My immediate thought is that the term 'memory' is being misused in this
context. The genome+environment model is not quite as new as the headline
implies: it is implicit in Andy Clark's _Being There: Putting Brain, Body,
and the World Together Again_ (1997) and explicit in Matt Ridley's _Nature
via Nurture: Genes, experience and what makes us human_ (2003), for
instance.
This, from Daniel Dennett's 'Things about things' I hope explains what I
mean by 'misuse':
Perhaps we can all agree that in order for intelligent activity to be
produced by embodied nervous systems, those nervous systems have to have
things in them that are about other things in the following minimal sense:
there is information about these other things not just present but usable by
the nervous system in its modulation of behavior. (There is information
about the climatic history of a tree in its growth rings-the information is
present, but not usable by the tree.) The disagreements set in when we start
trying to characterize what these things-about-things are-are they "just"
competences or dispositions embodied somehow (e.g., in connectionist
networks) in the brain, or are they more properly mental representations,
such as sentences in a language of thought, images, icons, maps, or other
data structures? And if they are "symbols", how are they "grounded"? What,
more specifically, is the analysis of the aboutness that these things must
have? Is it genuine intentionality or mere as if intentionality? These
oft-debated questions are, I think, the wrong questions to be concentrating
on at this time, even if, "in the end", they make sense and deserve answers.
These questions have thrived in the distorting context provided by two
ubiquitous idealizing assumptions that we should try setting aside: an
assumption about how to capture content and an assumption about how to
isolate the vehicles of content from the "outside" world. (Daniel Dennett,
Things about things. http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incpages/publctns.shtml,
1998)
As for Lysenkoism, group selection etc., I thought Dawkins' explanation
(can't remember where) of what would be required, at a molecular level, for
replicatable information to be written back to the genome was a pretty
convincing refutation. However, I do have the nagging doubt that perhaps
humans are uniquely equipped (thanks to language, memory or whatever) to
practice group selection, or at least attempt to do so.
P
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to
> poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Douglas Clark
> Sent: 04 November 2005 12:17
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Epigenetics
>
> This programme was amazing. It changes the way you look at
> the world. I hope petcers can understand some of it...
>
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/ghostgenes.shtml
>
>
> Douglas Clark, Bath, Somerset, England ....
> http://www.dgdclynx.plus.com
>
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