Agree entirely. You should have a look at the (three hour!) T.O.E. (Theory of Everything) podcast with Mr Deacon. It's not as technical, and doesn't have the powerpoint slides, but his thesis is perhaps more resolved. The work of Karl Friston, Michael Levin, and Chris Fields is also really pushing the envelope in terms of explicating those foundational questions pertaining to the creation of life and selves... To explicating _us!_ Have a great day!

Hero

I can't believe that you got all of that from this rambling smorgasbord of ideas. I agree that he is on to something with his ideas, but his presentation lacks focus and direction. I hear that the book is even worse.

@@caricue yes the book is absolutely Unreadable with an unbelievable amount of repetition. I tried reading it. But this lecture has some wicked ideas, although Stephen Pinker in his book Enlightenment Now covers 80 percent of them in his chapter Entro, Evo, Info, and presents them a million times better.

@@qariel8103 Thanks for the heads up on Pinker. I'll check him out. I think evolutionary studies need a shake up, but they have been fighting the creationists for so long that it's an impenetrable fortress by now.

@@caricue I’m curious, what do you mean by evolutionary studies needing a good shakeup? Is there something you have in mind that you think they are getting it wrong perhaps?

@@qariel8103 My impression is that people with novel and squishy ideas, like Terrence Deacon, are tolerated, but not given a seat at the table. By squishy ideas, I mean that his take on life doesn't give you solid, defendable answers. It mostly just opens up more questions, while implying that the consensus is just a moribund paradigm waiting for extinction. Evolutionists had to lock themselves into one defendable position shortly after Darwin to fight off the creationist, but this also prevents any questioning of the orthodoxy. The field will jump on anything solid, like the discovery of DNA, but push aside any new ideas that could help the enemy. Look how long it took them to accept punctuated equilibrium or catastrophism for fear of giving credence to creationists. In this generalist vein, I've come to the conclusion that random mutations are not nearly so random as they are portrayed, and that natural selection is not nearly as selective as the consensus would like it to be, but any questioning of these pillars of evolution is verboten, not only because of the diminishing threat of creationism, but because that is the nature of moribund paradigms. They can't tolerate dissent without threatening the whole edifice.

I found Symbolic Species to be quite readable, nonrepetitive, and eye-opening.

Strongly recommend “Neither Ghost Nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves” by Jeremy Sherman. He’s has worked with Terrence deacon for 20 years and wrote that book to make his ideas more digestible. Deacon wrote the forward lol. It’s a fantastic read.

I read Incomplete Nature twice and I still have no idea what it's about. Maybe this lecture will be more accessible to my feeble monkey brain.

@@carlsagan5189 haha yes

Totally agree

If you are talking about living things evolving, it is a description, not an explanation. Evolution is a natural process of change over time. There are many explanations, but the main one is excess production and differential survival. What word would you prefer to evolution?

@@caricue Many articles in biology say things like “this structure evolved so as to…..”. A). Show me the steps of its evolution. What did it evolve from?! Did it arise de novo? Show me the genetic steps involved. B). It is assumed by biologists that every structure evolved. So it’s redundant. Just say, “this structure confers [this benefit] on this organism”. Fine. That structure does this. See? No redundant stuff about it having evolved. C). Not everyone agrees with the idea that structures evolve “so as to do” anything, believe it or not. The reason is that biologists pretend on one hand that random mutations lead to fitness, and on the other hand, lead to unfitness or error. See Nathan Lents “Human Errors”. At some point, it becomes inherently contradictory and yields no useful information. There are biologists who claim that structures have “emergent properties”, and not “useful functions”. It’s insane, but that’s where the paradigm of random mutations and natural selection leads us. My point is, just describe the biology. Don’t say “this thingy evolved” because we already know that you believe in evolution, that it came from something or some process, that you can’t elucidate the steps from A to Z in the first place, because nobody can.

@@sliglusamelius8578 I agree that any talk of "this evolved for something" is ridiculous, but I think it is mostly laziness that causes scientists to use this shorthand. Honestly, if you really want to be a purest, saying useful functions is not quite right. There is only excess production and differential survival. Useful is in the eye of the beholder. I personally hate the term "natural selection" since there is no selector and no criteria for selection. Once again, there is only survival and reproduction. As I said above, evolution is a descriptor, not an explanation, so there is no obligation to be able to demonstrate every step in the process. We can see from fossils that creatures were different in the past, so we describe this observation as evolution since we don't have any reason to believe that there were radically different creatures popping up spontaneously, even if the fossil records incompleteness might sometimes seem to support this. Do you have some other idea how to explain the observation that organisms change over time? Or do you have a whole different idea about the presence of trilobites and dinosaurs in geologic strata?

@@caricue The fossil record does not prove phylogenetic relationships. Fossils prove nothing as far as the entire phylogenetic tree of life paradigm. Teleological considerations are the only way to understand biological systems. Structure and function are basic to understanding biology. If you can’t see that wings are “for flying”, or that the immune system is to prevent infection, I can’t help you.