[ExI] The Dogs of Immortality

[Damien Broderick]

At 08:25 AM 7/20/2008 +0000, BillK wrote:

> > Nations have homeorhetic
> > bauplans?

>Would you like to rephrase that?    :)

I'd rather not. Stuart knew what I meant. But I'll try briefly, below.

>(Searching on the words individually, I think you are talking about
>evolution tending towards some structural design).

Homeorhesis is the hypothetical ability of an individual organism to 
follow a morphogenetic trajectory, one that is presumably ordained by 
its DNA program. (It *doesn't* imply that "evolution has a plan," 
say; only that individual organisms do.) The way in which it does 
this is largely governed by stochastic processes using both internal 
chemical gradients and information from its interactions with the 
environment (since DNA doesn't contain nearly enough information to 
encode an entire viable organism).

My argument was that a "nation" is not such a structure. It is not 
even a *series* of such structures. But because it's a sort of slime 
mold composed of entities that *are* homeorhetic, it is likely (I 
think) that in some measure it *resembles* an organism following a 
morphogenetic trajectory, and can thus recover from disruptions by 
continuing along the trajectory (rather than remaining in a 
stationary steady state, which is what homeostasis implies).

Indeed, I've suggested (in my book THEORY AND ITS DISCONTENTS, which 
nobody will ever be able to find or read so why bother mentioning it, 
eh?) that something like this might be the case with historical 
processes that have been modulated externally by seasons, solar 
dynamic cycles, and other fractal recurrences.

Damien Broderick