Abstract
As Darwin portended but failed to develop, and of which Gould made much, the forensic evidence of evolution points toward Punctuated Equilibrium rather than Phyletic Gradualism; however Gould’s empirical postulation has long suffered from its lack of a testable theoretical basis. This is rectified by the work of Jaroslav Flegr and the Frozen Plasticity Theory, a hypothesis with striking application within semiotic theory and hence to questions of epistemology and ontology. The consequences of applying FPT within Biosemiotics is this: when any particular sign carries a great range of interpretation (semiotic polymorphism) combined with a high degree of mutually supportive referencing (semiotic pleiotropy), that sign is less likely to exhibit plasticity—less able to find new expressions capable of taking on a life of their own (as it were), but more likely to exhibit elasticity, and the flexibility necessary to survive a wide variety of niches. By contrast, much Darwinian and most Neo-Darwinian thought presumes that plasticity is equally and necessarily present in all living things, and that all populations thus slowly evolve. This devalues the point of interplay of such processes, which is the instigation of a specific instance of relating both delineated by and delineating its own unique heritage, and a phenomenon of signage. The presumption that these moments of transaction are all of a singular type has generated certain failures in extrapolating from evolutionary theory to understanding the experience of life. However Darwin was read differently by Darwin’s philosophical champion and Peirce’s “boxing master” Chauncey Wright. Using the historical encounter of the early Pragmatists with Origin, the hypothesis that Peirce’s Pragmatism and Semiotics originated within a study of the ontology implicit within Darwin’s one long argument, and also an evocative import from Sir Edward Strachey, this essay approaches Frozen Plasticity as a theoretical semiosis, so as to clarify the functioning of signage in evolution and cognition.
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Notes
Darwin (2007), pg. 578, emphasis and parenthesis original
Wright (2000), vol. 2, pg. 230, italics original
Flegr (2010)
The Blind Watchmaker and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, respectively
Flegr (2010)
Lear (1984), pg. v
Whitehead (1958), pg. 23
Wright (2000), vol. 1, pg. 202 (italics original)
Ostdiek (2010), pg. 105
Darwin (1985), pg. 133
Wright (2000), pg. 142
Ostdiek (2010), pg. 60
Wright (2000), vol. 1, pg. 9
Darwin (1887), pg. 46
Darwin (2004), pgs. 679–80
See: Madden, Edward (1963)
See, for example, The Principles of Psychology chapter 4, or Talks to Teachers chapter 8.
Compare, for example, his treatment of plasticity in the fourth chapter of Democracy and Education with his treatment of the organism in the first and third chapters of Art as Experience—after having reviewed his classic Reflex Arc, as well as The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy.
Peirce (1998), EP 2.222
Peirce (1932), CP 2.297–302
Hardwick and Cook (1977), pg. 81
Peirce (1997) PPM 282–283
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Ostdiek, G. Cast in Plastic: Semiotic Plasticity and the Pragmatic Reading of Darwin. Biosemiotics 4, 69–82 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-010-9108-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-010-9108-7