On Dec 5, 2007 3:44 PM, Charlie Bell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On 06/12/2007, at 2:56 AM, Nick Arnett wrote: > > > > > > I'm talking about the Santa Fe Institution people and those doing > > related > > work. Kauffman, Waldrop, Holland, Arthur, Lewin, etc. > > Right, now I'm a lot closer to understanding what you're alluding to > (but it's the Santa Fe Institute...).
Of course it is... the older I get the more my fingers decide to type words that are similar the ones I intended. I'm really astonished when they type the wrong articles -- correct part of speech, but not the word I was thinking. Makes me wonder how the whole brain-fingers things works. > People who > make sweeping statements without getting involved in specifics are 9 > times out of 10 cranks, or at the very least don't know what they're > talking about. It's hard to give people the benefit of the doubt when there are so many aggressive cranks out there. > > > Emergence has applications in ecosystems, crowd control, city design, > animal behaviour, surveillance, neural nets, and so on. Economics. Must not omit economics. The implications for economics are, in my mind, too interesting to make a list and leave it out. Just a point of personal preference...but money makes the world go 'round. Modelling > those systems through a few simple rules is a challenge, but not > beyond our capacity. Interestingly, some of the most successful work > has come out of games and movies - SimCity exhibits some emergence, > and CGI crowd/battle scenes Oh, I gotta disagree about what we can calculate. Take the simplest sort of rule system -- a binary network -- and if it is big enough to be interesting, there isn't enough time and computing power in the life of the universe to examine the possible states. Unless there's been some breakthrough I haven't heard about, nobody has come up with an algorithmic solution, either.... but when if and when somebody does, it'll be huge. Nobody has figured out how to mathematically describe the observable way the models cycle through similar (attractor) states. Perhaps with quantum computing... > > Especially interesting > is actually the pre-evolutionary field of abiogenesis, where > hypercycles may turn out to explain how a set of complex interactions > of molecules could bootstrap out of the prebiotic chemical soup. This is where Kauffman opened my eyes... replicators like to replicate and all that. But it's not Darwinism -- unless everything that we observe is getting tossed into the "Darwinism" bucket to fight off the ID people, which might be politically useful, but confusing. > > > Yes. But that's describing behaviour, not evolution (which is simply > changes in gene frequencies in a population over time). That strikes me as a surprisingly narrow definition and not at all common in my reading. > Now, there's > some speculation that DNA has a bit more going on than just a gene > carrier: - it's been postulated that interactions of genes can act in > a self-organising way, or even as a form of calculating device, a > genetic computer. But this is controversial, and it's going to take a > lot of work to show this. Interesting line of study, however. And just what Kauffman (or is it Axelrod) suggests is signified by the mathematical relationships between gene counts and cell differentiation counts, if I am remembering it correctly. I'm struggling to recall (and away from my books), but isn't the mechanism of cell differentiation still quite a mystery? Of course, with all the stem cell research going on, perhaps there's a lot of new evidence coming out all the time. Nick -- Nick Arnett [EMAIL PROTECTED] Messages: 408-904-7198 _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
