Jon,
Mostly your comments were out of my league. However, one probably irrelevant fragment caught my eye. While Lamarckism wasn't right for Darwin… . Darwin always was a Lamarckian and became ever more so with every passing edition of the Origin. My favorite question in Biology orals was, “Who was the most famous Lamarckian?” I think you could say, with out contradiction While Lamarckism isn’t right for most contemporary Darwinians… . … but evern that is becoming less true. I think you are talking about Weismann and Weismann’s Barrier <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weismann_barrier> ? Lamarckism was definitely not right for Weisman. Nick Thompson thompnicks...@gmail.com https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ -----Original Message----- From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of jon zingale Sent: Wednesday, May 5, 2021 10:45 AM To: friam@redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM] (no subject) EricS, Thank you for the kind and thoughtful response. Your 'three levels' project is interesting to me and reminds me (even if only tangentially) of an analysis I worked on regarding food webs, n-species Lotka-Volterra, and ABMs. I wanted to clarify for myself what each level of analysis offered or bracketed relative to one another. There: 1. Food webs were analyzed as weighted graphs with the obvious Markov chain interpretation[ρ]. Each edge effectively summarizing the complex predator-prey interactions found at level 2, but without the plethora of ODEs to solve. 2. N-species Lotka-Volterra, while being a jumble of equations, offered dynamics. Here, one could get insight into how the static edge values of level 1 were in fact fluctuating values in n-dimensional phase space. But still, one is working with an aggregate model where species is summarized wholly by population count. 3. ABMs, in theory, ought to be the whole story of individuals located in space and time. There the agents (a lynx, say) 'decides' what to eat based, perhaps, on what is most readily available. But as everyone on the list knows, analysis at such a fine-grained scale is simply a mess. I never did get as far with the analysis as I would have liked, and I never got the chance to share my findings, so yeah, thanks for the tangential opportunity, here and now, to say just this much. 1'. "site-rewrite rules in Walter Fontana’s site-graph abstractions" Fleshing out some of your references, I found this Fontana paper[σ]. As you suggest, the style is fairly straightforward category theory. Site-graphs and their morphisms form a well-defined category and a number of universal constructions (push-outs, pullbacks, cospans,...) are used to analyze the algebra and to establish its logic. 2'. "There is still an algebra of operation of reactions, but it is simpler than the algebra of rules, and mostly about counting." I am not entirely sure that I follow the distinction. Am I far off in seeing an analogy here to the differences found between my one and two above? I would love to have a facility with stochastic techniques like these, but I most likely will need to remain a spectator for the rest of my days. Occasionally, I meet LANL folk that can talk Feller and Fokker with ease, and I am always jealous. It would be great to even have a better understanding of where Lie groups (something I can at least think about) meet the stochastic world. 3'. "So the state space is just a lattice. The “generator” from Level 2 is the generator of stochastic processes over this state space, and it is where probability distributions live." Please write more on this. By 'just a lattice' do you mean integer-valued on account of the counts being so? Is the state space used to some extent, like a modulii/classifying space, for characterizing the species of reactions? I feel the fuzziest on how this level and the 2nd relate. I am thankful to have had drinks with Artemy on a number of occasions, though I am embarrassed to have never asked him to blow my mind, as he could so easily have done. I am working, slowly, through Valiant's discussion of evolvability problems regarding monotone disjunction and parity. I will hopefully have more to say soon. One thing that stands out for me is the idea that Lamarck could be so right, but about the wrong thing, a concept in search of a problem. While Lamarckism wasn't right for Darwin, it was fine for perceptrons. """ If that intuition is valid, then the only things Selection could ever rescue from chaos become those that get canalized into these ur- developmental “programs”, with defined roles for genes, and merely allelic variation within each role. I would like to find a formal way to frame that assertion as a question and then solve it. """ Yes, that would be very exciting. Cheers, Jon ps. I wrote Nick and Frank about a dream a day or two before your post, where I found myself sitting with a figure that kept morphing between Chris Kempes and Marcus. The figure was attempting to explain a Turing complete ball game to me. I appreciate the synchronicity. [ρ] Here, I mostly followed Levine's approach to computing trophic level. <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/002251938090288X> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/002251938090288X [σ] <https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.00592.pdf> https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.00592.pdf -- Sent from: <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/> http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe <http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC <http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/> http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/> http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
