VMartin
Posts: 525 Joined: Nov. 2006
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Quote (Alan Fox @ Mar. 23 2008,12:12) | Quote | For those who are interested in an independent view on the whole issue of mimicry and neodarwinism as well, some of Komarek's views can be found here pdf. |
This paper is a work of history. I can find no evidence of research into the possible mechanisms of mimicry in it. "Komarek' views" shed no light on any alternative explanation of mimicry, unless I have missed something. Perhaps you can pick out something? |
I suspect you of very superficial reading the material. Komarek for instance wrote:
Quote | Day-active birds, as is well known, attack owls with an almost passionate hatred /so called mobbing/, even though most of them do not constitute a direct danger for the birds. On the other hand, the birds usually cannot attack the owls with any great success. In spite of all neo-Darwinian attempts at interpretation of this phenomenon /e.g. Curio, 1978/ it seems, that „irrational“ emotions, something like archetypal hatred between day birds and night birds, play an important role. This is seen even clearer in occasionally published papers about occurrences of the mobbing of bats by small day birds /Campbell, 1973, Cundale et al., 1988, Strong & Cuffe, 1985/ (this author observed this as well) - Here neither predation nor competition can play even the slightest role, the only remaining explanation is the deep archetypal hatred for non-birds, which are too similar not to attract attention and at the same time too different to be accepted as „regular“ birds.).
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I think that "archetypal hatred between day birds and night birds" is something that is no way in accord with neodarwinian mantras.
Quote | It is interesting that nobody from the Continental school attempted to interpret cryptic phenomena using Jung’s and von Pauli’s (Jung, 1952) principle of synchronicity, or rather in this case „syntopicity“, for which it would be an almost ideal subject (synchronicity is understood by Jung and von Pauli to be the cumulation of phenomena, which require joint interpretation - in this case optical phenomena ) in space and time (even various other mimetic phenomena would fit into this thought system very well). It is important to know that Jung’s and von Pauli’s (and also Kammerer’s, 1919) principle of synchronicity goes against the whole range of modern science with its principle of causality... . . . then mimetic paralle lism of the external form would remind us of inter-psychic connections between people who are close to one another, which causes for example the induction of psychic symptoms in otherwise healthy individuals by their sick relations (the well known phenomena folie deux). Considering the fact that modern science does not operate with the term psýché in this way, the interpretation of mimetic phenomena in this way lies outside its scope of interest, but in any case this analogy seems to be quite useful
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Interesting is also the chapter "Darwinism and sociomorphic modeling". As you can see some biologists from Uni Prague have pretty relaxed stance towards the mainstream neo-darwinism.
-------------- I could not answer, but should maintain my ground.-
Charles Darwin
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