Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id AAA00930 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Fri, 19 Jan 2001 00:44:28 GMT Subject: Re: Phonosemantics and More parallels in the genome (and elsewhere) Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 19:41:05 -0500 x-sender: wsmith1@camail2.harvard.edu x-mailer: Claris Emailer 2.0v3, Claritas Est Veritas From: "Wade T.Smith" <wade_smith@harvard.edu> To: "Memetics Discussion List" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Message-ID: <20010119003924.AAA20964@camailp.harvard.edu@[204.96.32.110]> Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Hi Zylogy@aol.com --
>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.
There are no static structures in nature, and there never will be.
>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.
Replication alone is not evolution.
>We know that the genome is
>a linear string, at least ideally.
We know no such thing. How we know something can never be the thing
itself.
>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.
Mothering has always been cultural. Ask any mother.
>What would be interesting would
>be to find that so were the primitives in genetics and language
I once read that in far and ancient lands, there was no difference
between music, poetry, dance, and song. Each emotion had a tune and a
step and a meter and a scale. Have we evolved from that source, or, like
some Babel within our intellect, simply replicated away from it?
>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.
The esperanto of consilience.
- Wade
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