The General Ecosystems Thinking (GET) Group centred at Queensland University of Technology (or as we at UQ like to call it, the "city university") invited me to come give a talk on the ontology of evolution. I gave it yesterday. As it will be part of this series of posts that will end up as some form of publication, I thought you might like to hear my dulcet and husky tones, and read the incredible slide. If so, go here, or get the PDF slides here and the WMA sound here. Check out some of the other speakers too. Thanks to Marco Fahmi for the invite and shepherding.
The actual title was: "Species, Traditions and Corporations: What is it that evolves?" As I was talking to a variety of disciplines, I made it incoherent in all of them rather than just the one. I can do that, you know...
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"Never ever call something Darwinism"
Bravo!!!!
*golf clap*
Hmm. On slide 8 - could one just argue that Universal Darwinism is epistemic rather than ontic?
Minor nitpick: hyperbolic != exponential. Non-Malthusian growth is exponential (or geometric in discrete time).
Bob: under the Eigen and Schuster approach, there are exponential growth rates in non-malthusian reactors, but under the assumptions I was positing the growth rates are indeed hyperbolic. See this PDF paper, for example, page 2, and refs.
Universal Darwinism, in the Dawkins sense, is indeed epistemic, but there's a confusion in thinking that because we can call something informational, that information is causal, which is what I was trying to get across. Information is only causal when it is interpreted by an information processing system.
Now I've listened to all of it, I think I'll need to read the book: there's a lot in there which is fascinating, but I'd need to mull it over and see how it works with a couple of examples. I hope you're not lynched by molecular taxonomists before you've finished writing it (I'm sure they'll point out that they should effing well know what a pseudogene looks like!).
One thing I couldn't get/missed was where the phenotype appears in your story. If there is evolution, we see it as much in change of the phenotype, but you didn't seem to talk about its status: there has to be something causing differential survival, or to be a spandrelpedantive.
Slide 24 attributes "vegetable love" to Donne; didn't you mean Andrew Marvell ("To His Coy Mistress")?
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
Or perhaps you were thinking of Donne's "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day"?
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; all, all some properties invest....
I've been puzzling my brain and looking vain for Donne on vegetable love.
Ah, just finished listening to it and see that you caught it.
Yeah, you know... metaphysical poet. They're all alike :-)
Actually, "To his coy mistress" is one of my favourite pieces.
"But at my back I alwais hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near"