T.H. Ray wrote:

instinctualisation has nothing to with it

lysenko mostly worked with plants
for instance

what is in question is what became known as
the central dogma of neodarwinian theory:

information transfer occurs only in the direction of germ line to somatic line
(somatic line to germ line information transfer is not possible)

this is what lamarck is ridiculed for believing
from gould to kitcher to many intro philosophy of science classes

this has turned out to be quite wrong
both with the classical interpretation of
germ line = heritable traits
and with the neodarwinian
germ line = DNA

the former turns out wrong in many ways
upon which the field of epigenetics is founded
and there are many examples that also violate the latter
(though the fact that not all heritable information is stored in DNA
already requires a considerable rework of the neodarwinian theory)

what is becoming a classic example
points out the eggs have much of their future differentiation
stored not in their chromosomes but in the protein arrangement in their cell membranes

this is much more true in plant oocytes with their rigid cell walls
but animal eggs demonstrate this as well
and there are several known physiological mechanisms that can influence this arrangement
so the information of child development and somatic characteristics
may thus be influenced by activities of the adult and somatic interaction with environment

a much more in depth introduction to the many revolutionary experiments
that have been changing biology's fundamentalism about neodarwinian theory
can be found in a pair of books by jablonka and lamb

"epigenetic inheritance and evolution: the lamarckian dimension"
and
"evolution in four dimensions"

they are very research-bound and have huge bibliographies and citation lists
but in the latter book go well into the full theory of symbolic evolution
and the natural mathematical abstraction of the lamarckian mechanisms

lysenkoism was a horrid outreach of the system pushing its tendrils of power into science
and the consequent infiltration of blind fundamentalism into research and theory

that was the error

not the particular choice of fundamentalism

the same would be a problem (and has been) if neodarwinian dogma were chosen

the greater the extent of the censor
the more crippling the slow of science

a symbol is a transfer of information

this is the foundation of information theory
and the whole point of why it speaks of channels

digraphs with their inputs and outputs

diedges always have both a domain and codomain

outputs of one agent
affect the behavior of the agent it inputs

the study of the ways input can tend (to determine) future state
is control theory
coming from the early cyberneticists

i know you know all this tom
in some form or another
(you've demonstrated similar knowledge many times in the past)

i'm just trying to establish a common framework

now
for any _given_ information system
the symbolic system of transfer is axiomatised in the model
so there is a sense in which meaning is independent of language _in_a_model_

but

we are not models
our view is not that of models

we are model-generators
we use models to fulfill our drives

and no model is given us a priori

that is where all kantian foundations fail

categories are never given us
all of the classical ones have fallen to the progress of knowledge

we do not live in a euclidean geometry as kant thought
time is not universal as kant had writ
the logic of the universe is not boolean
as kant had claimed
these all turned out slightly wrong

these are the follies of the a priori

we do get more confident of prediction as we learn
because of a fundamental decision capability

we can choose to use the most accurate models

"meaning as referrent" is only itself meaningful
if the referrent is a symbol used in decision making

modern mathematical theories of computational semantics make this explicit
that the meaning of meaning really relies upon the
"information manipulation actually involved in decision making"

models that apply to the historical evolution of information exchange in the universe
symbols and meaning arise together
and from first response to every subsequent
the relationship follows the dynamics of the system
evolving

both meaning and symbol can change

model bisimulation can never prove certainty

that is the point of ateleology
(purposelessness)
(which many darwinists profess an affinity for
despite many also being quite kantian)

that because there is no categorical certainty possible
purpose cannot meaningfully be defined in future goals
but in local attitudes

there is meaning in discussing
or assigning symbols
these future goals

it's just that the meaning is derived from a logic of prediction and knowledge
and is no longer a priori or unchanging

(george dance once suggested a bimodal epistemic-doxastic logic
but the brussels school has favored their own dynamic epistemic logic
which has many nice features here in paradox recovery)

everything we can discuss
everything that has ever been or ever will be symbolised
is only a posteriori meaningful in the context of the interpretations used (in decisions)

the postmodernists got a lot right here
but except for thom and prigogine and only a handful of others
there weren't many really qualified to build the right mathematical theory
and so the focus was more on the opaque deconstruction of information transfers
in the context of their environmental and cultural ephemera
and it became a game of who could spot trivia

but once freed of the cool trend names and "movement"
the math tended pretty hard
to the ateleological social constructivism inherent in evolutionary models

i agree that this goes all the way down

the simplest information transfers are particle interactions

if our ontology is going to be consistent
we cannot stop the study once it reaches the limits of human written history
as there certainly was meaning in the exchange long before it was recorded

and we cannot start at the birth of humans
who merely perfected existing techniques
and once we realise that such external motions
and physical (acoustical and pressure) communication
date back to the beginnings of the eumetazoans
the model definitions must be general enough to apply even to this early stage

but of course even the first bacters
even the early archaea
had a variety of chemical interactions
by which to control their societies

at such a point in model-building
it should be apparent that their really isn't a good distinction
between environment and other agents
that information transfer is something occurring even billions of year before life

the control required for self-organisation
has a semantics and interpretable language
like all interaction
and biogenesis is just another instance of coordination of linguistic purpose

autocatalysis
hypercycles
all examples of the a posteriori dynamics of what can be seen as linguistic exchange

and i agree this leads us all the way back to the initial cascade

but i am also quite confident
that at this level the central dogma begins looking pretty absurd
because there is no longer any clear distinction between germ line and somatic line

the neolamarckian exchange mechanisms are the only ones definable
and only later is there any indication of collapse to control centers

i wrote the logical aspects up at one point to get things clearer for me
but the only things i found with a search were

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.philosophy/msg/3700f891ea56511e
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.politics/msg/c3e11d6f417d3a3b
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.philosophy/msg/d056f73575e36adf

but at some point
i know i gave a more involved development of the logical points
to expose myself to better scrutiny
at least a couple of pages worth

moving on without that
though
i can give a basic outline of the formalism

the point is that i think that the evolution of life is nonfirstorderizable
and that this is crucial to an ateleologic viewing of evolution

george boolos has a classical paper called
"to be is to be a value of a variable
(or to be some values of some variables)"

in it
he points to some classic sentences that cannot be expressed in first-order logic
and in messing with the geach-kaplan sentence he gives:
"some computers communicate only with one another"

this had set me off at the time
because i had been working with the latter book of jablonka and lamb
and trying to give it a firmer formalised setting
and the process of localising definitions to structural information patterns
(typifying the agents involved)
had led me to quantifications over information collections
with just these kinds of interactions between sorts

individuals and environments

that natural dynamics could involve selections which do not rely upon
a priori definitions of what was being selected
that no prior purpose was needed in describing evolution
helped a long way for me to move away from darwin

darwin
both in his works
and from those that have interpreted him
repeatedly assumes some "given" translation of germ line to somatic expression
as if the language were somehow fixed

of course
this is not explicitly stated in the primary development of darwinism
and might not even be necessary
but it was telling that such slips were common in the texts
and i realised it was a crucial assumption
in the darwinian rebukes of lamarckianism

if the meaning of the germ line encoding could change with state
it meant that meaning was not a consequence of the (unchanging) dynamical laws
but was sensitive to the particulars of state at any instance

somatic expression then could be seen
at appropriate scales
to be influenced directly and heritably by environment

i'm in mexico right now so i won't have access to my notebooks for another week
but i remember an equation group i came up with to describe evolution through second-order logic
and a demonstration/derivation to show the lamarckian interpretation in time-varying germ translation

i'll try to post those in a week when i get back
or hopefully do some more searches and find my original post on the matter

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galathaea: prankster, fablist, magician, liar