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Function follows form. No animal's shape is arbitrary. It's the result of eons of evolution and generally results in morphology quite unlike inanimate objects.

Function follows form. No animal's shape is arbitrary. It's the result of eons of evolution and generally results in morphology quite unlike inanimate objects. When we see a sculpture of something alive - at least a representational one - we recognize it as the shape of something that was (or could be) alive. There's no confusion that it's indirect evidence of life - whoever made it.

roenxi 3y ago
No boulder's shape is arbitrary either. Everything has its form for some reason. Something like a field of basalt columns sits the junction. They look like a living thing carved them, but that isn't what causes them.
gilleain 3y ago
Oddly, the original phrase is "Form follows function", although it was in the context of (human) architecture - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_follows_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_follows_function There is a school of though that says that evolution acts on forms that arise through natural processes. One of the ideas Philip Ball is interested in is how the forms created through natural processes (say, a cloud) differs from those formed partly by evolution (say, a tree). He has a series of three short books on this - "Nature's Patterns, a Tapestry in Three Parts": "Shapes", "Flow", "Branches".
fluoridation 3y ago
>No animal's shape is arbitrary. It's the result of eons of evolution and generally results in morphology quite unlike inanimate objects. No, the same is true of non-living things. The shape of a rock is not arbitrary. At any given time, it's the only shape it could have when you take into consideration all the trajectories of all particles since the Big Bang. What makes the trajectories of particles of living things different from those of the particles of non-living things? >When we see a sculpture of something alive - at least a representational one - we recognize it as the shape of something that was (or could be) alive. There's no confusion that it's indirect evidence of life - whoever made it. This is just begging the question. It presupposes both a clear morphological delineation between living and non-living and that supposed results of purely physical processes are not in fact works of art by sufficiently weird aliens. Also, necessarily life must have started at some point from non-living materials, so how is the shape a rock takes when it's struck by another rock falling on it fundamentally different from, say, a particular sequence of base pairs in your genome? The reason you can tell a sculpture is a sculpture is that it conforms to a particular cultural language that you understand. For example, it might reference something you know, such as a particular animal. If you had no idea what animals look like and you saw a sculpture of a dog and a dead pigeon, would you be able to tell which one used to be alive? Or if you saw a living cockroach and a robot vacuum, would you be able to tell which one is alive?
- mannykannot 3y ago
  > If you had no idea what animals look like and you saw a sculpture of a dog and a dead pigeon, would you be able to tell which one used to be alive? Or if you saw a living cockroach and a robot vacuum, would you be able to tell which one is alive? Well, yes, and if you took away everything we know about the things in the world, we would not know anything about those things!
  - fluoridation 3y ago
    The GP used the fact that we tell apart sculptures from rocks as a key point in their argument. The fact that removing knowledge eliminates the ability to tell them apart means that there's nothing intrinsic that we're observing when we say that something is a sculpture. There's nothing about the object itself that makes it a sculpture; it's a sculpture to the observer because it looks like what they understand sculptures look like. If the observer thought sculptures look like something different they would say the object is not a sculpture, even when nothing about the object changed.
    - mannykannot 3y ago
      What we have here are competing over-generalizations. There are many sculpture-like artifacts from prehistoric sites. In most cases, we have no proof that they are sculptures, just strong evidence, and there's a long tail of increasingly vaguely sculpture-like forms where no strong conclusions should be drawn. The existence of this tail does not invalidate the strong conclusions about the clearly artificial sculptures, and the analogous conclusion follows for RagnarD's main point about the fossil record.
      - fluoridation 3y ago
        But, again, you are determining whether something is a sculpture or not based on your knowledge of what sculptures look like and/or where the object in question is when you find it. Without that knowledge you are not able to make that determination. Without that knowledge you can only make much more basic statements, such as tell which one is heavier or larger, or what they're each made of. That's because those properties are intrinsic to the objects, unlike whether they're sculptures. You can't change those properties without changing something fundamental about the object.
trimethylpurine 3y ago
I think it's completely subjective, because it depends what degree of specificity you are edging on. In one extreme, plenty of people are convinced they see animal and even human like figures in the Martian landscape photos. On the other extreme, under a microscope, no two rocks look exactly alike, let alone like humans. That subjectivity of scope, I think, clouds our ability to grasp the complexity of the subject, and our ability to discuss it from an objective perspective.
- mannykannot 3y ago
  The fossil record is not, as you put it, "completely subjective." There are some cases where the evidence is insufficient for a determination to be made, but that does not justify your sweeping generalization.

roenxi 3y ago

No boulder's shape is arbitrary either. Everything has its form for some reason. Something like a field of basalt columns sits the junction. They look like a living thing carved them, but that isn't what causes them.

gilleain 3y ago

Oddly, the original phrase is "Form follows function", although it was in the context of (human) architecture - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_follows_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_follows_function There is a school of though that says that evolution acts on forms that arise through natural processes. One of the ideas Philip Ball is interested in is how the forms created through natural processes (say, a cloud) differs from those formed partly by evolution (say, a tree). He has a series of three short books on this - "Nature's Patterns, a Tapestry in Three Parts": "Shapes", "Flow", "Branches".

fluoridation 3y ago

>No animal's shape is arbitrary. It's the result of eons of evolution and generally results in morphology quite unlike inanimate objects. No, the same is true of non-living things. The shape of a rock is not arbitrary. At any given time, it's the only shape it could have when you take into consideration all the trajectories of all particles since the Big Bang. What makes the trajectories of particles of living things different from those of the particles of non-living things? >When we see a sculpture of something alive - at least a representational one - we recognize it as the shape of something that was (or could be) alive. There's no confusion that it's indirect evidence of life - whoever made it. This is just begging the question. It presupposes both a clear morphological delineation between living and non-living and that supposed results of purely physical processes are not in fact works of art by sufficiently weird aliens. Also, necessarily life must have started at some point from non-living materials, so how is the shape a rock takes when it's struck by another rock falling on it fundamentally different from, say, a particular sequence of base pairs in your genome? The reason you can tell a sculpture is a sculpture is that it conforms to a particular cultural language that you understand. For example, it might reference something you know, such as a particular animal. If you had no idea what animals look like and you saw a sculpture of a dog and a dead pigeon, would you be able to tell which one used to be alive? Or if you saw a living cockroach and a robot vacuum, would you be able to tell which one is alive?

mannykannot 3y ago
> If you had no idea what animals look like and you saw a sculpture of a dog and a dead pigeon, would you be able to tell which one used to be alive? Or if you saw a living cockroach and a robot vacuum, would you be able to tell which one is alive? Well, yes, and if you took away everything we know about the things in the world, we would not know anything about those things!
- fluoridation 3y ago
  The GP used the fact that we tell apart sculptures from rocks as a key point in their argument. The fact that removing knowledge eliminates the ability to tell them apart means that there's nothing intrinsic that we're observing when we say that something is a sculpture. There's nothing about the object itself that makes it a sculpture; it's a sculpture to the observer because it looks like what they understand sculptures look like. If the observer thought sculptures look like something different they would say the object is not a sculpture, even when nothing about the object changed.
  - mannykannot 3y ago
    What we have here are competing over-generalizations. There are many sculpture-like artifacts from prehistoric sites. In most cases, we have no proof that they are sculptures, just strong evidence, and there's a long tail of increasingly vaguely sculpture-like forms where no strong conclusions should be drawn. The existence of this tail does not invalidate the strong conclusions about the clearly artificial sculptures, and the analogous conclusion follows for RagnarD's main point about the fossil record.
    - fluoridation 3y ago
      But, again, you are determining whether something is a sculpture or not based on your knowledge of what sculptures look like and/or where the object in question is when you find it. Without that knowledge you are not able to make that determination. Without that knowledge you can only make much more basic statements, such as tell which one is heavier or larger, or what they're each made of. That's because those properties are intrinsic to the objects, unlike whether they're sculptures. You can't change those properties without changing something fundamental about the object.

trimethylpurine 3y ago

I think it's completely subjective, because it depends what degree of specificity you are edging on. In one extreme, plenty of people are convinced they see animal and even human like figures in the Martian landscape photos. On the other extreme, under a microscope, no two rocks look exactly alike, let alone like humans. That subjectivity of scope, I think, clouds our ability to grasp the complexity of the subject, and our ability to discuss it from an objective perspective.

mannykannot 3y ago
The fossil record is not, as you put it, "completely subjective." There are some cases where the evidence is insufficient for a determination to be made, but that does not justify your sweeping generalization.