Question:
I just read EO Wilson's "Consilience: The Unity Of Knowledge" and
thought, My God, he's talking about the Glass Bead Game. It was all
there: the language to unify knowledge, the importance of connections,
the glass beads themselves which are inate concepts that are the fruit
of evolution, a synthesis of humanities and science.
He is wisely not all that specific on the form of such a language, but
I would say a sort of scientific poetry and mythology. Seems
oxymoronic? Of course it does, that is the point. Or one could say
poetic and mythic science and come to the same result. Impossible? I
think not.
Natural philosophy! An idea whose time has come again.
Answer:
Wilson based his Sociobiology on a basic error within a population
genetics model. Please refer to the thread "The Mathematics Of Altruism"
quoting the ignored Mealey paper that points this out. Neo Darwinism
remains riddled with such errors. The most basic is their refusal to
acknowledge and incorporate within models the basic fact that all gene
fitnesses are epistatic within nature. When this fact is incorporated
within Hamilton's Rule (on which Wilson bases his Sociobiology) the rule
becomes inoperable.
Haldane's Dilemma was proven by the human genome project to be just a
storm in a population genetic teacup. No correction of the basic
population genetics premises that provided this false dilemma have been
forthcoming. The most basic is Fisher's dictate that only non epistatic
information is heritable and thus selectable thereby excluding all
empirical gene fitnesses as heritable and selectable because all of them
are epistatic.
A concept of "Natural philosophy" has been with us for a while now. It
is called "Post Modernism". In reality such a "philosophy" is just an
epistemological cancer where "anything goes". This "philosophy" has even
been allowed to reduce the critical concept of FITNESS within
evolutionary theory to be dictated to become just a heuristic exercise.
The only counterweight to all this 100% relativistic confusion is
Popper's epistemology where everything does not "go", at all! Of course
it is Popper who remains ignored/discarded by gene centric Neo
Darwinian's who refuse to discriminate between a valid theory of nature
and any oversimplified model allowing these models to contest and win
over the theory they were actually simplified from, e.g. Hamilton's
Rule. Here Hamilton's rb
heuristic fitness which has deleted all gene fitness epistasis is
allowed to contest and win over Darwin's non heuristic fitness that is
only represented as the cost c. Only c is a non heuristic fitness that
has actually included gene fitness epistasis within the rule. C.H.
Waddington attempted to revise Haldane's crude population genetics
equations over 40 years ago to include the value "developed in x" thus
actually allowing a variable for epistasis within these equations on
which all of today's population genetics is built. He was ignored. I
suggest you quiz one of his students that posts here on this critical
point.
