The Biologists Mistress Rethinking Selforganization in Literature Art and Nature
Victoria N. Alexander
Director, Dactyl Foundation; Fulbright Specialist, US Dept of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs
Victoria North Alexander is a biosemiotician, focusing on the role of chance in biology and in intentional beliefs. She is interested in questions nearly emergence, purpose, self-organization and mimicry. She is currently serving a iii-year term on the Fulbright Specialist roster (2018-2021), lecturing on not-Darwinan approaches to the evolution of novelty, purposeful behavior and intelligence.
Equally a contributor to the widely reviewed volume, Fine Lines: Vladimir Nabokov's Scientific Fine art (Yale UP, 2016), Alexander argues, following Nabokov's lead, that at that place is no compelling reason to believe that some forms of mimicry have been shaped by Natural Selection. Alexander is a novelist too equally a philosopher of science contributing to the field of biosemiotics, and since 1996 as Director at the Dactyl Foundation, she has worked to facilitate interactions between the arts and sciences. She earned her PhD in English language at the Graduate Center, City University New York and did her dissertation research on the relationship betwixt gamble, teleology, intentionality, self-organization at the Santa Iron Institute, with support from the Jewish Foundation for the Education of Women and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center.
Quote
"A widely remarked fact about On the Origin of Species is that it is not virtually "origins" per se—singular points at which something new begins—only nigh gradual changes in the proportions of already existing forms."
(Monstrous Fate: The Problem of Authorship and Evolution by Natural Pick," Register of Scholarship 19(ane) August 2010)
Books
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The Biologist'due south Mistress: Rethinking Self-Organization in Literature, Art and Nature
As 20th century geneticist J. B. S. Haldane famously quipped, "Teleology is like a mistress to the biologist; he dare non be seen with her in public but cannot alive without her." Teleology is the study of the purposes of nature. Equally a scientific subject area, it began its celebrated reject in the 17th century, with the birth of mod empiricism, and continued to plummet apace the rise of the Enlightenment, Darwinism, and quantum mechanics. Those who continued to think nature could exist purposeful were primarily spiritualists, artists, or madmen, who credited the guidance of gods, muses, or fate. Only could a wholesale rejection of teleology be an overreaction? Is in that location something in the idea, equally Haldane implies, that we need? Drawing on her experiences as a complexity theorist, novelist and art-theorist, Alexander examines the history and practices of teleology, the report of purpose, in nature as well as in human beliefs. She takes us "inside" paradoxically purposeful cocky-organizing entities (which somehow make themselves without having selves withal to practice the making), and she shows us how poetic-like relationships—things coincidentally similar each other or metaphoric and things coincidentally near each other or metonymic—assistance grade system where there was none earlier. She suggests that it is these chance language-like processes that issue in emergent pattern and selfhood, thereby offering an alternative to postmodern theories that have unfairly snubbed the purposeful artist. Alexander claims that what has been missing from the general give-and-take of purposefulness is a theory of creativity, without which at that place can exist no purposeful action, only robotic execution of inherited design. Thus revising while reviving teleology, she offers u.s. a secular, not-essentialist conception of selfhood.
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Hazard, Nature's Practical Jokes, and the 'Non-Utilitarian Delights' of Butterfly Mimicry
Writing nigh insects that play the mimic far better than is necessary to fool predators, Russian-American novelist and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov notes, "I establish in nature the kinds of non-utilitarian delights I sought in art." With this Rosetta nugget, we better empathize the subtle and complex ways in which Nabokov's fine art and science inform each other. As a scientist, Nabokov argued that natural selection, because information technology is not a source of variation, has no actual artistic powers (Alexander & Salthe, 2010). As an creative person, he understood creative processes; he saw himself in nature and nature in himself. As he muses in "Male parent's Butterflies," "Sure whims of nature can exist, if not appreciated, at least merely noticed simply by a encephalon that has adult in a related manner" (NB 219). Nabokov rejected Darwinian "gradual accumulation of resemblance" as an explanation for mimicry (NB 222). Instead, he thought some butterfly resemblances were more or less probable coincidences (equally in the similarity between the viceroy and the monarch) while others were unlikely coincidences (as in the butterfly that looks similar a dead leaf). He did non retrieve that fitness pick was necessary or able to explain how such resemblances came to be. In his fiction, Nabokov compared such coincidences to a funny typo that could requite new pregnant to a judgement: "the run a risk that mimics choice, the flaw that looks like a blossom" (1959: 622).
Download full chapter here.
Publications
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Selected Publication
"Toward a Definition of Biosemiosic Hazard," Biosemiotics Volume 7(3): August 2014
"Inventiveness: Self-Referential Mistaking, Not Negating," Biosemiotics 6(2): January 2012
co-author Stanely Salthe, "Monstrous Fate: The Trouble of Authorship and Evolution by Natural Selection," Annals of Scholarship 19(1) August 2010
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Complete listing of publications
For a complete list of publications, click here.
Websites
Source: https://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com/people/view/Victoria-Alexander