Animal of the Month: Black Grouse Get the Flash Player to see this player. Wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson chooses his top 10 bird songs via plump plum – some other of plump’s goodness: Nabokov on Lolita (part 2) [6m], Frank Zappa on Crossfire [21m] Wu Tang Clan Ain’t Nothin to Fuck With[3m]… at Chess [4m]: Apparently RZA is also a chess champion besides being one of the best rappers. Google News: ahh if only […]
Category: evolution
Psychopharmacological Enhancement
The only ways to enhance the mind is to learn or evolve. Since evolution is out of our hands, all that is left is to learn. Drugs that purport psychopharmacological enhancement do not do what their name states: they may change certain psychological factors but there is no drug that will make you smarter. This would be to eat from the tree of knowledge. However drugs may be able to let you do things that […]
Why Intelligent Design Is Correct
Darwinian Evolution is a theory of Intelligent Design. Darwin argues for Natural Selection by starting with ‘Artificial Selection’, a theory of Intelligent Design. When Artificial Selection is generalized to Natural Selection Darwin is entirely cognizant of and makes no attempt to remove the elements of intelligent design embedded in the theory. In fact, he recognizes that these elements of intelligent design are what make evolution by natural selection so compelling and he specifically exploits them […]
Evolution and Political Theory
Today my dad showed me a review of a book in the New York Times. The book is something about natural selection and how it supports/underpins capitalism and those who were capitalist first. This reminded me about an old objection to evolution: at the time Darwin wrote the “On the Origin of Species” the idea of capitalism was en vogue and therefore ‘struggle for survival’ was taken to be just a metaphor for capitalist society. […]
Positive and Negative Biological Time
In my biorelativity series I used mutations per generation as a measurement of distance. However, with my recent historical/generative musings, specifically the post on the logical foundations of biorelativity (the logic of which is at the foundation of how I arrived at biorelativity), I fear I may have ignored the distinction between a mutation and an adaptation. Consider an organism with some feature. The feature can be considered both a mutation or an adaptation depending […]
The Logic of Biological Relativity [draft]
How can we represent biological relativity in logical notation? Organism a is adapting relative to organism b Aab Organism b is adapting relative to a Aba Organisms a and b are adapting relative to each other Aab & Aba This schema is unsatisfactory because it describes the situation from an indeterminate outside perspective: a and b are said to be adapting relative to each other without regard to the observer describing the situation. Relativity applies […]
Relativity in Biology notes from 2005
It’s always interesting to see the start of ideas. Although I don’t have anything from the Spring of ’04 when I recall realizing biorelativity for the first time, I have found a file with a ‘last modified’ date of June12, ’05, the contents of which are below: Quantum Biology biology: the study of the physical attributes of life. the rate of mutation is constant, much as the speed of light organisms mutate. light shines. hence […]
The creation museum…
Some really nice pictures from the Creation Museum in Kentucky. Also, their new animated commercial is pretty cool: Play Creation Museum Commercial
Why Evolutionary Principles Cannot be Used to Support Racial Prejudices DRAFT
Evolutionary principles are sometimes used to justify racial prejudices. While no rigorous scientific study has yet proven one race to be inferior to any others it should be recognized that it is in principle impossible to prove racial superiority/inferiority and hence no study ever will. Firstly a note on the meaning of ‘more evolved’ and ‘less evolved’. Every species on the face of the earth today has been evolving for the exact same amount of […]
Evolutionary Drift, revisited yet again
With my recent paper on Measuring Fitness I realize that my previous responses to evolutionary drift, though not incorrect, may have not stated the solution particularly clearly. When fitness is defined and measured as described in the aforementioned article, evolutionary drift is irrelevant. The method of measuring the fitness of an organism or species makes no reference to any mutations whatsoever. Therefore evolutionary drift is no problem for the theory of fitness described here. If […]