E. Roy Weintraub

Genes in development : re-reading the molecular paradigm

Introduction / Eva M. Neumann-Held and Christoph Rehmann-Sutter 1 I. Empirical Approaches 1. Genome Analysis and Developmental Biology: The Nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as a Model System / Thomas R. Burglin 15 2. Genes and Form: Inherency in the Evolution of Developmental Mechanisms / Stuart A. Newman and Gerd B. Muller 38 II. Looking Back into History 3. From Genes as Determinants to DNA as Resource: Historical Notes on Development and Genetics / Sahotra Sarkar 77 III. Theorizing Genes 4. The Origin of Species: A Structuralist Approach / Gerry Webster and Brian C. Goodwin 99 5. On the Problem of the Molecular versus the Organismic Approach in Biology / Ulrich Wolf 135 6. Genes, Development, and Semiosis / Jesper Hoffmeyer 152 7. The Fearless Vampire Conservator: Philip Kitcher, Genetic Determinism, and the Informational Gene / Paul E. Griffiths 175 8. Genetics from an Evolutionary Process Perspective / James Griesemer 199 9. Genes-Causes-Codes: Deciphering DNAs Ontological Privilege / Eva M. Newmann-Held 238 10. Boundaries and (Constructive) Interaction / Susan Oyama 272 11. Beyond the Gene but Beneath the Skin / Evelyn Fox Keller 290 12. Poiesis and Praxis: Two Modes of Understanding Development / Christoph Rehmann-Sutter 313 IV. Social and Ethical Implications 13. Developmental Emergence, Genes, and Responsible Science / Brian C. Goodwin 337 14. Nothing Like a Gene / Jackie Leach Scully 349 Contributors 365 Index 369

Emergence and embodiment : new essays on second-order systems theory

Emerging in the 1940s, the first cybernetics—the study of communication and control systems—was mainstreamed under the names artificial intelligence and computer science and taken up by the social sciences, the humanities, and the creative arts. In Emergence and Embodiment , Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen focus on cybernetic developments that stem from the second-order turn in the 1970s, when the cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster catalyzed new thinking about the cognitive implications of self-referential systems. The crucial shift he inspired was from first-order cybernetics’ attention to homeostasis as a mode of autonomous self-regulation in mechanical and informatic systems, to second-order concepts of self-organization and autopoiesis in embodied and metabiotic systems. The collection opens with an interview with von Foerster and then traces the lines of neocybernetic thought that have followed from his work. In response to the apparent dissolution of boundaries at work in the contemporary technosciences of emergence, neocybernetics observes that cognitive systems are operationally bounded, semi-autonomous entities coupled with their environments and other systems. Second-order systems theory stresses the recursive complexities of observation, mediation, and communication. Focused on the neocybernetic contributions of von Foerster, Francisco Varela, and Niklas Luhmann, this collection advances theoretical debates about the cultural, philosophical, and literary uses of their ideas. In addition to the interview with von Foerster, Emergence and Embodiment includes essays by Varela and Luhmann. It engages with Humberto Maturana’s and Varela’s creation of the concept of autopoiesis, Varela’s later work on neurophenomenology, and Luhmann’s adaptations of autopoiesis to social systems theory. Taken together, these essays illuminate the shared commitments uniting the broader discourse of neocybernetics. Contributors . Linda Brigham, Bruce Clarke, Mark B. N. Hansen, Edgar Landgraf, Ira Livingston, Niklas Luhmann, Hans-Georg Moeller, John Protevi, Michael Schiltz, Evan Thompson, Francisco J. Varela, Cary Wolfe

Appraising General Equilibrium Analysis

General equilibrium analysis is a theoretical structure which focuses research in economics. On this point economists and philosophers agree. Yet studies in general equilibrium analyses are not well understood in the sense that, though their importance is recognized, their role in the growth of economic knowledge is a subject of some controversy. Several questions organize an appraisal of general equilibrium analysis. These questions have been variously posed by philosophers of science, economic methodologists, and historians of economic thought. Is general equilibrium analysis a theory, a paradigm, a scientific research program, or a set of interrelated theories? Is it not any of these but rather a branch of applied mathematics? Is GE analysis associated with the growth of knowledge, or does it waste intellectual resources? How is it related to other work in economics? Is it connected to, or is it apart from, the concerns of applied economists?

Economic Science Wars

Most discussions of relationship between the history of economics and economics have been a-historical. That is, if to write history is to write context, we have had virtually no historical narrative examining the break in the history-economics connection that we observe today. This paper provides that contextualization. Its main conclusion is that the marginalization of the history of economics is associated with the true belief of mainstream economists that heterodox economics and the history of economics are connected projects.

Growing Explanations: Historical Perspectives on Recent Science

Introduction: dynamincs all the way up / M. Norton Wise 1 Part I Mathematics, physics, and engineering Elementary particles? 1. Mirror symmetry: persons, values, and objects / Peter Galison 23 Nonlinear dynamics and chaos 2. Chaos, disorder, and mixing: a new fin-de-siecle image of science? / Amy Dahan Dalmedico 67 3. Forms of explanation in the catastrophe theory of Rene Thjom: topology, morphogenesis, and structuralism / David Aubin 95 Coping with complexity in technology 4. From Boeing to Berkeley: civil engineers, the cold war, and the origins of finite element analysis / Ann Johnson 133 5. Fuzzyfying the world: social practices of showing the properties of fuzzy logic / Claude Rosental 159 Part II The organism, the self, and (artificial) life Self-Organization 6. Marrying the premodern to the postmodern: computers and organisms after World War II / Evelyn Fox Keller 181 Immunology 7. Immunology and the enigma of selfhood / Alfred I. Tauber 201 8. Immunology of AIDS: growning explanations and developing instruments / Ilana Lowy 222 Artificial Life 9. Artificial life support: some nodes in the Alife ribotype / Richard Doyle 251 10. The word for world is computer: simulating second natures in artificial life / Stefan Helmreich 275 11. Constructing and explaining emergence in artificial life: on paradigms, ontodefinitions, and general knowledge in biology / Claus Emmeche 301 Afterword 327 Contributors 333 Index 337

Siting the New Economic Science: The Cowles Commission's Activity Analysis Conference of June 1949

In the decades following WWII, the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics came to represent new technical standards that informed most advances in economic theory. The public emergence of this community was manifest at a conference held in June 1949 titled Activity Analysis of Production and Allocation. Our history of this event situates the Cowles Commission among the institutions of post-war science in-between National Laboratories and the supreme discipline of Cold War academia, mathematics. Although the conference created the conditions under which economics, as a discipline, would transform itself, the participants themselves had little concern for the intellectual battles that had defined prewar university economics departments. The conference bore witness to a new intellectual culture in economic science based on shared scientific norms and techniques un-interrogated by conflicting notions of the meaning of either science or economics.

Stability Theory via Liapunov's Method: A Note on the Contribution of Takuma Yasui

The recent paper by D. W. Hands, ‘The role of crucial counterexamples in the growth of economics knowledge: two case studies in the recent history of economic thought,’ is the first serious examination, by a historian-methodologist, of the 1940-1 960 work on stability of competitive equilibria. The implicit narrative history, linked to the case studies that Hands extracts, involves Hicks’s development of perfect and imperfect stability, and Samuelson’s clarifications associated with the introduction of the ideas of dynamic stability to economic argumentation. Indeed, Hands’ first case concerned Samuelson’s demonstration that Hicksian ‘stability’ was not necessarily related to true dynamic stability. Hands’ second case involved the conjecture “normal preferences and the tatonnement dynamic are associated with stable positions of equilibria.” A counterexample to the conjecture, developed initially by Scarf, was based on the then recent stability proofs of Arrow, Block, and Hunvicz. Those proofs were developed around 1957-1958. The Hicks and Samuelson theorems were presented around 1939-1 942. The intervening period was one of the most active in the history of mathematical economics. Why then did stability analysis take nearly twenty years to develop? One possible answer is that the problems concerned the qualitative behavior of systems of ordinary differential equations. Since the relevant mathematical theory was not developed until the early to middle 1950s, mathematical economists had to wait upon the emerging developments in mathematics. That is, the economic theory required that there be ways to analyze the asymptotic behavior of solutions of certain classes ’of differential equations. The methods used by Samuelson required either explicit solutions of those equation systems or else analyses of certain approximations to those systems, usually by linearization. In any event, the mathematics was not well enough developed for economists to have available to them the solution techniques they needed. On this view, it was not until the middle 1950s, when there was a growth

Keynesian Historiography and the Anti-Semitism Question

Historians’ treatment of John Maynard Keynes’s putative anti-Semitism raises complex historiographic issues. Melvin W. Reder’s 2000 HOPE article “The Anti-Semitism of Some Eminent Economists” considered whether the term ambivalent anti-Semitism could be applied variously to John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, and Friedrich Hayek by arguing that those three important economists evinced attitudes or made remarks that today would be characterized as anti-Semitic. I am not concerned here to appraise Reder’s argument about whether the label “anti-Semitic,” whether “ambivalent” or not, is usefully attached to Keynes. I rather am concerned with the issue of how Keynesian historiography has dealt with the anti-Semitism question. That is, I am concerned with the role that Keynes’s possible anti-Semitism has played in Keynesian scholarship and how the community of Keynes scholars has treated that allegation.

ALLAIS, STABILITY, AND LIAPUNOV THEORY

To make a discovery is to achieve one of the closest approximations to a property right that the scientific career affords. Professional prestige is often closely associated with these acquisitions. Small wonder, then, that acrimonious disputes about priority and independence in discovery have often marred the normally placid tenor of scientific communication. Even less wonder that many historians of science have seen the individual discovery as an appropriate unit with which to measure scientific progress and have devoted much time and skill to determining what man made which discovery at what point in time. (1977, 166)

On Convergence to Pareto Allocations

The recent book by Arrow and Hahn [1] provides an admirable survey of the work on non-tatonnement adjustment processes developed by Uzawa [4], Hahn and Negishi [2] and others. Such processes permit disequilibrium trading as long as successive allocations are Pareto-better, so that all agents have non-decreasing utility indicators through trading periods. In this paper we formalize a similar process which focuses upon the coalition formation problems at the heart of all such trading processes. While our process is somewhat less descriptive of the role of the decision calculus of individuals in determining successive allocations than the bidding process of Hurwicz, Radner and Reiter [3], for example, we do admit such processes as special cases and our coalition formation framework appears to emphasize more naturally the problem of inter-agent communication. Under a particular assumption regarding the implications of costless intercommunication, we show that successive coalition formation must eventually lead to a Pareto allocation with probability one.