p.142 The natural selection epistemology here offered has one special analytic
feature: if one is expanding knowledge beyond what one knows, one has no choice but to explore without benefit of wisdom (gropingly,
blindly, stupidly, haphazardly). This is an analytic truth central to all descriptive epistemologies of the natural selection
variety
p.142-143 Darwin did not in the least doubt or undermine this evidence
of design and fit. Rather, he added to it exquisite detail, as in the fit between orchids and the insects that
pollinate them... The application of the model to creative thought and scientific discovery is the central focus of
my paper today... My own contribution has been primarily as a reviewer of these varied literatures... In
so far as I have made a novel contribution, it has primarily been in a stubborn effort to apply the model to visual perception
(1956b, 1966)...
Selection theory
There are three major components to the model:
(1) Variations, a heterogeneity of alterations on existing form.
(2) Systematic selection from among the variations. Systematic elimination.
(3) Retention, preservation (and, in many systems, multiplicative duplication)
of selected variations.
Lacking any one of these, no increase in fit or order will occur.
p.143-144 James Mark Baldwin, due to be rediscovered as the first brilliant
generalizer of the model (his obscure Darwin and the Humanities (1909) is the most efficient introduction) used the
phrase 'selection theory'.
p.144 We must remember the prior understandings that Darwin and
his generation were contending with: the pervasive assumption was that evolution had proceeded by wise changes, by deliberate,
planned, appropriate variations. These foresighted changes were either the work of God or, in the case of Lamarck,
based upon the animal's own wise survey of his needs... In these models, the source of improved fit was in the design of the
variations. Darwin changed all this by making the improved fit a function of selection after the fact. Rather
than to foresighted variations, design is due to the hindsight of a selective system.
p.145 In all scientific explanation, we explain by explanators which will
themselves need explanation.
p.145 In dealing with life and thought, we will need to consider at
very least three general classes of selectors, structural, external and vicarious.
p.146 Vicarious selectors are a class of internal selectors which
are related to adaptation in that they 'represent' external selectors vicariously... While internal-vicarious selection is
profoundly indirect, and potentially biased as a result of approximate structure (oversimplification) and changes in external
environment, it results in much more precise selection than do the vagaries of life-and-death that mediate the external selectors.
Those vicarious selectors that are represented in conscious experience are likewise compellingly 'immediate' at the phenomenal
level, their profound indirectness being totally disguised.
p.147 Two features of the vicarious selectors should be noted. First, each of them is itself a discovery
produced by natural selection, and containing partial or general knowledge about the nature of the world. Second, each of
them embodies in its own operation a variation-and-selective-retention process. Edelman's paper in this volume provides an
excellent detailed analysis of a vicarious variation and vicarious selection process.
p.147 Perhaps the slogan 'variation and selective retention' should suffice.
p.153 the wider the range of variations, the more likely a novel solution. The recommendation
to speculate wildly thus belongs in the guide book to the strategy of discovery, if not in the logic.
p.157 [Souriau] 'For every single idea of a judicious and reasonable nature which offers itself to us, what
hosts of frivolous, bizarre, and absurd ideas cross our minds' (1881, 43).
