proximity1

The point here is not « whether » but how genes operate their « regulatory » effects within organisms. As Kupiec clearly explains, the genes' influences, in themselves stochastic in character, combine with the given embryonic environmentitself a varible condition of development in each individual-- and with the particulars of each embryo's heritage as given in the originating ovum. This presents us with a picture which conforms to the expected importance of environment and natural selection (found everywhere else) as factors in organisms' internal biological processes. The consequences for the organism are a life-enhancing « plasticity » by the greatly increased potentials available in such a multiform set of processes, consequences which a deterministic programed operation of genetic regulation, an identical copy-to-copy process--except where mutations and other « accidents » may intervenecannot equal and is, therefore, selectively inferior from any evolutionary perspective in which random natural selection is the mode. And, of course, that's your prerogative to prefer it. I want to shift my focus here away from what may have become a too-personally-aimed discussion and, instead, write and reply as though I address any interested reader rather than you in particular. So, in that vein, considering scientists, researchers, students of natural sciences as under-graduates or graduates or post -doctoral students generally, why should any of them rule out the consideration of a text such as The Origin of Individuals ? The same just-mentioned scholars would not hesitate to read The Origin of Species or any of Ernst Mayr's books, or Dobzhansky's, or any number of other scientist-researchers who, for centuries, have written and published their scientific work in forms that reach--because they are addressed to these---the wider interested public beyond the confines of an expert community. No competent and self-respecting scholar-researcher in the natural sciences would offer to the non-specialist reading public a text which was in any serious way a departure from the same theoretical rigors applied in his or her writing for peer-reviewed journals. So for any reader to eschew on such a basis regarding as fit for consideration a text which comes from a general publisher of non-fiction strikes me as a habit of a curiously uncurious kind for any person of scientific bent.

If I recall your profile correctly, you are a mathematician. Very well : If "well-reasoned ideas" -------> "attitudes will be (positively) swayed by those" ? Here's one, for example: Please reconsider the premise-conclusion just above for its validity in the real world. Now, we have an actual experimental test of this assertion of yours. Let's observe the results---i.e. the "swaying" that should soon occur.

This deep insight is one that is momentarily lost on the leading lights of contemporary genetics. It's a very high bar your insight asks readers to clear. So, instead, and really without much of any awareness of it, contemporary genetic theory is shot through and through with terms and phrases which are sometimes subtlely, sometimes blantantly, redolent of a teleogical view, of a purpose-directed version of evolution. By such a view we get descriptions of cells as "guardians," or "helpers", or, really, all manner of humanly-derived agency. In an recent article in Scientific American, (August, 2012, vol. 306, Edition 8) "Quiet Little Traitors", by David Stipp, we have "...cells that are programmed to run out of dividing power..." and "cytokines that attract immune cells and activate them to fight infections", or, "senescent cells secrete hurtful molecules, bahaving like catatonic zombies drooling poison." A natural objection is that all such talk is nothing more than a "manner of speaking," that, of course, no one in science who is competent really thinks of the physical matter in so anthropomorhic a manner. But it seems that the most fundamental assumptions---those being the ones least consciously held up for re-examinations--actually do carry a very highly-charged element of "finalism", of purpose-directed life processes. So, it should not be such a wonder to us that "Creative Design" sprang up with such force and captured so many people's imaginations. Contemporary genetics takes a very "designer-driven" view of the basic nature of molecular processes directed specifically by genes, proteins, and other enchanted microscopic entities. This, "But before biological life formed, there was only non-biological so they are related beyound seperation," again, is a very deep insight. It happens that it is also the core principle and driving idea behind the theory of Jean-Jacques Kupiec's "ontophylogenesis---a bio-nature which is founded upon quantum theory not just as a strange, fanciful notion but in actual working anaysis and experimental research. And it's an idea that mainstream biology has not yet come to understand and accept as true and fundamentally important. It is as though quantum physicists never existed or, if they did, they and their ideas and work never chanced to influence the thinking of biologists, for whom the world is still fundamentally an enchanted place, no matter how much they may protest that they are the apostles of solidly-grounded scientific, materialistic, views.

In repsonse to RE: "Padren" @ post N° 63 , posted in "Why are scientists seemingly"... [ Editorial note about citing texts: Because, for practical reasons, I don't have access to the translated English edition of Kupiec's text, I am persenting my own translations of his original French whenever I cite his work--except of course where he may use English in the original. And in this thread and, in general, as I can read either English or French with equal facility, I choose, whenever practical, to read a work in either the author's original English or original French. But, where a text is either very difficult (or, of course, impossible) to obtain or obtaining it is for me too expensive, then I resort to whichever between French or English, is the cheaper, more easily obtained version. In the case of Mayr's texts (originally in English) I am using such of them as are easily available in French translations from libraries (but very hard to find in English other than by ordering them). So, since Kupiec's book is both very expensive and hard to come by as well as being no advantage to me in its English translation (except as I would like to cite the English translation's version), I have to, instead, offer my own translations, which might vary slightly from what a reader of the published translation finds on the page.] My response: Yes, that point of his text was, for me, too, one of the most startling, fascinating and interesting. But, by the time I arrived there, I'd already read and understood his theoretical arguments and their bases. However, though it surprises laymen such as we are, I suspect that this idea that I expressed as "Our bodies' organs are not "in the service of" our body as a whole. Instead, it is the other way around,' is, for some nuimber of scientists in biology, not really a great revelation. In fact, Kupiec gives full credit for this point to Claude Bernard, M.D., who, in Leçons sur les phénomènes de la vie communs aux animaux et aux végétaux at pages 357-359, writes, (in part ; this is an excerpt of Kupiec's excerpt of Bernard's text; elipses below show where I have skipped over Kupiec's citation)

RE: "The only thing that quantum unpredictability results in is you don't know which set of deterministic outcomes will be observed, and the possibility that multiple potential outcomes may interfere with each other (such as double slit experiment) but I still don't see how it applies." Well, rather than say "set of deterministic outcomes," the theory proposed (in another thread, where you'll find my more extensive reply to your post here,) Kupiec would say, "Probabilistic outcomes"---because, and this is very crucial to his point, the outcomes are simply not "determined," they present a more or less varied range of possible outcomes or, as you have put it, we "don't know which set of deterministic outcomes will be observed." For that reason, argues Kupiec, the best understanding of these processes is just this probabilistically produced set. For my complete reply to your comment here, please refer to On Ontophylogenesis or "Cellular Darwinism" at post N° 13 where you may read and judge for yourself whether I have misstated or misunderstood the points being argued by Kupiec. Thank you, too, for having read this thread, my comments, and having thought about them and offered the reply.

That is what you understood by this?: (emphasis added) Allow me to corrcect your faulty reading, understanding: I didn't read merely one and a half pages of de Queiroz's articles, I read (and have now read) ALL of them---those you referenced. And, let's stop on this point and think a moment: you've just insinuated, erroneously, that I read only one and a half pages of the article mentioned. (And to do that, you had to miss the clear import of what I actually wrote.) Now, on the other hand, in a thread I opened with the object of discussing another text, The Origin of Individuals, by Jean-Jacques Kupiec, as far as I know at this writing, you have read little or even nothing at all of it. You'll correct me, I'm sure, if I'm mistaken about that. To continue, your style of argument is interesting: you offer for support, certain texts; then, faced with cogent rebuttals of the text you yourself cited, you allege that the rebuttals are outdated because the state of current knowledge has moved on. But, if we are discussing species concepts at all, it is not because I made them a part of the discussion but, rather, because they are one of the central topics of the articles you cited. (for support? If not, why, then, did you cite them if species concepts are not really germane to this discussion?) Should I expect more of that from you? And, just out of curiosity, when, in a discussion, your interlocuteur points out an error on your part, do you ever acknowledge it, even implicitly, by, for example, changing tack and correcting course?

Whatever your perspective is, all I have to go on is the meager acquaintance I have with what is in your posts--in this case, the posts in this thread. I didn't see anyone apologize about making undue assumptions about Too-Open-Minded's perspective; on the other hand, instead, he was expressly invited to enlarge it. I think it's easy to assume offense where none is intended. How about we re-boot without the "So, you assume I have no wider perspective?" The reading suggestions are not necessarily intended to be adopted immediately, without further delay. They're for future reference; and that is how I (gratefully) accept yours, in the case of the Progress Paradox. I'm always interested in finding a new good source for information that I don't already have, and esp. when the topic interests me and this one does very much. No more than a tiny minority of the Chinese could ever know even a very modest level of the material wealth that has been common in the industrial West over the past 60 years. The population figures tell us that the Earth's resources won't ever even begin to stretch that far. So, as a beacon and a place to take spectator comfort in others' progress, while relatively, ours declines, some of the Chinese, yes, will "prosper" by the usual standards and measures of the West's privileged elite. But, the vast majority, whether they know it or not, simply cannot and will not. That's not necessarily a value judgement, though it could be that, too. It's a recognition of the planet's material limits being reached in our lifetimes. Too-Open-Minded's not so very optimistic views on these points have received the usual reception that this sort of view gets. Unless people, and lots of them, start to take a more open-minded view of the kinds of opinions that T-O-M has posted here, (and, please, that doesn't have to mean you, first, foremost and personally, Okay? You asked "What specific actions should we take? What should be rally around?" and this is addressed to that generally.) then prospects for change will remain far-fetched. But, the material constraints won't remain static. They'll worsen and force on people a recognition that current trends are not going to be able to be sustained and that, just as important, if not more so, that technology saving us through ever-more wonderful inventions is an illusion, too. So I'd suggest that as a starting place: a change of attitudes, which, whether we like it or not, will be forced on us if we don't adopt them voluntarily.

You don't have to join the site to see the content. And, of course, we can discuss anything. And if you aren't familiar with the background, how useful, interesting, is the discussion going to be? Yes, of course, there's no argument about our ancestors--Homo erectus and others. But, I don't see the point then about "we": you're defining "we" as some present species and, anything succeeding "us" is "something else"--is that it?

I think extinction means, by definition, doesn't it?, "No descendants." If "we"--i.e. human-kind--leave descendants, then "we" haven't become extinct, have we? RE: "I honestly think technology will if not save us then help greatly in the struggle to keep humanity going, the real test will be when fossil fuels run out. it might force us to use renewable energy or to use nuclear energy more wisely but I think we will survive it. " I ask: Have you ever read Neil Postman's Technopoly ? If not, then I recommend that you try it for what it has to tell you about the effectiveness of trying to solve every technologically-based problem by resorting to still more technology---which is the current general manner of dealing with these things. There are some citations from Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology which I patiently typed up and posted (though I no longer recommend or participate at the site for its social networking, discussion, purposes because I came to the conclusion that interesting discussions are out of the question there. Still, for the two links, it remains useful. Scroll down the page more than half way to find the book's excerpts. and, at this link, I've compiled an entire reading list which I called, "A Reading Course in 'Technology and Society' - main text

RE: "And darn near every single generation has written very similar things." That, of course, while true, is of no value as a premise for the assumed but unstated conclusion that, since X has been frequently predicted but has (supposedly) not been found to have occurred, the predictions of X are faulty." See, Taleb, N.N. (2007) RE: "While there certainly are troubling things going on, losing perspective of all the good things going on as well doesn't really accomplish much. This certainly doesn't mean that I am saying we should ignore the troubling things. But, I am saying that in a wider perspective, mankind on the whole is progressing at a fairly incredible rate." Thus my strong impression that, indeed, whatever you really mean, the upshot of your comments is that "Too-open-minded" 's concerns are exaggerated because they supposedly lack perspective---a perspective by which, we have on your authority, "that mankind on the whole is progressing at a fairly incredible rate." On such a perspective, I cannot recommend strongly enough Daniel Kahneman's recent Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011). There, see his discussion of the common reasoning error which he describes as "WYSIATI", or "What You See Is All There Is". For Taleb (2007) this fallacy is that of the "drowned sailors,"--whose contrary evidence never reach us because the witnesses were lost at sea. General optimism is a character trait that may be more due to our nature than to our nurture, though I do not deny that both are factors. Some people have optimism in abundance. Others, who don't, cannot simply adopt it, put it on like so much clothing. We need both clear-eyed optimism and clear-eyed pessimism when and where they are warranted by facts. In sum, your replies amount to inviting Too-Open-Minded to join you in your optimism mainly, or solely, it seems, because for you, the picture is not as gloomy as T-O-M paints it. I, too, see mankind progressing at a fairly incredible rate. But for me, more than not, the "progress" is toward mankind's self-inflicted destruction. We could despair in that, or, we could take T-O-M 's concerns as spurs for greater, more coordinated, public action.

(* emphasis added) Let's review: you are reproaching as outdated by "a few decades" an article written in 2009 by a professional scholar in the specialty concerned here and offering, as "evidence" of more recent work, articles which are dated, respectively, 2009; 2009; January 2011; 2009 (with unspecified revisions in 2012); April 2011 and, finally, March 2007. In addition, your rejection of Tautz's arguments comes completely without comment. At no point do you indicate any specific defect in the claims, reasoning and conclusions of Diethard Tautz. Instead, the reader is offered a flat unsupported assertion that Tautz's article is not receivable here because, by your claim, it is "...a few decades behind the current state of the field...." As I understand it, then, you are authorized to cite at will whatever you please as presumed valid scholarship while my citations in reply, despite their devastating cogency, are ruled out of order without review or comment on your part. I believe that the picture emerging does not serve you or your case well; on the contrary, nothing I've read so far of your cited articles has made the slightest impression on me for their pertinence to the issues concerned here. At this point, I have nearly finished reading all the previously cited articles you presented---with the exceptions of, first, the supposedly more up-to-date work of Kevin de Queiroz in "Species Concepts and Species Delimitation," which was submitted to the journal, Systematic Biology, in November of 2006 and, secondly, of Mayr's One Long Argument, published in 1992, and which I won't obtain until tomorrow at the earliest, from a library. But, even before I can finish these and write a comment on their merits or the lack of them, you present fresh reading recommendations with your observation that the state of the art has moved on, leaving Diethard Tautz's views lagging behind by a few decades. Let me conclude this by the observation that, having arrived within one and a half pages of finishing Kevin de Queiroz's article, "Ernst Mayr and the modern concept of species" my heart sinks at the prospects of having to read stilll another of his articles. For a picture of someone conceptually totally "at sea" and desperately flailing about for something which will float, I am very hard-pressed to imagine anything more compelling than what the author offers us there. Indeed, I cannot recommend strongly enough that readers examine this article--and, can it be doubted? his other one you recommend--for a vivid picture of a discipline in full conceptual disarray. By contrast, Kupiec's work and reasonings are models of everything that one could wish for in your champions' offerings, but does not find there. My next step is to invite Professor Tautz to have a look at what we have here so far as a discussion. Please excuse me, as I have more painfully dreary, plodding, text of tortured circular reasoning to return to and to read at your recommendation before I can comment further with examples in support.

Here' a little «status report » Currently, I'm reading through Arete's recommended reading. So this is a kind of « intermission » time for me. Still to read, or currently reading: de Queiroz, K. « Ernst Mayr and the modern concept of species » journal PNAS, 3 May 2005 de Queiroz, K. « Species Concepts and Species Delimitation » from the journal Systematic Biology, 56(6):879-886, 2007 Mayr, E.; One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought , Harvard University Press (fFrench translation)

This takes us farther still from the thread and perhaps with that I shouldn't even bother with the rest. Maybe I'll delete it bef........................ poof. gone. If you'd like to discuss this more, maybe we should (or someone has) started an appropriate thread over in "Politics". Whaddaya think?

Those are some very good points---and they call to mind for me a guy by the name of Richard Feynman who struck very, very many people as a particularly odd thinker with an enormous bent for the odd idea.

I think that you need an additional qualifier because it seems to me that, by your terms, the Universe itself could qualify as "life". By the Universe itself I mean the whole set of exstant physical reality. So, I would add, at a minimum: "Life is a chemical system (in contrast to artificial life) as distinguished from the Universe as a whole."

If I was going to bet, I'd bet that you're correct. It's not that complicated. Human history indicates that humans do not learn (except commonly as exceptional individuals) from human history. It also indicates that with rare exceotion, little short of great catastrophe is sufficient to make even a modest impression on very large portions of the world population. But, unfortunately, that's not enough--and in more than one sense. First, it's not enough to present us with any reasonable expectation that we can continue "learning by catastrophe" in our current technological circumstances-- because these set us irrevocably apart from all former times. But, also because "learning by catastrophe" (here, that needs an acronym: "LBC" ®) misses much of the populace in its effectiveness and, the "lessons" drawn are more likely to be a mass of erroneous incoherencies than a set of valid and pertinent corrective understanding. The examples are endless. What, correctly and pertinently and, perhaps most all, lastingly, was learned by any significant part of the world's population from any extraordinary LBC catastrophe that anyone may care to name? World War I? Nothing. (ex.) --> World War II---? Nothing, really, that counts much. Worse, during and since World War II, the most influential and powerful of the world's "Leading Industrial Nations ®" developed many of the worst, most dangerous and species-threatening habits of thought and action that plague us today. Over my life I've heard many optimistic people say things such as, "Well, we survived Nixon!" or "Well, we survived Reagan!" or, in case you mistake me as partisan, "Well, we survived Clinton! (Bush!; Obama!, etc.) Well, we survived the Cold War! ----my response is, "Uh, No, we haven't, not necessarily we haven't, not yet. All those things left us with festering wounds. It shows some amazing over-confidence to ignore that these wounds are still there, unhealed, unlearned from and, moreover, as far as we know, still deadly." On nuclear war, it's seems obvious to me, and I think it should be obvious to anyone who has his eyes open, that our peril from anihilation in nuclear war is no less today than it was in the Cold War--that is, at any moment some unexpected trigger event could put us all within minutes or hours of one or more nation's launching a nuclear strike (deliberately or by accident) on some other nation or nations. the U.S., Pakistan, India, Israel, China, and other nations have nuclear weapons; the U.S. have resorted to the use of atomic weapons already. Nuclear war is hardly the only or even the most appalling of the prospects for doom which stalk our world thanks exclusively to patented human stupidity, greed and blindness: there are the dangers of civil uses of nuclear power as a common source of power generation; there is the wildly insane monkeying around with the genomes naturally occurring flora and fauna which potential catastrophic consequences for our entire planet that no one is wise enough to foresee. Either or some combination of these are more than enough to place everyone on an endangered species list with an ever-shrinking half-life. If these dangers were somehow absolutely necessary, if we simply had no other choice but to run these risks, then that would be one thing, in sizing up our wisdom versus our folly. But we don't have to run these risks. They're aren't absolutely necessary. We could, if we used our intelligence and our courage, find and take better, saner, safer courses. If we don't, it's because we're lazy. We rather play video games and eat micro-waved popcorn. For sheer blind human folly, how is it possible to top the retort that "We have to stick with civil nuclear power generation because our economy---the Jobs!---depend on it! But, once spoiled, the livable environment lost, no one's job will matter or mean anything at that point. How many job openings are available now around a three-mile radius of the Tepco power plants of Fukushima? By the way, for the Japanese, there is immense irony in the terrible lesson they've been given in "LBC" ®. That is because, for them, "Fukushima" ( 福島第 ) means, 福: (chance, luck) 島第: ('island of,') or, "Island of Chance, Luck". It's as though someone replied, on hearing that a fuse had been lit, and that it leads to a world-ending explosion, "Relax, Buddy! Nobody knows how long that fuse is." But, after all that digression, I would like to return to the thread topic and offer to stitch up some of these fraying ends. The upshot includes not just the observation that, simply, there is no plan or program going on, no grand project with some final end which can be held up for hope or hopelessness, not just that it's all a matter of random, undirected events and how they combine in ways that are simply beyond anyone to calculate for their single or multiple influences but also that from an enlightened human perspective, this can be seen as a "good thing"---it would be a truly terrible and unbearable world if there really was an overall purpose, point and design and that this became "known" to us. And, on the other hand, less positively, that evolution not uni-directional, always upward, always onward. Since there is no plan, and no notion of "progress", of "winners" or "losers" in Nature's vocabulary, we and other creatures can just as easily "evolve" into something quite puny in relation to what grand stuff we think of ourselves as being today, if that is the condition on which overrall survival rests. Nature isn't up to anything in particular. It is simply making "trials," "experiments" in life-stuff. And it will "try" anything and everything, no matter what. There's no balance-sheet, no profit-and-loss statement, no quarterly reports to file. Nature has no peer, no competitor. It simply "is". And, for more irony, I recall more and more often Einstein's famous quip in which he ventured that "God doesn't play dice." (in a letter to Max Born, from Wikipedia : those may have been Einstein's most ironic words. It seems that there is no God, instead there are just the "dice" themselves, rolling incessantly and without point or purpose. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Right or wrong, I owe these views (insights, as I see them) to others, much smarter than I am; you could consult them for yourself if you are interested and curious and, so, while we wait for human stupidity to do us all in, we could read, think and try to add some unknown length to that fuse which is there, and is burning, and none of us knows how long before it reaches the detonation point: Neil Postman, author of Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Knopf, 1992 Konrad Lorenz, author of The Waning of Humaneness (1987) (Der Abbau des Menschlichen, 1983), and Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge (1973) (Die Rückseite des Spiegels. Versuch einer Naturgeschichte menschlichen Erkennens, 1973), and Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins (1974) (Die acht Todsünden der zivilisierten Menschheit, 1973) Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (the point of which, really, is that we often have no idea of nor any way to calculate what is or isn't "highly improbable"). Bertrand Russell, (works)

In that case, I think your speculations are squarely within the realm of standard evolutionary biology; it seems to me that theory offers us an entirely compelling basis for this first organism's springing from a set of physical conditions which were conducive to a spontaneous appearance of matter/energy which possessed (please excuse the vagueness of our language limitations in this) a capacity to react to stimulus from the surrounding environment. In this case, there's be no reason to suspect some other "meta-Evolution" occurring in biological forms; but that doesn't preclude some greater or lesser variation in the rates at which various living organisms evolve. The biological statistician, Katherine S. Pollard, has written about what is known as "HAR-1" --- Human Accelerated Region 1" a segment of human DNA which has shown an exceptional rate of change compared to other segments. And, interestingly enough, the area concerned has particular importance for human brain activity. I personally suspect, and perhaps many evolutionary biologists do, too, that living organisms emerged numerous times in numerous places and in some of them, the organisms didn't at first succeed in persisting, in multiplying, and so, that trial was lost. I see all life, at every level of every organism, from the so-called "lowest" to the so-called "highest" as a fresh trial in nature---one which is wholly without any a priori or a posteriori purpose, point, aim, ambition, design, plan or any other directional or intentional device. That is, all these trials are and always have been entirely the products of a completely blind process of a certain set of naturally occurring (contingent) conditions. And, taking my cue from work by Jean-Jacques Kupiec and predecessors he cites (Claude Bernard, for example), I agree with the view that it is our prior evolutionary forms (i.e. our organs, as these evolved by and through our ancestry, human-like and non-human, which are the driving motives, rather than any of the higher aims and motives that derive from our brain's store of intelligences and reasonings---valid and immensely fascinating as these are. There are some consequences which flow logically from this view. One of them is that the set of circumstances we live in is, from a biological point of view, simply impossible to estimate in its once-in-human-existance character. That is, if humans "blow it," ruin the life-sustaining properties of their environment, this planet, though other living organisms may eventually evolve, will never see homo sapiens again---even if some clever life form found ancient human DNA and successfully reanimated it in the laboratory, the result would be, strictly and figuratively speaking, a "freak of nature" at that point, hardly or no different than if by some wild chance, a meteorite brought some fragments of an extra-terrestrial life form which, upon some intervention by human efforts, was "reinvigorated". How would anyone know in what extent the "results" conformed to the living organism's original character?

RE: "Why does hearing what you want to believe seem to be more important than the truth?" Daniel Kahneman and Robert Trivers have each written very interesting books about just that, and some other, related, things. I tend to agree with all those points, but there is still some variability in the scope for "being able to, allowed to", tell the truth, isn't there? I have thought of it this way: there's a general and quite a variable kind of "current moral acceptability" which takes in many moral topics and issues and certainly includes when it is or isn't generally considered "acceptable" to lie. This movable feast or famine for the truth is something that seems to rise or fall with what are arguably some rather large proportion of "average people's" tolerances for social practices in honesty and dishonesty. Things seem to swing between periods of high or low tolerance for lying, or, indeed, for telling the truth. I'm generally always fascinated by what's typically so taboo that it is not allowed in most open discussion---whether that is in the "positive" : i.e. it's not just "okay" to talk about, or to think, thusly", it's practically required--or negative: "woe to him or her who dares voice such-and-such a view!" We seem to me to be living in very "stinky" times for honesty; so I agree with others who've mentioned that the tendencies toward dishonesty are hardly confined to politicians' misbehavior. When enough ordinary people become sufficiently fed up with the status quo, that will seep into the popular mass media's widely projected visions of "what's okay" and "what's not okay" and the margins will shift----for a while, right?

Please pardon this raincloud over what, I agree, ought to be science's faithful adherence to "very specific terminology," (or, where that isn't possible, some very careful thinking about why it isn't possible) but, it seems that not only has that been a very recurrent problem over centuries but also, the more I learn about various theories in contemporary science, the more I worry that there is something going awry in too many (younger?) researchers' habits of thought and practice in their scientific work. Please note, for example, on this topic, the following excerpt, which I recently appended to a thread elsewhere: Some sort of "meta-Evolution"? But in what respect would that, might that, be? Do you have anything in mind about where you're going in that?, if it's "meta-Evolution" you mean. Where (and how?) would we look for it?

Previous recommended reading, courtesy of Arete from the "Lounge" discussion : Why are scientists seemingly reluctant to accept new ideas? In some cases, at least Ernst Mayr and the modern concept of species by Kevin de Queiroz (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.) Species Concepts and Species Delimitation (from the Oxford University journal Systematic Biology ) by Kevin de Queiroz (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.) Genetics and the Origin of Species (1951) (excerpt) by Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975) (from the Unofficial Stephen J. Gould Archive "DARWIN ON SPECIES DEFINITIONS AND SPECIATION" (selected citations) On the Non-Existence of Human Races by Frank B. Livingstone and Theodosius Dobzhansky Counterpoint recommended reading, ( suggested by proximity1) : Speciation: From Darwin to Mayr and back again by Dr. Diethard Tautz, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön (Germany); in Lab Times , January 2009, pp. 24-27 (with references for further reading) As support for the view that scientists frequently "lag" in their readiness to give serious, fair consideration to new and challenging theories, this article makes for an interesting entry in that discussion. E.G. (some notes on this suggested reading: as I noted above, in the opening post here, though most everything I contribute on this topic is based primarily on my reading of Kupiec, I do not pretend to necessarily represent his own views in my comments or suggested reading. Here, for example, while I find the article by Dr. Tautz an excellent reply to the arguments (as I've read them so far) in the links above recommended by Arete, Kupiec, who knows the literature thoroughly as I do not, will know whether and in what respects his own work and views diverge from those of Dr. Tautz. Other non-specialists like myself should bear this factor in mind throughout this thread's progress.)

additional to the above, by Charles Darwin: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

CAVEAT: It's a pity that the opening post is no longer subject to editing. If it were, I'd remove the reference/link to Pure variation and organic stratification , by Jérôme Rosanvallon (Université Paris 7, Diderot, France) which, on further examination, has no place in a consideration of Kupiec's work as I see it. While, I hope, there shall be much more to come in this thread, here are other amendments I'd make to the opening post. In the following, I intend to refer to Kupiec's theory by the term he has coined for it, "ontophylogenesis" and drop any further use of "cellular Darwinism" in my posts. Even though "cellular Darwinism" as a phrase figures in the English translation of his L'origine des individus (2009, Fayard, Paris) I don't see in it any advantages over the term "ontophylogenesis" and think that "cellular Darwinism" may prompt misconceptions, so varied are popular notions of just what "Darwinism" denotes. I add the following two citations for a prefatory "flavor" to the thread: (my translation)