Is Science More Than Mapping,
Perhaps, Truth?
A map propels me
forward as I move across life's tarmac spending glucose going out of
style. Mother-of-Pearl buttons on a Pringle sweater, kilt worn for
boxing, gloves looking like bruised brains pickled in solution with
noisy crowds an anodyne to thoughts perturbing nets of neurons,
templates for other sports.
If neuroscience is
not fiction maps are drawn at every level framing physical laws from
neurons firing rhythmic as a child's sobbing but more predictable, so
many factors to compute by brains old as annelids, archives of action
patterns, origin of novelty, pathways constrained, limited in
number—in plasticity—as Weinrich has made clear.
What is Behavior
now that maps have been drawn and whole organisms are partitioned
into their smallest bits as Tetrapods were rived from three to four?
Basal
actions transition to questions of a higher order: What
did fruit taste like in the Cretaceous?
Temperature is
necessary but not sufficient for simple proofs of therian life
history, Mammalogy resisting detours from tradition: No formula more
powerful than life history, no method more accurate than description,
no algorithm more beautiful than the rules of systematics, no elegant
power laws of physiology or Mass.
Mammals as
prototypes of the ideal form: Rodentia over David.
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