Hi folks. Second email, mainly in response to John's comments and references. A bit lengthier, so feel free to ignore if this isn't of interest. I'm still learning and processing John's perspective, so forgive me if my response seems a bit facile. While I'm not (yet) convinced that Mind and Culture can be "reduced" to John's biological explanatory approach and modification of Darwin -- especially as a recovering "cultural determinist"(!) -- I'm impressed with the arguments John has advanced and some of the research I've been reviewing. Regardless of where any of us land on these issues, I think it's extremely helpful to be challenged in our thinking.
The salient point I want to make here is that I'm seeing now the relevance of what John's arguing about epigenetic phenomena and even the behavioral manifestations that can be transmitted inter-generationally, but not through standard genetic interpretations obviously. There are several innate characteristics of species that are transmitted genetically, but even there we have evidence of environmental influences. How that information gets translated back to the source (biologically speaking) certainly deserves to be examined far more seriously and extensively. I'm looking at Jablonka's work on this too, and have a fascinating book I've been perusing entitled Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life. Despite the human genome project and the aspirations, I think we understand better than ever that it's not simply a matter of encoded genes passing on discrete, hard-wired information that then produces behavioral expression. It's far more complicated, with interactive elements and environmental feedback mechanisms at the very least among non-human species. It gets even more complicated with more advanced species like primates and then even further with the cultural species Homo sapiens sapiens.
In short, with respect to humans, while both genes and culture can transmit latent information, the symbolic systems that humans use are far more flexible and, er, "adaptive," than genetic systems. Yet I appreciate too the implications of culture & physical envt as having direct links to biological phenomena and perhaps even to John's argument about cell-cell communication. My struggle remains that in light of both the vastness and mutability of symbolic systems, there's no obvious or even necessary transmission of fixed ideas, habits, or patterns that will be passed down automatically from one generation to the next. The Catholicism in my family, for example, which lasted for several generations, effectively has ended with me (in fact, while respectful of their dad shuffling off to mass on the occasional Sunday, our five adult boys have zero interest in attending!). And while my wife adamantly opposes tattoos for both religious and aesthetic reasons, that hasn't stopped four of the five boys from getting them. How this ultimately has a genetic basis, however, goes well beyond my aging brain. But I'm trying! For me, though, that's where the justification hypothesis and the J-I-I dynamic helps me understand behavioral variation in credible, testable ways -- even if I remain unclear on how these cultural phenomena relate to John's paradigm. Yet perhaps we will be able to come up with an ever-more integrated theory of complexity that allows us to map these multiple levels onto one another and concretely measure the feedback measures of mutual influence (and here I'm thinking of John's lovely comment about his experience while driving back from the beach last week!). As a mathematician friend of mine commented when I was sharing some of what we're doing commented: "Joe, I'm not sure how we could ever subject all of this to Monte Carlo simulations!" Yet, to his credit, we're going to keep trying! We still need a better model though, so that's one of the grand objectives I hope we'll all keep working on here. Respectfully yours, -Joe
Dr. Joseph H. Michalski
Associate Academic Dean
King’s University College at Western University
266 Epworth Avenue
London, Ontario, Canada N6A 2M3
Tel: (519) 433-3491, ext. 4439F
Fax: (519) 433-0353
Email: [log in to unmask]
______________________
eiš + 1 = 0
John:
Thank you for your reply/response. I understand the Storr article and thank you for providing that link. I remain (so far) skekptical that epigenetic “marking” is a permanent feature hereditarily.
Best regards,
Waldemar
Waldemar A Schmidt, PhD, MD
(Perseveret et Percipiunt)
503.631.8044
Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. (A Einstein)
On Jul 16, 2018, at 10:18 AM, JOHN TORDAY <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Waldemar, thanks for the correction regarding workers and drones. As for the persistence of epigenetic inheritance, if the perturbation persists the trait will also persist. And it can becomea true DNA mutation under physiologic stress if the insult persists based on the effect of Radical Oxygen Species on gene mutations (Storr, S.J., C.M. Woolston, Y. Zhang, and S.G. Martin. 2013. Redox environment, free radical, and oxidative DNA damage. Antioxid Redox Signal 18:2399–23408). It's also referred to as the Baldwin Effect. John
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On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 9:31 AM, Waldemar Schmidt <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
John:
A minor correction, if you will.Honey bee drones are not sterile and don’t collect nectar and pollen.That task is performed by the “worker” bees - who, presumably, collect the environmental conditions leading to epigenetic changes.Epigenetic influence on genetic expression is time limited, as opposed to “genetic” information, does not seem to last more than 4 generations.
Best regards,
Waldemar
Waldemar A Schmidt, PhD, MD
(Perseveret et Percipiunt)
503.631.8044
Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. (A Einstein)
On Jul 16, 2018, at 8:01 AM, JOHN TORDAY <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hi Joe, I haven't read The Singular Universe, but have read Smolin's book The Life of the Cosmos, in which he uses Darwinian evolution theory to explain Black Holes and other Cosmologic phenomena. I found that quite remarkable both because we Biologists haven't been able to explain the mechanisms of biology using Darwinian evolution, and because Smolin is merging the animate and inanimate into one. Oh, and btw, are you familiar with the 'dust up' between Einstein and Bergson circa 1922, Einstein insisting that time isn't real, Bergson stipulating that time is essential to understanding physiology? At any rate, my 'aha' moment occurred when I realized that time is an artifact of descriptive biology. That is to say, in the emerging discipline of epigenetic inheritance, previously known as Lamarckian, the organism is an agent for collecting epigenetic data, which it carries back to its germ cells- egg and sperm- modifying them 'epigenetically' by changing the way in which DNA is translated into RNA and protein, beginning with the zygote, or fertilized egg, the embryo, the offspring, the life cycle, and back again to the zygote. In other words, it is the unicellular state that is being selected for, which is striving to maintain its identity in an ever-changing environment by modifying its offspring to interface with the environment in order to collect epigenetic 'data' to inform the unicellular state of the organism. It's what is called the Red Queen phenomenon, like the character in Alice in Wonderland who is 'running as fast as she can to remain in place'. This perspective on the biologic imperative as 'stasis' is counterintuitive, yet once it is realized it explains why it is that we must return to the unicellular state over the course of the life cycle, for example. Mechanistically, the cell cytoskeleton exists in three discrete states- homeostatic, mitotic and meiotic. Those states are determined by a specific gene, Target of Rapamycin, which is interconnected with all of the structures and functions of the cell, controlling which state the cell exists in. Seen in this way, time is an artifact in biology, as it is in physics, both of which are striving to attain the Singularity that existed prior to the Big Bang. Biology recapitulates its 'Big Bang' from one life cycle to the next; physics does so through the expansion and contraction of the Universe.
Just as a reality check, the same thing occurs in a bee hive, the queen bee maintaining the genetic and epigenetic 'history' of the colony, the sterile drones flying off daily to nominally collect pollen to make honey, all the while providing epigenetic data to the queen in the process; at some point in that cycle the hive will eventually 'collapse', the queen flying off with the epigenetic data from the current environment to recreate the hive elsewhere. There are other well-known examples like the slime mold Dictyostellium switching between the amoeboid and colonial forms depending on how much food is available, and Turitopsis dorneii, the so-called 'immortal' jellyfish, thought to be death-less because under stress it reverts to its adolescent form, as if it had found the 'fountain of youth' NOT. In reality it's just figured out a way to collect epigenetic information by changing forms, but the underlying principle of interacting with the environment to obtain epigenetic data is a constant in all of these conditions. We do the same, chucking our bodies at the time of death, but our microbiomes (the bacteria that represent 70-90% of our bodies), which is informed through epigenetics over the course of our lifetimes, lives on! It's been documented as the 'necrobiome', which goes back into the soil (unless we are cremated or put into a concrete bunker), back into the water supply where it can be assimilated by the flora, eaten by the fauna, and re-constituted. The microbiome of the mother is located in the uterus, where the child will ingest it when it exits via the birth canal at the time of birth!
Aha moment indeed! I think that if we were to understand the actual mechanisms of biology we would be less anxious about our lives, being able to put things into perspective....just sayin'. John############################
On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 5:58 AM, Joseph Michalski <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
############################Dear Colleagues:
I understand everyone has busy intellectual agendas, but I thought I'd share an interesting parallel discovery from the past weekend (beyond the recent discovery of neutrinos from a distant galaxy!). My wife and I were flying back from England, reading next to each other on the plane. I was reading Roberto Unger and Lee Smolin's The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time as part of my efforts to understand the cosmos and our broader TOK mission. My wife, who's a Sufi Muslim, was reading Sadegh Angha's (41st Sufi Master) The Hidden Angles of Life in her efforts to understand the cosmos from a religious worldview. Here's what we were reading at the same time from our respective books:
Joe, the scientist, read on p. 8: “If, however, everything is time-bound (a key argument of the book), that principle must apply as well to the laws, symmetries, and constants of nature. There are then no timeless regularities capable of underwriting our causal judgments. Change changes. It is not just the phenomena that change; so do the regularities: the laws, symmetries, and supposed constants of nature.”
Farnaz, the spiritualist, read on p. xi: “(T)he laws of physics are fundamentally and essentially variable (for example, there is much evidence and documentation that most of the constant principles of nature and those influenced by gravity are in fact not constant). Existence itself is in motion.” (emphasis in the original)
Just some food for future thought. If I arrive at any great insights from all of this, I'll be happy to share. At the same time, perhaps others on the list have had their own "a-ha" moments in terms of understanding the evolving nature of the universe, the constancy of change, and the implications that nature's laws might best be viewed from a cosmological, historical perspective. Yours kindly, -Joe
Dr. Joseph H. Michalski
Associate Academic Dean
King’s University College at Western University
London, Ontario, Canada N6A 2M3
Tel: (519) 433-3491, ext. 4439
Fax: (519) 433-0353
Email: [log in to unmask]
______________________
eiš + 1 = 0
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