Individualism and Local Control

References

• My thinking in this paper was stimulated and usefully influenced by a seminar on Artificial Life given in collaboration with Paul Thompson in the Fall of 1990. Thanks to Paul Thompson and all participants, especially Greg Crookall, Lisa Blake, and Niko Scharer.
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• A curious etymological tidbit is suggestive here. It turns out that the word ‘whole’ and the various cognates of ‘holism’ are etymologically unrelated, even though the ‘w’ in ‘whole’ is adventitious. ‘Whole’ is etymologically related to ‘health’ (cf. ‘hale’); but health has become semantically so closely identified with the idea of an integral totality that the sense of ‘whole’ has actually shifted to merge with that of the Greek ‘holos.’ We can see the turning point in the word ‘wholesome,’ in which the morpheme is ‘whole’ but the sense is ‘health.’ Obviously I'm not suggesting that etymology has much weight as an argument; but it is an indication that the notions of an individual— of wholeness— is difficult to keep separate from some normative notion of functional integration.
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• In other respects as well, local control needn't preclude hierarchy altogether. Consider, for example, the different levels at which the DNA might affect the development of the individual: protein composition, interaction with environment in epigenesis, interaction with allele in selective competition, etc.
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