Footnote Physicist

by Steven Gussman           Despite all of the posturing about, “interactionist,” models of phenotype (to say nothing of pure, “environmentalis,”) all of the theories of biology (and much of the controversial hypotheses still being argued over) are integrally genetic. You wouldn't know it from most discussions of behavioral genetics, but there are indeed reports of, “vacuum behaviors,” in the animal kingdom (let alone the obvious cases of vacuum morphology). i Richard Dawkins writes:           The urge to feel 'grateful' in a vacuum, when there's nobody there to thank, is very strong. Animals sometimes perform complicated patterns of behavior in a vacuum – they are even called 'vacuum activities'. The most spectacular example I know is from a German film I once saw of a beaver... Beavers probably don't understand why they do it. They just do it without thinking, because they have a mechanism in the brain that goes off ...

by Steven Gussman           In the field of biology, what is commonly taken as, “environmental causation,” is more-or-less mythical. i All explanations of life terminate in genetic evolution with the, “environment,” playing a different role than almost anyone means by their mention of it. "Biology" is the scientific study of life; "genetics" is the scientific study of the unit of hereditary information which encodes the blueprint of life (and also plays the role of the unit of selection in evolutionary theory). "Determinism" is the philosophical idea that the world is explicable through tight chains of cause and effect with no room for fundamental noise (though ample room for practical noise). Post -Darwin, it's perverse that, "adaptationists," have sometimes been considered something of a disputed school of thought within evolutionary biology (though like, “biological/genetic determinism,” this is mostly achieved through a straw-man th...