Individual/social issue & evolution

Rolfe Windward (IBALWIN who-is-at mvs.oac.ucla.edu)
Sat, 28 Oct 95 10:53 PDT

Ana's comments are very helpful (and I think close to the position I was
dimly groping toward). A useful analog can be drawn from the marked
conceptual distinction between scalar and specification hierarchies in
developing systems (Salthe, 1993). This distinction is also important in
some of Jay's work I think (e.g., Lemke, 1995).

Particularly when development is an issue, the evolutionary progression
from single cell, to individual organism, to social human has virtually
nothing to do with scale, it has to do with individuation; that is, the
level of specification. A fully defined social human is the most specific
(the "highest") level and all the levels "below" can be deduced from that
definition but the reverse is not true--one can not deduce higher levels
from the lower, more "vague" levels. By the same logic, a more specified
individual has fewer degrees of freedom (but not none).

Lemke, J. L. (1995). Textual politics: _Discourse and social dynamics_.
London, UK: Taylor & Francis Ltd.

Salthe, S. N. (1993). _Development and evolution: complexity and change
in biology_. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Rolfe Windward
GSE&IS
ibalwin who-is-at mvs.oac.ucla/edu