Re: Spandrel
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Spandrel-tp7601069p7601099.html
Eric -
In my contrived (in my head, not in the post) example I imagined
some stonehengian folke who had decorated acute isosceles
triangular stiles with their earth/air/wind/fire dieties who
*then* and only then realized that they had an obscured,
unintended affordance that they could be stood on their tips and
leaned together to form 4 archways around the perimeter and a
larger opening above.
By experiment they may have discovered that if they aligned the archways (now considered spandrels in this context) to the rising/setting sun and the north star (and is there anything persistent to see in the heavens through the southern arch?) that these *arches* took on a significance that was not intended but nevertheless welcome (useful to their spirit/psyche). Building barrel vaults off of each arch and narrowing the top-opening would yield an interesting (at first) and useful (after completed) way of focusing celebrants who came to worship the 4 elementals carved in the styles on the distant heavens (rising/setting sun, pole-star, zenith, etc.) A refined and elaborated "elemental" shrine might therefore become indistinguishable from pendentive dome that is San Marco in construction. Parallel (nay, complementary) evolutionary paths might lead to homomorphic architectures where one man's spandrel is the other man's adaptive element? (contrivances R Us)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendentive
consider the geodesic-triangle Aad, Bba, Ccb, Ddc as the "styles"
I've contrived and the arches DAd, AaB,,BbC, CcD and circular
ceiling-hole abcd to be the "unintended features" with
"unexpected/unselected affordances" rather than vice-versa, and
the "decorative elements" carved on the styles to be their
adaptive fitness function (how effectively can I apprehend and
worship my elemental dieties? and the emergence of a
celestial-worshiping cult *from* the architectural artifacts began
with the exaptation/cooption of the "spandrels"?
One might (and since I'm in an expansive and speculative mood, I
will) suggest that the Octopus' eye might just have come up out of
an exaptation of the light-sensitivity of the molluscular ancestor
that developed photosensitivity on it's skin-membrane provide
adaptive camouflage against *sighted* predators whose own eyes
evolved out of different adaptive paths. I forget how many
(anecdotally) different parallel evolutionary paths are touted to
have lead to "eyes"... i think molluscs themselves have a number
of significantly different "types" of eyes (pit, pinhole, lensed,
etc) ... how many spandrels and how much exaptation or cooption
might have played in all those routes to "vision"? Perhaps an
expansive (if not exhaustive) analysis of morphological
features/lineages might expose that exaptation of spandrels is a
significant contributor to diversity. (maybe this is already
understood and agreed upon?) (and probably mollusc scholars know
how the various eyes came to be without my "just so" stories).
maunderingly,
- Steve
The spandrel is the place on the wall, whether it is decorated or not.
The decorations are what can mislead you to thinking the architect went out of their way to create the spandrels. But the spandrel exists as a byproduct of trying to do two other things: 1) Have a square-topped structure, 2) support the structure with a dome.
Similarly, natural selection should be expected to produce many structures as a result of selection for unrelated factors. Just because a structure is common in a species doesn't mean that structure itself has been selected for, even if the structure - once present - has become elaborated in fancy ways. With this concept in hand, evolutionary biologists and evolutionary psychologists should be very cautious about asserting that common traits are adaptive. Even things you can show to have resulted from selection (rather than genetic drift or other processes) could still be mere byproducts of the intersection of other adaptive traits.
On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 12:20 AM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:
correction (arches/domes vs spandrels) are duals- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
If we accept that contrivance or one like it, then the two types of elements (arches/domes) are duals.
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