Re: "Punctual Equilibrium", or "evolutionary stuff"

[wpc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Paul Cockshott)]

If you are reading Gould, who I think is generally one of
the best popularisers of science around, you should also read
Dennet (Darwins Dangerous Idea) and Dawkins (Blind Watchmaker),
as expositions of a more orthodox darwinism. Dennet for my
money, is an even better and more thought provoking read
than Gould, and has a strong polemic against him.

For a quite different alternative, have a look at Kauffman
( At home in the universe ). Kaufmann is philosophically a
reactionary with idealist longings and much explicit bourgeois
appologetics but has produced some brilliant work on autocatalytic
nets and the stability of random Boolean nets, which, I suspect
may turn out to be absolutely fundamental to our understanding
of the origin of life and of morphogenisis.


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