Habits

Have to put myself in the habit of expressing my thoughts whenever I finish reading a new book or even a new chapter of a book. All those fresh thoughts just seem to disseminate in just one day. In is anything ever new by crutchfield, the author talks about how even an observer plays a role in determining what we would call an emergent versus non emergent system. The newness that we are ascribing to a system is a human construction, and maybe nothing is ever new. But an emergent system is and can be more than sum of its parts, and be considered new in that sense. This idea of emergence is most easily applicable to the theory of evolution, where people still do not clearly understand how new biological life forms emerge out of old ones. There are selectionists, structuralists, and historicits who argue about how selection pressures play a role. Selectionists use the familiar argument that selection pressures are all about adopting to the environment. Historicists argue that there is an inherent randomness in genotype and in phenotype and this randomness can confer survival advantage in future but never at present. And structuralists argue that there are kind of platonic structures that determine optimum morphological conditions that are possible in a given environment and it is these structures that govern the output from evolutionary processes.