Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id JAA12199 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-bounces@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 29 Aug 2001 09:34:48 +0100 From: <joedees@bellsouth.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2001 03:39:04 -0500 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: Shaggy Dog vs. Psychic Dog Message-ID: <3B8C63D8.24092.970981@localhost> In-reply-to: <002f01c12ff2$2d46f2a0$e824f4d8@teddace> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12c) Sender: fmb-bounces@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
On 28 Aug 2001, at 11:49, Dace wrote:
> Scott wrote:
>
> > So...when I was a wee embryo and developed so-called gill-slits was
> > I remembering a time when an ancestor way back when was a fish? Was
> > I resonating with this ancestral water dweller?
>
> No. This might come across as hair-splitting, but you were never an
> embryo. You're a human being, and there's nothing human about an
> embryo. Human consciousness isn't born until sometimes during the
> first year of autonomous life. However, there is something to
> Haeckel's notion of phylogeny providing the mechanics of ontogeny.
> It's a species memory that infuses the developing organism. And
> Haeckel wasn't the first to apply the concept of memory to
> developmental biology. Sheldrake is resuscitating an idea that goes
> back to the 1870s.
>
And should have died there, like more sensible horses of an
unreasonable choler.
>
> > When Sheldrake (in _The
> > Presence of the Past_, last page of chapter 4) brings up these gill
> > slits
> he
> > refers to a figure in chapter 1 which is basically Haeckel's highly
> stylized
> > drawings of vertebrate embryos. Would Sheldrake's formative
> > causation or morphic resonance be any more valid than Haeckel's
> > mnemic analogy of perigenesis and plastidules in this regard?
>
> Haeckel's view of organic memory lacked a mechanism by which it could
> be transferred from species to egg. Sheldrake proposes that this
> occurs through resonance.
>
Which basically means that Sheldrake proposes no mechanism,
either, just some feelgood words poorly masquerading as
scientifically credible.
>
> Living forms (as well as certain nonliving
> forms) resonate with similar forms that preceded them.
>
This statement should be in a dictionary as a concrete example of
dogma; totally unsupported, yet people are urged to believe it.
>
> Thus the
> embryo in your mother's womb was resonating with the composite form of
> the embryos that came before it. Except for the variations resulting
> from unique genetic composition, this accounts for the form of the
> body as it emerges.
>
In other words, morphic resonances are not genetic, but generic.
maybe they employ bar codes.
>
> The value of Sheldrake is that he gives us a testable and as yet
> unfalsified hypothesis of memory.
>
The reason that it is unfalsified is PRECISELY because it is
untestable, which relegates it to the position of being an article of
faith/belief, rather than belonging within the realm of knowledge.
>
> Ted
>
>
>
> ===============================================================
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>
===============================================================
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
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