Showing papers in "Zygon in 1970"

New concepts in the evolution of complexity: stratified stability and unbounded plans

Abstract: discover in inanimate matter; and although that is a vague description to serve as a premise, it is what inspires vitalists to claim (and their opponents to deny) that some phenomena of life cannot be explained by laws of this kind. The phenomena that are said to be inaccessible to physics are of two different kinds. One school of vitalists another ground for claiming that the laws of physics are biologically incomplete, namely in questions about the evolution of organisms. Michael Polanyi asks questions of this kind, though he lumps all levels together-origins, functioning of individuals, and the sequence of species. He claims, as vitalists have always done, that there must be an overall plan which directs them all, and I shall criticize the confusion of meanings in his idea of plan or purpose. I shall distinguish between two concepts, the usual concept of a closed or bounded plan (that is, a tactic or solution for a defined problem), and a new concept of an open or unbounded plan, that is, a general strategy.