Markos / Markoš / Grygar Life as Its Own Designer

Darwin's Origin and Western Thought
1. Auflage 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4020-9970-0
Verlag: Springer Netherlands
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 4, 212 Seiten

Reihe: Biosemiotics

It has been nearly 150 years since Darwin published , and his theory of natural selection still ignites a forest of heated debate between scientific fundamentalists on the one hand and religious fundamentalists on the other. But both sides actually agree more than they disagree, and what has long been needed is a third way to view evolution, one that focuses more on the aspect of life and “being alive”, one that can guide us through, and perhaps out of, the fiery thicket. This book, a seminal work in the burgeoning field of Biosemiotics, provides that third way, by viewing living beings as genuine agents designing their communication pathways with, and in, the world.

Already hailed as the best account of biological hermeneutics, Origin is a wholly unique book divided into two parts. The first part is philosophical and explores the roots of rationality and the hermeneutics of the natural world with the overriding goal of discovering how narrative can help us to explain life. It analyzes why novelty is so hard to comprehend in the framework of Western thinking and confronts head-on the chasm between evolutionism and traditional rationalistic worldviews. The second part is scientific. It focuses on the life of living beings, treating them as co-creators of their world in the process of evolution. It draws on insights gleaned from the global activity of the Gaian biosphere, considers likeness as demonstrated on homology studies, and probes the problem of evo-devo science from the angle of life itself.

This book is both timely and vital. Past attempts at a third way to view evolution have failed because they were written either by scientists who lacked a philosophical grounding or New Age thinkers who lacked biological credibility. Markoš and his coworkers form an original group of thinkers supremely capable in both fields, and they havefashioned a book that is ideal for researchers and scholars from both the humanities and sciences who are interested in the history and philosophy of biology, biosemiotics, and the evolution of life.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Markos, Anton

Markoš, Anton

Grygar, Filip

Hajnal, László

Kleisner, Karel

Kratochvíl, Zdenek

Neubauer, Zdenek

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1;Preface;6
2;Acknowledgement;10
3;Contents;11
4;Part I Hermeneutic Nature of the World;14
4.1;1 Roots of Rationality and Hermeneutics;19
4.1.1; Hermeneutics of the Natural, or how Things Arise;20
4.1.2; Religious Preconditions and Contexts in Comprehending Physis ;22
4.1.2.1; Nature Loves to Hide Heraclitus B 123. ;26
4.1.3; Product;27
4.1.4; To Discriminate According to Physis ;29
4.1.5; Generations;30
4.1.6; Necessity and Chance, Destiny and Freedom;30
4.1.7;Physis, Mathematics, and Moral;32
4.1.8;Physis is Temporal and has a Memory;33
4.1.9;Physis is Flesh;35
4.1.9.1;Nature is Sufficient for All in All Heraclitus C 2, 15 (in Hippokrates, De alimento, ed. E. Littr0). ;37
4.1.10; Species and Logical Ideals Possibility of Logical Articulation;37
4.1.11; Platos Divided Line as a Map of Relations Between Archetypes and Imitations;39
4.2;2 Co-creators of the World;42
4.2.1; Singularities and Darwin;44
4.2.2; The Sphere;46
4.2.2.1; Appropriation;49
4.2.2.2; Cosmic Dreams;54
4.2.2.3; Complementarity of Scientific and Everyday Language;56
4.2.2.4; Semiosphere;57
4.2.2.5; Order for Free and the Expansion into Adjacent Possible;61
4.3;3 Novelty Wherefrom?;65
4.3.1; Science and Novelty;65
4.3.2; The Grave of the Soul?;67
4.3.3;Unde Novum in Philosophy;69
4.3.4; Language;71
4.3.5; Signification;74
4.3.6; Body as a Sign Compared to Letter-Signs;74
4.3.7; Self-Reference of Letter-Signs;76
4.3.8; Likeness;77
4.3.9; Likeness as a Totality of Features;80
4.3.10; Genidentity and Entelechy;81
4.3.11; To be Like Self;83
4.3.12; Whence the New?;84
4.3.13; Classification;85
4.3.14; Clare et Distincte;88
4.3.15; What is it Like to be Me?;88
4.3.16; Abstractions;90
4.3.17; Logos Incarnate;91
4.3.18; Semiotic Coherence;92
4.3.19; Becoming;94
4.3.20; Speciation;95
4.3.21; Every World has its Own Time;97
4.3.22; Vestiges of Creation;98
4.4;4 Aut Moses aut Darwin. Creation Versus Evolution;100
4.4.1; The Questionnaire;100
4.4.2; Answering the Poll;101
4.4.3; The Controversy Around Darwin as a Symptom;105
4.4.4; Things and Objects;106
4.4.5; Contest of Likenesses as a Manifestation of will to Power, i.e. the Struggle for Life;107
4.4.6; Genesis and Phylogenesis We are of course aware that the right English spelling is phylogeny. In the ongoing context we want, however, to point towards the meaning genesis that is hidden behind the current form of the word. ;109
4.4.7; Empirical not Rational;111
4.4.8; This is not Science;111
4.4.9; The Return to Natural Understanding Evolutionary Nature of Science;114
4.4.10; Logos as a Historical Contingency;115
4.4.11; Evolutionism as Reformation and Renaissance;116
4.4.12; Evolution as Religion By paraphrasing the famous book by Mary Midgley (1985), we pay homage to this extending philosopher;117
4.4.13; The Turn of Evolutionism Towards Naturalness: Discovery of Corporeality and of History;119
4.4.14; Nature as Narration;122
4.4.15; History;124
4.4.16; Being from the Beginning;127
4.4.17; The Turn of Ages;128
4.4.18; Ecological Order;130
4.4.19; There is Only One Single Truth: Each Truth is Single;131
4.4.20; The Archetypal Essence of the Clash;132
4.4.21; The War of Giants;135
5;Part II The Region Life;137
5.1;5 The Living Planet;144
5.1.1; Feedback and its Embodiment;145
5.1.2; Neo-Darwinism and Gaia;148
5.1.3; Gene pool, Communication, Body;149
5.1.4; Communication Networks;155
5.1.5; Multicellular and Multispecies Structures;155
5.1.6; Small World of Complex Systems, and Their Modelling by Graphs;157
5.1.7; Fitness Landscapes and Regioning;161
5.2;6 What is the Source of Likeness?;164
5.2.1; Short Glossary;165
5.2.2; How the Terms Homology and Analogy Got Their Recent Meaning: A Brief History;165
5.2.3; Troubles with Levels of Description;167
5.2.4; Continuity of Information, Genes, and Structures;169
5.2.5; Structures and Traits; Ideas and IDs;171
5.2.6; Unity of Semantic Field;174
5.2.7; External Appearances;175
5.2.8; Back to Letter-Signs (ID) and Shapes (IDea);178
5.2.9; Biosemiotic Interpretation of Portmannian Biology;182
5.3;7 Creation and Its Vestiges;185
5.3.1; Species as a Cultural Phenomenon;185
5.3.2; What is Passed Down?;187
5.3.3; The Sheaf;191
5.3.4; Cultural Parables;193
5.3.5; The Ghosts of Common Ancestors;194
5.3.6; Quaerendo Invenietis;195
6;Epilogue: SnowWhite and the Seven Dwarfs or On Nature;198
7;References;207
8;Name Index;212
9;Subject Index;215