Evolutionary Systems: Biological and Epistemological Perspectives on Selection and Self-Organization

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G. Vijver, Stanley N. Salthe, M. Delpos
Springer Science & Business Media, Apr 17, 2013 - Philosophy - 438 pages
The three well known revolutions of the past centuries - the Copernican, the Darwinian and the Freudian - each in their own way had a deflating and mechanizing effect on the position of humans in nature. They opened up a richness of disillusion: earth acquired a more modest place in the universe, the human body and mind became products of a long material evolutionary history, and human reason, instead of being the central, immaterial, locus of understanding, was admitted into the theater of discourse only as a materialized and frequently out-of-control actor. Is there something objectionable to this picture? Formulated as such, probably not. Why should we resist the idea that we are in certain ways, and to some degree, physically, biologically or psychically determined? Why refuse to acknowledge the fact that we are materially situated in an ever evolving world? Why deny that the ways of inscription (traces of past events and processes) are co-determinative of further "evolutionary pathways"? Why minimize the idea that each intervention, of each natural being, is temporally and materially situated, and has, as such, the inevitable consequence of changing the world? The point is, however, that there are many, more or less radically different, ways to consider the "mechanization" of man and nature. There are, in particular, many ways to get the message of "material and evolutionary determination", as well as many levels at which this determination can be thought of as relevant or irrelevant.
 

Contents

Model or metaphor?
13
Prospects for conver
21
MICHAEL CONRAD Towards high evolvability dynamics
33
On the origin of final cause
45
BRUCE H WEBER Emergence of life and biological selection from
59
45
66
Conflicting
79
MARTIN BAATZ Pleiotropy and the evolution of adaptibility
101
ALICIA JUARRERO Causality as constraint 233
232
GEORGE KAMPIS Evolution as its own cause and effect
255
RUPERT RIEDL Dealing with complex systems or how to decipher
267
JESPER HOFFMEYER The unfolding semiosphere
281
KOICHIRO MATSUNO Competence of natural languages for describing
294
SUSANTHA GOONATILAKE Towards a metaethic derived from
307
OLAF DIETTRICH On some relations between cognitive and organic evoluti
319
LUIS MATEUS ROCHA Selected selforganization and the semiotics
341

DANIEL R BROOKS The unified theory and selection processes
113
How does
129
H SMITH Canonical ensembles evolution of competing
140
KLAUS KORNWACHS Pragmatic information and the emergence of meaning
181
DUBOIS Emergence of chaos in evolving Volterra ecosystems
197
A Spinozist viewpoint on evolution
215
The emergence of
359
JON UMEREZ The evolution of the symbolic domain in living systems
377
ARANTZA ETXEBERRIA Embodiment of natural and artificial agents
397
CLIFF JOSLYN Are life and meaning coextensive ?
413
INDEX
423
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