[Avery.Andrews 951021.0915]
(various posts by Bruce Abbot, Bill Powers, Rick Marken)
On the subject of preserving/trashing the past, E.O. Wilson's
comments on the molecular revolution in biology (in his recent
autobiography, _Naturalist_) might be worth thinking about.
Crick, etc. successfully engineered a revolution in biology that
was about as deep as PCT revolution would be, if there was one.
They were highly dismissive of and hostile to traditional approaches
to biology, and one of the bad side effects of this was a substantial
decline in the prestige and therefore numbers of `systematists',
people who actually know about the organisms in some group or other,
and so can tell you what the critter on your lab table actually is,
which is an indispensible ingredient for doing more work on it,
including molecular-based work. The resulting shortage is becoming
a real problem for biology.
It is, b.t.w., due to Wilson and his holitic naturalist's approach
that we know that ants and termites communicate with chemicals, and
therefore have some prospect of figuring out what the control systems
actually are. Without this prelinary work, there'd be no chance
at all of figuring out which of the quadrillions of perceptions that
these insects might be controlling were actually being controlled.
Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au