"So if you want to do evolutionary biology, you need concept terms and good categories for whatever it is that generates all these higher-order “types” (corn-plants, people, etc.) which are plenty stable and identifiable, even if they have odd variations in the tails of their distributions, and toward which the concept of replicator is simply irrelevant; its work is elsewhere in the event architecture.
And then, if you want to look at other kinds of patterns —including but not limited to “groups” thought of as collectives of “objects”; though I would say that the pattern of relations and stereotyped events is every bit as much an attribute of the group as its object-membership — you can ask what kinds of categories you need to talk about their cascades of production. Being a little analogistic, just as the cycles of reproduction can make use of replication within the architectures to tidy up much of the organization, the cascades of ongoing “production” (a.k.a. open-ended evolution) can make heavy use of the stereotyped re-production within lifecycles as a robust central tendency to carry and maintain much of its order. It’s not one kind of thing. It’s as rich as the whole biosphere. There can be recurring motifs that we see at work, and they are good to recognize. But there is also room for enormous novelty across cases, because the combinatorics is very large and leaves room for many different versions to survive and matter." Eric, well said. You managed to enunciate where I feel my head has been as of late. Thanks.
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