It is also very strongly wired into our brains insofar that I would consider it part of the human condition. Marginalizing people for showing this behaviour is never going to end well.
Mild objection—discrimination is also strongly wired into our brains. It's only been in the past century that the objectification of women has become so overt. As far as sensitivity is concerned, this event was backward from previous social norms, even though huge improvements in discriminatory behaviour have occurred over the years.
Exactly; if, for some reason, some form of pre-life began using weird components like a nitrogen-phosphorus backbone or a silane backbone, it's almost certain there would be more Earth-like replacements more readily available—and there are already whole frickin' nebular clouds of bits and pieces of organic molecules, so it's not like the universe is really lacking in opportunities for this sort of thing anyway. Some arguments have been made about silicon perhaps being more viable at extreme temperatures and pressures, but I'm not convinced such an environment is stable enough for Baby Self-Replicating Molecule's First Steps.
You may want to read the Culture series by Iain M. Banks (recently deceased) for an alternative perspective. The system therein is both fully consensual and condescendingly holier-than-thou. It's generally fun to read about, although its villains (in the form of evil empires) tend to be cartoonish in their grotesqueness. Excession, despite widely being considered the most boring novel in the set, spends a great deal of time dwelling on this sort of thing precisely. Despite being a socialist utopia that offers all these things, people are still free to leave if they wish.
That being said, though, mental health matters can make getting permission a tricky task. There are plenty of situations in which a person may not be able to make informed consent, after all. Because of this I think such a system would have to be opt-out in order to achieve its goals. In addition to all of the usual arguably-impossible requirements about incorruptible and sentient computing.
Hey, you're welcome to say Windows isn't supported. That's totally your choice. Just don't say something is supported when it isn't. There are a lot of half-assed OSS projects out there that do this. (That being said, you don't need the hardware; VMware Player is close enough to native performance. And to some extent, even WINE and ReactOS can provide an alternative to getting a Windows licence if the software's simple enough.)
Oh yeah, just let me download and build all these libraries your project requires... oh, what's that? One of the libraries requires Visual Studio 2003 Ersatzpress Edition to compile? And another one needs gcc-mingw-0.0.1-super-alpha-pre-release-dinosaur-version? Okay, let me just... get on that...
If Windows binaries aren't provided, it means no one on the dev team could get them to build. (Maybe they can't figure out how to un-#pragma the #pragging #pragma correctly?) That's a big warning sign.
Yeah, that's the biggest difference between "compostable" and "edible." There are a lot of detritovores that don't care about the chemicals they're chewing up; unless it's something toxic enough to kill them, anything just looks like a carbon chain in dire need of stripping. Molecules of the wrong chirality definitely fit in this category.
That being said, chirality isn't the only thing that you can count on being totally arbitrary. The choice of amino acids is pretty fickle (humans only have 20, some species have two more, and we often modify them... and there is a more-or-less infinite number of them that nothing on Earth uses at all.) Nucleotides are similar, and the debate about nucleic acid backbones is open. There are countless opportunities for different preferences amongst sugars (we're designed around glucose, rather arbitrarily) and other metabolites. In a real-life validation of all of this, Archaeans don't even use normal phospholipids in their membranes! (Which seems like such a bizarrely difficult thing to do that I sometimes wonder if it isn't evidence of multiple abiogenesis events, but that's a bit flimsy.)
I think it would be better if we could create an environment where no one felt a need to become a recluse in response to social or developmental troubles. Hiding as a coping mechanism means there's something wrong.
Just to be clear: I didn't mean to suggest that spending a large part of your day alone is an issue. (I do that!) I'm talking about total self-isolation—recluses in the proper sense. Not genetic oddities with an inborn disposition against any social contact, just the garden variety hermit.
Avoiding all social contact in such cases might be evidence of a bad situation, dissimilar friends, or a traumatic experience. Some people can handle and recover from these situations, others can't. The same goes for depression and many other mental disorders; they're are difficult topics that most people can't really self-diagnose and handle properly on their own. And yet, they can be solved trivially if someone else is around and looking for signs of discomfort.
Ultimately, this comes down to a safety concern; I don't think that privacy should not extend to mental health problems that aren't self-correcting or easily manageable. There are over a million young people in Japan who are recluses because they can't keep up with academic and social expectations, and this group has a notably higher suicide rate. Being a recluse means no one can reach out to you. No one can be there to help you stop yourself.
And maybe it isn't outright suicide—maybe the cost is something else, like your creativity or intelligence going underutilized. Even Ayn Rand thinks that's wrong.
I was thinking more along the lines of "obtaining a warrant to search for evidence of what happened to all those prostitutes who keep disappearing on or around your property" or "making sure you don't become a total recluse." As I said further down in my post, this situation is completely unacceptable and needs to be destroyed. Necessity, unfortunately, is subjective; they'd argue it's necessary, no matter how much we opine otherwise. Thus we need to re-educate them and shame them for thinking it's necessary.
It's a good soundbite, the idea of mutual respect as a civilized accomplishment—but Rand oversteps. The very cornerstones of civilization are the same as the rules of that tribe; without it, you have something entirely more primitive: solitary animals and the complete abolishment of culture. It is alas a rather tawdry thought that betrays Rand's education, no matter how elaborate the clothes.
Strive for a balance. It's no more unattainable an ideal than an extreme like total freedom or total cooperation. There are, believe it or not, ways in which complete privacy is not optimal. Some small degree of intrusion is always necessary, both psychologically and for safety.
In this case, I am completely on the side of recovering privacy, as these violations are gross and driven by ignorance, paranoia, and greed. They are massively inexcusable, and if I were south of the border I would probably have turned to a career of being a crazy social activist when I was an undergrad.
Schneier hit the nail on the head last week when he pointed out the real issue, though, and I hope you'll agree with me that it is a much bigger priority than the collateral privacy loss itself. Bureaucratic and political need to save face and to manage risk has grown out of control. The post-9/11 culture of safety has led to oppression in every conceivable security-related corner, as well as moves of "me-too" safety fetishism in totally unrelated areas.
The enemy here isn't just a big government, though; it's the individuals in these organisations, departments, and legislative bodies trying to protect themselves and their careers. It's an insurrection of selfishness, regardless of who the campaign promises are designed to appeal to. Without arguing over the rightness of the system, it is at least plain that these people are horrifically mismatched to the jobs they hold, and they need to be very specifically shamed if the fundamental shift they caused is to be reversed. An Edward R. Murrow would really fit the bill right about now.
Not likely! While I don't really want to go through the exact details of it (I've had hilariously long and protracted conversations about this before), liquid water and the chemistry of the common non-metals (hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon) at temperatures where water is liquid have some fairly special properties that make them really well-suited to giving rise to life. Ammonia instead of water seems possible, but a few sci-fi staples like silicon-based lifeforms are extremely unlikely—and given the fickleness of what we know about abiogenesis, it's likely that any emergent life that starts off using anything unfamiliar will optimize toward something more similar to what we have. Strange things might be possible, but it's pretty likely alien life will be... compostable (if not edible) by us Earthlings.
Groundhog Day isn't a parable for that at all—Bill Murray keeps his knowledge of the universe through each iteration of the day, and is shaped by his experiences. In fact, it agrees with the alternative, as he is able to predict the behaviours of absolutely everyone every single time, as they have no knowledge of subsequent events. They have no innate randomness; they are completely deterministic.
Are you sure? Consider a poem. The best formalist poetry (not counting free-form poetry) fits an incredible number of very difficult constraints and yet creates an intricate image without apparent effort. If that poem is then labelled with its metre by someone who understands that metre, and then you try to reproduce the same beauty and find you cannot, then that frustration commands a much higher respect for the author than merely witnessing the poem's beauty from afar (perhaps, for our metaphor's sake, in a language you don't even understand, thus making it nothing more than beautiful gibberish) and having no further insight into how it works.
I, for one, definitely prefer marvelling at the beauty of how something works and how intricate its assembly is, not just the image it creates from afar. That image is merely an illusion; more a part of your imagination and expectations than of the thing itself.
Godel set out an ontological proof for the existence of God which, like the earlier Saint Anselm proof that he built his on, boils down to "God exists because he is good, and good things must exist." In the Anselm proof, the 'good' quality is "greatness;" in Godel's, it's (moral) "positiveness." Such ontological proofs categorically rely on premises that are incompatible with empirical realism, and are ultimately circular. (Which is fairly ironic, as Descartes himself proposed one.)
I don't think it's fair to characterise his opinion of set logic as being a "failure," either; his theorems established limitations on what it could describe, and as a result helped precipitate the end of positivism, but to have the conviction to pursue such ideas he must have seen set theory as incomplete and accepted it that way to begin with. It's not that he thought it was a failure, it's that other people felt it was a failure after he showed them the truth about what it could and could not do. Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and many other prominent logicians had already been doing this for thirty years when Godel's big works were contributed.
He definitely was a little crazy, though—he starved to death, weighing less than half his healthy weight, obsessively paranoid that someone was trying to poison him.
As far as the physical laws of the universe go—keep in mind that the impact on science of Godel's work has been the acceptance that we may not know everything about the universe because we cannot detect it. If, once technology has reached its absolute maximum, we still cannot detect a phenomenon, then in all likelihood it will be something that does not affect us—otherwise we'd be able to detect its effect!
As far as we know, the human mind doesn't depend on any of that stuff, though. There's enough mystery about how the brain works, and we're making enough headway in figuring it out, that at present we're not even sure the quantum randomness implied by this weird story is required.
Remember, the universe is plenty capable of being beautiful even when it isn't inexplicable.
I think you're misunderstanding my use of the word "mechanism" here. I'm not saying there are fixed gears and circuits that explain how we work (there quite obviously aren't!), only that there are patterns, pathways, and systems behind the brain and hence the mind. There is a way in which the mind works, it's not some magic supernatural black box instilled by some indecisive buffoon on a cloud.
I'm a little weirded out by the "near-uniform" part, though. Do you truly believe that, placed in a situation with no new knowledge, you would consistently make significantly different choices? Most decisions are the results of our experiences and our immediate concerns; at best, the maximum variability in the outcome occurs when we fail to think things through. But as with catching your balance when you slip, it has been greatly beneficial to evolution to try to avoid screwing up (Hence why Larry Niven's contribution to the Crosstime series is bullshit.)
Granted, there is a tiny spot in our model of how the central nervous system works to allow for quantum randomness to interfere with otherwise completely deterministic decision-making (the transposon activity we discovered a couple years ago), but I personally would argue most arbitrary decisions come from reflecting on forgotten knowledge or memories, a little like "casting the runes" over uninitialized RAM to get a random number. (An example: what is the most random-sounding two-digit number you can think of, and why?)
I think you may be drawing unintended semantic distinctions—I would not say that a "process" of evolution would be any different than a "mechanism." It happens, it happens in a way, that way is predictable. (Excepting of course for the stochastic realities of quantum randomness.) I did not mean to suggest there is some agent picking the exact direction of evolution, only that, if an organism's functioning is not based around some mechanism whose behaviour is primarily predictable, then evolution has nothing to optimize, and would be impossible.
Absolutely; I'm saying that although the non-physical component of our humanity must obey the laws of the universe (i.e. that there's no soul), that's no excuse for assuming we're dumb, instinctual creatures; the "linoleic acid pheromone romance" hypothesis utterly conflicts with the rest of what we know about how the mind and brain works. It is not wise to shave with Occam's razor without illumination!
But there are mechanisms for learning; mechanisms we know must exist and, to some extent, even understand. The subtleties in them form the foundation of who we are when we are conceived, and interplay with our experiences as life continues. They are the tie-breakers that prevent us from being completely at the mercy of our situations, and what ties us to our parents even if we have not met them.
What these people do is claim there is nothing more, and it is obvious they have no knowledge of cognitive science (or possibly other people). That is self-evidently wrong. But there's nothing inhuman about being a machine if that machine can learn, grow, and discover the universe. Would you deny personhood to an artificial intelligence with the same potential?
Welp. Mark that one as torpedoed. The really aggressive "doesn't require cookies!" tracking/ad services rely on stuff like Panopticlick's tricks, I'm pretty sure.
I wouldn't go so far as to say we're not machines at all, just that we're not simple machines; ultimately, everything must have a comprehensible mechanism, or evolution cannot function. Possibly that's what you meant, but I just want to underscore that my concern is that there's a profound amount of functional reduction going on because of a shortsighted, overly-analytical mindset: the authors are looking at a single brick with a bit of mortar on it and assuming the brick belongs to a barbecue pit, when we know there's a skyscraper sitting right in front of them. This is not only bad psychology but bad behaviourism—even B. F. Skinner's radical reductions of human activities came with the caveat that he was too humble to speculate on the underlying reasons for the causal links he observed.
The suspicion that part of social compatibility can be explained through superficial genetic traits has been explored before. The bibliography on page 21 of the totally free and unpaywalled arxiv PDF has a few citations that seem pretty similar.
That being said, I'm not so sure about some of their conclusions; they make it sound like there are purely mechanistic reasons why we seek out the friends we do. Consider the following:
The implications of the finding regarding homophily on genes related to linoleic acid metabolism are unclear. Linoleic acid is a precursor for substances involved in a broad range of important bodily processes (ranging from adipocyte function to bone formation to the regulation of gene expression) (42), and the component genes in the pathway are related to the metabolism of cholesterol, steroids, and various ingested substances, though it is intriguing that linoleic acid compounds might be used by moths as pheromones (43). Possibly, this pathway is related to the restrained consumption or the specific metabolism of various foodstuffs, traits for which homophily may be advantageous and heterophily self-injurious.
Personally, I think this is patently absurd and that there is no way this could influence personality or human behaviour. It seems to me to be more likely that the linoleic acid genes either have some wildly obscure indirect effect on personality that we can detect, or that they're simply inherited by chance with something that does.
It would have been wonderful if people here actually bothered to RTFA so we could argue about whether or not biochemically-inclined sociologists are out to destroy civilization by being too narrow-minded. On the plus side, this is a biology paper that was submitted to Arxiv, which means that it probably is having trouble getting into a major journal (i.e. it's very possibly being regarded as crap by journal editors due to its weird conclusions.)
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It is also very strongly wired into our brains insofar that I would consider it part of the human condition. Marginalizing people for showing this behaviour is never going to end well.
Mild objection—discrimination is also strongly wired into our brains. It's only been in the past century that the objectification of women has become so overt. As far as sensitivity is concerned, this event was backward from previous social norms, even though huge improvements in discriminatory behaviour have occurred over the years.
...Right, Pratchett. Yes. Agreed!
I'm not sure who or what "TP" is. Could you be more specific?
Exactly; if, for some reason, some form of pre-life began using weird components like a nitrogen-phosphorus backbone or a silane backbone, it's almost certain there would be more Earth-like replacements more readily available—and there are already whole frickin' nebular clouds of bits and pieces of organic molecules, so it's not like the universe is really lacking in opportunities for this sort of thing anyway. Some arguments have been made about silicon perhaps being more viable at extreme temperatures and pressures, but I'm not convinced such an environment is stable enough for Baby Self-Replicating Molecule's First Steps.
You may want to read the Culture series by Iain M. Banks (recently deceased) for an alternative perspective. The system therein is both fully consensual and condescendingly holier-than-thou. It's generally fun to read about, although its villains (in the form of evil empires) tend to be cartoonish in their grotesqueness. Excession, despite widely being considered the most boring novel in the set, spends a great deal of time dwelling on this sort of thing precisely. Despite being a socialist utopia that offers all these things, people are still free to leave if they wish.
That being said, though, mental health matters can make getting permission a tricky task. There are plenty of situations in which a person may not be able to make informed consent, after all. Because of this I think such a system would have to be opt-out in order to achieve its goals. In addition to all of the usual arguably-impossible requirements about incorruptible and sentient computing.
Hey, you're welcome to say Windows isn't supported. That's totally your choice. Just don't say something is supported when it isn't. There are a lot of half-assed OSS projects out there that do this. (That being said, you don't need the hardware; VMware Player is close enough to native performance. And to some extent, even WINE and ReactOS can provide an alternative to getting a Windows licence if the software's simple enough.)
How does "not remotely POSIX compliant and hence generally not source compatible" sound?
Oh yeah, just let me download and build all these libraries your project requires... oh, what's that? One of the libraries requires Visual Studio 2003 Ersatzpress Edition to compile? And another one needs gcc-mingw-0.0.1-super-alpha-pre-release-dinosaur-version? Okay, let me just... get on that...
If Windows binaries aren't provided, it means no one on the dev team could get them to build. (Maybe they can't figure out how to un-#pragma the #pragging #pragma correctly?) That's a big warning sign.
Yeah, that's the biggest difference between "compostable" and "edible." There are a lot of detritovores that don't care about the chemicals they're chewing up; unless it's something toxic enough to kill them, anything just looks like a carbon chain in dire need of stripping. Molecules of the wrong chirality definitely fit in this category.
That being said, chirality isn't the only thing that you can count on being totally arbitrary. The choice of amino acids is pretty fickle (humans only have 20, some species have two more, and we often modify them... and there is a more-or-less infinite number of them that nothing on Earth uses at all.) Nucleotides are similar, and the debate about nucleic acid backbones is open. There are countless opportunities for different preferences amongst sugars (we're designed around glucose, rather arbitrarily) and other metabolites. In a real-life validation of all of this, Archaeans don't even use normal phospholipids in their membranes! (Which seems like such a bizarrely difficult thing to do that I sometimes wonder if it isn't evidence of multiple abiogenesis events, but that's a bit flimsy.)
I think it would be better if we could create an environment where no one felt a need to become a recluse in response to social or developmental troubles. Hiding as a coping mechanism means there's something wrong.
Just to be clear: I didn't mean to suggest that spending a large part of your day alone is an issue. (I do that!) I'm talking about total self-isolation—recluses in the proper sense. Not genetic oddities with an inborn disposition against any social contact, just the garden variety hermit.
Avoiding all social contact in such cases might be evidence of a bad situation, dissimilar friends, or a traumatic experience. Some people can handle and recover from these situations, others can't. The same goes for depression and many other mental disorders; they're are difficult topics that most people can't really self-diagnose and handle properly on their own. And yet, they can be solved trivially if someone else is around and looking for signs of discomfort.
Ultimately, this comes down to a safety concern; I don't think that privacy should not extend to mental health problems that aren't self-correcting or easily manageable. There are over a million young people in Japan who are recluses because they can't keep up with academic and social expectations, and this group has a notably higher suicide rate. Being a recluse means no one can reach out to you. No one can be there to help you stop yourself.
And maybe it isn't outright suicide—maybe the cost is something else, like your creativity or intelligence going underutilized. Even Ayn Rand thinks that's wrong.
I was thinking more along the lines of "obtaining a warrant to search for evidence of what happened to all those prostitutes who keep disappearing on or around your property" or "making sure you don't become a total recluse." As I said further down in my post, this situation is completely unacceptable and needs to be destroyed. Necessity, unfortunately, is subjective; they'd argue it's necessary, no matter how much we opine otherwise. Thus we need to re-educate them and shame them for thinking it's necessary.
It's a good soundbite, the idea of mutual respect as a civilized accomplishment—but Rand oversteps. The very cornerstones of civilization are the same as the rules of that tribe; without it, you have something entirely more primitive: solitary animals and the complete abolishment of culture. It is alas a rather tawdry thought that betrays Rand's education, no matter how elaborate the clothes.
Strive for a balance. It's no more unattainable an ideal than an extreme like total freedom or total cooperation. There are, believe it or not, ways in which complete privacy is not optimal. Some small degree of intrusion is always necessary, both psychologically and for safety.
In this case, I am completely on the side of recovering privacy, as these violations are gross and driven by ignorance, paranoia, and greed. They are massively inexcusable, and if I were south of the border I would probably have turned to a career of being a crazy social activist when I was an undergrad.
Schneier hit the nail on the head last week when he pointed out the real issue, though, and I hope you'll agree with me that it is a much bigger priority than the collateral privacy loss itself. Bureaucratic and political need to save face and to manage risk has grown out of control. The post-9/11 culture of safety has led to oppression in every conceivable security-related corner, as well as moves of "me-too" safety fetishism in totally unrelated areas.
The enemy here isn't just a big government, though; it's the individuals in these organisations, departments, and legislative bodies trying to protect themselves and their careers. It's an insurrection of selfishness, regardless of who the campaign promises are designed to appeal to. Without arguing over the rightness of the system, it is at least plain that these people are horrifically mismatched to the jobs they hold, and they need to be very specifically shamed if the fundamental shift they caused is to be reversed. An Edward R. Murrow would really fit the bill right about now.
Not likely! While I don't really want to go through the exact details of it (I've had hilariously long and protracted conversations about this before), liquid water and the chemistry of the common non-metals (hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon) at temperatures where water is liquid have some fairly special properties that make them really well-suited to giving rise to life. Ammonia instead of water seems possible, but a few sci-fi staples like silicon-based lifeforms are extremely unlikely—and given the fickleness of what we know about abiogenesis, it's likely that any emergent life that starts off using anything unfamiliar will optimize toward something more similar to what we have. Strange things might be possible, but it's pretty likely alien life will be... compostable (if not edible) by us Earthlings.
Groundhog Day isn't a parable for that at all—Bill Murray keeps his knowledge of the universe through each iteration of the day, and is shaped by his experiences. In fact, it agrees with the alternative, as he is able to predict the behaviours of absolutely everyone every single time, as they have no knowledge of subsequent events. They have no innate randomness; they are completely deterministic.
Are you sure? Consider a poem. The best formalist poetry (not counting free-form poetry) fits an incredible number of very difficult constraints and yet creates an intricate image without apparent effort. If that poem is then labelled with its metre by someone who understands that metre, and then you try to reproduce the same beauty and find you cannot, then that frustration commands a much higher respect for the author than merely witnessing the poem's beauty from afar (perhaps, for our metaphor's sake, in a language you don't even understand, thus making it nothing more than beautiful gibberish) and having no further insight into how it works.
I, for one, definitely prefer marvelling at the beauty of how something works and how intricate its assembly is, not just the image it creates from afar. That image is merely an illusion; more a part of your imagination and expectations than of the thing itself.
An understandable trepidation. Alas, I can't exactly mod you up. Good luck!
Godel set out an ontological proof for the existence of God which, like the earlier Saint Anselm proof that he built his on, boils down to "God exists because he is good, and good things must exist." In the Anselm proof, the 'good' quality is "greatness;" in Godel's, it's (moral) "positiveness." Such ontological proofs categorically rely on premises that are incompatible with empirical realism, and are ultimately circular. (Which is fairly ironic, as Descartes himself proposed one.)
I don't think it's fair to characterise his opinion of set logic as being a "failure," either; his theorems established limitations on what it could describe, and as a result helped precipitate the end of positivism, but to have the conviction to pursue such ideas he must have seen set theory as incomplete and accepted it that way to begin with. It's not that he thought it was a failure, it's that other people felt it was a failure after he showed them the truth about what it could and could not do. Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and many other prominent logicians had already been doing this for thirty years when Godel's big works were contributed.
He definitely was a little crazy, though—he starved to death, weighing less than half his healthy weight, obsessively paranoid that someone was trying to poison him.
As far as the physical laws of the universe go—keep in mind that the impact on science of Godel's work has been the acceptance that we may not know everything about the universe because we cannot detect it. If, once technology has reached its absolute maximum, we still cannot detect a phenomenon, then in all likelihood it will be something that does not affect us—otherwise we'd be able to detect its effect!
As far as we know, the human mind doesn't depend on any of that stuff, though. There's enough mystery about how the brain works, and we're making enough headway in figuring it out, that at present we're not even sure the quantum randomness implied by this weird story is required.
Remember, the universe is plenty capable of being beautiful even when it isn't inexplicable.
I think you're misunderstanding my use of the word "mechanism" here. I'm not saying there are fixed gears and circuits that explain how we work (there quite obviously aren't!), only that there are patterns, pathways, and systems behind the brain and hence the mind. There is a way in which the mind works, it's not some magic supernatural black box instilled by some indecisive buffoon on a cloud.
I'm a little weirded out by the "near-uniform" part, though. Do you truly believe that, placed in a situation with no new knowledge, you would consistently make significantly different choices? Most decisions are the results of our experiences and our immediate concerns; at best, the maximum variability in the outcome occurs when we fail to think things through. But as with catching your balance when you slip, it has been greatly beneficial to evolution to try to avoid screwing up (Hence why Larry Niven's contribution to the Crosstime series is bullshit.)
Granted, there is a tiny spot in our model of how the central nervous system works to allow for quantum randomness to interfere with otherwise completely deterministic decision-making (the transposon activity we discovered a couple years ago), but I personally would argue most arbitrary decisions come from reflecting on forgotten knowledge or memories, a little like "casting the runes" over uninitialized RAM to get a random number. (An example: what is the most random-sounding two-digit number you can think of, and why?)
I think you may be drawing unintended semantic distinctions—I would not say that a "process" of evolution would be any different than a "mechanism." It happens, it happens in a way, that way is predictable. (Excepting of course for the stochastic realities of quantum randomness.) I did not mean to suggest there is some agent picking the exact direction of evolution, only that, if an organism's functioning is not based around some mechanism whose behaviour is primarily predictable, then evolution has nothing to optimize, and would be impossible.
Absolutely; I'm saying that although the non-physical component of our humanity must obey the laws of the universe (i.e. that there's no soul), that's no excuse for assuming we're dumb, instinctual creatures; the "linoleic acid pheromone romance" hypothesis utterly conflicts with the rest of what we know about how the mind and brain works. It is not wise to shave with Occam's razor without illumination!
But there are mechanisms for learning; mechanisms we know must exist and, to some extent, even understand. The subtleties in them form the foundation of who we are when we are conceived, and interplay with our experiences as life continues. They are the tie-breakers that prevent us from being completely at the mercy of our situations, and what ties us to our parents even if we have not met them.
What these people do is claim there is nothing more, and it is obvious they have no knowledge of cognitive science (or possibly other people). That is self-evidently wrong. But there's nothing inhuman about being a machine if that machine can learn, grow, and discover the universe. Would you deny personhood to an artificial intelligence with the same potential?
These are distinctions that, as a Canadian from the east, I was not aware of. So noted!
Welp. Mark that one as torpedoed. The really aggressive "doesn't require cookies!" tracking/ad services rely on stuff like Panopticlick's tricks, I'm pretty sure.
I wouldn't go so far as to say we're not machines at all, just that we're not simple machines; ultimately, everything must have a comprehensible mechanism, or evolution cannot function. Possibly that's what you meant, but I just want to underscore that my concern is that there's a profound amount of functional reduction going on because of a shortsighted, overly-analytical mindset: the authors are looking at a single brick with a bit of mortar on it and assuming the brick belongs to a barbecue pit, when we know there's a skyscraper sitting right in front of them. This is not only bad psychology but bad behaviourism—even B. F. Skinner's radical reductions of human activities came with the caveat that he was too humble to speculate on the underlying reasons for the causal links he observed.
The suspicion that part of social compatibility can be explained through superficial genetic traits has been explored before. The bibliography on page 21 of the totally free and unpaywalled arxiv PDF has a few citations that seem pretty similar.
That being said, I'm not so sure about some of their conclusions; they make it sound like there are purely mechanistic reasons why we seek out the friends we do. Consider the following:
The implications of the finding regarding homophily on genes related to linoleic acid metabolism are unclear. Linoleic acid is a precursor for substances involved in a broad range of important bodily processes (ranging from adipocyte function to bone formation to the regulation of gene expression) (42), and the component genes in the pathway are related to the metabolism of cholesterol, steroids, and various ingested substances, though it is intriguing that linoleic acid compounds might be used by moths as pheromones (43). Possibly, this pathway is related to the restrained consumption or the specific metabolism of various foodstuffs, traits for which homophily may be advantageous and heterophily self-injurious.
Personally, I think this is patently absurd and that there is no way this could influence personality or human behaviour. It seems to me to be more likely that the linoleic acid genes either have some wildly obscure indirect effect on personality that we can detect, or that they're simply inherited by chance with something that does.
It would have been wonderful if people here actually bothered to RTFA so we could argue about whether or not biochemically-inclined sociologists are out to destroy civilization by being too narrow-minded. On the plus side, this is a biology paper that was submitted to Arxiv, which means that it probably is having trouble getting into a major journal (i.e. it's very possibly being regarded as crap by journal editors due to its weird conclusions.)