well, isn't the question what levels of abstraction are meaningful and/or useful?..... jeff, the analogy police
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Yes. But evidently the boyz perfer to wrestle around with each other, yelling, Are too, are not, are too....
The more serious problem with a lot of evolutionary theory is that it is full of essences and saturated with metaphors to such a degree that it degrades the whole ideal of constructing an observation based and descriptive phenomenology. The word objective is supposed to be inserted some were in that last sentence, but then again that is exactly the problematical domain.
I think the trick is to de-tune, de-metaphorize. For example try to describe some attribute without using the word, adaptive. Since it is impossible for some common attribute to be non-adaptive, or else how would it exist, then in what sense does the claim of adaptation have any meaning? So then it becomes a question of what level or degree of abstraction does adaptation begin to take on meaning---and more important is that degree relevant to living processes?
I just suppose that Gould goes into these issues at some point, and I will probably find them.
In the meantime, I've got to go back to work. Lunch is over.
Chuck Grimes