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SPANDRELS

                                             December 10, 2013

  "Spandrel":

  An accidental by-product that was              STANDALONE_COMPLEX
  not included by design and/or
  because of evolutionary adaptive
  advantage.  It falls out of the
  logic of the situation, but
  doesn't by itself motivate the
  setup of the situation.

  The source term is from architecture:
  no one builds domes so that they can        This is metaphor
  have spandrels to decorate, but if you      turned into jargon.
  are building domes, you can easily end
  up with spandrels.                            And the fact that our words
                                                have the capability to be used
                                                in ways unintended at their
                                                coinage might be regarded as a
                                                spandrel of their own.

                                                    (He said cleverly.)
                                                                          
                                                    Metaphor as scribbling 
                                                    in the gaps of words. 

                                    PEACOCKS_IN_FIGHT

     Julian Bell:

     "... the tug-of-war tilted over how much in the zoo
     house was structural carpentry (an 'adaptation,'
     properly speaking, a genetically determined form of
     physiology or behavior, arrived at through processes
     of Darwinian selection) and how much (if any) might
     be considered a 'spandrel'-- literally, a space
     between two adjacent arches and a dome they support,
     a space whose decorative possibilities are incidental
     to the architecture; and thus, metaphorically, an
     opening, unintentionally offered by the evolutionary
     structure, for biological features to arise that are
     not directly the result of natural selection, not
     'adaptive' in the sense used by evolutionists."

                                  "Why Art?", October 8, 2009,
                                  "New York Review of Books"




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