Life as Its Own Designer (eBook)

Darwin's Origin and Western Thought

Anton Markoš, Filip Grygar, László Hajnal, Karel Kleisner, Zdenek Kratochvíl, Zdenek Neubauer (Autoren)

eBook Download: PDF

2009 | 2009
XIV, 212 Seiten
Springer Netherland (Verlag)
978-1-4020-9970-0 (ISBN)

Infos

It has been nearly 150 years since Darwin published On the Origin of Species, 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, Life As Its Own Designer: Darwin's Origin and Western Thought 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 have fashioned 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.

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It has been nearly 150 years since Darwin published On the Origin of Species, 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 "e;being alive"e;, 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, Life As Its Own Designer: Darwin s Origin and Western Thought 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. Markos 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.

Inhalt

Preface 6
Acknowledgement 10
Contents 11
Part I Hermeneutic Nature of the World 14
1 Roots of Rationality and Hermeneutics 19
Hermeneutics of the Natural, or how Things Arise 20
Religious Preconditions and Contexts in Comprehending Physis 22
Nature Loves to Hide Heraclitus B 123. 26
Product 27
To Discriminate According to Physis 29
Generations 30
Necessity and Chance, Destiny and Freedom 30
Physis, Mathematics, and Moral 32
Physis is Temporal and has a Memory 33
Physis is Flesh 35
Nature is Sufficient for All in All Heraclitus C 2, 15 (in Hippokrates, De alimento, ed. E. Littr0). 37
Species and Logical Ideals Possibility of Logical Articulation 37
Platos Divided Line as a Map of Relations Between Archetypes and Imitations 39
2 Co-creators of the World 42
Singularities and Darwin 44
The Sphere 46
Appropriation 49
Cosmic Dreams 54
Complementarity of Scientific and Everyday Language 56
Semiosphere 57
Order for Free and the Expansion into Adjacent Possible 61
3 Novelty Wherefrom? 65
Science and Novelty 65
The Grave of the Soul? 67
Unde Novum in Philosophy 69
Language 71
Signification 74
Body as a Sign Compared to Letter-Signs 74
Self-Reference of Letter-Signs 76
Likeness 77
Likeness as a Totality of Features 80
Genidentity and Entelechy 81
To be Like Self 83
Whence the New? 84
Classification 85
Clare et Distincte 88
What is it Like to be Me? 88
Abstractions 90
Logos Incarnate 91
Semiotic Coherence 92
Becoming 94
Speciation 95
Every World has its Own Time 97
Vestiges of Creation 98
4 Aut Moses aut Darwin. Creation Versus Evolution 100
The Questionnaire 100
Answering the Poll 101
The Controversy Around Darwin as a Symptom 105
Things and Objects 106
Contest of Likenesses as a Manifestation of will to Power, i.e. the Struggle for Life 107
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
Empirical not Rational 111
This is not Science 111
The Return to Natural Understanding Evolutionary Nature of Science 114
Logos as a Historical Contingency 115
Evolutionism as Reformation and Renaissance 116
Evolution as Religion By paraphrasing the famous book by Mary Midgley (1985), we pay homage to this extending philosopher 117
The Turn of Evolutionism Towards Naturalness: Discovery of Corporeality and of History 119
Nature as Narration 122
History 124
Being from the Beginning 127
The Turn of Ages 128
Ecological Order 130
There is Only One Single Truth: Each Truth is Single 131
The Archetypal Essence of the Clash 132
The War of Giants 135
Part II The Region Life 137
5 The Living Planet 144
Feedback and its Embodiment 145
Neo-Darwinism and Gaia 148
Gene pool, Communication, Body 149
Communication Networks 155
Multicellular and Multispecies Structures 155
Small World of Complex Systems, and Their Modelling by Graphs 157
Fitness Landscapes and Regioning 161
6 What is the Source of Likeness? 164
Short Glossary 165
How the Terms Homology and Analogy Got Their Recent Meaning: A Brief History 165
Troubles with Levels of Description 167
Continuity of Information, Genes, and Structures 169
Structures and Traits Ideas and IDs
Unity of Semantic Field 174
External Appearances 175
Back to Letter-Signs (ID) and Shapes (IDea) 178
Biosemiotic Interpretation of Portmannian Biology 182
7 Creation and Its Vestiges 185
Species as a Cultural Phenomenon 185
What is Passed Down? 187
The Sheaf 191
Cultural Parables 193
The Ghosts of Common Ancestors 194
Quaerendo Invenietis 195
Epilogue: SnowWhite and the Seven Dwarfs or On Nature 198
References 207
Name Index 212
Subject Index 215

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 9.7.2009
• Reihe/Serie: Biosemiotics
• Reihe/Serie: Biosemiotics
• Zusatzinfo: XIV, 212 p.
• Verlagsort: Dordrecht
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Evolution
• Themenwelt: Technik
• Schlagworte: Character of Western thought • Charles Darwin • Darwin • Darwin and introduction of historicity • Darwin and neodarwinism • Evolution • Likeness as basic property of life • Novelty in evolution • the origin
• ISBN-10: 1-4020-9970-3 / 1402099703
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4020-9970-0 / 9781402099700