Overcoming the Newtonian Paradigm: The Unfinished Project of Theoretical Biology from a Schellingian Perspective

Defending Robert Rosen’s claim that in every confrontation between physics and biology it is physics that has always had to give ground, it is shown that many of the most important advances in mathematics and physics over the last two centuries have followed from Schelling’s demand for a new physics that could make the emergence of life intelligible. Consequently, while reductionism prevails in biology, many biophysicists are resolutely anti-reductionist. This history is used to identify and defend a fragmented but progressive tradition of anti-reductionist biomathematics. It is shown that the mathematicoephysico echemical morphology research program, the biosemiotics movement, and the relational biology of Rosen, although they have developed independently of each other, are built on and advance this antireductionist tradition of thought. It is suggested that understanding this history and its relationship to the broader history of post-Newtonian science could provide guidance for and justify both the integration of these strands and radically new work in post-reductionist biomathematics

Bateson Information Revisited: A New Paradigm

The goal of this work is to explain a novel information paradigm claiming that all information results from a process, intrinsic to living beings, of self-production; a sensory commensurable, self-referential feedback process immanent to Bateson’s difference that makes a difference. To highlight and illustrate this fundamental process, a simulation based on one-parameter feedback is presented. It simulates a homeorhetic process, innate to organisms, illustrating a self-referenced, autonomous system. The illustrated recursive process is sufficiently generic to be the only basis for information in nature: from the single cell, to multi-cellular organisms, to consideration of all types of natural and non-natural phenomena, including tools and artificial constructions

Biosemiosis and Causation: Defending Biosemiotics Through Rosen's Theoretical Biology, or, Integrating Biosemiotics and Anticipatory Systems Theory

The fracture in the emerging discipline of biosemiotics when the code biologist Marcello Barbieri claimed that Peircian biosemiotics is not genuine science raises anew the question: What is science? When it comes to radically new approaches in science, there is no simple answer to this question, because if successful, these new approaches change what is understood to be science. This is what Galileo, Darwin and Einstein did to science, and with quantum theory, opposing interpretations are not merely about what theory is right, but what is real science. Peirce's work, as he acknowledged, is really a continuation of efforts of Schelling to challenge the heritage of Newtonian science for the very good reason that the deep assumptions of Newtonian science had made sentient life, human consciousness and free will unintelligible, the condition for there being science. Pointing out the need for such a revolution in science has not succeeded as a defence of Peircian biosemiotics, however. In this paper, I will defend the scientific credentials of Peircian biosemiotics by relating it to the theoretical biology of the bio-mathematician, Robert Rosen. Rosen's relational biology, focusing on anticipatory systems and giving a place to final causes, should also be seen as a rigorous development of the Schellingian project to conceive nature in such a way that the emergence of sentient life, mind and science are intelligible. Rosen has made a very strong case for the characterization of his ideas as a real advance not only in science, but in how science should be understood, and I will argue that it is possible to provide a strong defence of Peircian biosemiotics as science through Rosen's defence of relational biology. In the process, I will show how biosemiotics can and should become a crucial component of anticipatory systems theory

Development

ABSTRACTThis essay is about Jean Piaget’s late theory, but it is also an advance of my broader historiographical argument regarding the role of intellectual history in uncovering our science’s still-relevant “neglected invisibles” (introduced in Burman, 2015). It does this by building on recent scholarship in the History of Biology to show how Historians of Psychology can contribute to contemporary science without falling prey to “presentism” (i.e. the bias introduced into historical narratives as a result of the framing afforded by contemporary concerns). To wit: when the present itself has been biased by past disciplinary politics, then it is not “presentist” to show that this bias exists. Nor is it presentist to follow the consequences of this biasing back to the original sources, and then highlight the resulting neglected invisibles that have continuing contemporary relevance. I do that, here, by leveraging recent scholarship showing that development was actively suppressed from the evolutionary discourse during the 20th century. Because this is starting to change, with the rise of “evo-devo” (the new synthesis of evolutionary and developmental biology that augments the old synthesis of Darwin and Mendel), and because the biological discourse provides meta-theory for evolutionary thinking in adjacent areas, the conditions of possibility for theory in psychology and epistemology are also changing: ideas that were once dismissed as unthinkable can be reconsidered in new light. Therefore, here, I turn to what Piaget called his “hazardous hypotheses,” and reexamine his long-neglected proposals—building on Baldwin and Waddington—for a single unifying evolutionary, developmental, psychological, and epistemological mechanism.PLAN FOR THE BOOKThe handbook will cover how psychological ideas have evolved from past to present. The book will be organized much as an introductory-psychology text is, except that the goal of each chapter will be not merely to present the most recent theory and research, but rather the intellectual history of this theory and research. The book will be an intellectual history of psychology, but whereas textbooks on the history of psychology are virtually all organized chronologically, with successive chapters covering the history of ideas in all of the fields combined at different times in the past, our volume will be organized topically, with history reviewed for each of the major topics of investigation in psychology. We believe the topical organization has a large advantage over a strictly chronological one, in that fields have evolved differently, and when one does a strictly chronological book, progress in each given field tends to be given short shrift in favor of generalities. Obviously, there is no one “right” way to organize an intellectual history, but we believe that our topical approach will provide readers with the most scholarly, comprehensive, and useful history of the field. For better or worse (and we believe, for worse), students of psychology are learning less and less history of their field. The senior editor has authored several textbooks, and when he gets back reviews, the tendency almost always is for referees to recommend that historical material be cut back or even dropped. They may be responding to student preferences or their own ideas about pedagogy, but one scarcely can understand the present if one does not understand the past. George Santayana’s statement, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” applies equally well to the history of ideas as to the history of political and economic institutions. We believe that the subject matter of psychology demands historical scrutiny. The history of psychology allows us to see how psychological knowledge has been created and what role it has played in what people say and believe about being human, whether the topic is how they think, feel, or interact with each other. <br/

What kind of evolutionary biology suits cultural research?

What kind of evolutionary biology suits cultural research