> SA wrote:
>> I'm not sure either what Miles means by "independent elements." I
>> think that more productive than asking Miles to explain what he means
>> by "independent" would be to ask him to show what he means. Miles, if
>> genes have no "independent" effect on anything, can you think of
>> anything in the real world that *does* have an independent effect on
>> something else (in the sense you mean)?
>>
>> SA
>
> Let me provide a homey example. I put together the ingredients to
> bake a cake. I can tell you what ingredients are in the cake, but if
> you put all the ingredients on the counter, it's not a cake. The cake
> is an emergent property of a specific combination of ingredients in a
> specific proportions exposed to specific environmental conditions.
> Now, could the cake have some "independent effect" on something else?
> Sure. But that effect is the effect of the emergent property, not the
> effect of any of the individual ingredients that went into the cake.
>
> And just so with any human traits or characteristics, including language.
I'm not sure I grasp your analogy. The cake ingredients = our genes as well as all our various social relations. The cake and its characteristics = humans and their characteristics. The latter is an emergent property of the former. Right? Fair enough. But what we were talking about was whether a gene - i.e., a "cake ingredient" - could have an "independent effect" on a human characteristic - i.e., a "cake characteristic." Obviously in this analogy, it can - e.g., the amount of sugar in the cake determines how sweet the cake is. It has an "independent effect." (What the cake itself affects is irrelevant, so I don't get that part of your analogy.) Likewise, the makeup of someone's genes determines if they have blue eyes or brown eyes. So genes also have an "independent effect." Social relations don't enter into it, except insofar as they might somehow affect the genes for eye color.
It's possible to formulate a definition of "independent effect" so that genes have no "independent effect" on eye color. But to do that, your definition of "independent effect" has to be such that nothing ever has an independent effect on anything else.
SA