://med.muni.cz/biomedjournal/pdf/2000/04/211-222.pdf
>
>
> Yes, I read it. He's obviously got some contamination problem in his cell
> cultures - it's easily done. If what he says is correct, other people
would have
> seen the same thing. I did cell culture for nearly 2 years, and I never
saw
> anything like that.
You can't see what you're not looking for. In fact, you literally can't see
influence passed between physically separated cultures for the simple reason
that it's not visible.
As cell biologist Stephen Rothman points out, if you provide evidence that
reductionism can't provide a coherent explanation (e.g. in the case of
protein movement) reductionists simply dismiss the evidence as flawed. In
this way their beliefs become unfalsifiable. What this demonstrates is that
many scientists are ruled by the reductionistic meme more than the
scientific method.
> >Which one is magical? The unmediated transmission of traits or the
> >unmediated transmission of light?
>
> The former, obviously.
Why not the latter? Why not attribute radio, for instance, to magic? After
all, from a material standpoint nothing mediates the reception of a signal
from a transmitter. And how about a pair of magnets that "magically"
attract each other at a distance? Again, from a material standpoint,
nothing mediates event, since a magnetic field is composed of space, not
matter. And if spatial systems can be viewed holistically, why not temporal
systems?
Reductionism rests on the common sense notion of contact mechanics between
visible components. This is not a scientific concept but a deeply
ingrained, widely distributed habit of thought, i.e. a highly successful
meme.
> >It could be that we're tinkering with a blueprint, or it
> >could be that genes themselves tinker with species memory, causing it to
> >manifest one way instead of another.
>
> Occam's razor. Choose the simplest of two alternative hypotheses,
> (especially if one of them requires you to believe in magic).
Agreed.
The simpler of the two hypotheses is that genes merely distort species
memory one way or another rather than building from scratch a complete,
multicellular organism. The reductionistic hypothesis is more complex and
unwieldy insofar as it assumes that genes possess all the information
required to build an organism and that they possesses the magical power to
compute precisely how they must combine to bring about this stupendously
improbable event. If we take the holistic view and assume that a given
species exists as a whole-- its members merely serving to individuate a
shared form-- then the process of development is infinitely simplified.
However, this view requires that we accept the reality of the invisible
whole and not merely the visible parts. As long as the reductionist meme
reigns, scientists will choose the complex, magical hypothesis over the
simple, natural one.
If seeing is believing, then not seeing is not believing.
> > Nobody has ever calculated the correct combination of genes needed for
the
> > timing of penicillin production in the haploid mold Aspergilla. That's
> > because the number of possible combinations is 2 to the 1000th power (or
> > 10 to the 300th power), way beyond the realm of calculability. This is
to say
> > nothing of the production of multicellular organs out of diploid
genomes.
> > See *Reflections on a Theory of Organisms,* by Walter Elsasser, for
which
> > Rubin contributes an introduction.
>
> But this is Hoyle's fallacy yet again. Aspergillus doesn't need to
calculate
> anything from scratch. Natural selection over billions of year, and in
> Aspergillus's lineage that is many dozens of billions of generations, has
honed
> the genetically programmed sequence of enzyme activations.
And how does it remember its billion year ancestral history? Is the
knowledge divided into bits of information stored in its genes? Given that
the correct sequence of combinations in the timing of penicillin production
is transcalculational, how can all that information fit? There seems no
reason to make this assumption, only the imperative of aligning oneself with
the magnetic power of reductionism.
Even memes are nothing more than particles in a field of influence.
ted
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon 24 Oct 2005 - 21:22:55 GMT