Re: circular logic

From: Joe Dees (joedees@addall.com)
Date: Mon Dec 03 2001 - 05:29:15 GMT

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    Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2001 21:29:15 -0800
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    From: "Joe Dees" <joedees@addall.com>
    To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
    Subject: Re: circular logic
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    > "Kenneth Van Oost" <Kenneth.Van.Oost@village.uunet.be> <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Re: circular logicDate: Sun, 2 Dec 2001 13:29:29 +0100
    >Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
    >
    >
    >----- Original Message -----
    >From: Wade T. Smith <wade_smith@harvard.edu>
    >
    >
    >> To make some remark upon your 'should've' comments- lamarckianism (or
    >> neo-lamarckianism, don't matter much) marches from the 'need'
    >> perspective- as if it isn't so much an accidental process, this
    >> evolution, but somehow forced by some collective will- the cold starting
    >> to come in requiring the need for warmer woolens, and the tribe somehow
    >> selecting (the females selecting to mate, perhaps, with hairier, furrier
    >> males) for thicker coats. Or something.... At any rate, there is somehow
    >> a goal in lamarckianism, and, so far, nothing about evolution admits of
    >> goals.
    >> If all neo-lamarckianism is is the application of design criteria to
    >> future generations, we will be there soon enough with life, and we were
    >> always there with artefacts.
    >
    >Hi Wade,
    >
    >Well, well,... friend,
    >
    >Just to comment yours,
    >
    >The goal in Lamarckism, the need for warmer woolens, the need for longer
    >necks, is IMO a complete misunderstanding.
    >We ought to be alive, we must survive as an organism in order to act as the
    >proper working- hosts to allow memes to propagate.
    >The need for them to survive is far more greater than their desire to do so.
    >Desire is ' included ' in need but has not such a strong ' meaning' to it as
    >need as such does.
    >
    >The need is not expressed into what is found in Lamarckism ( use- disuse),
    >like the giraffe- example, but you have to concentrate yourself upon
    >Lamarckism as a more neurobiological substrate, not as more as a bodily
    >level.
    >Lamarckism IMO, has nothing to do with bodily supposed changes, not in
    >the short term anyway.
    >Lamarckian processes are the start for a possible bodily change, not having
    >longer arms/ hairier man or longer necks, but to have changed behavior_
    >another way to move/ (re)act, sit...
    >
    >The change is the way we express the behavior, not the behavior itself.
    >The change is like you mention, the application of design on another level
    >of complexity.
    >Lamarckism has to do with the brain and which kind of connections are made
    >there. The result of such processes are changed behaviors, changed appli-
    >cations of design, changed ways we use artefacts or changed ways we design
    >artefacts.
    >
    >And to conclude,
    >The famous giraffe- example of Lamarck is also a misunderstanding,
    >Devillers and Chaline, Théorie de l'évolution, Paris, 1989 write, in a kind
    >of circular logic, if the ancestors of the giraffe did got indeed a shorter
    >neck
    >they had to be bigger in general than the giraffes of today. They too did
    >reach (for) the leaves at the top of the tree.
    >
    >What in a sense dismisses any explanation as for Darwin as for Lamarck.
    >The thing is, according to Devillers and Chaline, that not only the neck,
    >but
    >also the frontlegs of the animals were getting longer. The result of both
    >processes, forced upon them by the environment, is that the giraffe, without
    >standing up on its backlegs can now reach a hight of six meters ( 20 feet).
    >All is due to habits. And the habit, more likely the need, of reaching for
    >the
    >highest leaves resulted in changes.
    >
    Nope. Shorter giraffes starved to death, taller ones (however 'taller' was manifested, by neck or legs or both) survived to reproduce, giving us a new spectrum of heights in succeeding generations; the shorter ones of these generations starved to death, too, and the median giraffe height rose as a consequence of this blind purposeless natural environmental selection of certain mutations over others, or of one end of that species' body-configuration spectrum over the other, in continuous iteration.
    >
    >===============================================================
    >This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
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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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