Subject: VNA answers Glass on Platonic forms and
machines
From: "Arthur Glass" <goliard@worldnet.att.net> To:
"Vladimir Nabokov Forum" <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU> Sent:
Thursday, September 12, 2002 3:49 PM Subject: Re: Fw: VNA replies to Robert
Weldon replies to VNAs Mimicry
It may be my ignorance of mathematics,
biophysics or both, but how can 'topology in design space' be a "mechanism' ?
First of all, the use the word 'mechanism' about a natural process is to use the
word metaphorically. A mechanism is, literally, something like a pulley and
chain, that is, a man-made system.
"Topology in design space' sounds
curiously like a Platonic or Aristotelian 'form' than anything else.---Arthur
glass
When physicists describe processes they do so using
mathematics, and they make models, which give visual representations of the way
various factors relate. You've heard of pie charts? Well, the feedback
relationships between various species of fish in a lake can be described with a
kind of doughnut shape, which has a topology. A "machine" can be a rule that
governs the behavior of a process and may make the model of it conform to a
particular shape. How do you feel, by the way, about the terms statistical
mechanics or quantum mechanics?
More on topology: Some evolutionary
biologists use the term "fitness landscape" to describe to kind of "hill
climbing" a species has to do to reach a fitness peak. It was a nice way to
visual a species stuck on one fitness peak unable get to an even higher fitness
peak nearby because to do so would mean the species would have to travel through
a low fitness area and might get wiped out in the process. It appeared, however,
that some species were able to hop to the next peak without crossing this
risking terrain and this was kind of a mystery. Some hoped that the model could
tell them just how unlikely these hops actually were. The fitness landscape
metaphor was invented casually many years ago and was taken seriously by
Kaufmann and others, which is unfortunate because evolutionary processes are far
too complex to be captured by model that is based on the effects gravity. Some
people have tried to complicate the model by poking holes in the landscape,
making it shift and percolate, folding in on itself (think of Nabokov's carpet
here!), or turning it upside down, but it would be better probably to abandon
it. Crutchfield has offered an alternative model, which has no up or down and
looks like interconnected clouds.
In reply to Arthur Glass's (very
good) question about Platonic forms, I'm cutting and pasting from some of my
published work:
Today the goal of structural evolutionary theorists, like
that of some 19th century secular morphologist-teleologists, is to elucidate the
"principles of organization" that result in the repeated appearance of similar
biological structures. They study the energetic, mechanical, morphogenetic
constraints that limit the kinds of biological structures that nature can
produce. Like teleologists, the structuralists contend that these constraints
result in a relatively small number of structural archetypes considering the
multi-dimensional space in which they evolve. Thus, if there were a film version
of Earth's evolution that could be rewound and run again, many of the forms we
know today would reappear. Structural archetypes occur throughout nature, at the
microscopic as well as macroscopic level. Also called structural attractors,
they are sometimes compared to Platonic forms because they exist, as concepts,
prior to the process of natural selection. (Such comparisons can be misleading,
since they might imply that a structural attractor has a metaphysical presence.
The term "attractor" may also be incorrectly interpreted to mean a pre-existing
physical form that draws natural processes toward it. As these concepts find
wider applications, it will be important to point out improper uses of
teleological language.) It turns out that evolutionary forms are not as deeply
contingent upon external agents and environmental pressures as Darwinists have
argued. The task of the biologist today, then, is to discover which forms are
likely to appear. Only then is it worth asking which of them will be selected by
environmental conditions.