Wednesday, January 28, 2004

Problems with the assembly approach to the human (or anything) Posted here Wednesday, January 28, 2004 at 11:42:48 AM     I ant to take on what  can be called the assembly approach to human phenomena. An example of the asembly  is the following From THE BIRTH OF THE MIND: HOW A TINY NUMBER OF GENES CREATES THE COMPLEXITIES OF HUMAN THOUGHT by Gary Marcus: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465044050/qid=1071262425/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-4463915-8209511?v=glance&;s=books   "It is popular in some quarters to claim that the human brain is largely unstructured at birth; it is tempting to believe that our minds float free of our genomes. But such beliefs are completely at odds with everything that scientists have learned in molecular biology over the last decade. Rather than leaving everything to chance or the vicissitudes of experience, nature has taken everything it has developed for growing the body and put it towards the problem of growing the brain. From cell division to cell differentiation, every process that is used in the development of the body is also used in the development of the brain. Genes do for the brain the same things as they do for the rest of the body: they guide the fates of cells by guiding the production of proteins within those cells. The one thing that is truly special about the development of the brain-the physical basis of the mind-is its "wiring", the critical connections between neurons, but even there, genes play a critical role. this can be found at Edge 133 at http://www.edge.org  Comment: take the hand. The assembly approach says that the pianists fingers, for example, built up skills out of parts. The baby's hand is a fist, all moves together. With time (weeks) the fingers begin to differentiate into separate actions. This process is hard to describe fom the assembly perspective. ********