Contents:Søren Brier: Foreword Full Text Claus Emmeche: Defining life as a semiotic phenomenon Abstract David J. Depew & Bruce H. Weber: What Does Natural Selection Have to Be like Abstract Jesper Hoffmeyer: Surfaces Inside Surfaces Abstract Robert Vallée: Cognition et Système, Essai d'Épistémo-praxéologie Abstract Robert Vallée: An Introduction to "Epistemo-praxiology" Abstract Columns Ranulph Glanville: A (Cybernetic) Musing: Varieties of Variety? Full Text Louis H. Kauffman: Virtual Logic - The Calculus of Indications Full Text Reviews Maj-Britt Rosenkilde, Anja Abel Sørensen, Christine Nordentoft and Søren Brier: Review of International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics Full Text Axel Randrup: Whispering Pond Full Text Mariaelena Bartesaghi: "The Therapy of Dialogical Possibility" Full Text
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What Does Natural Selection Have to Be Like In Order to Work with Self-OrganizationBy David J. Depew and Bruce H. Weber Abstract: This paper argues that self-organization and natural selection work together in evolution, but only when self-organization is distinguished from the self-ordering observed in computational systems under appropriate constraints, and only when natural selection is given a certain interpretation. We make three main claims: 1. Organisms are autopoietic, autocatalytic, self-organizing dissipative structures whose developmental trajectories and life-cycles are embedded within complex, self-organizing ecological systems. These systems are characterized by autocatalysis and energy dissipation. They become genuinely autopoietic when feedback allows them to change the parameters that control their interactions with their environments. 2. Natural selection is a phenomenon, not an algorithm, that emerges from and applies only to informed, self-organizing, autocatalytic dissipative systems, and that functions to enhance, stabilize, and differentiate the feedback processes and developmental trajectories of organisms. 3. Natural selection and self-organization work together to produce biological order, but not under conceptions of natural selection that minimize the developmental nature of organisms, or place development too severely under the control of a "genetic program." A conception of natural selection advanced by Developmental Systems Theory fits these criteria, and can be unified with self-organization as we construe it. We assert that this set of concepts can provide a robust basis for the synthesis of genetics, developmental biology, and evolutionary theory that is now the primary goal of evolutionary theorists.
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