Tool use can affect morphological traits by reducing selection pressure, e.g. corrective vision.
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That’s a fair point, and I agree that DNA and individual-level selection/choice provide primary foundation for ecosystem recovery and form. Fabric describes how patterns of organization persist and propagate across scales, from genes to behaviors to community structures to biogeochemical cycles.
When I use “memory,” it’s certainly not metaphysical. It’s a precise term for how prior configurations constrain and enable future ones. Your boreal forest example is perfect: yes, species recolonize because their DNA encodes adaptive traits. But which species arrive first, where they establish, and how quickly the system recovers depends on:
- Soil microbiome composition
- Seed bank distribution
- Root system architecture
- Hydrological patterns
- Landscape topology
These aren’t encoded in DNA. they’re system-level information stored in physical substrate, community relationships, even behaviors, and spatial structure. Remove old-growth soil and replace with sterile substrate, what happens? Mt. St. Helens example above.
Why This Reframing Matters Beyond Ecology:
Standard medicine: Disease = broken parts; fix the parts.
Fabric/systems view: Health = coherence across scales.
Examples: Chronic pain isn’t just damaged tissue. It’s nervous system memory. The body “remembers” pain patterns even after injury resolves. This is literally M_latent (pain memory) requiring agency (conscious practice) to shift to M_active (normal sensation). Or take immune dysfunction: Gut microbiome (ecosystem memory) takes years to fully restore.
Mental Health: Standard: Depression = serotonin deficiency; add SSRIs.
Fabric/systems view: Mental health = coherence threading through neurotransmitters, thought patterns, relationships, meaning-making, embodied experience. Trauma therapy (EMDR, somatic experiencing) works by accessing stored traumatic memory (M_latent) and allowing the nervous system to reprocess it (M_latent → M_active transformation through agency). You thread new coherence through the system.
Using the proper language, i.e., “Memory,” helps beyond ecology. It bridges domains. Ecologists, immunologists, neuroscientists, and trauma therapists are all describing the same phenomenon: systems store information in their structure, and that stored information shapes future behavior. Calling it “memory” lets us apply insights across fields:
Disturbance ecology informs medical understanding of beneficial stressors (hormesis, fasting, cold exposure). I do cold plunges are mega-hikes regularly. Makes me feel wonderfully for weeks.
You’re right that DNA matters. The Fabric framework simply adds depth and scope.
“information stored in a physical substrate”. But this just seems to be fancy semantics restating the fact that natural selection occurs as a result of organisms (with their phenotypes encoded by DNA) interacting with the physical environment. There doesn’t seem to be a fundamentally new concept here that I can see and no need to appeal to a ‘memory”.
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Yes, tool use can serve as a selective pressure. However, a blacksmith is not going to have children with a large right arm simply because the blacksmith swung a hammer for all those years. IOW, tool use doesn’t lead to acquired traits like those described by Lamarck. Human groups who live next to water for 20 years aren’t going to all give birth to a generation of humans with flippers, as another example.
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Wiki is fine. It reflects the minimal, conservative consilience that the unit of gene selection is the organism. That we know.
Your critique assumes “organism DNA + environment = natural selection explains everything.” But consider what the neo-Darwinian framework cannot easily explain: Monarch butterfly migration.
- Individual monarchs live 2-8 weeks
- 3k-mile migration takes 3-4 generations
- No single butterfly completes the entire journey
- Population navigates to exact Mexican mountaintops annually
- Wowsers!
What DNA could encode:
- Sun compass orientation
- Magnetic sensing
- Flight muscle physiology
- Behaviors
What DNA Cannot Encode:
- Specific route (varies by starting location)
- Stopover timing (adjusted yearly for weather)
- Destination coordinates (shift slightly over decades)
- When to stop migrating and breed vs continue flying
The “selection” explanation fails: Dead butterflies can’t pass on “correct route” genes. Yet the system navigates successfully despite complete generational switcheroo.
Fabric Explanation: Distributed Memory
Memory is distributed across:
- Behavioral (Social learning from other butterflies in flight)
- Landscape (Mountain ridges, river valleys guide navigation)
- Temporal (Triggers in successive generations)
- Population (Swarm intelligence emerges from individual rules)
Individual butterflies choose flight direction moment-to-moment; landscape features constrain possible routes; weather patterns activate different stopover strategies; population dynamics coordinate timing.
Neo-Darwinian: Information lives in DNA, environment filters.
Fabric: Information lives in system architecture (DNA, behavior, landscape, community, timing) and “agency at multiple scales actively threads coherence.” This isn’t “fancy restating.” It’s acknowledging that evolution operates through distributed memory and multi-scale agency, not just DNA + environmental filter.
Fabric provides a comprehensive framework for understanding evolution across scales, from subatomic particles to galaxies. The fundamental insight is that coherence-threading processes operate similarly at every scale, just with different manifestations. The Fabric equations serve as a universal proxy mathematics describing how systems: activate latent potential, optimize toward geometric efficiency, and develop through memory recrystallization.
Galaxies converge on spiral structures. Giraffes develop similar morphologies across independent lineages. Particle interactions follow resonance patterns.
These aren’t coincidences, but manifestations of the same underlying coherence-optimization principles. The fabric equations reveal a fundamental process of the universe.
Once we truly understand ecology properly, we can then apply it to medicine and even mental health. The connections are profound because the ecology of the mind is a space were we can all use some help. The implications are truly revolutionary and beautiful.
Even so, don’t we long for Jesus? “For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.” Romans 8:19
[edit for clarity]
Hi,
But if all individuals in a population do not benefit by using the exact same migration route, the exact same stopover coordinates, the exact same migration timing etc., (and it is clear that monarchs do not) why does one expect that the organism’s DNA should encode for such things in the first place? So the fact that monarch DNA does not encode one particular route and one fixed timing is not evidence that DNA can’t theoretically encode for such behaviours but simply because such behaviour has not been selected for in Monarchs in the the past. No big surprise there….
In sum, Monarchs are not an example of where “DNA coding of behaviour fails”. Non-biologists often get confused because they assume that “genetically encoded behaviour” must result in rigid, fixed and instinctual behaviours. But the ability to learn, and to adjust behaviour in real time to environmental conditions and cues, called “behavioural plasticity” is also encoded in the DNA. The degree of plasticity that an organism shows for a trait can also be acted on by natural selection and is encoded in the genome. In monarchs, this includes very complex (genetically coded) abilities to use sun compasses, magnetic fields, and circadian clocks. A fascinating overview of Monarch migration, and the morphology used to achieve it, is here (again, no “memory” other than the info contained in DNA is required).
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I’m getting a sense of deja vu with Rupert Sheldrake’s “Morphic resonance” idea.
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A clearer example of what I’m describing might be the slime mold Physarum polycephalum. It has no nervous system, yet it “remembers” past conditions, solves mazes, and anticipates periodic stress. Laboratory studies show it can retrace efficient nutrient routes it previously discovered, and even merge with other individuals to share this learned information. Critics often note that such behaviors can be explained by local biochemical feedback loops (ion fluxes, oscillating contraction waves, and nutrient gradients)and that’s true. But those very feedbacks are forms of embodied memory: physical traces that encode prior states in the system’s morphology and environment.
In that sense, Physarum demonstrates how memory can exist across multiple substrates: biochemical (ion and cytoskeletal patterns), behavioral (path reinforcement), and environmental (slime trails that guide future movement). The organism’s intelligence arises not from a centralized controller, but from threaded coherence among these interacting layers.
Similarly, a monarch population migrating across continents behaves like a macro-scale slime mold: no single individual carries the full map, yet coherence emerges through distributed cues, shared environmental features, and generational reinforcement. Fabric simply makes this principle explicit, that adaptation and navigation can arise from spatially extended, multi-scale memory systems, rather than being confined to genetic encoding alone.
And interestingly, it was a brilliant field biologist friend of mine who explained this to me 25+ years ago.
Human scientific communities, much like biological populations, often exhibit what could be called intellectual swarming. Ideas propagate along well-established pathways: conceptual routes that have historically proven “fit” within existing paradigms. This is an efficient strategy for cumulative progress, but it can also constrain exploration when the system becomes dynamically stable around familiar attractors. From a Fabric perspective, this represents a form of epistemic threading, where collective cognition follows gradients of coherence shaped by shared memory, institutional structure, and disciplinary resonance. Just as monarch butterflies repeatedly navigate toward ancestral migratory corridors, scientists navigate toward explanatory frameworks that have been evolutionarily stable within the intellectual ecosystem.
Yet outside those flight paths may lie other valid, even perhaps more precise, proxies for reality. Identifying them requires temporary de-threading (forgetting): relaxing the dominant coherence so that latent conceptual potentials can recrystallize into new explanatory forms. This is potentially frightful to some. This process mirrors what occurs in natural systems when ecological or energetic disturbances reopen dormant pathways of adaptation. In that sense, theoretical innovation, like biological evolution, depends not only on selection within existing structures, but on the capacity of the collective to rediscover and activate its deeper latent memory.
Presently working on the Threaded Mind Fabric proxy. Will provide soon for strong debate. Warning: this one goes deep into the psyche.
That ability is made possible by their DNA.
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The theory of evolution fits the data.
That’s word salad. It doesn’t mean anything.
If you want to be understood you are going to have to use something other than your private vocabulary.
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Slime molds are indeed a very interesting example of how individuals (cells) can live independently for part of their life and then can come together and act as an aggregate of individuals. But the aggregate (group) is composed of individuals with DNA that encode behaviours of the individuals and how they related to others in the group (and the growth and movement of the aggregate is then an outcome of individuals relating to their environment.)
It is true that slime molds don’t have neurons but recent research has uncovered that their ability for simple habituation “learning and memory retention” is a result of uptake of chemicals. This ability to use chemicals, and to communicate physical states to other cells in the aggregate would be encoded in the DNA of the individual cells themselves. So, again, no need to postulate a non-physical, non-embodied “fabric of memory” if conventional natural selection on DNA of individuals can explain the behaviour just fine.
for the physical chemistry of this see:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2018.0368
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This looks to be a good review article:
As a free-living organism, the plasmodium is equipped with a range of surface receptors and internal mechanisms for sensing and responding to the world around it. One of the key response mechanisms, underpinning the majority of cognitive, locomotive and homeostatic functions, is oscillation (Durham and Ridgway 1976). The plasmodium can be considered a connected mass of multitudes of tiny oscillating units, capable of expanding and contracting in response to local sensory stimuli via actin-myosin interactions—the same contractile mechanism in human muscle tissue. When cell surface receptors detect attractants such as food and moisture, oscillation frequency increases in the local area, which decreases cell surface tension, making the plasmodium more fluid (Ueda et al. 1980). This causes protoplasm to flow towards the stimulus area, and directs the movement of the entire cell. Repellents such as light and certain salts induce the opposite response, increasing the local stiffness of the cell and restricting further flow into the area.
Thoughts from the forest floor: a review of cognition in the slime mould Physarum polycephalum - PMC
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Word salad. Now I think a few olives and raisins are good together. Goat’s cheese?
Let me rewrite: From a Fabric perspective, this is like “idea threading,” where a group’s thinking naturally follows familiar paths shaped by shared knowledge, the way institutions are organized, and the habits develop.
One thing my biologist friend taught me is about migrations. He suggested, and I agree, that the landscape itself can hold memory, much like neurons do. A migrating hummingbird’s brain may be the size of a pea, but its capabilities are far larger than that. The key insight is that individuals have boundaries, yet those boundaries are more fluid than we often assume. In many ways, I am more than the sum of my parts.
In fact, why not get poetic. Here’s a poem I wrote about the fact that we are more than the sum of our parts, and less than. Really, this encapsulates what I’m saying about evolution in poem.
=======
Winter Dies
Winter dies and my black walnut traces over the morning light with ink,
Scribbling its long life history across the sky.
Lacking leaves, vacant and void,
Is it not the sum of all its parts,
Yet bound to earth, to air, and to spring-yet-come?
Soon, and very soon,
Buds and blossoms,
Green and greatness,
Quiet explosion upon the heavens
Will come.
What dark tracery am I upon the heavens and earth?
Which parts of the sum am I forgetting?
What “I am” am I?
Can I choose from any grocery aisle, top or bottom?
Let’s see.
Am I the one who is sickly,
Ugly,
Angry,
Crazy,
Abused,
Broken,
Foolish,
Addicted,
Unlovable,
The one who people ignore?
Why didn’t you just tell me to stay away from aisle 13?
Am I the one who comes at lightning speed when others are attacked?
Am I gorgeous, gay, grandiose, the grandstander?
Shall I ask at the counter for a pack of ‘the one who smokes on the porch’?
When did I stop being nervous, anxious, and weird?
When did I choose to be a frequent visitor to aisle 5?
Check-out Lady, please scan a small box of
Genius,
Gentile,
Judicious,
Gypsy,
And please return the jerk to aisle 15.
My walnut’s cupboard holds a storehouse well-disguised:
Night roost,
Spider webs,
Warbler’s perch,
Desk,
Cabinet,
Lazy place for us?
Long before me, water cracked my walnut’s inky hull.
The sun drew my walnut out of itself
higher,
Taller,
bolder,
To flex in the strong, wild winds.
What bulb-lined vanity mirror drew me from my hull?
Him, her, Ad Industry, Sum of All Fears,
Scrolling without any destination?
Dad, Mom, DNA?
To no fault of its own, my walnut stays put, bulging at the lawn,
Trapped by power lines and asphalt.
To what “I am” am I bound?
Don’t pass me any new chains.
Undress me,
De-skin me,
Break me,
“Tear down that wall,”
Depoliticize me,
Lose and loose my religion.
I am more than the sum of all my parts,
And less than.
Lick me clean, Aslan. My dragonskin itches terribly.
To no fault of their own, they come, every few years.
Men, with tall cherry pickers and chainsaws rip a bite out of my walnut, and me,
To keep the power on. Progress. Yup.
Prune me against any new trend,
Fad,
Lust,
Tattoo,
Shroud,
Branding,
Higher high,
Cloistered life,
Her story, not mine.
Yet build me up,
“For I am Yours and You are mine.”
Father, write my poem, make it say:
I am a child of God.
Take off my old,
Put on your new.
“I no longer live,
But Christ lives in me.”
Science follows the data.
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Crack that walnut, Mr. T, and see what you find!
That seems to be completely false. Landscapes don’t release neurotransmitters.
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I have. You seem to be averse to data.
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