Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id XAA00758 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Thu, 18 Jan 2001 23:42:30 GMT From: <Zylogy@aol.com> Message-ID: <48.104a6f31.2798d8b5@aol.com> Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 18:39:33 EST Subject: Phonosemantics and More parallels in the genome (and elsewhere) To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk CC: Zylogy@aol.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 5.0 for Windows sub 129 Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
One fish hooked. Ok, then. What I'd like to know is why material reality
should be structured in such a way that tables of primitive units CAN be
elucidated. Why some set of these is then chosen as the fodder for
combinatoric work at the next higher hierarchical level. Why such
combinations then act as primitive tokens for the next level. And so on.
Language is structured this way. The genome is structured this way. Protein
complexes are structured this way. Even subatomic particles and atoms work
this way. What gives?
Not everything is completely in parallel- while the genome and language are
essentially linearized (with modifiability- so that the split genome is
informationally fractalized to slightly more than dim 1, while the
overlapping genome is slightly less than dim 1), particle and atomic systems
are multidimensional in their combinations. What would be interesting would
be to find that so were the primitives in genetics and language- just not
obviously so (and that, I presume, depends on your focus).
Structure is information. Information is structure. There are different
degrees of informational density, complexity, distribution. Sometimes there
is redundancy. But always information seems to be antientropic in essence.
Not that entropy itself cannot be utilized in a dynamic system for
informational purposes (it can, and is used, for instance, in language
structure). Of course information is useless unless you can do something with
it, so dynamic structures are much richer than static ones in nature in this
regard.
Origin of life- is a self-replicating RNA world likely? Or merely an
idealized abstraction drawn from the experimenters test tube from current
living material structure? I've seen countless magical accounts- always the
RNA gets a "cell" somehow. But I've studied the literature- proteinoid
microspheres, soapy bubbles- etc., and parallel structures would have been
commonly created and destroyed way back then. Instant containment, but hardly
alive. Various types of polymers would also have been dynamically recycled.
Seems like the ones that could either survive intact or get cyclically
reprocessed would accumulate at the expense of other species, regardless of
chemical makeup. Get a syncopation going. Coding would have evolved only
after the stabilization of the STRUCTURAL dynamic interaction.
Same thing for language- I'm now working on an "alternate universe" scenario
(as I call it) to bridge the gap between animal communication and language.
Based on what I know about the phonosemantic dynamic in typological cycling
of languages, evolution of tones, clicks, monosyllabicity versus
polysynthesis, etc., it looks as if human language came from a system without
time-dependent combination (syntax, morphology, etc.).
Combination was emphatically NOT ABSENT in this scenario, just different. I
hypothesize that there was a signalling inversion. In this model, human
language utilizes a relatively small number of abstract phonological
distinctive features in words (there are languages with as few as 8 phonemes,
and as many as 120 or more). The smaller the number of phonemes, the longer
words must be to convey the same amount of information. Period. Longer here
means number of unit phonemes, not amount of time (accurate fine articulation
is a must if you would temporally shorten such a long message). The higher
the number of phonemes, the shorter words may be, simply because the feature
string is longer, thus each phoneme contains more information. A letter p
here is not necessarily informationally the same as one there.
Extrapolating (as click languages are the ones with the most phonemes)
backwards, one can end up with a situation where one can, with as few as 16
pairs of distinctive features (where each feature pair is an opposion- front
versus back articulatory position, voiced versus voiceless, etc.), have more
than 50,000 distinct individual phonemes, each of which is a phoneme, root,
word, sentence simultaneously.
Instead of being laid out horizontally requiring combinatory syntax, such
communicative strings would be laid out vertically (as acoustic spectra are
usually depicted). Repetition would give the signal to noise ratio a boost
(and might itself be capable of information transfer if some change in the
repetition were regular).
This is the alternate universe hypothesis. I'll be giving a talk about this
sometime in the spring to the bonobo folks in Atlanta. IF correct (and its
only an extrapolation at this point), it means that primate (and likely other
mammalian, perhaps even beyond) calls could contain huge amounts of
unrecognized information. All because our own unusualness and
center-of-creation biases might prevent us from thinking outside the box.
But that would still leave the evolution of the vertical information string
to be explained. That I will leave for another day- but suffice it to say
that the ability of an organism to simply reorganize the spatio-temporal
signalling matrix begs the question about whether something similar might be
possible at other levels of material organization. We know that the genome is
a linear string, at least ideally.
But there is also other, more distributed information heritable- witness the
pellicle of paramecium. Covered with cilia oriented in such and such a way,
the particulars of the organization aren't coded, but inherited from each
fissioning parent. Mess up that structure, and every single descendent will
possess the new configuration. Experiments have proven it. Different
"species"of paramecium have all sorts of shapes and cilial orientations.
Might these simply be the results of close scrapes and not something genetic
as it is usually understood.
And in humans we have known maternal effects on the development of the fetus.
And birth order effects. None of which are "genetic", but which for all we
know have consequences which carry down the generations nonetheless. Just as
language and culture do.
Enough for now- how about some substantive criticism. Positive or negative,
it matters not- just wish SOMEBODY would chime in. Thanks.
Jess Tauber
zylogy@aol.com
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