+Jon Lawhead I’ve become convinced that what’s going on here is a fundamental failure to properly understand the phenomenon of organization at a quite general level.
This is just circumstantial evidence, but it gives some hint at the extent of the problem. Consider the following two Wikipedia pages:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organism
Notice how, despite the obvious conceptual relations, the two pages share virtually no overlap whatsoever. The page on “organization” is almost exclusively about human bureaucratic institutional structures– with some notable exceptions, like the link to ANT and complexity theory. There are links, of course, but there are links everywhere on the web. But on its face this discussion bears almost no relation whatsoever to the discussion of organisms, presumably exactly those entities which are so organized. There is virtually no hope, at least from the Wiki entries, of figuring out how the process of organization might lead to any of the organisms that populate the planet.
That’s not enough for the full argument, but in broad outline this mismatch convinces me that we are running against a fundamental conceptual gap. And Jon, I think we’ve put together a theory that can bridge this gap in ways that have consequences throughout the disciplines. Its a theory that makes the Queen of Spades hypothesis a paradigm case instead of a curious outlier crying for explanation. That’s how paradigm shifts work.
I don’t think it is coincidental that the Greek roots for the word, ??????? literally means “instrument, implement, tool, for making or doing a thing”. It makes the solution seem almost obvious in retrospect.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Do%29%2Frganon
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Left this comment in Jon’s thread. h/t +Jonathan Langdale
https://plus.google.com/u/0/103315650425474752023/posts/9efsd68tV4v
Jonathan Langdale originally shared this post:
Get others to do the hard essential hard work. Sounds familiar.
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Queen of spades key to new evolutionary hypothesis
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