Being and nothingness.Being and nothingness noth·ing·ness n. 1. The condition or quality of being nothing; nonexistence. 2. Empty space; a void. 3. Lack of consequence; insignificance. 4. Something inconsequential or insignificant. How many animals aren't there, and what don't they look like? Comparative zoologists, paleontologists and a chemist convened last week to ponder a conundrum conundrum A problem with no satisfactory solution; a dilemma set by Einstein: Did God have a choice in creation? Or, to put it in evolutionary terms, does natural selection work on randomly occurring forms, or is the pattern-generating system itself limited? Monsters "are a very good example of the internal rules of morphology,' says Pere père n. 1. Used after a man's surname to distinguish a father from a son: Dumas père primarily wrote novels, while dramas occupied Dumas fils. 2. Alberch of Harvard University Harvard University, mainly at Cambridge, Mass., including Harvard College, the oldest American college. Harvard College Harvard College, originally for men, was founded in 1636 with a grant from the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. . Two-headed monsters, for instance, occur (if rarely) in many species; in a random system, three-headed ones should be as likely, says Alberch, but "you never find them.' The relative profusion of the two-headed and the dearth of the three-headed variety reflect not only limits at the level of gene or organism, he says, but also constraints on the types of possible patterns. To R. D. K. Thomas of Franklin and Marshall College Franklin and Marshall College, at Lancaster, Pa.; United Church of Christ (Evangelical-Reformed); coeducational; est. 1787 as Franklin College, reorganized 1853 when it merged with Marshall College (chartered 1836). in Lancaster, Pa., evolutionary convergences also indicate the limits of the possible. To investigate structural possibilities and constraints, Thomas and W.-E. Reif of West Germany's Tubingen University defined a "skeleton space' made up of seven structural variables such as internal or external skeleton and rigid or flexible materials. Once they eliminated nonsensical combinations, the number of design combinations was reduced to fewer than 1,000. Of those, Thomas says Thomas Say (June 27, 1787 – October 10, 1834) was an American naturalist, entomologist, malacologist and carcinologist. He was a taxonomist and is often considered to be the founder of descriptive entomology in the United States and one of the founding fathers of the , more than half are abundantly represented and fewer than one-third are rare. This suggests, Thomas says, that "the number of shapes is not only finite, but has been nearly fully exploited.' |
|
||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion