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Science and Cultural Theory
The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution
In this work, the author attempts to complicate certain conventional dichotomies (particularly the nature/nurture split) that she belives impede scientific inquiry and thought about individual development, and to untangle the often subtle assumptions embe
298 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 28, 1986
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August 22, 2022
The aim of the book is to propose a replacement to the nature-nurture dichotomy, by something more "dialectical". The concrete proposals are two:
* On the biology side, Oyama proposes developmental systems theory to replace the central dogma of molecular biology. Briefly, developmental systems theory states that instead of DNA as the unit of evolutionary change, the entire developmental process should be considered as so. So it's not that DNA uses a chicken to make another DNA, it's an egg-chicken process making another egg-chicken process.
* On the metaphysical side, Oyama proposes "contructivist interactionalism".
*Interaction* means matter interactions creates forms. Form is not imposed by God, DNA, or any special kind of information- bearing thing. Oyama thinks that the western idea of “form imposed on formless matter” is a wrong turn, blamable on Plato, and exemplified in the genesis creation narrative.
*Construction* means that time is creative. The future is not encoded in the past (that is a kind of preformism, and Oyama rejected all preformisms). Laplacian demon is not even theoretically possible.
Non-creative time, as Oyama understands it, is just another disguise of the unacceptable idea of preformism: the future is encoded in the past. She does not even like the etymology of "development", which means "unrolling, undoing of an envelope", as if time consists of nothing but unwrapping a crumpled painting.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/develop
develop: Borrowed from French développer. The word acquired its modern meaning from the 17th-century belief that an egg contains the animal in miniature and matures by growing larger and shedding its envelopes.
Determinism is only allowed if there is no possible shortcut, that is, the Laplacian demon can't predict the future on a piece of paper, only "copy" the universe and let it run and watch. Perhaps it can't even copy the universe, and the only model of the universe is itself.
More practically, Oyama rejects the mere possibility of predicting developmental process by simulation. Life, she claims, is never predictable without doing it at least once. If we have the schematic of an alien egg, we still can't predict what it will hatch in silico without building the egg and hatching it at least once. After hatching it once, we would probably know enough to predict the result of similar eggs by simulation. But we have to do it at least once.
Overall, I'm quite disappointed by the book. It is highly theoretical, which is okay. However, it is mostly a philosopher's book, in that it contains few examples, and spends a lot more effort in describing alternative theories and explaining what's wrong with them.
At times, the author seems more like justifying a political agenda through metaphysics than doing biology. This -- disguising political agenda by dense metaphysics -- actually characterizes a large chunk of all those theoretical books output by the humanities department.
Consider the following quote
> There are no ghosts in machines, only persons in the world, thinking, feeling, intuiting and sensing, deciding, acting, and creating. And there are therefore no ghosts in these ghosts, no programs in the operators of the machines, making them feel as their ancestors felt, making them act or want to act as gorillas or chimps act. But there are many ghosts in the psychological, social, and cultural machines that create and re-create the body-machine, the ghost in it, and the ghost in it.
So, can ghosts exist, or not? I presume there are two metaphors of ghosts here, and I'm missing it. But I think the metaphysics is quite irrelevant here. What the author is really trying to do is to keep a large human population stable and well-nutritioned, with as little conflict as possible. All the dense metaphysics is just an excuse. If it can't be achieved by one metaphysics, the author will just throw it away, and find another one more fitting to her political agenda. But this seems quite pointless. No matter the metaphysics, people can use it for the sake of advancing political toleration, thanks to the boundless creativity of human confabulation.
To put it as bluntly as possible: people will be on your side or not on your side, no matter what metaphysics they believe in. Metaphysics and political alliances are simply orthogonal. This can be seen by how people holding as diverse opinions as "determinism", "anti-deterministic free will" and "compatibilism" can somehow agree on all the political points despite their incompatible metaphysics.
What I recommend, then, is to simply do high-quality metaphysics, REGARDLESS of its political consequences.
The developmental systems theory is a good framework to subsume the central dogma. However I find the book's explanation of the theory opaque and political (as explained above). A more fruitful direction, instead of endlessly pointing out that DNA-preformism is wrong, is to ask "Is DNA a special part of the developmental process? Why?". I have tried sketching out a theory for whether DNA is special, and my tentative conclusion is that it is special.
As the book itself said at page xiii, DNA by itself is extraordinarily inert, so that we can even recover them from fossils. Not only that, DNA is extraordinarily discrete, made of 4 discrete units.
Consider an egg. With constant temperature and water, it will become a tadpole. We ask what allowed it to happen. Certainly, DNA doesn't do all the work. There are epigenetic markings on the DNA, and one must consider the cytoplasm, packed with proteins, RNA, and smaller molecules. However, when all is said and done, the discreteness of DNA itself remains striking in the writhing confusion of all the other stuffs in the egg.
Now, we compare this egg and the egg of its mother. Then the discreteness of the DNA is more striking: the DNA molecule differs only at a few base pairs, while the differences in the other molecules are much more continuous: this RNA has a few more copies, that has a few less, and the magnesium level changed by 0.01 M...
In short, out of all components of the developing system, DNA stands out as the only discrete element that passes on generation to generation with high fidelity. This is striking. Why can't RNA, or the concentration level of magnesium, do that? Why doesn't the temperature of the womb vary discretely, while the DNA in the womb cells vary discretely? A proper developmental systems theory must account for this specialness of DNA. What is the role played by such an extraordinarily discrete and high-fidelity component? Is it possible to be living at all, without something as inert and discrete as DNA?
The book was written in 1985, so I can take it charitably and forgive it for not making much progress on these interesting questions. It was probably written to combat the central dogma of molecular biology, and for that it probably has succeeded.
A more up-to-date book, then, is Evolution in Four Dimensions (Jablonka, Lamb, 2014), which describes four kinds of heritable material in developmental systems: DNA, non-DNA cellular matter, behavior, and symbols (language and other forms of communication).
Personally, I suggest we return to the roots of how genetics was understood at first, as the general study of inherited traits in biological organisms. DNA, in this definition, is not the only kind of genetic material, but it surely is still very special, as I explained above. A more modern genetics will take account of all genetic material, not just DNA, but also not deny the specialness of DNA. This new genetics can then combine with developmental biology to explain how all these genetic material develops, such that it is repeated in time, generation by generation.
* On the biology side, Oyama proposes developmental systems theory to replace the central dogma of molecular biology. Briefly, developmental systems theory states that instead of DNA as the unit of evolutionary change, the entire developmental process should be considered as so. So it's not that DNA uses a chicken to make another DNA, it's an egg-chicken process making another egg-chicken process.
* On the metaphysical side, Oyama proposes "contructivist interactionalism".
*Interaction* means matter interactions creates forms. Form is not imposed by God, DNA, or any special kind of information- bearing thing. Oyama thinks that the western idea of “form imposed on formless matter” is a wrong turn, blamable on Plato, and exemplified in the genesis creation narrative.
*Construction* means that time is creative. The future is not encoded in the past (that is a kind of preformism, and Oyama rejected all preformisms). Laplacian demon is not even theoretically possible.
Non-creative time, as Oyama understands it, is just another disguise of the unacceptable idea of preformism: the future is encoded in the past. She does not even like the etymology of "development", which means "unrolling, undoing of an envelope", as if time consists of nothing but unwrapping a crumpled painting.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/develop
develop: Borrowed from French développer. The word acquired its modern meaning from the 17th-century belief that an egg contains the animal in miniature and matures by growing larger and shedding its envelopes.
Determinism is only allowed if there is no possible shortcut, that is, the Laplacian demon can't predict the future on a piece of paper, only "copy" the universe and let it run and watch. Perhaps it can't even copy the universe, and the only model of the universe is itself.
More practically, Oyama rejects the mere possibility of predicting developmental process by simulation. Life, she claims, is never predictable without doing it at least once. If we have the schematic of an alien egg, we still can't predict what it will hatch in silico without building the egg and hatching it at least once. After hatching it once, we would probably know enough to predict the result of similar eggs by simulation. But we have to do it at least once.
Overall, I'm quite disappointed by the book. It is highly theoretical, which is okay. However, it is mostly a philosopher's book, in that it contains few examples, and spends a lot more effort in describing alternative theories and explaining what's wrong with them.
At times, the author seems more like justifying a political agenda through metaphysics than doing biology. This -- disguising political agenda by dense metaphysics -- actually characterizes a large chunk of all those theoretical books output by the humanities department.
Consider the following quote
> There are no ghosts in machines, only persons in the world, thinking, feeling, intuiting and sensing, deciding, acting, and creating. And there are therefore no ghosts in these ghosts, no programs in the operators of the machines, making them feel as their ancestors felt, making them act or want to act as gorillas or chimps act. But there are many ghosts in the psychological, social, and cultural machines that create and re-create the body-machine, the ghost in it, and the ghost in it.
So, can ghosts exist, or not? I presume there are two metaphors of ghosts here, and I'm missing it. But I think the metaphysics is quite irrelevant here. What the author is really trying to do is to keep a large human population stable and well-nutritioned, with as little conflict as possible. All the dense metaphysics is just an excuse. If it can't be achieved by one metaphysics, the author will just throw it away, and find another one more fitting to her political agenda. But this seems quite pointless. No matter the metaphysics, people can use it for the sake of advancing political toleration, thanks to the boundless creativity of human confabulation.
To put it as bluntly as possible: people will be on your side or not on your side, no matter what metaphysics they believe in. Metaphysics and political alliances are simply orthogonal. This can be seen by how people holding as diverse opinions as "determinism", "anti-deterministic free will" and "compatibilism" can somehow agree on all the political points despite their incompatible metaphysics.
What I recommend, then, is to simply do high-quality metaphysics, REGARDLESS of its political consequences.
The developmental systems theory is a good framework to subsume the central dogma. However I find the book's explanation of the theory opaque and political (as explained above). A more fruitful direction, instead of endlessly pointing out that DNA-preformism is wrong, is to ask "Is DNA a special part of the developmental process? Why?". I have tried sketching out a theory for whether DNA is special, and my tentative conclusion is that it is special.
As the book itself said at page xiii, DNA by itself is extraordinarily inert, so that we can even recover them from fossils. Not only that, DNA is extraordinarily discrete, made of 4 discrete units.
Consider an egg. With constant temperature and water, it will become a tadpole. We ask what allowed it to happen. Certainly, DNA doesn't do all the work. There are epigenetic markings on the DNA, and one must consider the cytoplasm, packed with proteins, RNA, and smaller molecules. However, when all is said and done, the discreteness of DNA itself remains striking in the writhing confusion of all the other stuffs in the egg.
Now, we compare this egg and the egg of its mother. Then the discreteness of the DNA is more striking: the DNA molecule differs only at a few base pairs, while the differences in the other molecules are much more continuous: this RNA has a few more copies, that has a few less, and the magnesium level changed by 0.01 M...
In short, out of all components of the developing system, DNA stands out as the only discrete element that passes on generation to generation with high fidelity. This is striking. Why can't RNA, or the concentration level of magnesium, do that? Why doesn't the temperature of the womb vary discretely, while the DNA in the womb cells vary discretely? A proper developmental systems theory must account for this specialness of DNA. What is the role played by such an extraordinarily discrete and high-fidelity component? Is it possible to be living at all, without something as inert and discrete as DNA?
The book was written in 1985, so I can take it charitably and forgive it for not making much progress on these interesting questions. It was probably written to combat the central dogma of molecular biology, and for that it probably has succeeded.
A more up-to-date book, then, is Evolution in Four Dimensions (Jablonka, Lamb, 2014), which describes four kinds of heritable material in developmental systems: DNA, non-DNA cellular matter, behavior, and symbols (language and other forms of communication).
Personally, I suggest we return to the roots of how genetics was understood at first, as the general study of inherited traits in biological organisms. DNA, in this definition, is not the only kind of genetic material, but it surely is still very special, as I explained above. A more modern genetics will take account of all genetic material, not just DNA, but also not deny the specialness of DNA. This new genetics can then combine with developmental biology to explain how all these genetic material develops, such that it is repeated in time, generation by generation.
April 2, 2012
This book will set the stage for psychobiological research for the foreseeable future.
April 8, 2024
A powerful philosophical guide for the nature / nurture debate.
This book explores how scientists talk about the origins of behavior, often in terms of the innate nature each creature is born with, and the effects of the environment, experience, and learning that challenge or build upon that base. Oyama's point is that this way of thinking is fundamentally wrong, that science has long come to a consensus on that, and yet these ideas still persist stubbornly, often in subtle, unnoticed ways. Oyama goes into great depth discussing how and why this view is wrong, why it matters, the many ways dualism and essentialism slip into scientific discourse anyway, and better ways to talk about these ideas that respect the full complexity of evolution, development, and learning as we know them.
This is a book about biology, but even more so it's a book about how scientists investigate and write about biology. It's a careful work of philosophy, teasing apart the subtle nuances of developmental and evolutionary biology, and the ways certain phrases or frames of reference can obscure or distort important aspects of those phenomena. It's full of examples of how to discuss these things well or poorly, delivering pointed critiques at some very big names in these fields. It's a technical and precise academic work, yet well written and easy to read. It assumes a basic grounding in biology, but focuses on a very narrow slice of it, and reviews the evidence and dialog around that slice quite thoroughly, so it's easy for a novice to join the conversation. The tone of the book is of someone fed up with this debate, venting her frustrations in the most respectful and constructive way she can, and trying her best to help everyone move on from arguing about the wrong things to arguing about the right ones.
This is an essential read for anyone studying genetics, evolution, or how those things influence behavior. It's eye-opening, and a practical toolkit for thinking about this stuff. Also recommended for anyone interested in the philosophy of science.
This book explores how scientists talk about the origins of behavior, often in terms of the innate nature each creature is born with, and the effects of the environment, experience, and learning that challenge or build upon that base. Oyama's point is that this way of thinking is fundamentally wrong, that science has long come to a consensus on that, and yet these ideas still persist stubbornly, often in subtle, unnoticed ways. Oyama goes into great depth discussing how and why this view is wrong, why it matters, the many ways dualism and essentialism slip into scientific discourse anyway, and better ways to talk about these ideas that respect the full complexity of evolution, development, and learning as we know them.
This is a book about biology, but even more so it's a book about how scientists investigate and write about biology. It's a careful work of philosophy, teasing apart the subtle nuances of developmental and evolutionary biology, and the ways certain phrases or frames of reference can obscure or distort important aspects of those phenomena. It's full of examples of how to discuss these things well or poorly, delivering pointed critiques at some very big names in these fields. It's a technical and precise academic work, yet well written and easy to read. It assumes a basic grounding in biology, but focuses on a very narrow slice of it, and reviews the evidence and dialog around that slice quite thoroughly, so it's easy for a novice to join the conversation. The tone of the book is of someone fed up with this debate, venting her frustrations in the most respectful and constructive way she can, and trying her best to help everyone move on from arguing about the wrong things to arguing about the right ones.
This is an essential read for anyone studying genetics, evolution, or how those things influence behavior. It's eye-opening, and a practical toolkit for thinking about this stuff. Also recommended for anyone interested in the philosophy of science.
September 28, 2020
Survey of dualistic metaphors surrounding evolution and cellular biology. Peppered with interesting philosophical commentary throughout, but felt overly academic at times.
Want to read
May 13, 2022RK INFORMATION STUDIES INFORMATION CITED IN SHARMA, INTERDEPENDENCE WWRD ANF CITED IN ROSE, MAKING OF MEMORY
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