> From: Hans-Cees Speel <hanss@zondisk.sepa.tudelft.nl>
> Organization: TU Delft
> To: Bruce Edmonds pcp <b.edmonds@mmu.ac.uk>
> Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 11:14:30 +0000
> Subject: "rosen and evolution
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> some further questions...
>
> > Don also writes:
> > >"He[Rosen] points out that biologists have always wanted to both
> > >have their cake and to eat it too. They play at "hard" science and
> > >mechanistic/reductionism as if it were perfectly adequate for
> > >dealing with the "livingness" of living systems and then when it
> > >fails they have "evolution" to fall back on. Much of what is
> > >unentailed by their> mechanistic
> > >models gets entailed by "evolution". He also makes a clear
> > >distinction between the physiology of an organism and the
> > >"fabrication" of and organism. Here's a real stepping off point for
> > >future work!"
> >
> > Help me understand this difference from Rosen's point of view. How
> > something 'works' vs. how it 'came to be' seems a simple
> > distinction. But are mechanisms not organisms because they do not
> > have a closed self-entailment like organisms? Or is self-entailment
> > (organismic reproduction) what Rosen means by closed efficient
> > causation?
>
> I also had problems with Rosens views on this point. I think
> self-entailment [being your own efficient cause] entails
> reproduction, and thus a little piece of what we call evolution. I
> did not quit understand what he meant by unentailed evolution.
>
> Hans-Cees
>
>
> Theories come and go, the frog stays [F. Jacob]
> -------------------------------------------------------
> |Hans-Cees Speel School of Systems Engineering, Policy Analysis and managemen
t
> |Technical University Delft, Jaffalaan 5 2600 GA Delft PO Box 5015 The
> Netherlands
> |telephone +3115785776 telefax +3115783422 E-mail hanss@sepa.tudelft.nl
> HTTP://www.sepa.tudelft.nl/~afd_ba/hanss.html featuring evolution and memetic
s!
>
> -- End of filtered message --
The fact that organisms reproduce is certainly entailed in the M-R scheme,
but he never deals with this explicitly.
As I understand him, "unentailed evolution" is the practice of reaching
to evolution for entailment when the mechanistic model can't supply it.
The issue then is simply avoided. A good theory of evolution must
include sufficient entailment.
Best regards,
Don Mikulecky