Jerry, Kirsti, Gary R, Helmut, list,
I didn't respond to some earlier points in this thread because I was
tied up with other things. But I looked into Sheldrake's writings and
the earlier writings on morphogenesis by Conrad Waddington, a pioneer
in genetics, epigenetics, and morphogenesis. For a 1962 article about
Waddington's theories, see
http://www.microbiologyresearch.org/docserver/fulltext/micro/29/1/mic-29-1-25.pdf?expires=1496787497&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=4E2DC93EE4641BFAB00E8253006B4B2C
.
Alan Turing (1952) wrote a mathematical analysis "The chemical basis
of morphogenesis" and cited a 1940 book _Organisers and Genes_ by
Waddington. See http://cba.mit.edu/events/03.11.ASE/docs/Turing.pdf
Sheldrake has a PhD in biochemistry from Cambridge, and he spent a year
at Harvard studying the philosophy of science. His primary reference
is to Waddington's work. But many scientists believe that he crossed
the thin line between genius and crackpot: he took a reasonable
hypothesis in biology and mixed it with dubious speculations about
parapsychology. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake
For a sympathetic interview with Sheldrake by a skeptic, see
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/scientific-heretic-rupert-sheldrake-on-morphic-fields-psychic-dogs-and-other-mysteries/
Some comments on previous notes:
Jerry
Are you saying Hamiltonian:Lagrangian :: local state:global state?
No. I was just saying that the Hamiltonian and the Lagrangian are
related: both are global functions of a system, and local equations
of motion can be derived from them. For any physical system, the
Hamiltonian represents the total energy, and the Lagrangian represents
the total action (it has the dimensions of energy x time).
Kirsti
Are there dogmas in science? Could there be?
Gary R,
Certainly not holding dogmatic views is an ideal of scientific...
Science, as science, does not have dogmas. As Peirce stated in his
First Rule of Reason, "Do not block the way of inquiry."
But scientists are human, and some are dogmatic. They might
do everything they can to block hypotheses they don't like.
Kirsti
If so, how could one tell?
Sometimes it's hard to tell. A theory that has proved to be
reliable for a wide range of applications is hard to give up.
Tycho Brahe, for example, correctly believed that the Ptolemaic
theory of epicycles was more accurate than the circles in
the theory by Copernicus.
But it was Kepler, Brahe's assistant, who discovered that
elliptical orbits were more accurate than the epicycles.
Kirsti
Are there flaws and shortcomings in [Sheldrake's] theory?
People have been trying to find evidence for parapsychology for
centuries without success. There is nothing wrong with considering
the idea as an interesting hypothesis. But Sheldrake seemed to be
just as dogmatic as anybody that he was criticizing.
Helmut
"Morphogenetic field" is not an explanation. Neither is the
"Dormative principle" of opium, and neither is "Habit".
Words, by themselves, can't explain anything. Peirce admitted
that the following two statements are different ways of stating
the same observation:
Opium puts people to sleep.
Opium has dormitive virtue.
By applying Ockham's razor, nominalists would "shave away"
the concept of "dormitive virtue" because it is an unnecessary
assumption. But Peirce said that the assumption that there
exists some underlying principle or substance can suggest a useful
methodology: analyze the chemicals in opium to find some substace
that has "dormitive virtue".
In this case, the chemists discovered morphine as the common
chemical that had that dormitive virtue. The neuroscientists
then began the search for naturally occurring chemicals in
the brain, and they discovered endomorphins -- whose structure
had that critical "dormitive virtue".
In summary, the hypothesis of "dormitive virtue" inspired
a successful search for chemicals and mechanisms tht might have
been overlooked.
John
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