Dear Pedro, You bring up an important item in regard to the "autogen". It is a point of departure between myself and Terry. While his narrative is biomolecular, mine is in terms of "configurations of processes". The difference is dimensional (mass vs mass/time), and dimensions are quite important to me as an engineer.
Of course, I don't go as far as Alicia and Terry into human psychology, but the chief difficulty with both of our scenarios involving autocatalysis is that it is exceedingly difficult to capture all the aspects of autocatalysis in terms of mechanical models. True, simplistic models of autocatalytic feedback can be constructed, but they cannot function with the same breadth as does the evolutionary agency. As a consequence, most will not buy into the assertions that autocatalysis exerts selection upon it members or gives rise to centripetal attraction -- both extremely important features currently absent from contemporary evolutionary theory, but readily observable (especially in a social/economic context). My own guess as to why mechanical models fail is that difficulties lie more in the accompanying boundary statements than in the constituent mechanisms. As Stu Kauffman contends, it is impossible to specify entirely the "adjacent possible". My own jargon for the problem is "combinatorial intractability". That is, the combinations of boundary contingencies very rapidly grow hyper-astronomical in number. It may still be that certain model formulations can yet exhibit rudimentary facsimile to selection and centripetality. Mishtu Banerjee of U. Calgary and I are currently investigating this challenge. Another difference between Terry's narrative and my own is that he keeps referring to the "absential" in terms of constraints. But constraints are specific realities, not the absence thereof. It is the latter that is so important to life, and such absence can be conveniently quantified in entropy-like terms (entropy itself being an apophasis). Unfortunately, Terry eschews Shannon approaches to information (as do many on FIS), but I hold that the major advantage of that calculus is that it provides an important experimental window on flexibility and resilience (as Michael Conrad long ago suggested). Thanks for bringing these problems to the foreground. The best, Bob Quoting "Pedro C. Marijuan" <pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es>: > Dear FIS colleagues, > > Thanks to the late discussants; particularly it was a pleasure reading > the elegant comments on "cosmic" computation by Bob (Logan). There was > also a previous message on info and absences by Bob (Ulanowicz) that > should be discussed at length. About Terry's book, now I have almost > finished it, and cannot help but feeling that there are important > materials for the "New Information Synthesis" ---accompanied by a lot of > useless stuff and a fundamental misdirection. The author has been caught > into his own system thinking (a brilliant one indeed) but has > overstretched it with deleterious consequences. The weakest point is the > "autogenic" process, for which no real biomolecular case is offered... > if this link is out of order, most of the subsequent scheme falls. At > least from a molecular biological point of view ( & systems biology), > the defense is quite problematic. > > all the best > > ---Pedro > > ------------------------------------------------- > Pedro C. Marijuán > Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group > Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud > Avda. Gómez Laguna, 25, Pl. 11ª > 50009 Zaragoza, Spain > Telf: 34 976 71 3526 (& 6818) Fax: 34 976 71 5554 > pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es > http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/ > ------------------------------------------------- > > _______________________________________________ > fis mailing list > fis@listas.unizar.es > https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis > _______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
