Social structure as genetic encoding

[David Bovill]

On 17 January 2013 02:20, Michael Allan <mike at zelea.com> wrote:

>
> I discovered something strange and interesting.  Recall that Votorola
> is recombinant text + transitive voting.  In order to keep it simple,
> I was forced to drop the genetic encoding of the texts.  All I kept
> was the population structure and text transfers, as explained here:
>
> http://lists.thataway.org/scripts/wa-THATAWAY.exe?A2=ind0906E&L=NCDD-DISCUSSION&F=&S=&P=83
>

I remember talking about this a few years back, and I still don't get what
the problem implementing what you describe as recombinant text is. As ever
you have given an important and central concept that many people over the
years have struggled with, a catchy and simple title - but since 2005 we
have had several systems that actually implement all the features you
describe for recombinant text - a p2p population of text fragment variants
in which attribution to each fragment is carried and traceable across the
variations - its called distributed version control (DVCS) - or the de
facto standard - git.

I've always proposed using a DVCS combined with p2p messaging as the basic
infrastructure for distributed LD - a server based implementation is a
convenience, but structuring the core concepts and data model around a
distributed set of apps (mobile, desktop and server based) - has a number
of additional benefits.

I can't go into details here (this is just a napkin sketch), but I
> want to say that, technically, this is a genetic structure.
>

Explore more? I'm looking at the moment to do a phD in this sort of area -
so biological / morphological / genetic modelling with parallels to
political organisation - so any thoughts we can develop here could help
frame the proposal. In an earlier life I studies the evolutionary genetics
of the immune system. This time I'm thinking more along the lines of the
morphology of tissue structures, or modelling the structure of tissues
(probably the immune system) using topological concepts rather than direct
spatial modelling. The immune system is interesting because of it's a
natural fit with agent theory (and therefore Latour), and also because the
genetics are unusual (the generation of diversity), and would seem to lend
themselves to a topological analysis of interactions (DAG).
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