Step 1: Find a superstar.
Step 2: Teach the superstar to program.
More seriously, how does one *become* a programming superstar? I mean, I'll do it. If no-one else seems to want to, I mean. Sure. Programming superstar. Sounds cool.
The only thing is, I would rather be lit on fire than have someone try to teach me that Java is the perfect 'lingua franca' of computer science, so that sort of rules out formal education, in my part of the world.
My problems with the original study were the following:
It sought (or at least, seemed, from the subsequent claims that were made about what had been proven) to imply that the development of polynesian outrigger canoe designs was the result of the conservation of advantageous traits, arising from a context of continual unguided, random changes that subsequently proved to be either adaptive or maladaptive.
It wished to describe this process using a model that seemed to have some major flaws, and failed to address (in the article) to establish that these could be disregarded, [and]
It made grandiose, attention-grabbing claims as a result.
Only if you assume that human beings never design by trial and error. Surely we can dismiss that assertion by inspection. (Or perhaps you need to be told how many different materials Edison experimented on for his light bulbs.) Designing 'by trial and error' would fall well within the range of what I mean by directed change. It involves thinking and planning, using concepts, which will undoubtedly influence the direction of the next trial. Large-scale batch testing consumes times and resources, and we both know the anecdote about Edison precisely because his filament tests were unusual in this regard. They were not, however, random, nor lacking in direction. Having had some experimental success with carbonized filaments, after giving up on metallic ones, Edison was searching for a type of carbonized filament that lasted long enough for commercial purposes, and found (through mass testing) that a bamboo splint was the most suitable filament, of those tested.
Sit down for a couple of hours and watch one of those 'artificial life' simulations where a four-legged 'creature' learns to walk through randomized trial and error and positive feedback. That's what undirected change stemming from a random walk of parameters looks like.
The conservation of traits is the evidence. We guess that the traits are conserved because they represent functional aspects of boats, and that's probably true, but it's really not important. The fact that the rate of variation in traits is not constant at all loci is the evidence for selection... [a] finding that all traits varied at equal rates and never became fixed or conserved would have proved that natural selection was not weeding out inferior new designs.
I'll go back on what I've said, after thinking about it, and agree that that's something that the study would have strongly suggested if you'll agree that the study (or at least the article, and the supporting back-of-the-book-blurb givers) had absolutely no business suggesting that they had demonstrated anything at all like "natural selection can [or even might] act on human culture." It verges on a breach of ethics for scientists to purport that such reasoning has any scientific legitimacy, and I find it rather sordid.
I'll eventually have to concede the technical argument, as I don't have a sufficient grounding in that sort of analysis to make insistent statements in good faith. However, there's several points I've made that haven't been addressed (don't feel obliged), and the problem that I have with what you've said can be easily referred back to one of them.
With genetic drift, it is perhaps a plausible assumption that all quantifiable 'traits' will be subject to the same underlying mechanism of drift; that, consequentially, unchecked by selection, they'll all tend to diverge at the same rate. I do not believe that it has been established that we can safely make this assumption when it comes to the observed differences in the 'traits' of the outrigger canoes. There is no reason we could assume that all traits are replicated by similar mechanisms, or subject to the same inherent rate of drift; there's not even any way to be sure that the mechanisms themselves are, like cell division, continuous or predictable over time, or that the 'inherent rate of drift' (by which I mean, to be clear, the rate of divergence without the influence of the hypothetical selection) is itself constant over time.
Thus, we cannot be sure that any significant clustering in the observed drift of the outrigger 'traits' represents anything exterior to the replication of the design itself, let alone resembling - on a more philosophical level - 'natural selection.'
This seems to betray a lack of understanding of evolutionary theory--speciation does not occur as a response to environmental differences... -in a completely unchanging environment, evolution still occurs so long as any biological change can result in a competitive advantage. You're misunderstanding this, I think, probably because of other remarks I made about adaptations to changes in the environment being more sufficient evidence of evolution. What I'm saying is that:
1) There's no evidence presented that the small changes in critical design observed are under any sort of selective pressure. That is, there is an apparently randomized drift, as one would expect, but there is no evidence that this drift results in a competitive advantage for one design over another, or is of any significance save as a habitual manner of making boats, or that the making of boats 'evolves' in any sense. It does mean you could make some good predictions about what the crucial features of outrigger design might be by looking at this sort of drift, probably a notion of some use to archeologists, but this isn't the claim that the study seems to be making.
2) There is every reason to believe that, faced with any significant selective pressure, it would be impossible to model the changes in outrigger design as a type of genetic drift.
the rate of change would accelerate in direct response to the pressure, until that pressure ceased.
the change would not be random, but directed, according to the cultural preconceptions of the people attempting to solve the problem.
the first successful solution would be instantaneously [compared to the time scale] imitated.
this solution would be incorporated, insofar as possible, into pre-existing boat designs; only the necessary changes would have 'evolutionary success'. It would manifest itself as a universal aspect of design.
You sound like you might be familiar with this sort of research. Is there an aspect to the study that was buried in or distorted by the article, that would make it seem more sensible? Because right now, the key phrase claim seems to be:
Statistical test results showed clearly that the functional canoe design elements changed more slowly over time, indicating that natural selection could be weeding out inferior new designs. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080216175953.htm
Which proves absolutely nothing, especially as the study was not set up in any way that could prove that natural selection was not 'weeding out inferior new designs'.
Well, except that breeding pigeons is really categorically (as you point out) pretty much the same sort of thing as the 'natural selection' of pigeons gene lines by their environment in the wild. It's just a question of what environment the pigeons find themselves in. The title of the article that we're discussing, on the other hand, is "Human Culture Subject To Natural Selection, Study Shows"; in which there is a leap from a study of differences in the rates of change of critical and non-critical 'cultural traits' to the conclusion that this difference is due to the influence of "natural selection", whatever that may be.
Turns out, the 'cultural traits' under consideration have to do with structural versus decorative 'design traits' of Polynesian canoes. This seems hugely problematic to me. I will hazard a guess (and one would think this would be evidence worthy of note, were I wrong) that these canoes are all pretty much made out of similar materials, and all pretty much sail in the same conditions. Starting with the same basic design, the same resources, and the same problem, one must consider the possibility that there's really not a lot of room for drift in the basic parameters of Polynesian canoe making; that in a finite amount of time one reaches a local maximum in design optimization, and learns not to wander too far from it. They seem to have used a notion of sequential island colonization as a rough time guideline, but this is really irrelevant unless all cultural evolution was frozen in time as soon as people left for the next island over; otherwise, you have people working in parallel with the same knowledge, tools, resources, and conditions, and (quite possibly) simply finding that there's not a wide variety of solutions. (In the aesthetic design, on the other hand, one could see strong pressure for diversification, if one wanted to be able to tell canoes apart at a distance. Just saying.)
I think that, upon closer investigation, the researchers will find that the standard Polynesian fish-gathering and/or travel platform is now made of metal, and has an engine; furthermore, they will be unable to find a 'missing link' - half canoe, half trawler - that demonstrates that the former evolved into the latter. This is an extreme demonstration of the fundamental problem with the argument. They have not established that the 'species' of outrigger canoes changed in response to environmental pressures, at a limited rate, as each copy of a prior design was 'improved' more and more in a certain direction. In fact, they haven't established that the construction of each type of outrigger canoe involved the deterministic (but imperfect) replication of a distinct prior design, that they may be 'species' to begin with.
No mention is made of whether any degrees of variation between outrigger canoes on the same island, and the researchers did not even examine the canoes themselves - they relied on reports of the canoe design of eleven different cultures, which almost guarantees that (a) they started with the features of a 'typical' or 'quintessential' (take your pick) outrigger canoe from that culture, and (b) they started with these features as described by a person who had been thinking about the differential aspects of these designs.
There is no evidence that there is any sort of constraint placed by the construction process on the rate of change between one iteration of the design and the next. If, in one generation, the Polynesians had canoes, and a certain fellow experimented with strapping two canoes together, and then settled on the concept of an outrigger, it would not take very many different prototypes (and note another difference here; a 'prototype' is often something that doesn't work, rather than something that works better than what it's replacing) or generations before the outrigger was firmly established as a feature of all future Polynesian canoes... and any future ocean-going canoe built by anyone who saw such a canoe.
What do you think "nature" is, precisely? Well, it's more a question of what is meant by 'natural selection'; ask Darwin what he meant by 'Nature', not me.
The way I figure it, if an antelope chooses to run away from a lion, that's selection.
If the lion can run faster, that's natural selection.
So if I get this right... the outcome of their research is that over time, pacific islanders tried to make better and better boats?
By not changing features that worked well and changing features that failed?
Doesn't natural selection have to be done by nature for it to be natural?
Isn't this just selection?
For what it's worth, I suspect that the original paper had to do with the applicability of the mathematical models for predicting the rate of change, or something. To imply that divergence was shaped by a winnowing process during migration from island to island, they would have demonstrate that the alterations under consideration actually had improved seaworthiness. Otherwise, the divergence is just random drift, and it's just a demonstration that the pacific islanders knew what the critical elements of outrigger design were, and didn't mess with them too much. Saying that "natural selection could be weeding out inferior new designs" is just saying "shucks, we didn't disprove our hypothesis."
[previously on the 'firehose' thingy by accident, whatever that is]
My [kibbitzing] advice is to them to document their accomplishments in an semi-formal team (b)log, not subject to continuous management review, with an emphasis on the solution of problems that they've encountered. This will help them detect similarities between problems encountered in the past, and maintain a sense of the value of their work. Focus on the sharing of best practices and needed information between groups, rather than how the institution might most easily transfer worker value from one person to another. (That's scary.)
My thesis is that enough contextual information will be obtainable, by someone perusing this log, that they will be able to replicate best practices after a relatively short experimental period. Nobody needs a detailed procedural description of how to mop a floor; but from some perspectives, in some roles within the institution, this might seem exactly like what you're asking for. And even if they write it for you, they know - everyone knows - that no-one don't really needs detailed instructions to figure out how to mop the floor.
On the other hand, I found a note to himself that one of the day-shift guys, Jerry, had left in the staff-room, and it totally revolutionized my fundamental understanding of the entire procedure: "fill bucket from kitchen tap until slop closet plumbing fixed."
If management is serious about this, they should practice and find best practices for the process of documenting processes itself at their own level itself before they dump it on anyone else.
Dear Sirs with your kind indulgence, as I am not from Nigeria I have difficulty comprehending this exciting new economic model. Allow me to outline how this would work, as far as I can tell, and please correct my misapprehensions.
(Step 1) Invest several billion dollars in researching, developing, and tooling for the production of a manycore chip.
[Analogy] Develop a completely new, superbly engineered high-performance sports car.
(Step 2) Massively subsidize the first few production cycles of this chip in order to penetrate the PC market.
[Analogy] Hire someone from Enron to write your shareholder reports.
(Step 3) Develop the personnel resources necessary to collect a small amount of revenue from each of the millions of owners of your chip as it runs at a tiny fraction of its capacity, most of the time.
[Analogy] Use your incredible new sports car as a 50 cent fun ride for the very timid at the local fair. A million times over. By mail. Provide free (a 45 penny value) postage. Rev the engine every so often to scare small children.
(Step 4) ? ? ? [plus a gnome shrugging.]
[Analogy] The invisible hand of the market playing a complicated etude by Chopin. Without a piano.
(Step 5) BIG PROFITS ! ! ! !
[Analogy] Just like Enron!
What *is* Step 4? Does one introduce a run-time system built around a Java interpreter written in BASIC, or does one sit back and let the the slow, insidious malice of an economic model that actually *rewards* the computer industry (as a whole) for the production of inefficient and deficient software do its work?
In a few areas in the western US, there have been incidents when military aircraft electronic warfare systems have triggered widespread issues like garage doors opening and closing by themselves and TV signals being jammed.
One might note that these are, unlike bees, human devices manufactured for the purpose of detecting radio-frequency energy. Also, garage doors operate at very limited range on frequencies reserved in the United States for use by the military, and such interference is to be expected.
As a counter-theory, I would propose that the CIA is genetically modifying opium poppies to increase the production of opiates within the plant itself, and that whole hives are getting hooked on the junk and dying of heroin overdoses.
Here's my question. Does this mean that if I (an obscure little media company which just now happened to be founded) lived in a country which did not have an extradition treaty with the United States for, um, perjury, I could happily sell people an "non-investigatory acceptance of presumptive distribution rights (r)" or some such, and issue DMCA takedown requests to my heart's content?
Slashdot Mirror
This is what I was thinking. "Glass Route Networking". Something such. Funny, but seriously usable, in my opinion. And memorable.
Step 1: Find a superstar.
Step 2: Teach the superstar to program.
More seriously, how does one *become* a programming superstar? I mean, I'll do it. If no-one else seems to want to, I mean. Sure. Programming superstar. Sounds cool.
The only thing is, I would rather be lit on fire than have someone try to teach me that Java is the perfect 'lingua franca' of computer science, so that sort of rules out formal education, in my part of the world.
Sit down for a couple of hours and watch one of those 'artificial life' simulations where a four-legged 'creature' learns to walk through randomized trial and error and positive feedback. That's what undirected change stemming from a random walk of parameters looks like.
The conservation of traits is the evidence. We guess that the traits are conserved because they represent functional aspects of boats, and that's probably true, but it's really not important. The fact that the rate of variation in traits is not constant at all loci is the evidence for selectionI'll go back on what I've said, after thinking about it, and agree that that's something that the study would have strongly suggested if you'll agree that the study (or at least the article, and the supporting back-of-the-book-blurb givers) had absolutely no business suggesting that they had demonstrated anything at all like "natural selection can [or even might] act on human culture." It verges on a breach of ethics for scientists to purport that such reasoning has any scientific legitimacy, and I find it rather sordid.
I'll eventually have to concede the technical argument, as I don't have a sufficient grounding in that sort of analysis to make insistent statements in good faith. However, there's several points I've made that haven't been addressed (don't feel obliged), and the problem that I have with what you've said can be easily referred back to one of them.
With genetic drift, it is perhaps a plausible assumption that all quantifiable 'traits' will be subject to the same underlying mechanism of drift; that, consequentially, unchecked by selection, they'll all tend to diverge at the same rate. I do not believe that it has been established that we can safely make this assumption when it comes to the observed differences in the 'traits' of the outrigger canoes. There is no reason we could assume that all traits are replicated by similar mechanisms, or subject to the same inherent rate of drift; there's not even any way to be sure that the mechanisms themselves are, like cell division, continuous or predictable over time, or that the 'inherent rate of drift' (by which I mean, to be clear, the rate of divergence without the influence of the hypothetical selection) is itself constant over time.
Thus, we cannot be sure that any significant clustering in the observed drift of the outrigger 'traits' represents anything exterior to the replication of the design itself, let alone resembling - on a more philosophical level - 'natural selection.'
1) There's no evidence presented that the small changes in critical design observed are under any sort of selective pressure. That is, there is an apparently randomized drift, as one would expect, but there is no evidence that this drift results in a competitive advantage for one design over another, or is of any significance save as a habitual manner of making boats, or that the making of boats 'evolves' in any sense. It does mean you could make some good predictions about what the crucial features of outrigger design might be by looking at this sort of drift, probably a notion of some use to archeologists, but this isn't the claim that the study seems to be making.
2) There is every reason to believe that, faced with any significant selective pressure, it would be impossible to model the changes in outrigger design as a type of genetic drift.
You sound like you might be familiar with this sort of research. Is there an aspect to the study that was buried in or distorted by the article, that would make it seem more sensible? Because right now, the key phrase claim seems to be:
Which proves absolutely nothing, especially as the study was not set up in any way that could prove that natural selection was not 'weeding out inferior new designs'.My apologies, crashfrog, I'll know to ignore your comments in the future.
Well, except that breeding pigeons is really categorically (as you point out) pretty much the same sort of thing as the 'natural selection' of pigeons gene lines by their environment in the wild. It's just a question of what environment the pigeons find themselves in. The title of the article that we're discussing, on the other hand, is "Human Culture Subject To Natural Selection, Study Shows"; in which there is a leap from a study of differences in the rates of change of critical and non-critical 'cultural traits' to the conclusion that this difference is due to the influence of "natural selection", whatever that may be.
Turns out, the 'cultural traits' under consideration have to do with structural versus decorative 'design traits' of Polynesian canoes. This seems hugely problematic to me. I will hazard a guess (and one would think this would be evidence worthy of note, were I wrong) that these canoes are all pretty much made out of similar materials, and all pretty much sail in the same conditions. Starting with the same basic design, the same resources, and the same problem, one must consider the possibility that there's really not a lot of room for drift in the basic parameters of Polynesian canoe making; that in a finite amount of time one reaches a local maximum in design optimization, and learns not to wander too far from it. They seem to have used a notion of sequential island colonization as a rough time guideline, but this is really irrelevant unless all cultural evolution was frozen in time as soon as people left for the next island over; otherwise, you have people working in parallel with the same knowledge, tools, resources, and conditions, and (quite possibly) simply finding that there's not a wide variety of solutions. (In the aesthetic design, on the other hand, one could see strong pressure for diversification, if one wanted to be able to tell canoes apart at a distance. Just saying.)
I think that, upon closer investigation, the researchers will find that the standard Polynesian fish-gathering and/or travel platform is now made of metal, and has an engine; furthermore, they will be unable to find a 'missing link' - half canoe, half trawler - that demonstrates that the former evolved into the latter. This is an extreme demonstration of the fundamental problem with the argument. They have not established that the 'species' of outrigger canoes changed in response to environmental pressures, at a limited rate, as each copy of a prior design was 'improved' more and more in a certain direction. In fact, they haven't established that the construction of each type of outrigger canoe involved the deterministic (but imperfect) replication of a distinct prior design, that they may be 'species' to begin with.
No mention is made of whether any degrees of variation between outrigger canoes on the same island, and the researchers did not even examine the canoes themselves - they relied on reports of the canoe design of eleven different cultures, which almost guarantees that (a) they started with the features of a 'typical' or 'quintessential' (take your pick) outrigger canoe from that culture, and (b) they started with these features as described by a person who had been thinking about the differential aspects of these designs.
There is no evidence that there is any sort of constraint placed by the construction process on the rate of change between one iteration of the design and the next. If, in one generation, the Polynesians had canoes, and a certain fellow experimented with strapping two canoes together, and then settled on the concept of an outrigger, it would not take very many different prototypes (and note another difference here; a 'prototype' is often something that doesn't work, rather than something that works better than what it's replacing) or generations before the outrigger was firmly established as a feature of all future Polynesian canoes... and any future ocean-going canoe built by anyone who saw such a canoe.
F
The way I figure it, if an antelope chooses to run away from a lion, that's selection.
If the lion can run faster, that's natural selection.
So if I get this right... the outcome of their research is that over time, pacific islanders tried to make better and better boats?
By not changing features that worked well and changing features that failed?
Doesn't natural selection have to be done by nature for it to be natural?
Isn't this just selection?
For what it's worth, I suspect that the original paper had to do with the applicability of the mathematical models for predicting the rate of change, or something. To imply that divergence was shaped by a winnowing process during migration from island to island, they would have demonstrate that the alterations under consideration actually had improved seaworthiness. Otherwise, the divergence is just random drift, and it's just a demonstration that the pacific islanders knew what the critical elements of outrigger design were, and didn't mess with them too much. Saying that "natural selection could be weeding out inferior new designs" is just saying "shucks, we didn't disprove our hypothesis."
[previously on the 'firehose' thingy by accident, whatever that is]Oh yeah, I heard about that! The tippler PDA.
My [kibbitzing] advice is to them to document their accomplishments in an semi-formal team (b)log, not subject to continuous management review, with an emphasis on the solution of problems that they've encountered. This will help them detect similarities between problems encountered in the past, and maintain a sense of the value of their work. Focus on the sharing of best practices and needed information between groups, rather than how the institution might most easily transfer worker value from one person to another. (That's scary.)
My thesis is that enough contextual information will be obtainable, by someone perusing this log, that they will be able to replicate best practices after a relatively short experimental period. Nobody needs a detailed procedural description of how to mop a floor; but from some perspectives, in some roles within the institution, this might seem exactly like what you're asking for. And even if they write it for you, they know - everyone knows - that no-one don't really needs detailed instructions to figure out how to mop the floor.
On the other hand, I found a note to himself that one of the day-shift guys, Jerry, had left in the staff-room, and it totally revolutionized my fundamental understanding of the entire procedure: "fill bucket from kitchen tap until slop closet plumbing fixed."
If management is serious about this, they should practice and find best practices for the process of documenting processes itself at their own level itself before they dump it on anyone else.
Dear Sirs with your kind indulgence, as I am not from Nigeria I have difficulty comprehending this exciting new economic model. Allow me to outline how this would work, as far as I can tell, and please correct my misapprehensions. (Step 1) Invest several billion dollars in researching, developing, and tooling for the production of a manycore chip. [Analogy] Develop a completely new, superbly engineered high-performance sports car. (Step 2) Massively subsidize the first few production cycles of this chip in order to penetrate the PC market. [Analogy] Hire someone from Enron to write your shareholder reports. (Step 3) Develop the personnel resources necessary to collect a small amount of revenue from each of the millions of owners of your chip as it runs at a tiny fraction of its capacity, most of the time. [Analogy] Use your incredible new sports car as a 50 cent fun ride for the very timid at the local fair. A million times over. By mail. Provide free (a 45 penny value) postage. Rev the engine every so often to scare small children. (Step 4) ? ? ? [plus a gnome shrugging.] [Analogy] The invisible hand of the market playing a complicated etude by Chopin. Without a piano. (Step 5) BIG PROFITS ! ! ! ! [Analogy] Just like Enron! What *is* Step 4? Does one introduce a run-time system built around a Java interpreter written in BASIC, or does one sit back and let the the slow, insidious malice of an economic model that actually *rewards* the computer industry (as a whole) for the production of inefficient and deficient software do its work?
It's just the phone, really.
One might note that these are, unlike bees, human devices manufactured for the purpose of detecting radio-frequency energy. Also, garage doors operate at very limited range on frequencies reserved in the United States for use by the military, and such interference is to be expected.
As a counter-theory, I would propose that the CIA is genetically modifying opium poppies to increase the production of opiates within the plant itself, and that whole hives are getting hooked on the junk and dying of heroin overdoses.
Here's my question. Does this mean that if I (an obscure little media company which just now happened to be founded) lived in a country which did not have an extradition treaty with the United States for, um, perjury, I could happily sell people an "non-investigatory acceptance of presumptive distribution rights (r)" or some such, and issue DMCA takedown requests to my heart's content?
Is chicken-xor-egg problem. Chicken-and-egg, no problem. Is simple.