Re: Sociobacteriology

On Sat, 27 Oct 2007 18:29:54 -0700, *Hemidactylus*
<ecphoric@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Oct 27, 7:24 pm, r norman <r_s_norman@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, 27 Oct 2007 16:03:17 -0700, *Hemidactylus*





<ecpho...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Oct 27, 3:48 pm, r norman <r_s_norman@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, 27 Oct 2007 10:31:58 -0700, *Hemidactylus*

<ecpho...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Norman has twice applied terms from the human behavioral sciences to
his emergent systems view of bacterial colony capabilities. The first
instance was "groupthink" and when I questioned that usage he backed
away. Recently he used the term "collective behavior" that has a
highly circumscribed usage in sociology.

I agree that the single word "groupthink" was inappropriate and
withdrew that. I do NOT withdraw the notion of thinking in group
terms or thinking about how groups work. Shapiro pushed the envelope
when he may have referred to bacteria thinking but I have argued that,
in the context in which he spoke, such hyperbole was appropriate and
could easily be understood and interpreted by his audience. Wilkins
was present at the time and he disagrees, thinking that Shapiro really
claims bacteria think. I don't go that far. I only claim that a
complex assembly of bacteria, especially of a tremendous variety of
different types of bacteria, interacting tightly with one another,
produce a form of behavior for that complex, that group, that
ensemble, that set, that collective. Hemidactylus now argues that I
can't even use those words for describing a group, an ensemble, a
complex, a set, a collective; the terms are reserved for the
exclusive use of sociologists. Actually, 'set' and 'group' are
reserved for the exclusive use of mathematicians and 'collective' is
reserved for the exclusive use of socialists, not sociologists. The
mathematicians and the psychiatrists can fight over who owns
'complex'.

I guess none of us can use numbers then unless we are mathematicians.
Maybe I've pushed the envelope with terminology purism. Collective
behavior could more easily be carried over to a grouping of bacteria
than groupthink, if we are respecting the initial meanings of the
terms. If initial meanings be damned then have at it.

I have noticed a tendency for biologists to get all out of sorts when
terms from biology are applied in other contexts. And physicists are
the original curmudgeons. If you used the word field for anything,
they might get violent, so be careful developmental biologists with
your loose talk of morphogenetic fields. But it's OK to snag
psychological terms out of the air, because psychology, the redheaded
stepchild of the soft sciences needn't be taken seriously by
physicists and biologists.

All the psychologists will do in retaliation is take their leather
couches, survey forms and cigars and storm out of the room, leaving
the bearded biologists and lab coated physicists to duke it out over
whether biology is soft.

The psychologists, who called it a day, will be down at the tavern
getting into a drunken bar fight as the cognitivists and behaviorists
argue over the legitimacy of "mind". Then the Freudians accuse
Jungians of harboring a death wish against them and the Jungians call
the Freudians a bunch of sexually obsessive monomaniacs. The Freudians
counter that the Jungians are a bunch of occultists and a brawl erupts
upon the bodies of the behaviorists and cognitivists. One of these
cognitivists, still clinging to life, yells to the Jungians that
archetypes are just modules in the evolved mindbrain, then breaths
their last. This distracts the Jungians long enough for the Freudians
to win the fight and relax with their cigars, having defeated the
Oedipal Jungians wanting to kill the primordial dad and ...umm....

My impression of psychology is George Miller and Smitty Stevens at one
end of a hall and BF Skinner at the other. But that wasn't my
institution. At all the several places I have been, the fights
between the experimental and the social/clinical groups have made the
little spats about deconstructionism in humanities seem quite mild.

Where I went to university the molecular/micro department had
separated itself from the biology department and each offered courses
in anatomy and physiology . A happy byproduct of this great schism was
that I took human anatomy, human physiology, comparative anatomy, and
animal physiology. I also took a molecular cell biology course offered
by the biology department then eventually took the first semester of
molecular biology offered by the molecular/micro department. I suppose
this schism is not unlike the separation between psychology in
sociology departments.

And as part of my psych degree I took physiological psychology. Yet
later I took neurobiology offered by the molecular/micro department,
from a professor who specialized in ummm...glial cells. That term i
decided to take neurobiology and immunology as offered by the evil
molecular/micro department, when maybe I should have taken the more
field and taxonomy oriented courses of ornithology and mammalogy as
offered by the very nice biology department. The subsequent semester I
opted for developmental biology instead of plant taxonomy. What the
hell was I thinking? I can see plants, mammals, and birds everyday.
Immunocytes, neurons, and fetuses OTOH...


The academic environment is very weird. You can't even begin to play
the game if you keep thinking that any of it is related to a search
for truth and beauty.



.

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