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Darwin-L Message Log 36: 1–30 — August 1996
Academic Discussion on the History and Theory of the Historical Sciences
Darwin-L was an international discussion group on the history and theory of the historical sciences, active from 1993–1997. Darwin-L was established to promote the reintegration of a range of fields all of which are concerned with reconstructing the past from evidence in the present, and to encourage communication among scholars, scientists, and researchers in these fields. The group had more than 600 members from 35 countries, and produced a consistently high level of discussion over its several years of operation. Darwin-L was not restricted to evolutionary biology nor to the work of Charles Darwin, but instead addressed the entire range of historical sciences from an explicitly comparative perspective, including evolutionary biology, historical linguistics, textual transmission and stemmatics, historical geology, systematics and phylogeny, archeology, paleontology, cosmology, historical geography, historical anthropology, and related “palaetiological” fields.
This log contains public messages posted to the Darwin-L discussion group during August 1996. It has been lightly edited for format: message numbers have been added for ease of reference, message headers have been trimmed, some irregular lines have been reformatted, and error messages and personal messages accidentally posted to the group as a whole have been deleted. No genuine editorial changes have been made to the content of any of the posts. This log is provided for personal reference and research purposes only, and none of the material contained herein should be published or quoted without the permission of the original poster.
The master copy of this log is maintained in the Darwin-L Archives (rjohara.net/darwin) by Dr. Robert J. O’Hara. The Darwin-L Archives also contain additional information about the Darwin-L discussion group, the complete Today in the Historical Sciences calendar for every month of the year, a collection of recommended readings on the historical sciences, and an account of William Whewell’s concept of “palaetiology.”
--------------------------------------------
DARWIN-L MESSAGE LOG 36: 1-30 -- AUGUST 1996
--------------------------------------------
DARWIN-L
A Network Discussion Group on the
History and Theory of the Historical Sciences
Darwin-L@raven.cc.ukans.edu is an international network discussion group on
the history and theory of the historical sciences. Darwin-L was established
in September 1993 to promote the reintegration of a range of fields all of
which are concerned with reconstructing the past from evidence in the present,
and to encourage communication among academic professionals in these fields.
Darwin-L is not restricted to evolutionary biology nor to the work of Charles
Darwin but instead addresses the entire range of historical sciences from an
interdisciplinary perspective, including evolutionary biology, historical
linguistics, textual transmission and stemmatics, historical geology,
systematics and phylogeny, archeology, paleontology, cosmology, historical
anthropology, historical geography, and related "palaetiological" fields.
This log contains public messages posted to Darwin-L during August 1996.
It has been lightly edited for format: message numbers have been added for ease
of reference, message headers have been trimmed, some irregular lines have been
reformatted, and some administrative messages and personal messages posted to
the group as a whole have been deleted. No genuine editorial changes have been
made to the content of any of the posts. This log is provided for personal
reference and research purposes only, and none of the material contained herein
should be published or quoted without the permission of the original poster.
The master copy of this log is maintained on the Darwin-L Web Server at
http://rjohara.uncg.edu. For instructions on how to retrieve copies of this
and other log files, and for additional information about Darwin-L and the
historical sciences, connect to the Darwin-L Web Server or send the e-mail
message INFO DARWIN-L to listserv@raven.cc.ukans.edu.
Darwin-L is administered by Robert J. O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu), Center for
Critical Inquiry in the Liberal Arts and Department of Biology, University of
North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina 27412 U.S.A., and it
is supported by the Center for Critical Inquiry, University of North Carolina
at Greensboro, and the Department of History and the Academic Computing Center,
University of Kansas.
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:1>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Thu Aug 1 00:05:07 1996
Date: Thu, 01 Aug 1996 01:05:01 -0500 (EST)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: List owner's monthly greeting
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro
Greetings to all Darwin-L subscribers. On the first of every month I send
out a short note on the status of our group, along with a reminder of basic
commands. For additional information about the group please visit the
Darwin-L Web Server (http://rjohara.uncg.edu).
Darwin-L is an international discussion group for professionals in the
historical sciences. The group is not devoted to any particular discipline,
such as evolutionary biology, but rather seeks to promote interdisciplinary
comparisons across the entire range of "palaetiology", including evolution,
historical linguistics, archeology, geology, cosmology, historical geography,
textual transmission, and history proper. Darwin-L currently has about 700
members from more than 35 countries.
Because Darwin-L does have a large membership and is sometimes a high-volume
discussion group it is important for all participants to try to keep their
postings as substantive as possible so that we can maintain a favorable
"signal-to-noise" ratio. Personal messages should be sent by private e-mail
rather than to the group as a whole. The list owner does lightly moderate
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interdisciplinary study of the historical sciences.
Bob O'Hara, Darwin-L list owner
Dr. Robert J. O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu) | Darwin-L Server
Cornelia Strong College, 100 Foust Building | http://rjohara.uncg.edu
University of North Carolina at Greensboro | Strong College Server
Greensboro, North Carolina 27412 U.S.A. | http://strong.uncg.edu
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:2>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Thu Aug 1 00:16:59 1996
Date: Thu, 01 Aug 1996 01:11:06 -0500 (EST)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: August 1 -- Today in the Historical Sciences
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro
AUGUST 1 -- TODAY IN THE HISTORICAL SCIENCES
1744: JEAN BAPTISTE PIERRE ANTOINE DE MONET, CHEVALIER DE LAMARCK born
at Bazentin-le-Petit, Picardy, France. A pioneer of invertebrate
paleontology, Lamarck will come to reject the fixity of species late in
his life and will expound an evolutionary view of nature, first in 1802,
and then more thoroughly in 1809 in his _Philosophie Zoologique_.
Today in the Historical Sciences is a feature of Darwin-L, an international
network discussion group on the history and theory of the historical sciences.
Send the message INFO DARWIN-L to listserv@raven.cc.ukans.edu or connect to
the Darwin-L Web Server (http://rjohara.uncg.edu) for more information.
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:3>From pnelson2@ix.netcom.com Wed Jul 31 12:26:16 1996
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 10:26:08 -0700
From: pnelson2@ix.netcom.com (Paul A. Nelson)
Subject: Universal common descent before 1859?
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
To the list:
I'm claiming in my dissertation that Charles Darwin gets priority rights
to the theory of universal common descent, i.e., the monophyly of life
on Earth. There's nothing surprising in this claim, of course. I'd like
to know, however, if I missed something in a corner of scientific history
overlooked in the standard secondary literature. The only possible
challenger I've been able to find is Erasmus Darwin (see the _Zoonomia_,
section 39, "Generation," pages 503, 511). I'm arguing however that
Charles still gets the credit, because of the clearly speculative tenor
of the _Zoonomia_ passage, when compared with the straightforward
argument "Therefore I should infer from analogy" [one common ancestor]
in the _Origin_ (1859, 484).
Question:
Does anyone know of postulations of universal common descent prior
to 1859? Geoffroy St. Hilaire doesn't qualify. Lamarck, Chambers, von
Baer, and Owen all postulated polyphyletic geometries. (As did Haeckel,
for that matter.) And the transcendentalists seemed not to have Darwin's
conception of *historical* [ancestor-descendant, or material begetting]
descent, uniting all organisms Recent and extinct.
Please send answers to the list, as I think others may be interested.
Paul Nelson
pnelson2@ix.netcom.com
Department of Philosophy
University of Chicago
1050 East 59th St.
Chicago IL 60637
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:4>From m.schmitt@uni-bonn.de Thu Aug 1 06:41:08 1996
Date: Thu, 1 Aug 1996 06:40:46 -0500
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
From: m.schmitt@uni-bonn.de (Michael Schmitt)
Subject: Re: Reciprocal illumination and Dilthey
Dear Bob,
you wrote
>I wonder if Michael or someone else would enlighten us with an explanation
>of what Dilthey meant by this term. Dilthey is someone I have heard much
>about but have never really studied; I would be happy to learn more.
Frankly spoken: so do I. I am not an expert in Dilthey=B4s philosophy or
philosophy at all. My background is zoology, ethology, phylogenetic
systematics, and morphology (temporal sequence). In Hennig=B4s 1950 book I
read the passage on reciprocal illumination, in which he (p. 26) refers to a
book chapter by the ethnologist Muehlmann who stated (cited after Hennig
1966, p.21): "The nature of culture and its individual systems can be
determined by the method of reciprocal illumination of the part in relation
to the whole. The objection that this is circular reasoning has been
discussed by Dilthey ...".
The question what Dilthey REALLY meant is difficult to answer by me. First,
because I only read a few original pages from Dilthey=B4s "Der Aufbau der
geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften", but second, because
Dilthey=B4s style of language is vague and complicated (at least to me).
Moreover, Dilthey as well as Gadamer and other authors in this tradition
insist that their terms (all German) were exact. Consequently, it is an
extremely sensible endeavour to translate them into English. I am not
certain at all whether e.g. "understanding" does mean the same as
"verstehen".
A further complication arises from the different segregation of the fields
of science (and from the different meaning of the term *science*) in the
Anglo-Saxon world and in Central Europe. In Germany, *Wissenschaft* (Science
sensu lato) is divided into *Naturwissenschaft* (roughly characterized as
*science sensu stricto*) and *Geisteswissenschaft* which probably
corresponds to *humanities*. More recently *Sozialwissenschaften* (*social
sciences* are recognized as a separate field). These fields of science are
defined by their objects (*nature* versus *human beings and their products*)
rather than by different methods. Consequently, I see no problems to
recognize *Naturwissenschaft* as *science* in terms of Popper=B4s
hypothetico-deductivistic epistemology, but it is difficult for me to see
how Non-*Naturwissenschaft* can be *science*. Maybe this was the starting
point for Dilthey, too. He outlined a method of *verstehen* (roughly:
understanding) as the specific *scientific* method of the
*Geisteswissenschaft*. The proper method of *Naturwissenschaft* is said to
be *explaining*. He explicitely stated that only a *Sinn* (maybe *sense*?)
can be *understood*. This means, in my opinion, necessarily that there must
have been an intention of setting a *Sinn* into something that can be
investigated empirically. If this applies, then phylogenetic systematics
(and science in general) had to accept a rationale (e.g. a creator) behind
its object.
That much concerning Dilthey seen through my eyes. As you may see, I am
entirely uncertain as to correct translation of Dilthey=B4s philosophical
terms and an adequate description of his ideas.
The other point is how Guenther and Hennig came to the opinion that
*reciprocal illumination* were the same as *checking, correcting and
rechecking*. Does anybody have any idea about that?
Thank you for any comment.
Sincerely
Michael
****************************************************************
* Dr. Michael Schmitt (Zoologischer Anzeiger) *
* Zoologisches Forschungsinstitut und Museum Alexander Koenig *
* Adenauerallee 160, D-53113 Bonn, Germany *
* Phone/Fax +49 228-9122 286, e-mail: m.schmitt@uni-bonn.de *
****************************************************************
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:5>From elanier@crl.nmsu.edu Thu Aug 1 09:27:46 1996
Date: Thu, 1 Aug 1996 08:27:42 -0700
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
From: elanier@crl.nmsu.edu (Ellery Lanier)
Subject: descent theory
answer to Paul Nelson,
If memory serves me correctly, a reasonable facsimile of a theory of
universal common descent was proposed by Pierre Maupertuis somewhere around
1744.
I would appreciate it if someone on the list would correct me, or perhaps
clarify why I have the idea.
Ellery (somatotyping) elanier@crl.nmsu.edu
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:6>From mayerg@cs.uwp.edu Thu Aug 1 10:21:12 1996
Date: Thu, 1 Aug 1996 10:21:03 -0500 (CDT)
From: Gregory Mayer <mayerg@cs.uwp.edu>
Subject: Re: Ahouse on Gould (fwd)
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
On Tue, 30 Jul 1996, Paul Gallagher wrote:
> In "Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?" (Paleobiology 6:119-
> 30 (1981) [1980 {GCM}]), Gould presents a good summary of his views on a
> number of issues.
This paper may not adequately present Gould's current views. It is one of
his least nuanced statements, including the famous claim that the
synthetic theory is "effectively dead" and the suggestion that jawed
vertebrates arose in "one step". As such, it has been a favorite target
of Gould's critics, and may not present Gould's views in the best light,
or as he would argue them today.
Gregory C. Mayer
mayerg@cs.uwp.edu
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:7>From gliboff@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu Thu Aug 1 19:17:10 1996
Date: Thu, 01 Aug 1996 20:14:43 -0400
From: Sander J Gliboff <gliboff@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu>
Subject: Re: Universal common descent before 1859?
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
In response to Paul Nelson, who wrote:
> I'm claiming in my dissertation that Charles Darwin gets priority
> rights to the theory of universal common descent, i.e., the
> monophyly of life on Earth. There's nothing surprising in this
> claim, of course. I'd like to know, however, if I missed
> something in a corner of scientific history overlooked in the
> standard secondary literature.
What I find most surprising about this claim is that no one finds it
surprising. There were many pre-Darwinian evolutionists in the
German-speaking countries, and they were not all dreamy transcendentalists
with no concept of *historical* descent, as Paul Nelson implies.
Particularly those with an interest in the cell theory, such as Matthias
Schleiden or Franz Unger, pictured a single primeval cell (_Urzelle_)
giving rise to all living species. I am working on a paper on Unger's
theory of 1852 and I consider it a full-fledged theory of common descent.
So don't go granting bragging rights to the Darwinians too fast. Take a
closer look at the German-Austrian-Swiss corner of scientific history and
see if you don't agree that some of them were on to common descent. A
good place to start is:
Temkin, O. (1959). The idea of descent in post-Romantic German biology:
1848-1858. In _Forerunners of Darwin: 1745-1859._ Edited by B. Glass, O.
Temkin and W. Straus, Jr. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press:
323-355.
There's also a bit on Unger in Ernst Mayr's _Growth of Biological
Thought._
Yours,
Sandy
-------------------------------------------------------------
Sander Gliboff
Department of the History of Science, Medicine and Technology
Johns Hopkins University
3400 North Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218
gliboff@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:8>From daaf@cerium.demon.co.uk Thu Aug 1 14:49:20 1996
From: Danny Fagandini <daaf@cerium.demon.co.uk>
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: Ahouse on Gould (fwd)
Date: Thu, 01 Aug 1996 18:22:39 BST
Paul Gallagher <pcg@panix.com> wrote:
> In "Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?" (Paleobiology
> 6:119- 30 (1981)), Gould presents a good summary of his views on a
> number of issues.
How long will it be before we will be able to call up a reference
such as this for a quick read? It may well be on the Web somewhere,
but what we need is a click on the reference itself.
--
danny
daaf@cerium.demon.co.uk
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:9>From daaf@cerium.demon.co.uk Thu Aug 1 15:36:13 1996
From: Danny Fagandini <daaf@cerium.demon.co.uk>
Message-Id: <mF702FCAE@cerium.demon.co.uk>
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: Universal common descent before 1859?
pnelson2@ix.netcom.com (Paul A. Nelson) wrote:
> Question:
> Does anyone know of postulations of universal common descent prior to
> 1859?
A contemporary of Darwin Alfred Russel WALLACE b Jan 8, 1823 Usk in
Monmouthshire GB. Darwin read a joint paper before the Linnean Society
announcing the theory of natural selection. Wallace had evolved his own
thinking independantly of Charles Darwin whilst working in the tropical
rain forests of SE Asia (I think). He had nothing like the wealth of
data that Darwin had assembled and probably could never have defended
his theory against the formidable challenges that Darwin's supporters
(Huxley et al) had to face. Wallace, however, stimulated Darwin into
publication. By himself he would quite possibly have remained silent,
fearing the uproar. Darwin was not one to relish that.
The Erasmus you mention was Charles's grandfather; Charles's brother
had the same name.
--
danny
daaf@cerium.demon.co.uk
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:10>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Mon Aug 5 20:50:42 1996
Date: Mon, 05 Aug 1996 21:50:38 -0500 (EST)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: August 5 -- Today in the Historical Sciences
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro
AUGUST 5 -- TODAY IN THE HISTORICAL SCIENCES
1852: FRANTISEK LADISLAV CELAKOVSKY, Professor of Slavic Philology at
Charles University in Prague, dies. A collector of Slavic proverbs and
folktales as well as a linguist and amateur botanist, Celakovsky will
draw one of the first trees of language history. The diagram will be
published from his lecture notes in 1853, a year after his death.
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:11>From menier@cimrs1.mnhn.fr Fri Aug 2 07:31:27 1996
Date: Fri, 2 Aug 1996 13:21:56 +0200
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
From: menier@cimrs1.mnhn.fr (Jean J. Menier)
Subject: descent theory
Ellery wrote :
>answer to Paul Nelson,
>If memory serves me correctly, a reasonable facsimile of a theory of
>universal common descent was proposed by Pierre Maupertuis somewhere around
>1744.
>I would appreciate it if someone on the list would correct me, or perhaps
>clarify why I have the idea.
>
>Ellery (somatotyping) elanier@crl.nmsu.edu
Memory serves well !
The exact date is : 1745, the tittle of the book is : " Ve'nus Physique "
where he suggest that a common descent among organisms may exist.
Later, Maupertuis wrote also about a possibility of evolution of species :
1756, " Essai sur les corps organise's " republished in 1756 as " Syste'me
de la Nature " in which he wrote :
" Ne pourrait-on pas expliquer par la' comment de deux seuls individus la
multiplication des espe'ces les plus dissemblables aient pu s'ensuivre ?
Elles n'auraient du^ leur premie're orifgine qu'a' quelques productions
fortuites, dans lesquelles les parties e'le'mentaires n'auraient pas retenu
l'ordre qu'elles tenaient dans les animaux pe'res et me'res : chaque degre'
d'erreur aurait fait une nouvelle espe'ce : et a' force d'e'carts re'pe'te's
serait venue la diversite' infinie des animaux que npous voyons aujourd'hui.
" (Maupertuis, Syste'me de la nature : 164).
It is though a very rudimentary conception of "natural selection".
The " Ve'nus physique " has been reprinted in 1980 by Aubier-Montaigne.
(sorry for all the accents appearing just after the letter on which they
should be).
Sincerely,
Jean J. Menier, Professor,
Head of Coleoptera Dept.
Museum national d'Histoire naturelle,
45 rue Buffon, 75005 Paris
Tel. (33) (1) 40 79 33 92 Fax :(33) (1) 40 79 36 99
e-mail : MENIER@MNHN.FR
See MNHN on WWW : http://www.mnhn.fr
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:12>From caporl@rpi.edu Fri Aug 2 08:27:34 1996
Date: Fri, 02 Aug 1996 09:23:44 -0400
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
From: Linnda Caporael <caporl@rpi.edu>
Bryant Furlow wrote that the "majority of the humanities and even social
science professors" with whom he's discussed the adaptationist program have
used Gould's popular work as evidence that biologists have rejected the
primacy of natural selection in evolutionary process. Hinsdale remarked
that he has been unable to find evidence that humanities or social science
(H&SS) professors use Gould as Furlow suggests.
I suspect that the work of Gould, Lewontin and others is useful for just
side-stepping evolution in H&SS, where all the objections to
pan-adaptationism are writ large. I don't think there is a rejection of
natural selection per se; few would deny that humans evolved just as have
other species. But current versions of evolutionary theory don't seem
particularly useful applied to the human case. Most are "economic man"
theory using a genetic currency. Perhaps the developmental systems
approaches (e.g., Oyama, Thelen) will eventually bridge the gap between H&SS
and Darwinism.
Linnda R. Caporael Voice: 518-276-8519
Department of Science & Technology Studies or 212 627-3626
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Fax: 212 741-2440
Troy, NY 12180
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:13>From mayerg@cs.uwp.edu Fri Aug 2 10:05:20 1996
Date: Fri, 2 Aug 1996 10:05:17 -0500 (CDT)
From: Gregory Mayer <mayerg@cs.uwp.edu>
Subject: Re: Universal common descent before 1859?
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Although I cannot say what the German transcendentalists themselves
thought about common descent, Richard Owen, who was much influenced by
them, did _not_ believe in common descent. Rather, he believed that life
originated many times, and was still originating today. Owen saw this as
a point in which his evolutionary views differed importantly from Darwin's.
Gregory C. Mayer
mayerg@cs.uwp.edu
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:14>From ahouse@hydra.rose.brandeis.edu Fri Aug 2 14:12:55 1996
Date: Fri, 2 Aug 1996 15:13:30 -0400
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu (Darwin List)
From: ahouse@hydra.rose.brandeis.edu (Jeremy C. Ahouse)
Subject: a better analogy?
Dear DarwinL,
And now a bit more on analogy. While I have played the part of
analogy skeptic in this discussion, I hope that I won't also be perceived
as analogy cynic. So to further the discussion I will offer a positive
instance of analogy between language and biology.
Wiener (1987) reaffirms my comment that one disanalogy between
language change and organimsal evolution rests on the status of monophyly.
There is general agreement that organisms share a common ancestor and less
than general agreement that languages do. Wiener points out that monophyly
is an important assumption as it is the basis of the outgroup method. This
method assumes that we can use sister groups to help us make descisions
about character polarity. Monophyly (though not intrinsically) usally
assumes minimal reticulation after branching. Language clearly doesn't play
by that rule either.
So maybe a better analogy between language and biological evolution
is protein evolution. In protein evolution we don't have concensus about
the monophyly of all proteins (though we certainly do about certain
"families" of proteins). Additionally the description I applied in an
earlier posting to language, "lineage limited diffusion" seems to apply
here as well.
We make an interesting distinction in protein evolution. There are
two kinds of homology; orthology and paralogy (Fitch 1970, Patterson 1987).
Orthology refers to genes in different lineages and are the basis for
inferences of common ancestry among them. Paralogies may be found in the
same organism and are the basis of inference for common ancestry among
genes (e.g. the vetebrate globin family of genes; myoglobin, alpha, beta &
gamma hemaglobin). It seems to me that descriptions of language change too
would benefit from this distinction.
We still have two big(!) disanalogies;
1. It isn't clear how much protein evolution happens through
borrowing. On the up side, like language, if parts of proteins (functional
motifs) are brought together in a new protein there is no reason to think
that recency of a common ancestor is relevant to the success of this
placement. On the down side there doesn't seem to be any grammer of
functional parts of proteins that the DNA knows about. It is the DNA that
is being shuffled and only subsequently translated protein where the
functional motifs can be realized. (Though we should strictly stay aware of
the importance of recombination signals that are due to non-coding
sequences on the chromosome.)
2. languages are integrated and functional in a much different way
than individual proteins. My sense of a good analogy is not satisfied by
either taking collections of proteins for the comparison or analogizing
words with proteins.
Now, an aside about analogy and method.
Since I have been arguing that some of the analogizing between
biology and language is "bad analogizing" I thought I would meditate a
little about borrowing and metaphor between fields.
Borrowing descriptions to make a point seems almost constitutive to
communication (see Hacking 1983 on representing). In science we are forever
using models and reapplying them in new situations. Recently some physical
scientists have let themselves get very bent out of shape about what they
view as inappropriate borrowing (Gross & Levitt 1994). This even resulted
in Alan Sokal's hoax of Social Text
(http://weber.u.washington.edu/~jwalsh/sokal/). Part of the anger comes
from the sense from the scientists of "you just don't understand" coupled
with a sense that an anti-realist position is being advocated. The
anti-realist straw army that these folks inveigh against results in an
unfortunate closing of ranks and oversimplification of method.
(Wendling(1996) discusses just how confused and misplaced Gross et al.'s
complaints are.)
What saddens me the most about this is that scientists present such
a caricature of their own methods when they take up the public debate
(Weinberg 1996). These people "know", in the visceral way that leads to
daily actions in the lab, the many intricacies that are necessary to
negotiate the conversation with nature. So then why offer a simplistic
correspondence theory of truth when daily activity is so much more
interesting? (Contrast Lewontin (1992).)
This doesn't only happen with scientists. Philosophers who
generally use their finely meshed webs of words to capture all of this
intricacy lose their nuance and become naive realists about their own work.
See the tweaking that Hull (1988) gets from cladists, Farris and Platnick
(1989)).
They can also lose the focus that a tangled reality demands when
preparing to bludgeon what they think is a simple minded opposition. For
example, Dennett in going after his caricature creationists uses his wide
brush (cudgel?) in ways that must leave philosophers of science, much less
scientists, wondering where the last 100 years of discussion have gone.
Compare Kitcher's (1993) description of Darwinism, or Sober (1984a), or
even the close readings of concepts like fitness found in Mills & Beatty
(1979) to "Darwin's Dangerous Idea".
So now back to selectionist explanations in language, biology,
epistemology, etc... There are even areas within biology that selectionist
theories are more or less apt.
The way that the immune system generates a primary antibody (Ab)
response is about the nicest fit of the selectionist framework you will
find. A continuous supply of variant Abs (due to multiple germ line V
genes, V-J and V-D-J gene segment recombinations, recombinational
inaccuracies, somatic point mutations and the combinations of heavy and
light chains) are selected by the residence time of an antigen (Ag) and an
antibody receptor. Cells that interact strongly enough with an Ag are
stimulated to divide, resulting in more Abs of that idiotype. These are
then taken through rounds of hypermutation. The end result can result in a
high affinity Ab. (Though it isn't clear that the high affinity Abs that
are produced in bunnies or mice as reagents are what the body uses in a
typical response. Natural responses may be due to a polyclonal lower
affinity response.)
Sorry for slipping into a bit of immunology. The point I want to
make is that a simple selectionist story is quite effective here. Genotype
and phenotype are remarkably close and we don't need to explain the
evolution of complicated developmental regulatory circuits. So the
winnowing of diversity that a selectionist process does so well is
foregrounded and appropriate. Interesting to me is that this best exemplar
of selection came along many years after Darwin and Wallace. The folks
working on genetic algorithms have an even more rarefied and thus accurate
instatiation of a selectionist model.
Empiricists will forever prefer to subordinate particular models to
"the world." (That is part of why Dennett's a priori selectionism doesn't
fly.) Now we should be quick to insist that the world/model division is not
so easy to sustain. Even so when there is the general sense that when the
two are moving apart it is theory that is asked to bend.
So what does it mean to have a good or bad analogy? At some level
anything that inspires is fair (e.g. quantum mechanics in poetry or social
criticism). At another we must follow Lakatos' injuction (1978, v1 p6) to
"take budding programmes leniently; programmes may take decades to get off
the ground and become empirically progressive" (e.g. artificial life
models). At another we have the characterization by Sereno (1991)
(mentioned in a previous post) that we must show (1) decomposition of the
source and target systems, (2) establishment of a map between the two
systems, (3) generation of predictions about the target and (4) testing of
the predictions.
It really is only in this last that I want to wrangle about the
analogy of language and biological evolution.
Refs.
Danny Fagandini <daaf@cerium.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>How long will it be before we will be able to call up a reference
>such as this for a quick read?
You will have to hit the library for these - sorry.
Dennett, D. C. (1995). "Darwin's dangerous idea: evolution and the meanings
of life." Simon & Schuster, New York.
Farris, J. S., and Platnick, N. I. (1989). Lord of the Flies: The
Systematist as a Study Animal. Cladisitcs 5, 295-310.
Fitch, W. M. (1970). Distinguishing homologous from analogous proteins.
Systematic Zoology 19, 99-113.
Gross, P. R., and Levitt, N. (1994). "Higher superstition: the academic
left and its quarrels with science." Johns Hopkins University Press,
Baltimore.
Hacking, I. (1983). "Representing and intervening: Introductory topics in
the philosophy of natural science." Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Hull, D. (1988). "Science as Process: An evolutionary account of the social
and conceptual development of Science." University of Chicago Press,
Chicago.
Kitcher, P. (1993). "The advancement of science : science without legend,
objectivity without illusions." Oxford University Press, New York.
Lakatos, I. (1978). "Philosophical Papers." Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Lewontin, R. C. (1992). "Biology as ideology: the doctrine of DNA."
HarperPerennial, New York.
Mills, S., and Beatty, J. (1979). The Propensity interpretation of fitness.
Philosphy of Science 46, 263-286. Also in Sober (1984b).
Patterson, C. (1987). Introduction. In "Molecules and morphology in
evolution: conflict or compromise?" (C. Patterson, Ed.). Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge.
Sereno, M. I. (1991). Four Analogies Between Biological and
Cultural/Linguistic Evolution. Journal of Theoretical Biology 151, 467-507.
Sober, E. (1984a). "The nature of selection: evolutionary theory in
philosophical focus." MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Sober, E. (1984b). "Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology." MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA.
Wendling, K. (1996). Is Science Unique? Biology & Philosophy 11, 421-438.
Weinberg, S. (1996). NY Review of Books July? Sorry I don't have the
complete ref for this. It was out last week.
Wiener, L. F. (1987). Of Phonetics and Genetics: a Comparison of
Classification in Linguistic and Organic Systems. In "Biological Metaphor
and Cladistic Classification: An interdisciplinary perspective" (H. M.
Hoenigswald and L. F. Wiener, Eds.), pp. 217-226. University of
Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:15>From pnelson2@ix.netcom.com Mon Aug 5 07:57:48 1996
Date: Mon, 5 Aug 1996 05:57:44 -0700
From: pnelson2@ix.netcom.com (Paul A. Nelson)
Subject: Re: Universal common descent before 1859?
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Thanks to Ellery Lanier, Sander Gliboff, Danny Fagandini, and Ron
Roizen for their pointers re the above-listed topic. Sander's
recommendations about taking another look at the Germans (e.g., Unger)
sounded especially promising. It's moderately discouraging to learn
that my "Charles Darwin first with universal common descent" story was
too tidy, but that funk passes quickly with the cheerful prospect of
improving the accuracy of my dissertation. Thanks!
Paul Nelson
Dept of Philosophy
Univ of Chicago
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:16>From zinjman@uog9.uog.edu Tue Aug 6 02:33:04 1996
Date: Tue, 6 Aug 1996 17:36:31 +0000 (WET)
From: "Gary M. Heathcote" <zinjman@uog9.uog.edu>
To: Darwin Discussion List <darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu>
Cc: Vince Diego <xvpdiego@uog9.uog.edu>, Frank Camacho <xfcamach@uog9.uog.edu>,
Tom Taisipic <xttaisip@uog9.uog.edu>,
"Luigi L. Cavalli-Sforza" <mh.lcs@forsythe.stanford.edu>
Subject: question for the List
I have been pouring over works by Cavalli-Sforza and many others
on genetic-linguistic co-evolution, searching - so far in vain - for the
following:
Has anyone given *extended attention* to the multiplicity of factors
(historical, spatial, demographic, physiographic, etc.) involved in
~determining the extent to which biology, language and culture
co-vary (i.e. differentially, within a regional or
inter-regional context)? I'm looking for either empirical studies that
explore the factors associated with a given society (within a regional
context) manifesting greater-->>lesser
degrees or co-variation, or theoretical models/simulation studies.
Your bibliographic or other assistance will be most
appreciated.
Gary Heathcote
Anthropology Lab
University of Guam
=====================================================================
| Dr. Gary Heathcote | voice: (671) 735-2817 |
| Anthropology Lab | fax: (671) 734-7930 |
| University of Guam | addr: zinjman@uog.edu |
| House 32, Dean's Circle | |
| UOG Station, Mangilao | coordinates: 13.5N, 144.7E |
| Guam U.S.A. 96923 | GMT +10, EST +15 |
=====================================================================
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:17>From cavalli@lotka.Stanford.EDU Tue Aug 6 13:42:48 1996
From: L.L. Cavalli-Sforza <cavalli@lotka.Stanford.EDU>
Date: Tue, 6 Aug 96 11:44:52 -0700
To: Gary M.Heathcote <zinjman@uog9.uog..edu>
Subject: Your question
Cc: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
As far as I am aware, the subject of genetic-cultural-linguistic
coevolution is very recent, and I am not aware of published papers
other than those cited in Cavalli-Sforza and Minch, PNAS 1992, or
the Guglielmino et al. paper in PNAS 1995.
L.Cavalli-Sforza
Genetics Dept.
Stanford U.
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:18>From kent@darwin.eeb.uconn.edu Tue Aug 6 07:08:33 1996
Date: Tue, 6 Aug 96 08:08:10 EDT
From: kent@darwin.eeb.uconn.edu (Kent E. Holsinger)
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: a better analogy?
>>>>> "Jeremy" == Jeremy C Ahouse <ahouse@hydra.rose.brandeis.edu> writes:
[stuff deleted]
Jeremy> So now back to selectionist explanations in
Jeremy> language, biology, epistemology, etc... There are even
Jeremy> areas within biology that selectionist theories are more
Jeremy> or less apt.
[stuff deleted]
Jeremy> So what does it mean to have a good or bad
Jeremy> analogy? At some level anything that inspires is fair
Jeremy> (e.g. quantum mechanics in poetry or social criticism). At
Jeremy> another we must follow Lakatos' injuction (1978, v1 p6) to
Jeremy> "take budding programmes leniently; programmes may take
Jeremy> decades to get off the ground and become empirically
Jeremy> progressive" (e.g. artificial life models). At another we
Jeremy> have the characterization by Sereno (1991) (mentioned in a
Jeremy> previous post) that we must show (1) decomposition of the
Jeremy> source and target systems, (2) establishment of a map
Jeremy> between the two systems, (3) generation of predictions
Jeremy> about the target and (4) testing of the predictions.
Is it possible that Jeremy's skepticism about the usefulness of
analogies between biological evolution and linguistic evolution arises
because you suppose that those analogies must include a selectionist
component? The first fragment quoted above seems to suggest so. That
skepticism I share to some degree.
The analogies I suggested in earlier discussions involve, so far as I
can tell only a few assumptions:
1) There is a interacting group of individuals able to reproduce
themselves (a biological population or a linguistic community).
2) When those individuals reproduce themselves the offspring tend to
resemble their parents, but they are not necessarily identical.
In biology the appearance, physiology, and biochemical structure of
offspring is similar to that of the parents. Transmission is
strictly vertical, from parents to offspring, and only genetically
determined characteristics are transmitted, not acquired traits.
With languages, children will grow up speaking the language(s) of
their parents and the community in which they live. Transmission is
*not* strictly vertical, and acquired language characteristics are
transmissible. I'm not sure it even makes sense to try make a
distinction analogous to the genotype/phenotype distinction when
talking about transmission of language.
The diffences in transmission dynamics will, undoubtedly, lead to
differences in detail, but some general features are clear even
without specifying a precise mechanism. All we really need to know
is that offspring resemble their parents. Darwin got the mechanism
of inheritance famously wrong, after all, and he still got the rest
of it right.
3) New characteristics arise and spread independently in
non-interacting groups.
1), 2), and 3) are sufficient, I believe, to account for descent with
modification (i.e., a hierarchical structure of relationships among
both biological populations and linguistic communities), to predict
isolation by distance for both genetic and linguistic variation in
continuously distributed populations, to predict divergence of both
non-interacting biological populations and non-interacting linguistic
communities (regardless of whether the lack of interaction is a result
geographical isolation or other causes), and to predict that the
degree of divergence between both partially isolated biological
populations and partially isolated linguistic communities will be
inversely related to the amount of interaction between them.
Each of these predictions seems testable to me. I've already mentioned
the distribution of local dialects along the coast from Iberia to
Sicily (isolation by distance), the Romance and Indo-European language
families (hierarchical structure). Perhaps the linguists among us can
tell us whether the following prediction is true:
The degree of divergence between two dialects of a major national
language, English say, is inversely related to the socio-economic
``distance'' between the communities speaking those dialects.
To me what is useful about the analogies we've tried to develop here
ist that the very way in which they are developed begins to illustrate
the limits of their application (cf. the discussion of transmission
dynamics above).
-- Kent
--
Kent E. Holsinger Kent@Darwin.EEB.UConn.Edu
http://darwin.eeb.uconn.edu
-- Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
-- University of Connecticut, U-43
-- Storrs, CT 06269-3043
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:19>From kent@darwin.eeb.uconn.edu Wed Aug 7 06:48:19 1996
Date: Wed, 7 Aug 96 07:47:59 EDT
From: kent@darwin.eeb.uconn.edu (Kent E. Holsinger)
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: question for the List
>>>>> "Gary" == Gary M Heathcote <zinjman@uog9.uog.edu> writes:
Gary> I have been pouring over works by Cavalli-Sforza and many
Gary> others on genetic-linguistic co-evolution, searching - so
Gary> far in vain - for the following:
Gary> Has anyone given *extended attention* to the multiplicity of
Gary> factors (historical, spatial, demographic, physiographic,
Gary> etc.) involved in ~determining the extent to which biology,
Gary> language and culture co-vary (i.e. differentially, within a
Gary> regional or inter-regional context)? I'm looking for either
Gary> empirical studies that explore the factors associated with a
Gary> given society (within a regional context) manifesting
Gary> greater-->>lesser degrees or co-variation, or theoretical
Gary> models/simulation studies.
Gary> Your bibliographic or other assistance will be most
Gary> appreciated.
I don't know of any specific references off-hand. (If you develop a
good list, why don't you post it to Darwin-L. I'm sure many besides
myself would be interested in it.) I do recall a seminar about four
years ago by Guido Barbujani (based on work he did in collaboration
with Bob Sokal, I believe) describing patterns of gene frequency
change in rural Italian communities and relating it to variation in
local dialects. I seem to recall an example of a steep gene frequency
cline that corresponded with a marked difference in local dialects.
If you haven't seen his work, you should contact him directly. His
e-mail address is:
G4BBOV15@ICINECA.CINECA.IT
I'm sure he'd be happy to send you reprints. You may mention my name,
if you like, but I'm not at all sure he'll remember meeting me.
After checking my bibliography, I find that I do have several
references to his work. These may not be as comprehensive as you're
looking for, and you may have seen them already, but here goes:
@ARTICLE{Barbujani-Sokal90,
author = "Barbujani, G. and Sokal, R. R.",
year = "1990",
title = "The zones of sharp genetic change in Europe are also
language boundaries",
journal = "Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA",
volume = "87",
pages = "1816-1819"
@ARTICLE{Barbujani-Sokal91,
author = "Barbujani, G. and Sokal, R. R.",
year = "1991",
title = "Genetic population structure of Italy. II. Physical and
cultural barriers to gene flow",
journal = "Am. J. Hum. Genet.",
volume = "48",
pages = "298-411"
@ARTICLE{Barbujani-Pilastro93,
author = "Barbujani, G. and Pilastro, A.",
year = "1993",
title = "Genetic evidence on origin and dispersal of human
populations speaking languages of the Nostratic superfamily",
journal = "Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA",
volume = "90",
pages = "4670-4673"
-- Kent
--
Kent E. Holsinger Kent@Darwin.EEB.UConn.Edu
http://darwin.eeb.uconn.edu
-- Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
-- University of Connecticut, U-43
-- Storrs, CT 06269-3043
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:20>From rog@cns.brown.edu Wed Aug 7 07:29:12 1996
From: rog@cns.brown.edu (Roger B. Blumberg)
Subject: MendelWeb 96.2
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Date: Wed, 7 Aug 1996 08:19:44 -0400 (EDT)
August 6, 1996
A new edition of MendelWeb (96.2) is now available at Netspace
(http://www.netspace.org/MendelWeb/), the University of Washington
at Seattle (http://www-hpcc.astro.washington.edu/mirrors/MendelWeb/),
and on the Scholarly Technology Group server at Brown University
(http://www.stg.brown.edu/MendelWeb/). Additions include Jan Sapp's
science studies article, "The Nine Lives of Gregor Mendel," first
published in 1990; a form-based Statistics page that allows you to
calculate averages, variance and standard deviation on your own data
sets; and a Web-Moo environment called the "Mendelroom," where you
can meet other users of MendelWeb and find copies of Mendel's paper(s).
MendelWeb is a WWW teaching and learning resource, built upon
Gregor Mendel's famous pea-plant paper of 1865.
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:21>From kent@darwin.eeb.uconn.edu Thu Aug 8 06:52:28 1996
Date: Thu, 8 Aug 96 07:52:08 EDT
From: kent@darwin.eeb.uconn.edu (Kent E. Holsinger)
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Life on Mars?
This information on the recent report from NASA on the possibility of
ancient microbial life on Mars was posted on another list to which I
subscribe. I thought members of DARWIN-L might be interested, too.
-- Kent
------- Start of forwarded message -------
Date: 7 Aug 1996 16:02:19 -0800
From: "Lynn Rothschild" <Lynn_Rothschild@qmgate.arc.nasa.gov>
Subject: Ancient life on Mars?
To: "pop genetics evolution" <evoldir@evol.biology.mcmaster.ca>
OFFICE MEMO
Subject: Ancient life on Mars?
Date: 8/7/96
Time: 2:57 PM
In response to a barrage of phone calls and e-mails, I am passing on what I
know about the "life on Mars" excitement.
In 10 days an article will be published in Science by researchers at Johnson
Space Center (led by David McKay), with collaborators at McGill, Savannah
River and Stanford University. These workers have been studying a meteorite,
ALH84001, which was found in the Antarctic but is thought to be from Mars.
The rock is thought to have crystallized 4.5 billion years ago (Ga). It
contains carbonate globules that are thought to have formed 3.6 Ga. The
meteorite arrived in the Antarctic about 13,000 years ago. There are several
aspects of the meteorite which suggest that they contain the remains of a
microscopic Martian biota.
1. It contains abundant polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) that are
indigenous to the meteorite. PAHs are not, of themselves, indicative of life.
However, ice and other meteorites from the Antarctic show far lower levels of
PAHs, and are different chemically. PAHs are abundant as fossil molecules in
ancent sedimentary rocks, coal and petroleum where they are derived from
organisms such as marine plankton.
2. Areas of the meteorite rich in PAHs also typically contain partially
dissolved carbonate globules which are orange in visible light. Many of the
globules display alternating black and white rims. The Fe-rich rims consist
of an aggregate of tiny ovoids intermixed with irregularly shaped objects
ranging from 20 to 100 nm. These objects include elongated structures that
look like nannobacteria. (I saw SEM's of these this morning and one can
easily imagine that some of the elongated structures are nannobacteria in the
process of cell division.)
3. There are magnetite and iron sulfide particles in the 10 to 100 nanometer
size range. Simple abiogenic explanations of their formation do not allow
them to coexist with partially dissolved carbonates. However, bacteria are
capable of leaving this suite of biomarkers. There are terrestrial magnetite
particles known as magnetofossils which are the fossil remains of bacterial
magnetosomes, and are found in a variety of sediments and soils.
This infomation was presented on NASA select television this morning, and I
also have the page proofs of the Science article. Bill Schopf (UCLA) was at
the press conference as an outside member of the scientific community. Bill
is, of course, a specialist in the oldest terrestrial fossils. He is fairly
convinced that the meteorite is from Mars, but is somewhat less convinced, on
the basis of the evidence thus far, that the fossils are biologic in origin.
One of the issues that is troubling is that the fossils are an order of
magnitude or two smaller than the earliest terrestrial fossils. However, they
are not out of range of modern nannobacteria.
My opinion?. I certainly hope that this is the first evidence of a Martian
biota because it would be the most exciting discovery ever for evolutionary
biology - that is, that there was more than one origin of life. What is
inevitable about evolution vs what is contingent? As Gould points out, we are
not inevitable, but on a planet with a chemistry such as ours, is life based
on carbon inevitable? I often make the point that, given carbon-based life
and an atmosphere rich is inorganic rather than organic carbon, eventually
there would be strong selection for the evolution of autotrophy and probably
light-driven carbon fixation (i.e., photosynthesis). The current models
suggest early Earth and early Mars were similar physically and chemically. If
life is inevitable given a certain set of physical and chemical constraints,
it should have arisen on early Mars as well. If not, we are left with
explaining why not. But, to sound a note of caution (and paraphrasing Carl
Sagan), extraordinary science requires extraordinary proof. This will
certainly be a fascinating story to follow.
Lynn Rothschild
Mail Stop 239-12
NASA/Ames Research Center
Moffett Field, CA 94035-1000
Lynn_Rothschild@qmgate.arc.nasa.gov
------- End of forwarded message -------
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:22>From Turner@bio.uva.nl Fri Aug 9 02:19:56 1996
Date: Fri, 09 Aug 1996 09:19:01 +0200
From: Hubert Turner <Turner@bio.uva.nl>
Organization: University of Amsterdam
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: Life on mars?
In bionet.molbio.evolution, R M Bernstein wrote:
> The _entire_ life on mars article is at Science's home page at:
>
> http://www.aaas.org/science/mars/924/924.html
>
> it is -unbelievable i know- the whole article.
>
> ralph
>
> R.M. Bernstein
> Dept of MBIM -University of Arizona
> College of Medicine -AHSC LSN 612
> TUCSON AZ 85724 -Ph:520 626 6061
> url: http://lamprey.medmicro.arizona.edu
As a follow-up to Kent Holsinger's post I thought this might be of
interest to Darwin-Lers too.
--
Hubert Turner
**********************************************************
ISP/ZMA, Dept. Entomology, Plantage Middenlaan 64,
1018 DH Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Phone: +-31-20-5256245 Fax: +-31-20-5256528
E-mail: turner@bio.uva.nl
WWW: http://rulsfb.leidenuniv.nl/~turner/index.html
**********************************************************
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:23>From hanss@zondisk.sepa.tudelft.nl Fri Aug 9 05:03:26 1996
From: "Hans-Cees Speel" <hanss@zondisk.sepa.tudelft.nl>
Organization: TUDelft
To: kent@darwin.eeb.uconn.edu (Kent E. Holsinger), darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1996 12:12:24 +0000
Subject: Re: Life on Mars?
>My opinion?. I certainly hope that this is the first evidence of a Martian
>biota because it would be the most exciting discovery ever for evolutionary
>biology - that is, that there was more than one origin of life. What is
>inevitable about evolution vs what is contingent? As Gould points out, we are
>not inevitable, but on a planet with a chemistry such as ours, is life based
>on carbon inevitable? I often make the point that, given carbon-based life
>and an atmosphere rich is inorganic rather than organic carbon, eventually
>there would be strong selection for the evolution of autotrophy and probably
>light-driven carbon fixation (i.e., photosynthesis). The current models
>suggest early Earth and early Mars were similar physically and chemically. If
>life is inevitable given a certain set of physical and chemical constraints,
>it should have arisen on early Mars as well. If not, we are left with
>explaining why not. But, to sound a note of caution (and paraphrasing Carl
>Sagan), extraordinary science requires extraordinary proof. This will
>certainly be a fascinating story to follow.
There are of course other possibilities, that life on mars moved to
earth or the other way round. However, there is a possibility that
the rise of life from non-life is not as difficult as we use to think
[but still it takes about half a billion years or so].
greetings Hnas-Cees
Theories come and go, the frog stays [F. Jacob]
-------------------------------------------------------
|Hans-Cees Speel School of Systems Engineering, Policy Analysis and management
|Technical Univ. 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 memetics!
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:24>From mwinsor@chass.utoronto.ca Fri Aug 9 16:28:31 1996
From: Mary P Winsor <mwinsor@chass.utoronto.ca>
Subject: evolution of coins
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu (bulletin board)
Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1996 17:28:22 -0400 (EDT)
In 1875 John Evans gave a talk entitled "The coinage of the ancient
Britons, and natural selection" in which he said "...the succession of
the types of the coins followed certain laws, to a great extent
analogous with those by which the evolution of successive forms of
organic life appear to be governed..."
... "the reduction of a complicated and artistic design into a symmetrical
figure of easy execution, was the object of each successive engraver
of the dies for the coins, though probably they were themselves
unaware of any undue saving of trouble on their part, or of the
results which ensued from it."
I take this from a xerox copy in my possession. This seems like a
wonderful topic some member of the list may want to follow up. I
can give no more information (not even a citation!) but will
gladly mail the xerox to whomever wishes to enlighten us about
this proto-Darwin-l chap.
Polly Winsor mwinsor@chass.utoronto.ca
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:25>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Sat Aug 10 22:14:39 1996
Date: Sat, 10 Aug 1996 23:14:35 -0500 (EST)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: CFP: Conference on the History of the Book (fwd from HUMANIST)
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro
--begin forwarded message--------------
Date: Wed, 07 Aug 1996 14:00:10 +0100 (BST)
From: WILLARD MCCARTY <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: 10.0206 conference on book history
To: Humanist Discussion Group <humanist@lists.Princeton.EDU>
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 10, No. 206.
Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (Princeton/Rutgers)
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
Information at http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/
[1] From: Germaine Warkentin <warkent@chass.utoronto.ca> (69)
Subject: Book History [X-post]
[Double cross-posted from Ficino... -WM]
Of interest to FICINIANS:
CALL FOR PAPERS AND CONTRIBUTORS
The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing
solicits proposals for its fifth annual conference and contributions for
its new scholarly journal, *Book History*.
SHARP will meet 4-7 July 1997 at the University of Cambridge. We
welcome proposals for papers dealing with the creation, diffusion, or
reception of script or print in any historical period. There are no
limitations on topics. Proposals for either individual papers (20 minutes
in length) or full panels (comprising a chair and three papers) may be
submitted. We may also sponsor workshops devoted to shorter, more
informal presentations of works in progress.
Proposals (one page maximum per paper) and inquiries about the
conference itself (including requests for advance booking forms) should be
sent to:
James Raven
SHARP Conference Programme Committee
51 Sherlock Close
Cambridge CB3 0HP
United Kingdom
The absolute deadline for receipt of proposals is 20 November
1996. Four travel grants of $250 each will be offered to graduate
students who present papers at the conference: to apply, simply indicate
in your cover letter that you wish to be considered for this award. All
other participants and presenters will be expected to pay their own
expenses, including the registration fee; so please submit proposals only
if you can arrange for your own funding.
SHARP is also launching a new juried scholarly journal, *Book
History*. It will be a hardcover annual edited by Ezra Greenspan and
Jonathan Rose, and published by Penn State Press.
*Book History* is devoted to every aspect of the history of the
book, broadly defined as the history of the creation, dissemination, and
reception of script and print. It will publish research on the social,
economic, and cultural history of authorship, editing, printing, the book
arts, publishing, the book trade, periodicals, newspapers, ephemera,
copyright, censorship, literary agents, libraries, literary criticism,
canon formation, literacy, literary education, reading habits, and reader
response. *Book History* will be published in English, but it welcomes
articles dealing with any national literature. Publication of the first
issue is scheduled for August 1998.
Articles dealing with any part of the American hemisphere or the
Middle East should be submitted to Prof. Ezra Greenspan, Department of
English, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA,
ezra.greenspan@scarolina.edu. Articles dealing with other parts of the
world should be submitted to Prof. Jonathan Rose, Department of History,
Drew University, Madison, NJ 07940, USA, jerose@drew.edu. Send one hard
copy and a WordPerfect diskette for each article.
To obtain information on joining SHARP and subscribing to SHARP
publications -- or to request a free sample copy of the SHARP newsletter
-- contact the Membership Secretary, Dr. Linda Connors, Drew University
Library, Madison, NJ 07940, USA, lconnors@drew.edu.
[Other lists and print publications please copy]
****************************************************************************
Germaine Warkentin warkent@chass.utoronto.ca
English, Victoria College, University of Toronto
****************************************************************************
--end forwarded message----------------
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:26>From dawnvo@unixg.ubc.ca Thu Aug 15 13:07:32 1996
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 1996 11:07:25 -0700 (PDT)
From: dawnvo@unixg.ubc.ca
To: darwin-L@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Kuhn on NPR (fwd)
Hi All,
Here's something that may be of interest to DarwinLers, particularly
given who will be on the show. Apologies for cross-posting.
Dawn Ogden
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 1996 12:28:38 CDT
From: daniel elliot garber <garb@MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU>
To: Multiple recipients of list HOPOS-L <HOPOS-L@LSV.UKY.EDU>
Subject: Kuhn on NPR
Dear HOPOI,
Tomorrow (Friday) at 3 eastern time there will be a radio broadcast
centering on the work of Thomas Kuhn. It will be on Science Friday, part of
NPR's "Talk of the Nation" series, a live call-in show. The guests will be
myself and David Sloan Wilson, a biologist known for his work on group
selection, which he thinks constitutes a scientific revolution, I am told. It
should be amusing. And by all means call in if you think that I am going off
track!
--Dan Garber
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:27>From g-cziko@uiuc.edu Thu Aug 15 17:52:22 1996
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 1996 17:54:26 -0600
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
From: g-cziko@uiuc.edu (Gary Cziko)
Subject: Darwin and Regulation?
[from Gary Cziko 96.08.15]
Does anyone know if Darwin ever wrote about evolution and adaptation from
the perspective of regulation (control) of an organism's internal and/or
external environment? If so, any references or pointers as to where to
look would be very much appreciated.
The idea I am looking for is nicely summarized in the two paragraphs
appended below. For reasons of my own, I would like to find that Darwin
recognized the importance of an organism's control of its internal and
external environment, but it may well be Darwin missed it and that Claude
Bernard was the first to recognize this.
--Gary Cziko
===================================================================
"We have said that adaptations are the key to survival and evolution, and
now we can ask further: What do adaptations actually do to make survival
possible? Survival of the individual depends on establishement and
maintenance of the complex physicochemical reactions that are necessary for
life to continue. Additionally, adaptations must protect this energy
machine from lethal extremes of environmental fluctuations. These
functions of adaptations we can call the -regulatory- processes of the
organism. Much of our basic insight in this critical area of biology we
owe to Claude Bernard (1813 - 1878) who called attention to the complete
dependence of body cells on an environment with minimal deviations from
constant and correct conditions of many variables--chemical composition,
concentration, temperature, acidity, and so on. For the single naked cell,
few environments, save for certain marine situations, provide such
constancy. Yet, as we know, multicellular organisms have successfully
established themselves in environments that not only deviate from the
correct conditions for cellular life, but also fluctuate grossly over time.
Consider the human animal, whose cells depend on an enviromental
temperature of rougly 98F. Yet people live adequately in our "temperate"
regions, where the temperature of the external surroudings may vary over a
year from -60 to 110F. The concentrations of the body fluids bathing the
cels must stay constant within rather narrow llimits, yet some animals make
do in arid deserts, while others live in waters either much less or much
more concentrated than the optimal chemistry for their cells. +
"Bernard's consideration of this seeming paradox led him to distinguish an
-internal- environment in direct contact with the body cells and protected
by the skin from the -external environment-. The totality of the processes
by means of which the internal environment is kept constant are usually
referred to as -homeostasis-, or homos- tatic regulation. A large number
of adaptive structures and their mechanisms are devoted to regulation of
the parameters of the internal environment. For our purposes we distingish
two aspects of regulatory process: (1) -internal physiological- and (2)
-external behavioral-. To make the distinction clear, consider body
temperature maintenance. Internally, heat is produced by the chemical
reactions of metabolic processes, aided by neural and hormonal mechanisms
that augment heat gain or loss. Behaviorally, the animal can move to parts
of its environment with more optimal temperatures, construct nests or
shelters, or, as in the human, put on or take off protective clothing.
Body fluid maintenance may be controlled internally through neurohumoral
mechamisms that change the water and salt loss through kidney excretion
Behaviorally, the animal may move in its enviroment to sources of water and
drink, or move to parts of its environment that minimize water loss. Much
of the behavior of any animal is in the service of regulatory maintenance.
It should be noted that the particular environmental location of an animal
at any time is likely to be closely related to its regulatory problems and
needs. Thus we can see that the distribution and dispersal of organisms is
itself based on adaptive process."
O'Kelly, Lawrence I. (1980). Animal distribution and dispersal. In M. Ray
Denny (Ed.), -Comparative psychology: An evolutionary analysis of animal
behavior- (pp. 30-44). New York: Wiley. pp. 32-33
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:28>From dawnvo@unixg.ubc.ca Thu Aug 15 13:17:46 1996
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 1996 11:17:43 -0700 (PDT)
From: dawnvo@unixg.ubc.ca
To: darwin-L@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Amundson 1987 reference--help
Darwin-L:
I'm looking for an article refered to in _Biology and Philosophy_ (3)
April 1988, p160 in an article by William Bechtel. (I have Bechtel's
article from interlibrary loan, so if there was a list of works cited, it
didn't come with my copy.)
Bechtel says, "...if ideas are developed in order to solve particular
problems and are guided by empirical information, then it is this
intentional, problem solving activities [sic] of the scientist and not
selection that plays the primary role fixing the direction of science
(see Amundson 1987, for a clear statement of this challenge)." There is
an article by Amundson in Hahlweg & Hooker, 1988, and I wonder whether
this was a typo and Bechtel meant to refer to the 1988 article instead,
since I can't find any reference to a 1987 article.
Please reply offline, and thanks in advance.
Dawn Ogden
Philosophy Department
University of British Columbia
dawnvo@unixg.ubc.ca msgs. 604-822-3292 fax 604-822-8782
http://www.arts.ubc.ca/philos/irvine/OHP.html
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:29>From Garelli@attach.edu.ar Fri Jun 14 14:51:28 1996
From: Juan Carlos Garelli <Garelli@attach.edu.ar>
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 1996 16:42:25 -0300
Subject: More on @
Organization: Attachment Research Center
The following text is a posting from Humanist which I forward to add
to the thread on @.
JC Garelli
-----------Forwarded Message Follows-----------
Date sent: Fri, 14 Jun 1996 12:24:29 -0400 (EDT)
From: Humanist <mccarty@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
To: Humanist Discussion Group <humanist@lists.Princeton.EDU>
Subject: 10.0109 the @: yet another tongue
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 10, No. 109.
Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (Princeton/Rutgers)
Information at http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/
[1] From: "Finn N. Rasmussen" <finnr@bot.ku.dk> (20)
Subject: @ in Scandinavia
In Danish, @ is pronounced "snabel-a" which means "an a with a trunk"
(like an elephants trunk). I think this term originated at the
University mainframe computer center in the early 80'ties. The pc
was hardly invented yet, but a few computer freaks had terminals
connected with a Sperry-Univac 1100. All commands in the operating
system for this machine were still referrred to as "cards",
and they all began with an @, which the computer technicians called
"master space". However, one of the students attending a course
once called the @ sign for snabel-a. This term spread very rapidly,
and it is now the common and accepted term for @ in Danish. I have
heard Swedes using it recently, and I expect that it will eventually become
the official term in all Scandinavian languages.
Before the Internet revolution @ was unknown to most
Scandinavians. It only appeared on sales tickets printed by cash
cash registers imported from the U.S.A.
Finn N. Rasmussen
Botanical Laboratory, University of Copenhagen
Gothersgade 140, DK-1123 Copenhagen K., Denmark
Phone: +45 35 32 21 55 Fax: +45 33 13 91 04
Web homepage: http://www.bot.ku.dk
Email: FinnR@bot.ku.dk
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Juan Carlos Garelli, M.D., Ph.D.
Department of Early Development
University of Buenos Aires
Juncal 1966, 1116 BA, Argentina
Tel.: 54-1 812 5521
Fax: 54-1 812 5432
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
_______________________________________________________________________________
<36:30>From Michael_Kenny@sfu.ca Fri Aug 16 10:40:40 1996
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 1996 08:40:33 -0700 (PDT)
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
From: Michael_Kenny@sfu.ca (Michael Kenny)
Subject: Rushton, evolution, eugenics, and Africa
[I sent this message once before, but it didn't seem to get through, at
least not onto the Darwin Digest; forgive me if you have already seen it -
mgk]
___________________________
Readers of DARWIN may have come across *Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A
Life History Perspective* (1995) by J. Phillipe Rushton, a psychologist at
the University of Western Ontario. Rushton has lately specialized in (to
put it mildly) controversial theories about the nature and evolutionary
origins of race differences in ability and behavior, and in this capacity
has played a minor role in *The Bell Curve* debate.
To make a long story short, Rushton elides comparative studies of IQ, crime
rates, and patterns of sexual behavior with r- and K-selection theory from
sociobiology in an effort to explain what he sees as salient differences
between "Caucasoids, Mongoloids, and Negroids." Racial essentialism
permeates his terminology.
Africans and people of African descent come off badly in all this. They are
seen as r-selective in reproductive strategy, the males sowing their seeds
where they may; in Rushton's view they are unstable, undependable,
hypersexual, crime-ridden, and stupid (as opposed to e.g. 'Mongoloids' with
their strong and K-selective sense of family values).
More to my immediate point, Africa is seen by Rushton as unconducive to the
development of higher civilization, which has been left to the Caucasoids
and Mongoloids after modern humans left their place of origin within the
last 100,000 years or so. In his view, the circumstances in Africa were so
enviromentally undependable and yet so forgiving as to produce the
r-strategy while at the same time generating little selective pressure
toward higher intelligence. The latter comes from living in a cold climate,
which forces people to plan ahead and be provident; for this reason
Mongoloids, because their ancestors evolved in harsh Siberian conditions,
are brighter than everyone else (unless they happen to be Amerindians, and
therefore came across the Baring Bridge before the last decisive glacial
episode, thus missing the selective pressures that put their E. Asian
relatives over the top in terms of racial IQ).
There is a historical chain in Rushton's argument, and I would like to
query DARWIN readers about its nature. On p. 142 of his book, Rushton
quotes verbatim a table of "criteria for civilization" from a book entitled
simply *Race* by J.R. Baker (OUP, 1974). However, I sense that Rushton did
not get the table in the first instance directly from Baker, but rather
from Richard Lynn of *Mankind Quarterly* fame (and a much more significant
player in *The Bell Curve* affair). In a MQ paper entitled 'Race
differences in intelligence: a global perspective' (31: p281; 1991), Lynn
cites the Baker table in order to demonstrate Africa's low level of
cultural achievement. Rushton uses the table to the same end.
Baker derives his own views about Africa from the accounts of 19th Century
European explorers; on the basis of these 'first contact' narratives he
wishes to show that, without significant pre-existing outside cultural
contact, 'black' Africa was essentially incapable of developing
civilization on its own. He deploys the IQ argument to explain just why
and, like Rushton et al, has an essentialistic view of race (here we have
'Negrids, Europids' etc). Civilization is produced by the intelligent
elite. Lower distribution of IQ scores = less capacity for civilization,
because fewer elite are present; and if you want further proof of the point
just look at Africa.
As a further link in this chain, Baker dedicates his book to C.P. Blacker,
a leading member of the British eugenics movement (cf. Kevles, *In the Name
of Eugenics*). So the intellectual lineage is fairly clear. What I would
like to know most particularly, is: Who was J.R. Baker, and how did he come
by these theories? But, beyond this, I would much appreciate whatever
insights anyone might be willing to offer about this and related questions.
Michael G. Kenny
Dept. of Sociology & Anthropology
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C. V5A 1S6; Canada
Michael_Kenny@sfu.ca
phone: (604) 291-4270
fax: (604) 291-5799
_______________________________________________________________________________
Darwin-L Message Log 36: 1-30 -- August 1996 End
