Thread by @yoginho

Wow. Science by Twitter is one up from science by press release. Progress can’t be stopped, I guess.

Since you publish your science on Twitter now, I guess you won’t mind if I do a Twitter peer review of it?

Thread 👇🏻

https://twitter.com/sanewman1/status/1273709173256134656

First of all: I love the direction in which this is going! You identify a number of the most profound misrepresentations & challenges in biology today. And I think the way you go about describing them is pretty spot on. Thank you for posting this and popularising this view! /1

I couldn’t help feeling a bit funny about the "scientific journals won’t print this so I do science by Twitter instead” vibe. The fake media won’t print my views? It does remind me of something, or rather, someone… Which is a bit ironic. But I digress. /2

The two main problems with science by Twitter, in my view, is (a) a lack of context and references to existing work, and (b) a lack of depth of the argument (due, no doubt, to the constraints of the medium). /3

Your thread leaves the impression that all this is your work, and that all the ideas are new, while in reality, your argument draws on a lot of really good previous work that goes back to the organicism of the 1920s and 30s. Could you please provide the missing references? /4

So let’s go over this step by step: “cells are autonomous” agents. Yes! As you mention, this view goes back to Kant (and maybe even Aristotle). A good starting point here is Moreno & Mossio’s book “Biological Autonomy.” See also Jonas, Piaget, Rosen, Maturana/Varela, Ganti... /5

I especially like some recent work by Mossio & Montevil that shows how autonomy is based on closure of constraints, and thus entirely compatible with what we know about far-from equilibrium thermodynamics. Also: Kauffman’s work-constraint cycles in “Investigations”… /6

… and Kauffman’s more recent work on Kantian Wholes and the adjacent possible. Of course, you have also read Denis Walsh’s “Organisms, Agency, and Evolution” which seems central to your argument? /7

For the evolution of new levels or organisation, I recommend Wimsatt’s “Re-engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings,” whose notion of non-aggregativity you seem to be using. /8

Griesemer’s “Genetics from an Evolutionary Process Perspective” (2006) has an account of the emergence of new reproducer systems, that seems similar to your account of multicellularity arising. /9

On this topic, could you please clarify in what way multi-level selection theory only provides “just-so-stories” and in what way your own work on the topic goes beyond this state of affairs? I understand this may require a more in-depth treatment of the matter. /10

The argument about self-organisation and natural selection is a classic in the field (starting with Kauffman’s work in the late 1960s). What I don’t understand about this debate is why it makes selection less important. Don’t we need both self-organisation and selection ? /11

Please do specify what you mean by natural kinds and in what way organisms are like chemical elements? I do not understand the analogy. What definition of “natural kind” are you using here? What does being a “kind” have to do with being autonomous? /12

Before I finish, let me repeat how much I like your general outlook. In fact, I talk about many of the topics you touch on (autonomy, agency, self-organisation) in my lecture:
youtube.com/playlist?list=….

Bonus: YouTube gives me more space for argument & to cite earlier work. /12

Conclusion: major revision!

A worthwhile & important train of thought!

Before this can be published in a peer-reviewed journal, the missing context needs to be provided, the argument needed to be fleshed out, and the author should clarify his own contribution to the work. /13