Dennis P Waters

Resolutions passed by county commission on 2/24. You can download 'em.

Block 2701, lots 2, 6, 32.02, 85-90

This is "Aldo Leopold's Big Woods" behind the campus. It will be preserved open space adjacent to the township's Loveless Preserve. It includes an option on an easement to facilitate the Johnson Trolley Trail including the proposed bike/ped bridge across 295.

Reading Group - Gibson (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception Rob, Marianne, and I had so much fun with the Turvey (2019) reading group that we decided to keep going, and we decided to return to the so...

Buckle up!

psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2026/02/read...

Home of the ever so appealing Cartlidge Meats....

"Therefore there must be two states of this copolymer; perhaps a straight chain which serves as a memory, and a folded conformation which can selectively interact with the environment.” 2/2

Interesting to note that Howard Pattee anticipated the ribozyme from first principles in 1966: "“The memory and transcription functions must occur at different times; that is, the sequence of copolymers cannot act as a degenerate memory and a non-degenerate selective structure at the same time." 1/2

A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself and its complementary strand The emergence of a chemical system capable of self-replication and evolution is a critical event in the origin of life. RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but their large size and structural ...

A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself and its complementary strand | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... - this looks super cool, but does it really relate to the origin of life?

Imagine! I mean, imagine how hard it is for a quadratic equation to understand itself! Imagine how hard it is for that statement to have any meaning whatsoever!

I like thinking of the gene regulatory network as an organ - a little chemical brain. And it seems reasonable to think of the adaptive responsiveness of the cell as reflecting a kind of cognition.

Updated Chapter 1 of my lectures notes for the Evolutionary Systems course.
casci.binghamton.edu/academics/i-...

And it will mark the 100th birthday of Howard Pattee!

How Dad’s Fitness May Be Packaged and Passed Down in Sperm RNA | Quanta Magazine Research into how a father’s choices — such as diet, exercise, stress, nicotine use — may transfer traits to his children has become impossible to ignore.

What child is this? Look to the father.

Closing the loop: how semantic closure enables open-ended evolution? Abstract. This study explores the evolutionary emergence of semantic closure—the self-referential mechanism through which symbols actively construct and in

New paper led by @amahury.bsky.social published in JRS Interface:
"Closing the loop: how semantic closure enables open-ended evolution?"
royalsocietypublishing.org/rsif/article...

Urban lichens as an emerging model for urban evolution Click on the article title to read more.

bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

The Year in Biology | Quanta Magazine Take a jaunt through a jungle of strange neurons underlying your sense of touch, hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution and the dense neural networks of brains and AIs.

www.quantamagazine.org/the-year-in-...

Behavior and Culture in One Dimension (Resources for Ecological Psychology Series) Amazon.com: Behavior and Culture in One Dimension (Resources for Ecological Psychology Series): 9780367703295: Waters, Dennis: Books

The gift that keeps on giving....
www.amazon.com/Behavior-Dim...

By "memory" you mean long-term perception?

Humans, of course, are the ultimate allosteric devices, almost infinitely reconfigurable.

It appears that Rider used the prospective WCC sale funds as collateral for loans that funded operating deficits. The money they got from the sale repaid those loans. So there's nothing left.

I doubt von Neumann would agree that DNA sequences are computer code. As he wrote in TSRA, "by axiomatizing automata in this manner, one has thrown half of the problem out of the window, and it may be the more important half." It's the stuff that can't be formalized that's interesting.

I continue to think the the more interesting question is "how does language acquire children?"

Thanks to #ComplexityCat (@amahury.bsky.social‬) for dredging up this old paper and providing thoughtful comments. I should point out that this paper forms the basis of chapter 4 ('The Grammar of Extension') in my book Behavior and Culture in One Dimension. amahury.github.io/posts/review...

Today #complexitycat reviews an article by @dpwaters.bsky.social, who has proposed a synthesis between Dawkins' extended phenotype and Gibson's theory of affordances. What's the next step towards a synthesis between physical biosemiotics and ecological psychology?👇🐈‍⬛
amahury.github.io/posts/review...

AI Is Nothing Like a Brain, and That’s OK | Quanta Magazine The brain’s astounding cellular diversity and networked complexity could show how to make AI better.

"A maggot knows things about the outside world in a way that no computer does." Read @yaseminsaplakoglu.bsky.social fun + fascinating feature: AI Is Nothing Like a Brain, and That’s OK www.quantamagazine.org/ai-is-nothin...

Going thru some old journals and found this amazing TOC. Pattee, Rosen, Richerson & Boyd, Goodwin, Tullock....all in one place. Journal of Social & Biological Structures 1:2 (April 1978). Pretty sure this is the first Pattee paper I read.

How do you simulate a brain in any detail with a simple digital (or even quantum) computer? "Making a connection" in the brain is not just "information processing." It's physical. There is no workable "software" driving the mind. It is the "hardware" that is messy and unique, and constantly changing

However, in the biological world, an awful lot of information is transmitted via sequences.

RNA xkcd.com/3056

To begin to grasp pleiotropy one only needs a child with Fragile X Syndrome.