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Fw: VNA answers Glass on Platonic forms and machines
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----- Original Message -----
From: Victoria N. Alexander
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent: Saturday, September 14, 2002 7:56 AM
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.
-Victoria Alexander