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POPSDid You Hear The One . . . "He joked about linear regression (a rumination about what kind of people post cat videos on YouTube), period doubling in chaos (which he likens to the splitting of behaviors of people as they become more and more drunk) and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. He explained this fundamental concept of quantum physics — that the more precisely the position of a particle is measured, the less is known about the particle’s momentum, and vice versa — with a photograph of a men’s room with television screens above the urinals. The designer “clearly didn’t understand the uncertainty principle,” Dr. Lee said."
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POPSGenetic Diseases & Pedigree Dogs Can't help wondering about how our obsession with genetic health solutions compare to natural selection and biodiversity? I can't help but feel most of the time humans are particularly short-sighted seeing such a brief, brief, brief glimpse in the grander vaster scheme of things and hence make decisions, rules, laws based on this - with results that are life depleting rather than life enhancing (to ALL LIFE).
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POPSThe Evolution of the God Gene It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.
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POPSJust a couple of words that speack on their own I've been responsible for hiring and overseeing the development of people in my corporate days and must confess that I've never seen any of these comments, but apparently, they have been taken from actual employee appraisals. Enjoy!
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POPSStephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution" The best part of the article: ""By contrast," Hawking says, "there are about 50,000 new books published in the English language each year, containing of the order of a hundred billion bits of information. Of course, the great majority of this information is garbage, and no use to any form of life. But, even so, the rate at which useful information can be added is millions, if not billions, higher than with DNA." :)
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POPSGoodness! Evolution and the War between Fundamentalist Atheism and Religion
This will settle nothing, but it is a good read. The clip is a 'taster'' of an article focused on debates around evoulution and moral motivation. It ends: <<< Of course, religion doesn’t have a monopoly on awe and inspiration. The story that science tells, the story of nature, is awesome, and some people get plenty of inspiration from it, without needing the religious kind. What’s more, science has its own role to play in knitting the world together. The scientific enterprise has long been on the frontiers of international community, fostering an inclusive, cosmopolitan ethic — the kind of ethic that any religion worthy of this moment in history must also foster. William James said that religious belief is “the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” Science has its own version of the unseen order, the laws of nature. In principle, the two kinds of order can themselves be put into harmony ...(more follows)
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POPSStephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution" We have entered a new phase of evolution. "At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information." But what distinguishes us from our cave man ancestors is the knowledge that we have accumulated over the last ten thousand years, and particularly, Hawking points out, over the last three hundred.
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POPSJohn Scalzi's guide to the most epic FAILs in Star Wars Design
More: Bad design in Star Wars is not just limited to stuff; evolution here seems wacky, too. Three choice bits: Sarlaac A monstrous yet immobile creature who lives in an exposed pit in the middle of a lifeless desert, waiting for large animals to apparently feel suicidal and trek out to throw themselves in? Yeah, not so much. Not every Sarlaac can count on an intergalactic mob boss to feed it tidbits. That Asteroid Worm Thing in Empire Strikes Back So, large space worm lives in asteroid, disguises itself as a cave and waits for unwary spaceships to fly by so it can eat them? Makes the Sarlaac look like a marvel of natural selection, it does. Midi-Chlorians Oh, man, don't get me started. Except to say this: If in fact a high concentration of midi-chlorians is the difference between being a common schmoe and being a dude who can Force Choke his enemies, the black market in midi-chlorian injections must be amazing. Star Trek fans, don't get smug: I'm going after it ne
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POPSThe evolution of religion "Religion arose out of a hodgepodge of genetically based mental mechanisms designed by natural selection for thoroughly mundane purposes," he writes. Those mechanisms include conformist bias (believing what your peers believe, in order to get along), a tendency to explain events in terms of personal agency (since our mental machinery for thinking about causality evolved in the context of social interaction), and interest in remote control (a bias toward beliefs that promise influence over predators, diseases, and bad weather). Given these biases, we're prone to believe in powerful, jealous, tempestuous personal deities.
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POPSThe beauty and terror of science A good history of science unreels like the practice of science itself. It wends through a world of experiments until a new reality arises. But the more layered story of that journey is that science is not just a process but is the men and women performing it. In his radiant new book, "The Age of Wonder," Holmes treats us to the amazing lives of the pioneering sailors and balloonists, astronomers and chemists of the Romantic era. Making good on the book's subtitle, he takes us on a dazzling tour of their chaotic British observatories and fatal explorations in African jungles, showing us "how the Romantic generation discovered the beauty and terror of science."
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POPSMonkey see, monkey do... "These four kinds of behavior — empathy, the ability to learn and follow social rules, reciprocity and peacemaking — are the basis of sociality. De Waal sees human morality as having grown out of primate sociality, but with two extra levels of sophistication. People enforce their society's moral codes much more rigorously with rewards, punishments and reputation building. They also apply a degree of judgment and reason, for which there are no parallels in animals." Natural selection favors organisms that survive and reproduce, by whatever means. And it has provided people, he writes in "Primates and Philosophers," with "a compass for life's choices that takes the interests of the entire community into account, which is the essence of human morality."
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POPS How altruism evolved over 200,000 years of conflict Biologists have argued for decades about the evolution of altruism and long ago came to the conclusion that Darwinian natural selection cannot explain acts of supreme personal sacrifice except those directly connected with helping the survival of close blood relatives who share similar genes.
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POPSNatural-born supernaturalists 2 interesting concepts that portrait religion and other supernaturalism as stemming: 1) Natural selection- the Darwinist angle. 2) A by-product of the human psychology.
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POPS Cooking Makes The Man . . . psychology and society.” Put simply, Mr. Wrangham writes that eating cooked food — whether meat or plants or both —made digestion easier, and thus our guts could grow smaller. The energy that we formerly spent on digestion (and digestion requires far more energy than you might imagine) was freed up, enabling our brains, which also consume enormous amounts of energy, to grow larger. The warmth provided by fire enabled us to shed our body hair, so we could run farther and hunt more without overheating. Because we stopped eating on the spot as we foraged and instead gathered around a fire, we had to learn to socialize, and our temperaments grew calmer. There were other benefits for humanity’s ancestors. He writes: “The protection fire provided at night enabled them to sleep on the ground and lose their climbing ability, and females likely began cooking for males, whose time was increasingly free to search for more meat and honey.
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POPSA closer look at termites continued: This trial-and-error method of natural selection does not go on ad infinitum; nature is smarter than that. Each magnetic termite colony passes on a particular successful mound orientation to the next one through a clever technique: Each termite has a magnetic compass programmed into its system that allows it to sense a particular magnetic bearing, which it then passes on to its offspring. Something like an architectural blueprint ingrained into the DNA. Pretty cool, huh?
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POPSSuper Rats are here continues: Prof Smith of the university's applied sciences department warned that "super rats" may be thriving in communities across Britain. The Government no longer provides funding to track resistance, meaning the scale of the problem is unclear. "Natural selection means that when you have a rat population in your town, poison will kill the ones that aren't resistant, the ones that survive may have the gene, they then have babies who can receive the gene themselves," he said. "There are mutations and changes in their DNA that alter the ability of rats to deal with these poisons. It appears to be moving west and has now been located in Swindon and Bristol. It is a warning of things to come."
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POPSThe links between mental illness and creativity continues (long article at source): Mental illnesses have been around for thousands of years. Evolutionary theory suggests that in order for them to be still here, there must be some kind of survival advantage to them. If they were wholly bad, it's argued, natural selection would have seen them off long ago. In some cases the advantage is clear. Anxiety, for example, can be a mental illness with severe symptoms and consequences, but it is also a trait that at a non-clinical level has survival advantages. In healthy proportions, it keeps us alert and on our toes when threats are sensed.
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POPSA Cultural Law of Gravity "Human culture seems to have gone way beyond what such a law of gravity might allow" a fascinating post, worthwhile your time of reading
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POPSWhat if, the alien, is no more than a human? These same thermodynamic arguments should also hold on Earth-like planets elsewhere in the cosmos. And if that's the case, then ET may not be so alien after all, as Higgs and Pudritz imply with the extraordinary conclusion to their paper: "The combined actions of thermodynamics and subsequent natural selection suggest that the genetic code we observe on the Earth today may have significant features in common with life throughout the cosmos." Now that's a thought....
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