Is Hodges' model a selection machine?

Sober (1984) Child's toy

"It is gratifying to find these biological ideas already enshrined in the ordinary meaning of 'selection for' and 'selection of'. My young son has a toy which takes all the mystery out of this distinction. Plastic discs with circles cut out of them are stacked with spaces in between in a closed cylinder. Top-most disc contains very big holes, and the holes decrease in size as one moves down from disc to disc. At the top of the cylinder are found balls of different sizes. A good shaking will distribute the balls to their respective levels. The smallest balls end up arrayed at the bottom. The next smallest sized balls settle at the next level up, and so on. It happens that the balls of the same size also happen to have the same color. Shaking sends the black balls to the bottom, the pink to the next level up, and so on. The whole cylinder (plus paternal administered shaking) is a selection machine. The device selects for small balls (these are the ones which pass to the bottom). It does not select for black balls (even though these are the ones that pass to the bottom). But when we ask after a shaking what was selected, it is equally correct to say that the black balls were selected and that the small ones were. 'Selection for' focuses on causes; 'selection of' picks out effects." p.50-51.

Sober, E. Force and disposition in evolutionary theory. In. Hookway, C. (ed.) (1984). Minds, Machines And Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp.43-61.

Image adapted from figure 4 within "Is art an adaptation? Prospects for an evolutionary perspective on aesthetic emotions" http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~sousa/artfunction/art.htm

See also: slide 35/47  http://slideplayer.com/slide/9735486/

Northern England CHE group; links and Mind Canvas

The Northern England Centre for Human Ecology interest group are meeting on the 30th June at Sedburgh. I've no exact details as yet, but plan to attend even though the following w/e I'm off to Charleston for the SPT conference. My wife and daughter may come along, we've never been to Sedburgh before, so we could meet up again after the meeting and have tea up there....

Here are a few links including an interesting site called Mind Canvas.

http://www.slideshare.net/

Slide share is really cool and well worth exploring.

http://www.themindcanvas.com/demos/

At the above link you will find the following methods and visualizations you can explore. I like the category sorting example. Now what could we use that for...?

MindCanvas Methods	Research Method	Visualizations
OpenSort	Sort top 20 movies from American Film Institute	Dendogram (to see structure) VocabularyBrowser (for labels) SimilarityBrowser (to see similarity)
TreeSort	TreeSort study of movies & genres	CategoryBrowser
Divide-the-Dollar	Choose Cell phone features	WeightMap (for importance) ClusterBrowser (to see groupings)
FreeListing	Cellphone freelisting study	List Map (for trends)
Sticky	What do you think of Gap design	CommentMap
Clicky	Quick: Find info on this Gap webpage	ClickMap

You can see how Web 2.0 makes it easier to create inviting interfaces and tackle quite complex research based questions. Could Web 2.0 also be a tool to support triangulation? This may still be quite a way off, but imagine what that could do for the research methods debate?

Anyway this reminds me: I've some slides to sort myself! Thanks for visiting.

To follow 'i3' - informatics, inclusion and integrated (and possibly Goethe).