Browsing by Author "Crawford, David Robert"

At the end of the nineteenth century Charles Sanders Peirce wrote that "chance begets order" - indeterministic or `chancy' processes can underlie orderly and seemingly deterministic processes. Indeed, Peirce argues that indeterminism is the seed of all order in the natural world. The dissertation explores this theme in three parts. The first chapter reconstructs and elaborates Peirce's objections against necessitarianism, the position that all natural laws are perfectly orderly, deterministic. The second chapter examines and elaborates Ronald Aylmer Fisher's sophisticated analogy between gas models from statistical mechanics and his own population genetics models. The final chapter treats a contemporary indeterministic account of biological fitness and examines several points on which intuitions from deterministic theories misinterpret this quintessentially indeterministic position. The dissertation motivates an indeterministic theory of natural law and reinvigorates its implications for hierarchical models of the natural world.

In this project I expand the current model of hierarchical transition to include transition by individuation in addition to transition by integration and I apply my model of transition by individuation to the evolution and development of the filamentous fungi. I accomplish this in two parts. In the first section, I defend a general Hierarchy Thesis: A differentiated hierarchical whole can arise not only through the integration of individuated parts but also by the individuation of parts within an integrated whole. I elaborate an expanded model of hierarchical transition and discuss the relevance of part-level selection and part-hood regulation for different modes of transition.

In the second section, I defend a Mycology Thesis: The filamentous fungi have evolved a developmental cellularization process to meet ecological and reproductive demands for coenocytic growth in early development and cellularization in later development. I elaborate the origins and evolution of the filamentous fungi and argue that this history provides cases of hierarchical transition via individuation in both phylogeny and ontogeny.

The project provides an expanded evolutionary-developmental framework for hierarchical transition and a framing narrative for the evolutionary development of filamentous fungi, an evolutionarily significant and ecologically ubiquitous group, and has implications for the study of similar organisms outside Fungi and of hierarchical transition in general.