I’ve been working hard on Special Biological Relativity and it is taking up most of my blogging energy. However, I do have some fun results: Define Biological Energy as the ability to do work, the ability to change the environment. Then Fitness can be related to Energy because the higher the fitness the greater the ability to change the environment. E ∝ f If we consider an organism that lives in a place with infinite resources […]
Tag: Relativity
Special Relativistic Fitness, Preliminary Thought Experiment
Imagine two different tribes of biologists. The first tribe is comprised of very fast people. They survived for thousands of years by studying biology and being faster than their competitors. The second tribe is comprised of very strong people. They survived for thousands of years by studying biology and being stronger than their competitors. After all this time, the first tribe is filled with very fast biologists and the second tribe is filled with very […]
Deriving Natural Selection = Fitness × Acceleration
As you can see from my previous post, I now have postulated a direct relation between Natural Selection and Fitness (N.S.=F.×A.). This relation follows from the theory. The short short short version of the theory is this general postulate: one organism’s traits are another’s environment and vice versa. Hence all competition can be viewed as environmental phenomena. This gives Natural Selection as a result of Fitness and an environmental factor, which I refer to as […]
Rewrite of Evolution
New theory of evolution! Hooray! Patched a bunch of things together to make a nice story. Fixed the little issue about fitness being circular. Expanded natural selection to apply more generally. Causal structure. Epistemological foundations. ooOoOO0Ooooooo. And it’s good fun. I swear. Epistemology, history of physics, evolution… makes me happy. You should really read it. Download here. [pdf, 304kb]
Hypotheses Natura Non Fingo
Newton famously wrote [1] [2]: I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses… It is enough that gravity does really exist and acts according to the laws I have explained, and that it abundantly serves to account for all the motions of celestial bodies. as a response to those who challenged him to provide causes of gravity. He said, […]
Aristotle’s Theory of TOPOS (Place)
[This is something I wrote before I had this blog, but I really like it and hope the readers here will find it interesting.] The task of explaining Aristotle’s theory of place lies in the interpretation of this sentence: “Hence the place of a thing is the innermost motionless boundary of what contains it,” (Physics IV 212a20). Now the idea of a motionless boundary for perceptible and obviously movable objects seems impossibly counterintuitive. However, using […]
Time and the Limits of Science
Measurement takes time; measurement is a process. So the measurement of time immediately yields this theoretical issue: Since measurement takes time, our ability to break time into ever smaller pieces will always be proportional to the method of measurement used. The faster our measurement device that measures time, the more divisible time will be. Insofar as there are limits to how fast a measurement process can occur (relativistic or other), there will be limits on […]
Economics
Readers of this blog may have noticed a lack of updates recently. I can’t apologize: I’ve been eating, breathing and drinking philosophy for so long, that now that I have written everything I wanted to write, I feel free. I wish it on all of you. [Happy New Year Everyone!] But this doesn’t stop me from thinking. I was at a Christmas party and got talking with an Indonesian economics grad student. He was researching […]
something about time
There is something about time that I can’t seem to stop thinking about. We measure time by agreeing upon an event and then counting from that point onward. Today is October 17, 2008 AD. It is this AD that keeps my attention. It has been 2008 years, ten months and seventeen days since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth: AD stands for Anno Domini, or year of our lord. Those not wanting to be explicitly […]
Relativity as Informational Interdependence
Ever have the experience of sitting in traffic and believe that you are moving in reverse, only to realize a second later that you were fooled by the vehicle next to you moving forward? You were sitting still, but because you saw something moving away, you mistakenly thought you started to move in the opposite direction. Two different senses may be at work here: your sight and your balance. Lets assume that your balance did […]