Hi Jorge, Jorge: > I don't want to go into more examples but I hope >I've made myself clear; we might all know how to >distinguish a thick from a thin pullover; very few, if >any, of us, or elsewhere, knows where to draw neat >lines of separation between biological and social and >intellectual. It's not that we are dumb; it's just >that we are dealing with complexity and I'll repeat: >complexity entails ambiguity.
Steve: Thick and thin are on a continuum. I don't see how inorganic, biological, social, and intellectual are on a continuum. You raised the issue of ants as social. Ants do not participate in social patterns, period. Ant colonies are not on a continuum with human societies. There are no learned behaviors that are passed from generation to generation among ants. Ants do not copy the behavior of other ants. In other words, there are no "cool" ants that all the other ants want to be like. There is no evidence that I am aware of that different ant hills develop different ant cultures. There is some evidence of this in higher primates, so I agree that it can be difficult to distinguish whether we are looking at social patterns or biological patterns in a given instance, but that doesn't mean that social and biological patterns are on the same continuum. The question in determining whether a pattern is social or biological is whether this is a pattern of preference that is maintained through genetic encoding and interacting with the physical environment, or is this a pattern of preference that is maintained in the way that cultures are maintained--passed along from parent to child and copying celebrities and roles that aren't hard-wired like ant roles, etc. Sometimes this is easy to do and sometimes it is hard, but the difference between the types of patterns themselves is not fuzzy. Regards, Steve Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
