Life Is Random: Biologists now realize that “nature vs. nurture” misses the importance of noise by Cailin O’Connor.
From the post:
Is our behavior determined by genetics, or are we products of our environments? What matters more for the development of living things—internal factors or external ones? Biologists have been hotly debating these questions since shortly after the publication of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Charles Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton was the first to try to understand this interplay between “nature and nurture” (a phrase he coined) by studying the development of twins.
But are nature and nurture the whole story? It seems not. Even identical twins brought up in similar environments won’t really be identical. They won’t have the same fingerprints. They’ll have different freckles and moles. Even complex traits such as intelligence and mental illness often vary between identical twins.
Of course, some of this variation is due to environmental factors. Even when identical twins are raised together, there are thousands of tiny differences in their developmental environments, from their position in the uterus to preschool teachers to junior prom dates.
But there is more to the story. There is a third factor, crucial to development and behavior, that biologists overlooked until just the past few decades: random noise.
In recent years, noise has become an extremely popular research topic in biology. Scientists have found that practically every process in cells is inherently, inescapably noisy. This is a consequence of basic chemistry. When molecules move around, they do so randomly. This means that cellular processes that require certain molecules to be in the right place at the right time depend on the whims of how molecules bump around. (bold emphasis added)
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Is another word for “noise” chaos?
The sort of randomness that impacts our understanding of natural languages? That leads us to use different words for the same thing and the same word for different things?
The next time you see a semantically deterministic system be sure to ask if they have accounted for the impact of noise on the understanding of people using the system. 😉
To be fair, no system can but the pretense that noise doesn’t exist in some semantic environments (think description logic, RDF) is more than a little annoying.
You might want to start following the work of Cailin O’Connor (University of California, Irvine, Logic and Philosophy of Science).
Disclosure: I have always had a weakness for philosophy of science so your mileage may vary. This is real philosophy of science and not the strained crys of “science” you see on most mailing list discussions.
I first saw this in a tweet by John Horgan.