The mind of the ecological engineer 27 Oct 201127 Oct 2011 I watched a very interesting documentary episode recently, entitled “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” (a phrase of poet Richard Brautigan’s), in which the maker Adam Curtis put forward the view that ecology was founded (at least in its modern iteration) in direct analogy with the view of cybernetics that complex systems find a natural equilibrium. Promos for the next episode suggest that Curtis is going to use this to argue against the idea that organisms are machines. I agree with the analysis in that episode – clearly ecologists tend to think of there being some natural equilibrium that can be perturbed but which, left alone, ecosystems (the very term is a giveaway) will return to. But if he is going to reject the notion that organisms (indeed all physical systems) are machines, then I think he is wrong. Perhaps I should wait to see it, but then I wouldn’t be a blogger, would I? Organisms are machines in the purest sense of that term: they are thermodynamic engines that use free energy to create work. Everything that happens in an organism does so because it is not merely permitted but mandated by the laws of chemistry and physics. Nothing that we have so far encountered does so otherwise. There are no uncaused events in organisms. By the principle of addition, neither are there any unphysical and non mechanical processes between organisms. Indeed most ecosystems can be characterised very well as energy flows between organisms. But the issue that I predict Curtis to be having is not with this; it is with the “clockwork” model of mechanisms. When modern science first kicked off around the mid 17th century, the most complex machines known were clockwork devices (some of which, like the Antikythera Mechanism of 2000 years earlier, were very complex indeed). So it followed that Descartes and those who first considered biological organisms as system of machines would appeal to clockwork mechanics. Later, we would appeal to other known complex engineering: telegraphs and then telephones for the brain, followed by computers (now appealed to by people for everything including the known universe), holograms, feedback loops and so on, which brings us back to ecology. Modern ecology depends heavily on the notion of a feedback loop. This is where a system controls its over behaviour by modulating its outputs depending upon the results of those outputs – feedback. The trouble is, as Curtis rightly notes, such systems can equally end up in a runaway amplification of outputs, as any guitarist who has pretended to be Jimi Hendrix can attest. Why do scientists in one field appeal to the results of another? The answer is best described in the work of Herbert Simon, whose book Sciences of the Artificial, a classic in the field, is now in a third edition. Engineering is what humans like to do to their environment. They manufacture it. So it seems obvious to understand the world in terms of engineering. But there is a problem with this that I have often alluded to on this blog: engineering is a post hoc science. Engineers learn from the past (like, oh, I don’t know, another scientific theory of note?) and predict the future only on that basis. There are no Noetic Rays that predict what will happen. Clockwork mechanisms were often (but not always) easily predictable in their outcomes. The point of the analogy was this: that we could easily predict things if they were mechanical. Around the middle of the 19th century it became clear to us this was a forlorn hope. From this realisation developed statistics, including thermodynamics, and also systems theory. The problem with ecology is not that it treats organisms as machines. The problem with ecology is that it tends not to realise that systems are dynamic and will undergo mild to radical changes, smoothly or discontinuously, slowly or rapidly, depending. Ecosystems can collapse, buffer against perturbation, and change homeostatically, and we can’t predict very much at all because the outcomes, while determined by mechanical processes, are too damned hard for us to work out in advance. This affects our notions of conservation. It cannot be that we can keep any ecosystem the way it was when humans first encountered it, because it wasn’t going to do that anyway. It’s like trying to juggle water. So what should we use as indicators of the health or value of an ecosystem? It is a highly debated topic in modern biology and philosophy. For my money, I think we should appeal to the mechanical notion, but the notion of a thermodynamic system rather than a clockwork machine where all you need to do is tweak the levers. A thermodynamic system is in its best state when it tends to pass free energy through it, retarding that process as often as possible. If an ecosystem generates too much waste heat, then it is not using the energy effectively. The better an ecosystem retards free energy and converts it into work, the healthier it is. Focusing upon a single node or level in the food web (the trophic hierarchy) and making that the keystone indicator of ecosystem health is a mistake. All nodes and levels can be removed or replaced, and while it will make a difference to the overall topology of the trophic hierarchy network, it need not change the complexity of that network. And we cannot easily or even often predict how things will work out. We will have to trade off thermodynamic health with phylogenetic diversity, and social utility, when we seek to conserve things but let us not be confused by the clockwork engineer’s mind. We cannot predict how things will occur in even a simple system. Ecology and Biodiversity Evolution General Science Logic and philosophy Metaphysics Philosophy Science
Philosophy Christian capitalism and socialism 13 Aug 201113 Aug 2011 Greg Paul, whose work on dinosaurs I find most interesting, has a blog entry on the Washington Post site on another kind of dinosaur – Christian socialists. He notes that the current American Christian obsession with capitalism is quite contrary to the early church and possibly Jesus’ own social philosophy, but more… Read More
Ecology and Biodiversity “Systematics is sick” 21 Aug 2008 So says a committee of the UK House of Lords: Systematic biology and taxonomy – the science of describing and identifying plants and animals – is in critical decline and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) must act before it is too late. Of course, this is not… Read More
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John, your link goes to the trailer at Adam Curtis’s blog. That trailer is a quick scamper through all the parts of the “All watched over…” series. Let me quickly summarize part one, which you are probably not referring to. The first part (All watched over by machines of loving grace. Part 1: Love and Power) starts with Ayn Rand, her strongly individualistic philosophy, and her strong influence on entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley. The main thesis, here, is that computer nerds believed that machines (computers/internet) would give power to individuals making all (connected) individuals equal in a global system. There is another interesting connection followed from Ayn Rand to Greenspan, who convinced Clinton not to interfere with the markets, the following new economy boom and the eventual crash of East Asian markets, the bailouts, and arrives at the conclusion that powerful individuals corrupted the system that was dreamed up to be free, equal, and just. (This is particularly intriguing to Europeans now, that saving the Euro is much about the question who is bailed out by whom). He even weaves 9-11, Enron, the 2008 crisis, etc. into the story somehow. I take it that you did not see this part, because you were writing about ecosystems. That is Part 2: “All watched over by machines of loving grace: The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts.” I’ve criticised that part here, because it is simply wrong to claim that Arthur G. Tansley analogously transferred a machine metaphor from his studies of psychology into his ecosystem concept. Tansley’s ecosystem concept was a mere definition in the sense of delimitation implying no content such as networks. In this it was like the definition of the term ecology by Haeckel, just a definition. The claims by Peder Anker to the opposite have no basis. He simply saw drawings of mental networks in Tansley’s “New Psychology” (1925) and jumped to the conclusion that the ecosystem concept as proposed in 1935 must also contain them. Nevertheless, Tansley rigorously refrained from imputing anything concrete about the innards of ecosystems see here) Of course, early ecology was teeming with metaphors, but the non-rigorous nature of analogies does not mean that we can simply take them out of context and let them mean what we want to. On the use of metaphors in early ecology see here and here. The former shows that early ecologists sometimes used analogies to stress differences not similarities between the compared systems. The latter is particularly relevant to your opinion of why organisms are machines. (A claim that the ecosystem concept is associated with a machines metaphor is in fact easier to maintain by tracing a thread from Spencer over Lotka to the ecosystem ecology of the Odum brothers. But that does not change my criticism. What is being said about Tansley, especially by Peder Anker being interviewed, is simply wrong. In conclusion, I think Curtis’s main thesis is: the dream of a machine mediated equilibrium society is flawed and there will always be corruptions of the system by individuals. In this I can agree. However, he and Anker have erroneously backdated the machine metaphor guided ecosystem ecology of the Odum brothers, Frank Golley, etc. and ascribed to Tansley. Unfortunately, part 2 is no longer available at youtube. BBC has withdrawn it.
joe: Of course, early ecology was teeming with metaphors, but the non-rigorous nature of analogies does not mean that we can simply take them out of context and let them mean what we want to. “early ecology was teeming with metaphors…the non-rigorous nature of analogies … we can simply take them out of context and let them mean what we want to. …” Funnily enough the ‘non-rigorous nature of analogies’indicates potent abstraction functionality. Forcing into correspondence to achieve mix and match … creates a Procrustean heuristic of … “we can simply take them out of context and let them mean what we want to”
But if he is going to reject the notion that organisms (indeed all physical systems) are machines, then I think he is wrong. I’m wondering whether you have a clear definition of “machine.” For myself, I do not consider organisms to be machines. That does not imply that there is anything mystical about them. They just don’t fit what I mean when I use “machine.” Organisms are machines in the purest sense of that term: they are thermodynamic engines that use free energy to create work. I don’t see that as properly characterizing machines. My father worked a lot with machines. He had a wood lathe, a metal lathe, a band saw, and many similar machines. Overhead, in his workshop, there was a system of pulley, belts and gears that drove them all. All of that would be consider machinery. An electric motor, in turn, drove the system of pulleys. He would not have considered the electric motor to be a machine. My mother would sometimes cook with a wood stove. Some burning pieces of wood in the stove provided the heat. That stove would never have been considered a machine. Everything that happens in an organism does so because it is not merely permitted but mandated by the laws of chemistry and physics. I see that as based on a serious misunderstanding of science, albeit a very common misunderstanding. There are no uncaused events in organisms. Are there no quantum events in organisms? Is there no radioactive decay? Modern ecology depends heavily on the notion of a feedback loop. And that, I would already see as non-mechanical.
So you disagree that I have defined “machine” and “mechanism” correctly because of your father’s dispositions? You think a feedback loop, defined for cybernetic applications, is not mechanical? You assert that physical things are not mandated by their physical properties? And all this by assertion… I am not required to accept your definitions when I went to some little trouble to provide arguments for my own. And I do not think argument ad usum resolves metaphysical questions. I have often noted that I am a hard reductionist; you are free to disagree but please, try to give reasons other than “most folk disagree”. As to quantum events in organisms, sure; but they aggregate in ways that mean we can treat the processes in organisms as physically determined in whatever ways macrophenomena are determined in general.
What sort of a response is that? If you don’t want comments, then just close them off for that post. So you disagree that I have defined “machine” and “mechanism” correctly because of your father’s dispositions? Really, John, you can do better than that. I used examples to illustrate how I am using “machine” and mechanism. You have not defined those words, so I could not be disagreeing with how you defined them. I tend to go with Wittgenstein’s “meaning is use”, so I was suggesting that the way “machine” is used by people who work with machines is different from the way you are using it. Sure, some people use the word much as you do. I have often seen that in debates on AI and cognitive science. You think a feedback loop, defined for cybernetic applications, is not mechanical? I think the kind of feedback that is seen in biological systems is not mechanical. You assert that physical things are not mandated by their physical properties? You have switched from “laws” to “properties.” The word “mandate” is what one might use to talk of an intelligent designer ordering the physical world to obey the commands of that designer. It’s the wrong way to talk about science. I see scientific laws are mostly part of a program of describing the world. They are perhaps mandates to scientists, as to how they should do their science. But they do not mandate anything to physical objects. I am not required to accept your definitions when I went to some little trouble to provide arguments for my own. I neither asked nor expected you to accept any definitions. I was making the case that there is a considerable diversity in how people use the words “mechanism” and “machine.” I thought you were trying to say something other than just argue about meanings. But I’m not quite sure what you were trying to say, because it was drowned in your disagreement with how you thought Adam Curtis was going to use the word “machine” in his next episode.
I never said I didn’t want comments. This is the hurly burly of debate… I too go with meaning-as-use, but there are different language communities as Ludwig noted. Here the relevant language community is that of physics and how physicists define and use words, and moreover of philosophers who try hard to retroengineer what physicists must mean by the uses of words (since physicists themselves tend to communicate largely in mathematical code). And they talk about computers being machines, steam engines being machines, and indeed anything that does something physical that is largely regular is a machine. What the Volk use the term for is not relevant in this context. Unless they happen to be Wissenshaftliche Volk. After all the Volk think that an organism is some sort of vitalistic whole which has “life force” and “spirit”, 200 years after Wohler… As to feedback in biological systems not being mechanical, when the original definition of feedback was based upon rate governors in steam engines in the most mechanical possible way, I cannot conceive what you might mean. I think the onus is on you to make that clear, and not assume your view is the default here. Properties are lawful, or physics and science is impossible. I will slip between the two terms as being of no difference that matters. Nor does “mandate” mean much here. You are reaching. Scientists talk about laws causing outcomes; do I think laws are agents? Well, Rob Wilson at Alberta does, but that is a radical suggestion not widely held. I do not.
@Neil Rickert briliant. That’s exactly what I mean when I say that one cannot simply lump machine metaphors together – or organism metaphors – or microcosm metaphors. They mean different things depending on context. John embraced here the sort of machine metapor most clearly propounded by Lotka. That is, any energy converter is subject ot the general laws of thermodynamics. As thermodynamics was invented by studying machines (steam engiens to be precise) that metaphor is quite clearly a justification for applying themodynamic laws on organisms. Stephen A. Forbes, on the contrary, saw a major difference in machines and organisms in that an organism (at least the metazoan kind that usually comes to mind) loses its life, when a part is take away, whereas a machine can be repaired. He therefore saw ecosystems more like machines and less like organisms. After all, an ecosytem does not die when a top predator is exterminated. At the same time, he saw ecological interaction to be more like the interdependence between organs of an organism than the tree-like metaphor for evolution. That is, he contrasted ecological relations with evolutionary relations and then contrasted oganismal with machine parts. Forbes pointed out differences, not similarities! He used the methaphor very differently from, say, Clements and others who tried to stress the similarities betewen ecological succession and organismal development. Therefore, I claim that it is useless to speak about machine or organism metaphors, as if they were all the same. Check the original source, see what the analogy tries to emphasize, and keep a discriminating frame of mind. P.S.: The links for those who want to check on what I said are all in myprevious post, (the first comment her).
LOL, big ups to your patronizing dogmatism. Nevertheless, the way you jump from one particular similarity between organisms and machines (both are energy converters to which the laws of thermodynamics apply) to the general claim (organisms = machines) is not warranted, because there are many respects in which organisms differ from machines. For example, machines don’t live and hence cannot die, they can only lose their function. But once they lost it, they can be repaired. Organisms cannot be reanimated once they are dead. What if someone wanted to stress one of these differences rather than the similarity you wanted to stress – Stephen A. Forbes for example? The problem that I have with your kind of reductionism is that doing it twice and combining both into a syllogism yields mashed potatoes. Here’s the recipe: 1. Take the fact that thermodynamisc applies to both machines and organisms for claiming: organisms = machines (that general) 2. Take either the notion that ecosystems are (like) organisms or (like) machines in some respect to claim: ecosystems = organisms (that general again) 3. Now you can combine 1.+2. and claim anything you like, for example, esoteric stuff about the health of an ecosystem being defined in thermodynamic lingo.
Joe I’m a bit surprised. I know that to be a reductionist is immediately to be cast as an evil person lacking reason and morality, but I do not think I ever said or implied that organisms equal machines. We have had, for some time now, logical quantifiers and inclusion operators: some machines are organisms. Some machines are ecosystems. Some machines are Machines (the traditional kind). This in no way licenses the implication that organisms = ecosystems = Machines. Pretty basic error in logic, I would have thought. Moreover, I fail to see how asserting my view on my blog is being patronising. Is it merely that if a reductionist says anything they are patronising, or are there criteria for evaluating patronisation? If so, could you perhaps explicitly state them and how I crossed that line here? Lastly, what exactly is it that makes a living system “alive” that is not physical? And is that different to, say, the way a complex machine might become degraded and eventually nonfunctional, and unable to be fixed without replacing all the parts Ship-of-Theseus style? I await, in my most patronising and rather miffed way, your clarifications here.
See my comment below that summarizes the third part of the documentary series and points out the difference between your definition of machine and Curtis’s. Concerning the “patronizing”, excuse me (I mean, please take my excuse, here!). But (joke mode on) ain’t one terse sentence typical for a patronizing philosopher? The other one, the not patronizing philosopher, tends to fill pages, books, and bandwidths as far as I know (joke mode off). I really don’t see why you think that your definition of machine is the only correct one. Nor do I understand why stressing similarities should be the only valid kind of analogical (comparative) reasoning. My use of the term metaphor may be a bit wider than yours, but you probably agree that an analogy is involved in calling organisms machines. For originally machines meant contrivances and unless you now introduce a creator or designer, organisms are no contrivances.
Here here and aye aye, cap’n. The question is do we have any evidence to believe that humans can re-tweak ecosystems back to their original “complexity”, which I take it you use here as a normative term denoting the health(?) of an ecosystems efficiency. While I don’t subscribe to any nostalgia concerning the way ecosystems used to be back in the good ole days when algae was algae, it’s hard for me to say that humans can re-establish thermodynamically efficient ecosystems once we’ve perturbed them. Your post itself contains an admission of our epistemic limitations regarding these stochastic and, dare I say, chaotic little buggers.
We can achieve some things, but not control the entire complex system, due to our epistemic limitations, as you say. Better not to intervene in ways likely not to have massive effects in the first place.
My mistake. I must not have read the last paragraph. I thought you were equating diversity with thermodynamic health. So my question must be, after that magnificent blunder, why oughtn’t we equate diversity with thermodynamic efficiency. Well.. not equate exactly… there are no a priori truths in this corner. But I would say that diversity allows for more pickups in the energy game, and I don’t find any reason to believe that we can, as conservationists, restore ecosystems to their previous efficiency.
Please note that was just a reformulation of my question not a reply to your reply. You’re too fast for me sir.
First time anyone has ever called me fast… except in circumstances I would prefer not to discuss in public. The health of an ecosystem is something I suspect we can measure thermodynamically (and many in fact do this already). But diversity is something else, and it raises complex questions. One is how to measure diversity. There are almost as many answers to this as there are workers, and a lot of it depends on what you previously think should be conserved (e.g., taxonomic, trophic, genetic, varietal, behavioural) and why. Monocultures are generally very fragile over time to perturbation, so some diversity of trophic structure is important, but this implies thermodynamic efficiency. But it may be that a simpler trophic network will be more resistant to perturbations of a particular kind. There is no a priori generalisation, or at any rate not until we do the actual math, simulations and reality checks. Oddly in conservation biology the last are not often done.
“But this implies thermodynamic efficiency” I’m not sure what you mean here by “implies”. You mean trophic structure is a sufficient condition for thermodynamic efficiency? I guess I would agree that this would be the case, if I were at all proficient in this area. My speculations are, alas, untutored. It seems to me like if there is free energy in an ecosystem, it would be possible for organisms to fill the niche. And if it’s possible, there are a good many ecosystems in which this possibility has been realized to a certain degree. Or you mean something like in comparison with with a monoculture, trophic diversity is important, but monocultures with efficiency are often stable, so quit your a priori speculation in these matters jimbo. I concede.
My hunch is that thermodynamic inefficiency would be sunlight falling on sand or rocks and being converted into heat directly and entirely. It hinges on the notion that life is good and no life is bad; more life is better and less life is worse. But how do you measure the amount of life? Is it biomass, is it diversity? Is higher diversity to be favoured over higher biomass, even if that means less thermodynamic efficiency?
Part 3 (“The monkey in the machine and the machine in the monkey”) starts with Bill Hamilton’s journey to the Congo (the one where he combined Malaria with an aspirin and died), then weaves in the civil war in the Congo, the rare minerals that are dug up in mines there, the computers that need those minerals, and back to Hamilton. A sentence from minute 3:10 shows the difference in the machine concept used by Curtis: “But even as he died, Hamilton knew that he would liver forever, because he had shown that human beings are really just self-replicating machines, like computers, whose function is to transmit a vital code across time that will live throughout eternity.” The interpunction is vital, here, because Curtis means that the transmission of a vital code is not a function of computers but of human beings. Anyway, this clearly shows that Curtis’s definition of machine differes from Wilkins’s. Wilkins: machine = energy transformer Curtis: machine = serving a self-replicating code (here’s a flaw, because machines including computers are not yet self-replicating) Then Curtis goes on to mention the Chimp feces collected by Hamilton before his death; from there to Enos (the first Chimp in space), back to Earth and so on. It’s art not analysis. At minute 9 he gets back to Hamilton and his puzzling over altruism, the gene’s eye view. The analogy between genetic code and computer code justifies the machine metaphor the way Curtis uses it. I’ll skip the genocides in Ruanda and Congo, George Price, his equations, spite, Dian Fossey, Richard Dawkins, the selfish gene, and all the other threads that Curtis artfully wove into his story. The simple point is that Wilkins’s definition of organism=machine is entirely different from Curtis’s. Ach, and here’s a working link, if you want to see for yourself: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/ If that breaks go to: http://rutube.ru/tracks/4525740.html?v=30dfe0fefe8182e9febe828bf9efe8dc&&bmstart=3415344
John, just follow one of the the links above and you can see it straight away. One leads to a site with top documentary films, the other to the Russian tube Rutube. In general, always follow all of my links – it’s worth it 🙂
Haven’t the time to read all the comments, but here’s my two cents anyway: “All nodes and levels can be removed or replaced, and while it will make a difference to the overall topology of the trophic hierarchy network, it need not change the complexity of that network. And we cannot easily or even often predict how things will work out.” All nodes in a scale-free network are not equal. Thus, changing the activity of one node might do nothing, or, as in the case of the retioblastoma or BRCA genes, predispose to cancer. Similarly in ecosystems: some nodes are better indicators of system ‘health’ than others – ants being one example of which I have heard. At this stage, prediction is *still* a mugs game, though, due to the complexity of the networks. However, the general rules of networks are worth noting. These include: 1) Networks with hugely different numbers of nodes tend to have virtually unchanged diameters: the average distance between randomly selected pairs of nodes is about 6 – the famous “six degrees of separation.” 2) Networks are resistant to random losses, but targeting specific nodes can be highly problematic – as in the examples I gave above for cancer; viruses do the same thing, hijacking cellular systems by targeting specific nodes. 3) In networks, too many, too weak connections leads to chaos; too few and too strong lead to crystalline-like rigid order, neither of which states allow the complexity of life. Thus, while it may be impossible to predict in minute detail how a system will respond, it is possible to predict that ablating nodes randomly won’t have a critical effect, but that any process that places great strain on key nodes – eg, by concentrating a toxin to lethal levels in a predator – could dis-associate the system and lead to runaway populations uncurbed by predation. Also, less stable, chaotic environments tend to favour simpler, more adaptable organisms – eg, algae – over higher organisms. Conversely, systems lacking in complexity – eg, monoculture – lack the dynamism to respond to environmental variation – eg, the potato blight and banana mold that have or are decimating monoculture farming.
Yes, indeed. This backs up my view that we do not know what will or will not radically change the dynamics of an ecosystem (or any system for that matter) unless we do the actual simulations or calculations and specify the state of the system and the parameters it operates under. It is a generalisation that chaotic environments will engender simpler systems, but if there is any periodicity whatsoever, systems can adapt to that too. For this reason I tend to prefer John Holland’s notion of Complex Adaptive Systems than any general systems thinking, as they require some special preconditions.
I know it’s a little glib just to post this without adding some substantive analysis of my own, but this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg satirises Curtis perfectly: his documentaries have far more style than they have substance. Whilst All Watched Over… has some very interesting stories and insights – the Rand set and the birth of ecology being examples – it really didn’t work for me as an overall argument. There were just too many hasty generalisations to be believable.
As must be true of most visual media docos. Please do not misunderstand me. I am not relying upon the accuracy of Curtis – he’s just the jumping off point of my ruminations, and I think what I think about current ecology largely from personal observation (equally unscientific, I know, but I must think what I think, as I don’t know how to think what other people think before I think it too).
Thanks, I liked that parody. Collageumentary is a well taken descriptor for Curtis’s works. Documentaries used to be far more focussed on a particular issue. I guess every academic can pull one or another string and bring the texture apart. I tried for the stuff on Tansley in part 2. ( here). If John wants to do the same with the machine – organism analogy used by Curtis, I’d welcome that, he’d need to stick to Curtis’s replicator implication of that analogy I’m afraid. But this discussion serves to show at least, how Curtis switched his machine analogy between parts two and three.
Organisms are machines in the purest sense of that term: they are thermodynamic engines that use free energy to create work. Everything that happens in an organism does so because it is not merely permitted but mandated by the laws of chemistry and physics. Nothing that we have so far encountered does so otherwise. There are no uncaused events in organisms.… (Raving: In the soft meaning sense, ‘life’ does “seem” to do otherwise) Apologize for my stutter hereabouts … am slooooowly decompressing from an endless ‘perseveration’ playback loop caused by hyperfocusing too long on a comment, perhaps in your ‘moderation trap’ (Context: Severing as to cause ‘discontinuity’ and subsequently associating so as to meld the gap across discontinuous voids is ‘ecological stuff’ and a bit mysterious) John S. Wilkins: Joe I’m a bit surprised. I know that to be a reductionist is immediately to be cast as an evil person lacking reason and morality, … (Raving: Aren’t those sorts of people known as ‘Darwinist’?) … Lastly, what exactly is it that makes a living system “alive” that is not physical? (Raving: That’s the really intriguing question !^42) … And is that different to, say, the way a complex machine might become degraded and eventually nonfunctional… (Raving: Yes, exactly) “Nothing that we have so far encountered does so otherwise. …” Stream of conscious spew: Autonomous machines, steam punk … A problem of [woodlots, forests, trees, wood core] … hunting for scale … The ‘secret sauce’ or missing magic is in the connective glue. .. in the nitty gritty details of describing the specifics of continuity and coupling.
Ecology wasn’t supposed to be reductionist even though local isolates and agglomerations of isolates has come to be the basis of ecological perspective. Reductionism (atomism, physicality) biases ‘description’ to suppress details within the connecting tendril.