Rumor--Hungary During the Wars

[jporter]

On Oct 3, 2005, at 11:42 PM, David Casseres wrote:

> And Ulam, and others who worked in the Manhattan Project.  The
> non-Hungarians called them Martians, citing the evidence of
> otherworldly intelligence and an utterly opaque language, unrelated to
> any language known to other physicists.
>

You've got to love von Neumann, though, and  not only for
his propensity to party late into the night, and get up around
noon. Pure genius. He recognized that in order for heredity
to work with anything close to the  observed efficiency, then
it had to proceed via a code, i.e., a digitized version of the
analog organism for which it coded- and this before Watson
and Crick's discovery.

Furthermore, in order to explain the efficiency of living systems
ability to "find" the most adaptive structure in a given environment,
the code had to be arbitrary, i.e., not clearly related in an iconic
way to what it code for, i.e., "symbolic" in the purest Peircean,
semiotic sense.

Selection, then, worked not on the organism, but the code.
Slip ups in "the letters" caused huge changes in the inter-
pretation, i.e., the phenotypic organism- which paid the price
(usually) or thrived (rarely) and had mucho offspring.

Second order selection.


jody