Heredity as Transmission of Information: Butlerian 'Intelligent Design'
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the 1870s, Ewald Hering and Samuel Butler provided what was, for that time, a scientifically coherent foundation for the Lamarckist view that positive adaptations to the environment acquired during an individual's lifetime can be transmitted to the offspring. Observing that heredity was a form of memory (involving stored information), they distinguished what are now known as genotype and phenotype and proposed that cognitive abilities present in the the most elementary organisms might mediate a transmission of acquired adaptations. While compatible with the then-available facts of evolution, this Butlerian version of 'intelligent design' was rendered less credible by subsequent appreciations of the discrete (discontinuous) inheritance of many phenotypic characters (Mendelism) and of the separation of germ line from soma (Weismanism). However, it can now be seen that 21st-century bioinformatics has 19th-century roots.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".