Excellent essay Steven.  I hope this praise does not "put the mark of
Satan" on you.  :-p

Steve


--- Steven Bissell <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Re: Autopoesis, and Hierarchies, Linearity, Binary thiSince I've
> gotten a
> couple of off-list messages, perhaps I should explain my irritated
> response
> to Foster's post on autopoesis and competition.
>
> Competition, as the term is used by biologists, occurs within a
> species or
> between similar species for scarce resources. These are species
> similar in
> morphology, physiology, or behavior, but are usually closer related
> species
> in an evolutionary/taxonomic sense. Insects do not compete with
> plants,
> lions do not compete with zebras. Predation is not an example of
> competition
> and no biologist has ever said it was, Mariotti (I still don't know
> who he
> is, but I did find out he was a playwright. . .more on that later)
> is
> constructing a straw man here. Redhead Woodpeckers compete with
> Starlings
> for nesting sites, since both are cavity nesters (Redhead
> Woodpeckers do not
> eat Starlings and Starlings do not eat Woodpecker eggs). Suitable
> tree holes
> are scarce and Starlings, being permanent residents, get the better
> holes
> before the Woodpeckers, being migrants, arrive. So, the Woodpeckers
> compensate by killing the Starling chicks and taking over the
> holes. This
> reduces the overall fitness, in terms of reproductive success, of
> Starlings,
> which is the big point of competition.
>
> When Darwin proposed competition as a factor in evolution he did
> not use the
> word in any sort of aggressive or combative sense (I can just see
> the posts
> about Darwin's ideas being the result of a Victorian, Masculine,
> hierarchical society. This nonsense is usually put forward by
> sociologists
> or philosophers [no offense Jim T.] who have read "about" Darwin,
> but never
> bother to read a single word of any of his works). The example of
> competition used by Darwin was a plant growing on the edge of a
> desert,
> which "competed" for scarce water with other plants of the same
> species.
> Those individual plants better adapted to collecting water in times
> of
> scarcity were more likely to have higher reproductive potential,
> thus were
> more "fit." The use of the terms "fit" and "competition" were
> clomped onto
> by sociologists and political science writers as early as Herbert
> Spencer to
> produce terms like "Survival of the fittest."
>
> One real world example of competition is in character displacement
> in
> Darwin's Finches (Ecology and Evolution of Darwin's Finches. 1999.
> Peter R.
> Grant, Jonathan Weiner. Princeton Univ. Press). The idea, well
> actually it's
> not an idea, it's documented, is that if two species have a variety
> of
> characters, (morphological, physiological, or behavioral) in common
> you can
> calculate the degree of similarity. Say two species with ten
> characters in
> common. If you divide the degree of similarity of one by the other,
> the
> index gets closer to 1 as the total similarity approaches unity. If
> the two
> species overlap in distribution, the degree of similarity in the
> zone of
> overlap will be less than in the areas where they don't overlap.
> Say in the
> area where only species A occurs the index is 0.75 and the same in
> the area
> where only species B occurs. In the area where both A and B occur,
> the index
> is 0.50. This is known as "character displacement" and the
> mechanism for
> this displacement is generally attributed to competition. In fact
> no other
> mechanism, other than random chance, can logically be proposed.
> Darwin's
> finches are a group of very similar species on the Galapagos
> Islands. They
> are related to a few mainland species, but have diverged on the
> islands into
> a variety of niches. On those islands where they occur together,
> they
> demonstrate character displacement, on those islands where they
> occur alone,
> they do not.
>
> Another example of competition is when a species "invades" the
> range of
> another similar species and causes a reduction in the overall
> fitness of the
> resident species. This may be "naturally" or thru introduction. The
> invader
> may totally displace the resident species through competition. This
> has been
> extensively studied in the Hawaiian islands where native birds have
> been
> reduced to extinction by habitat destruction, but in several cases
> by
> competition with introduced species (Michael P. Moulton and Stuart
> L. Pimm.
> 1986. The extent of competition in shaping an introduced avifauna.
> In:
> Community Ecology. J. Diamond and T.J. Case, eds. Harper and Row,
> New
> York.). Now, as a biologist, I think competition has been used a
> bit widely
> to explain to much. For example the MacArthur/Wilson theory which
> relies, in
> part, on competition (Robert H. MacArthur and E. O. Wilson. Theory
> of Island
> Biogeography. 1967. Princeton Univ. Press) has been used to explain
> everything from bat distribution to prairie grouse declines.
>
> But, the issue is environmental ethics. Competition is important
> because
> humans overlap other species in a variety of ways. Paul Shepard
> describes us
> as: "Our human ecology is that of a rare species of mammal in a
> social,
> omnivorous niche." As such we may not compete in the classic sense
> with
> other species for resources, but the effect is very nearly the
> same. Thus
> far the result of this type of competition has been a reduction in
> the
> fitness or reproductive potential of lots of other species. Unlike
> other
> species we have the capability of modifying the impacts of this
> type of
> competition in ways that consider the ethical implications of
> competition.
> To ascribe competition to some weird category of "linearity" or
> such
> dismisses the ecological importance of the effects of competition
> and it
> implies that thinking about competition is merely masculine
> posturing. It
> puts competition into an intellectual drawer of "social
> construction" and
> then uses that drawer as a urinal. The importance of competition is
> lost in
> a maze of intellectual Onanism.
>
> On to Autopoesis. This is one of those "just so" ideas that seem to
> take on
> a life of their own. As I said, the term Autopoesis has been
> extended far
> beyond what the original authors intended by Mariotti (the
> playwright
> remember?) and others. Another example is that of the
> "super-organism."
> Originally proposed by Eugene Marais, a Boor lawyer/physician, and
> morphine
> addict, who wrote a series of articles around the turn of the
> century which
> became _The Soul of the White Ant_ (a loose translation of the
> Afrikaans
> word for "termite" is "white ant"). Marais proposed that termite
> colonies
> should be considered as single organisms. Marais only published in
> Afrikaans
> because he hated the British and his book was plagiarized by the
> Flemish
> playwright (see I told you this would crop up again) as _The Life
> of the
> White Ant_ (1927. 1939. Trans. by Alfred Sutro. Dodd, Mead & Co.)
> At least
> this got Marais off his high horse so he published in English
> shortly before
> his death (1937. Trans. by Winifred De Kok. Methuen & Co. London).
> Marais
> enjoyed a short period of popularity early in the environmental era
> through
> the efforts of Robert Ardrey, another playwright (what's with those
> guys
> anyway?), who wrote a series of popular paleoanthropology books and
> was
> instrumental in getting Marais' major work _The Soul of the Ape_
> published
> (1969. Atheneum, New York). The idea of colonial insects as
> super-organisms
> was also proposed by a William Wheeler, a noted American ant
> specialist.
> While it is a charming idea, it has never gone much beyond that.
> There are
> lots of issues as to why it doesn't really work, but my interest is
> in how
> the idea influenced ecologists.
>
> Early ecologists seemed to like the idea of "super-organism"
> because it got
> applied very early on to assemblages of organisms and
> transliterated into
> "communities." The idea being that assemblages of soil, plants, and
> animals
> formed discrete "organisms" in nature. This idea implies that there
> are
> certain types of assemblages that will occur in exactly the same
> manner
> given the same conditions. Ideas such as "climax community" came
> out of
> this. This is the same sort of idea as "autopoesis" which implies
> that some
> biological unit will automatically reproduce itself under constant
> conditions. If we go past the cell the problem is that there are no
> data to
> support the concept at all. In nature we do not find identical
> assemblages
> of soil, plants, and animals regardless of similar conditions. And,
> there
> are no limits to these so-called "communities." You cannot find
> where one
> "community" leaves off and another begins. Again, a charming idea,
> one full
> of all sorts of intuitive benefits, but, to paraphrase a movie
> line, "Show
> me the data!"
>
> Probably the height of this line of thinking has been the Gaia
> stuff. James
> Lovelock proposed this in regard to an explanation of atmospheric
> stability.
> It really isn't a hypothesis or a theory, it's an idea. But
> Lovelock, with
> an eye perhaps toward book sells, knew "The Gaia Hypothesis" would
> probably
> sound better than "A passing idea I had about atmospheric
> stability."
>
> So, what is my problem with all this? Well, it smells of
> determinism to me.
> If we can suppose that ecological communities have some sort of
> magical
> built in stability, or tendency to return to the same state after
> perturbations, why bother with environmental protection? All this
> thinking
> presumes that ecosystems, or communities, are somehow determined by
> unknown
> rules or outside forces. It implies that regardless of human
> activity,
> Mother Nature knows best and will clean up after us. I mean after
> all, we
> have this maternal Green Goddess watching over us, protecting
> herself and
> us, and everything will work out in the end. A probabilistic view
> of
> ecosystems however forces us to consider consequences. If the
> outcome of
> environmental disturbance is a set of probabilities then we can, in
> fact we
> do, load the dice to make it come out the way we want.
> Environmental ethics
> tells us that some probabilities are not in our best interest or in
> the best
> interest of ecological stability and which are. The deterministic
> view tells
> us, "don't worry, be happy.'
>
> Well, there you go. For those of you who have hung in there with
> all this
> meandering, I'll bet you wish I had just stuck to bullyragging
> Foster.
>
> Steven
>
> Even errors must be respected
> when they are more than
> two thousand years old.
>                  Sangharakshita
>
>


=====
"In a nutshell, he [Steve] is 100% unadulterated evil. I do not believe in a 'Satan', but this man is as close to 'the real McCoy' as they come."
--Jamey Lee West

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