Dennis P Waters
@dpwaters.bsky.social
Author, Behavior & Culture in One Dimension (http://1dimensional.com; Routledge 2021); Visiting Scientist, Rutgers DEENR & CHRB; Founder, GenomeWeb.com, WatersTechnology.com; Lichenologist; Patteeist; fan of @hanner.bsky.social
Speaking at the Howard Pattee Centennial: Claudia Carello is professor emerita at the Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action (CESPA) at the University of Connecticut and, briefly, was a faculty member at Binghamton University. A leader of the Ecological Psychology movement...
Speaking at the Howard Pattee Centennial: Jon Umerez is a philosopher of biology and Professor at the University of the Basque Country. He is a scholar of Pattee's work, having written several influential papers including "Howard Pattee's Theoretical Biology—A Radical Epistemological Stance to...
Speaking at the Howard Pattee Centennial: Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi is a Professor at the University of Warsaw, where she works in the Human Interactivity and Language Lab (@uw_hill). With Pattee, she co-edited Laws, Language, and Life, the main book-length entry point into Pattee's work.
Howard Pattee defining *internal* #description and #construction as the fundamental requirements for #life and other life related qualities such as (autonomous) #agency, #consciousness ... It is interesting that not even von Neumann's UC would qualify. Excerpts from: www.academia.edu/6576779/Rose...
Howard Pattee will celebrate his 100th birthday in October, and a group of his collaborators and former students will mark the occasion with a one-day symposium at Binghamton University on October 15th. Attend in person or virtually.
Howard Pattee will celebrate his 100th birthday in October, and a group of his collaborators and former students will mark the occasion with a one-day symposium at Binghamton University on October 15th. Attend in person or virtually.
If the genome is not a blueprint, what is it? My attempt to unravel this particularly knotty question, in @quantamagazine.bsky.social www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-huma...
Why the Human Genome’s Tangled Physicality May Confound AI | Quanta Magazine
Our genetic heritage is not a blueprint or an algorithm, as many biologists have imagined, but something else entirely.
quantamagazine.org
Howard Pattee has one of the most consequential, comprehensive and well thought approaches in modern evolutionary biology. Unfortunately, many just try to fit bits and pieces of his theories into boxes instead of trying to understand the philosophy behind the science www.academia.edu/127552909/Re...
![Umerez is correct that until recently I was unaware of the new field of
biosemiotics. In fact, until I read Kull's (2007a) and Favareau's (2007) histories I had no idea of how the current discipline of biosemiotics originated or how it had been promoted by Sebeok, Hoffmeyer, Barbieri, and others. As judged by its current literature, Umerez is also justified in concluding, "that Pattee is not properly a biosemiotician." I have no problem being an improper biosemiotician as long as I pass as a proper physicist and evolutionary biologist. Jon continues, "His [Pattee's]
perspective has not been and it is not semiotic. His use of linguistic vocabulary: language, code, symbol, etc, is just in plain terms and not as part of a specialized terminology." That is true. The symbol-matter problem that I consider fundamental is primarily a physics problem. I use conventional terminology from the culture of physics, and I do not coin words. In my papers I try to credit the experts who influenced my thinking, and none of them are semioticians.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:xavm25e7szbrygppzj2hjbln/bafkreigbhuqjytlofcrcvouvzxapwxlh35zh5t4m5vwyzgslcixecz3m4i)
Howard Pattee, one of te giants of Theoretical Biology, will be honoured in his 100 anyversary with a special meeting with outstanding speakers @lmrocha.bsky.social @complexitatcat.bsky.social @yrcss.bsky.social @sfiscience.bsky.social sites.google.com/binghamton.e...
Our series, “How We Came To Know Earth,” is a guide to the modern understanding of fundamental climate science. Vote for it in this year's Webby Awards:
Vote for the best of the internet
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Journey with writer @maxlevy.bsky.social and a team of researchers through the Arctic tundra as they sample some of Earth’s rarest and most restricted fungal species — underground wisps that govern life aboveground. www.quantamagazine.org/an-arctic-ro...
An Arctic Road Trip Brings Vital Underground Networks into View | Quanta Magazine
A vast meshwork of soil-bound fungi governs life aboveground. In Alaska, and at field sites around the world, researchers are racing to understand exactly how, with critical stores of carbon at stake.
quantamagazine.org
Buckle up! psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2026/02/read...
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...
psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com
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?
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 ...
science.org
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!
The New Yorker@newyorker.com · 6mo agoResearchers working with the A.I. system Claude have come to understand that the model’s selfhood, like our own, is a matter of both neurons and narratives. newyorkermag.visitlink.me/kEX1vV
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-...
ISE483/SSIE583: 1 - What is Life? - Luis M. Rocha
casci.binghamton.edu
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...
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
royalsocietypublishing.org
Humans, of course, are the ultimate allosteric devices, almost infinitely reconfigurable.
Philip Ball@philipcball.bsky.social · 8mo agoThe Bohr effect had nothing to do with Niels but was discovered by his physiologist father Christian. Taught now as the first example of allostery in protein action, it touched on deeper questions about the nature of living organisms. My lastest column for CW www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/the-...
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.
Blaise Agüera y Arcas@blaiseaguera.bsky.social · 10mo agoDNA sequences are computer code! It was a pleasure to explore John Von Neumann's theory on life as a form of computation and the lessons we can learn from modern AI systems with Tim Scarfe on Machine Learning Street Talk: bit.ly/4nreMO7 Thank you for the thoughtful questions!
I continue to think the the more interesting question is "how does language acquire children?"
Caroline Rowland@carorowland.bsky.social · last yr.Children are incredible language learning machines. But how do they do it? Our latest paper, just published in TICS, synthesizes decades of evidence to propose four components that must be built into any theory of how children learn language. 1/ www.cell.com/trends/cogni... @mpi-nl.bsky.social
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...
Review From extended phenotype to extended affordance: distributed language at the intersection of Gibson and Dawkins
During NERCCS 2025 I had the opportunity to meet Dennis P. Waters, a transdisciplinary thinker whose PhD was done under the direction of Howard Pattee. With Dennis I had the opportunity to talk about ...
amahury.github.io
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...
Review From extended phenotype to extended affordance: distributed language at the intersection of Gibson and Dawkins
During NERCCS 2025 I had the opportunity to meet Dennis P. Waters, a transdisciplinary thinker whose PhD was done under the direction of Howard Pattee. With Dennis I had the opportunity to talk about ...
amahury.github.io
"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...
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.
quantamagazine.org
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.
