Re: The Politics of Dancing

From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Sat Dec 08 2001 - 07:55:11 MST


"Robert J. Bradbury" wrote:
>
> Responding to my comments about the difficulty of not viewing advanced
> SysOps as competitors or "parents", Brian D Williams wrote:
>
> > How about "inherent order" or "inherent emerging order".
>
> I don't like the idea of "emergent" because it suggests a
> lack of "intelligence". Everything we see in Nature is
> "emergent" and it is rather ruthless with regard to what
> information it keeps (that which is optimized for survival
> in a very local environment) and which it destroys
> (that which is suboptimal for the local environment).

Is this really true, though? From the stuff I've been reading, animals'
genes are pack-ratty about saving information from ancestors. For
example, given the right GE signals, it should be possible to make a
human grow an insect wing on any part of their body, since we still have
those genes in a dormant state. I don't doubt that there are losses,
that unused information is eventually written over just as de-named
files on my hard drive are eventually written over, making them
impossible to undelete at some point in time, but at what rate does this
happen?



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