Genetic cybernetic
So I took Dawkins' own advice, and read The Extended Phenotype.
What struck me afterwards was that the influence from artificial-intelligence types is obvious enough that he could almost have called it animal cybernetics. I mean, apart from the bit where everyone would make horrible jokes about bionic badgers
and things.
This is perhaps to be expected from the analogy of parasites pulling levers
to manipulate their hosts: after all, the word "cybernetics" comes from concepts of piloting. The difference between cybernetics and the extended phenotype would perhaps be that the extended phenotype is concerned with drawing the shortest lines between genes and behavior. The feedback
from behavior to genes is through differential survival, so the feedback loop wouldn't be tight enough, nor the causality tightly enough connected, that we can talk about cybernetic systems proper.
...or maybe we can, if we talk about cybernetic systems on the level of an entire genome and up. Apparently there's something called Schmalhausen's cybernetic approach
.
He was the first to propose an evolutionary scenario of interaction of the main components of biosphere, from the subcellular level to the biocoenotic one. Evolution and speciation are considered in this scenario as a cybernetic cycle of regulated processes with direct and feed back
(I'm guessing that last bit would be direction and feedback.)
There's also this, which sounds intriguing, and this which I haven't the faintest idea what is but it sounds totally sci-fi.
eg., biocybernetics seems to be the study of regulatory processes within the organism.
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