I'd have to agree. The third one, like the book, takes a sudden delightfully unsettling turn for the macabre. Flirting betweent eh characters, twisted evil... it's much more fun for an adult audience to relate to. They have all been really excellent renditions, but I feel like they are getting better.
There is nothing wrong with the conclusions contradicting eachother. These studies trace the migration of single loci, not entire critters. Loci don't move exactly like critters do; they are fluctuating in frequency and bottlenecking and doing a whole bunch of other fun stuff under the radar. Just because we have a mitochondrial eve and a Y chrome Adam does not at all mean these two mated with eachother. It just means that all other versions of those genes that didn't descend from these two were since snuffed out, by random chance, in the y chromosome case.
Furthermore, the nomenclature is mischeivious: Adam and Eve never met. They probably didn't even live within 5 thousand years of eachother. All these studies show are that all existing versions of these genes trace back via a given series of mutations to a specific individual, which, usuing geographic data and some assumptions about migratory behavior and mutation rates, you can imply to have existed in a certain place and time. You can do this with any loci, and at some point in the past it fixes. Each gene goes back to a different individual in a different place. HLA genes go back to the earliest vertibrates.
Don't freak out when you learn the truth about the garden.
NORAD with big frickin lasers... My favorite part is the study that determined that the laser dose they were using was safe.
"Ok, now I'm going to shine a big frickin laser directly into your dome, please try to relax. Greeeaaat.. so, are you feeling blind? No? That's truly excellent. Ok, now I'm going to shine a slightly bigger frickin laser directly into your dome..."
Very briefly, I was arguing against the selfish gene folks. Once upon a time, genes made hominids, and hominids were flung at survival obstacles. some of the ones that randomly made it through sometimes did so because of some genetic advantage. If you want to anthropomorphize those genes, go for it.
However, that is not the selective paradym that faces humans. The whole reason for the period of immese selection for the modern human mind was that in it rested the capacity to form internal abstractions of external obstacles. This problem solving skill could shift the point of selection from the death of unfit creatures to the death of unfit ideas. When that transition was complete, selection lo longer acted upon the critter, but rather internally, in a virtual space where that critter could throw itself at a problem a thousand times with no real risk of injury (with the exception of a couple of my other readers.). In the modern world, it is folly to worry that all your actions serve the interest of selfish genes.
That was what I was arguing. Here was how I did it.
1) Genes are not anthropormorphic entities.
The misunderstood hypothesis:
Genes act randomly.
Some variation is selected for.
Selection filters adaptive variation.
Some behaviors can be selected for.
Advantageous behavior genes often popularize.
Therefore:
many animals sometimes serve some of their
genes, sometimes.
living beings are the result of a perfect
legacy of successful procreation.
The way it is:
Living beings have a heritage of many genes
that might have been useful at one point or
another.
However
Evolution is additive (you work with what you've already got.)
selective conditions are in flux (times change)
Adaptive advantages are eacg local to a set of specific conditions.
Therefore
What we end up with is not this Olympian survival machine that everyone in this post keeps talking about, but rather a legacy device that has managed to clunk its way through a vast past of obstacles by accumulating hack upon hack upon hack.
Selfish genes are not what predicts the outcome of behavior. Humans are released into each new generation's new environmental conditions with the patchwork of software and hardware that had gotten them through the past. Like all such evolutionary tales, not all will make it; not all were meant to. The point of diversity is that random variation in function can cover a side enough range that enough of a subset can always fit through selective barriers to perpetuate into the next generation.
Remember violence? Violence was useful once. It may not be so useful now. It would be better that violence was not used by anyone, but it is a truce that is almost impossible to establish when we all were born with violent capacity from our genes. Don't try to blame the rules of power for a need for violence: many animal types use violence, many do not. We used it. A behavioral gene type that is no longer as useful, and yet it remains.
It is being selfish? Not effectively. Our new moral structures have caused those genes to be selected against, by incarcerating (effectively sterilizing) many of the more violent individuals. Individuals who MIGHT be carrying violence genes. This is not a selfish gene, it is a stupid gene that just does its thing. In the past centuries the release of new moral thought occured in contradiction with these violent genes, dispite their presence. New conditions allowed new thought to be selected for, and the thought in turn creates the new conditions that we select ourselves with. What is this going to be called, the Selfish Mind?
My point is this: don't thank your genes; they don't know what they are going. Thank luck, thank your particular collection of choices that led you to where you are, thank your mommy, thank whatever you want, but not your genes. You were made with them, but they made you with a mind strong enough to ursurp them.
You are confusing what you ought to do with what mathematically represents the general tendancies of your breeding behavior. In doing so, you deprive yourself of all the advantages of humanity.
I also read the selfish gene. I was barely a highschooler when I read it: already interested in the field of genetics. At the time, it made a brilliant sort of sense. Our actions encaged by the selfish genes. How brilliant, how pure! When I grow up, I will have harems and seed sperm banks. My sweet sweet genes will survive!
Twelve years and a lot of population genetics later I still remember that book quite clearly. I remember it because of how little since it makes in the face of real science.
The first major crime committed by your arguement
is that of heubris. Genetically, the death of the individual does not matter that much for a given gene pool. Your genes will continue as long as the group's genes continue: every gene in your genome will be represented. It makes heroism make a bit of sense. It opens us up for freedom to die. Quite liberating, actually.
The second major crime espoused by your position is that of confusing mathematics with philosophy. Allow to to provide an example. When I was a young lad, after reading that foolish book, I was really concerned: I was brilliant, and it was my duty to insure my brilliant genes would pass on. I could insure this with my brilliance; with the harems and sperm banks previously mentioned. But would this be enough? Would I also have to go on semenary roadtrips across foreign lands, seeding the population like johnny appleseed? That's what Attila the Hun had to do, but I don't know if I could act like that. How would I be able to overcome my moral repugnance to the actions of the selfish genes? I was truly concerned that my moral sense was going to be a competitive disadvantage. Poisoned by memes! For surely nothing so disadvantageous as morality could have a genetic component? You have to forgive me for worrying about such silly things as selfish genes: I was extremely young and uneducated.
I don't worry about that stuff any more. My genes aren't anthropomorphic things that define me and dictate my actions. They have brought me where I am, but then leave it up to me to decide what to do with it. Surely you can think of examples of choices that make sense for the individual but not for their genetic legacy? Surely you don't think that becasue genes are passed on, that that becomes more important than the choices you make? Monks make choices; they find those choices to be more important than passing on their legacy. Their genes are still circulating in the community of other humans; it is no loss to the pool. Their genes wouldn't care even if they did have a say.
Evolutionary principles may tell us what happens, but they can never justify those choices. Your arguement could equally be used to rationalize male polygamy because of evolutionary tendancies. LEAVE DARWIN OUT OF IT. Mathematics has never been used to dictate morality.
And with cockroaches. There is actually a company called BrainGate that is in human trial phase for a complex electrode fiber implant sheith that will go over the brains of the severly handicapped to allow them to regain fine tuned control over computer screen elements. Eventually they would like to produce "wearable robots"; essentially a hydrolic exoskeleton directly controllable via "natural" movement commands from the brain. There are also groups trying to devise means of implanting a surrogate nervous system that would stimulate the muscles and allow a severly injured individual to regain direct control over their limbs. This last bit is highly speculative, but all have been considered.
None have very much to do with this particular technology.
Their list seems pretty arbitrary in some places. How are eyes and photosynthesis so amazing? They even function in similar fashions: make a chemical that will absorb frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. Simple energetics, and really only a matter of time before these sort of systems would appear.
Also sex. Give me a break! Sex had to happen. Evolution is a numbers game. As soon as you start being able to transfer elements of heredity, you improve those cell's odds of having a legitimate set of functioning enzymes. Immense selection, really not that surprising.
Far more interesting is the immunological response systems. Think of it: how are we able to have around 30k genes, and yet each one of our bodies can produce millions of unique antigen receptors? Well, I'll tell you. We trapped a transposon, that's how. We trapped it, activate it in our leukocytes and make it randomly reshuffle our Antigen receptor dna to produce a unique antigen binding surface. We trapped the devil to catch the devil! And that's just a beginning.
I think slashdot can beat their silly list. Cmon, creationists; give us your best shot.
Did I just read that? Corporations certainly do "just get money." They get it through tax breaks, subsidies, disproportial amount of business, or externality management. Sometimes, as with the airline industry, they are considered too integral to our economy to allow to fail, and are subsidized. Other times, as with pet companies run by Senators, they are given wide tax breaks, under the pretext of stimulating the economy to ward of external competition (this is a form of protectionism). Often, as with the industrial military complex, our reliance on a particular private sector product so empowers that sector that they begin to distort our continuing preference for that product even though our continuing need has diminished. Finally, as with the oil industry, externalities such as wildlife preservation, roadways, and extranational reserves are managed by national resources, effectively saving the industry that cost by distributing it to all of us, the tax payers.
The difference between NASA and corporate handouts is just in the fraction of subsidy. What makes these corporate handouts different is their motivation: NASA takes our money to forward an idealistic vision and forge a collective legacy. Corporations take our money to make us pay for the cost of reassembling an elite aristocracy. This is not a project that distinguishes our legacy from any of the other miserable historic states of mankind. It is not in my interest, it is not in America's interest, in is not in the interest of mankinds plight, nor mankind's betterment.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd have to agree. The third one, like the book, takes a sudden delightfully unsettling turn for the macabre. Flirting betweent eh characters, twisted evil... it's much more fun for an adult audience to relate to. They have all been really excellent renditions, but I feel like they are getting better.
When the wife comes home early, and you've got a fifty-fifty shot at violence or threesome.
How dare these clown polute the slashdot literature!
Furthermore, the nomenclature is mischeivious: Adam and Eve never met. They probably didn't even live within 5 thousand years of eachother. All these studies show are that all existing versions of these genes trace back via a given series of mutations to a specific individual, which, usuing geographic data and some assumptions about migratory behavior and mutation rates, you can imply to have existed in a certain place and time. You can do this with any loci, and at some point in the past it fixes. Each gene goes back to a different individual in a different place. HLA genes go back to the earliest vertibrates.
Don't freak out when you learn the truth about the garden.
Oh, dat? Dat's not a Trojan: Dis is a trojan!
You must believe in the force, luke.
"Ok, now I'm going to shine a big frickin laser directly into your dome, please try to relax. Greeeaaat.. so, are you feeling blind? No? That's truly excellent. Ok, now I'm going to shine a slightly bigger frickin laser directly into your dome..."
Very briefly, I was arguing against the selfish gene folks. Once upon a time, genes made hominids, and hominids were flung at survival obstacles. some of the ones that randomly made it through sometimes did so because of some genetic advantage. If you want to anthropomorphize those genes, go for it.
However, that is not the selective paradym that faces humans. The whole reason for the period of immese selection for the modern human mind was that in it rested the capacity to form internal abstractions of external obstacles. This problem solving skill could shift the point of selection from the death of unfit creatures to the death of unfit ideas. When that transition was complete, selection lo longer acted upon the critter, but rather internally, in a virtual space where that critter could throw itself at a problem a thousand times with no real risk of injury (with the exception of a couple of my other readers.). In the modern world, it is folly to worry that all your actions serve the interest of selfish genes.
That was what I was arguing. Here was how I did it.
1) Genes are not anthropormorphic entities.
The misunderstood hypothesis: Genes act randomly.
Some variation is selected for.
Selection filters adaptive variation.
Some behaviors can be selected for.
Advantageous behavior genes often popularize.
Therefore:
many animals sometimes serve some of their genes, sometimes.
living beings are the result of a perfect legacy of successful procreation.
The way it is: Living beings have a heritage of many genes that might have been useful at one point or another.
However
Evolution is additive (you work with what you've already got.)
selective conditions are in flux (times change)
Adaptive advantages are eacg local to a set of specific conditions.
Therefore
What we end up with is not this Olympian survival machine that everyone in this post keeps talking about, but rather a legacy device that has managed to clunk its way through a vast past of obstacles by accumulating hack upon hack upon hack.
Selfish genes are not what predicts the outcome of behavior. Humans are released into each new generation's new environmental conditions with the patchwork of software and hardware that had gotten them through the past. Like all such evolutionary tales, not all will make it; not all were meant to. The point of diversity is that random variation in function can cover a side enough range that enough of a subset can always fit through selective barriers to perpetuate into the next generation.
Remember violence? Violence was useful once. It may not be so useful now. It would be better that violence was not used by anyone, but it is a truce that is almost impossible to establish when we all were born with violent capacity from our genes. Don't try to blame the rules of power for a need for violence: many animal types use violence, many do not. We used it. A behavioral gene type that is no longer as useful, and yet it remains.
It is being selfish? Not effectively. Our new moral structures have caused those genes to be selected against, by incarcerating (effectively sterilizing) many of the more violent individuals. Individuals who MIGHT be carrying violence genes. This is not a selfish gene, it is a stupid gene that just does its thing. In the past centuries the release of new moral thought occured in contradiction with these violent genes, dispite their presence. New conditions allowed new thought to be selected for, and the thought in turn creates the new conditions that we select ourselves with. What is this going to be called, the Selfish Mind?
My point is this: don't thank your genes; they don't know what they are going. Thank luck, thank your particular collection of choices that led you to where you are, thank your mommy, thank whatever you want, but not your genes. You were made with them, but they made you with a mind strong enough to ursurp them.
It's called sarcasm, you twit.
You are confusing what you ought to do with what mathematically represents the general tendancies of your breeding behavior. In doing so, you deprive yourself of all the advantages of humanity. I also read the selfish gene. I was barely a highschooler when I read it: already interested in the field of genetics. At the time, it made a brilliant sort of sense. Our actions encaged by the selfish genes. How brilliant, how pure! When I grow up, I will have harems and seed sperm banks. My sweet sweet genes will survive! Twelve years and a lot of population genetics later I still remember that book quite clearly. I remember it because of how little since it makes in the face of real science. The first major crime committed by your arguement is that of heubris. Genetically, the death of the individual does not matter that much for a given gene pool. Your genes will continue as long as the group's genes continue: every gene in your genome will be represented. It makes heroism make a bit of sense. It opens us up for freedom to die. Quite liberating, actually. The second major crime espoused by your position is that of confusing mathematics with philosophy. Allow to to provide an example. When I was a young lad, after reading that foolish book, I was really concerned: I was brilliant, and it was my duty to insure my brilliant genes would pass on. I could insure this with my brilliance; with the harems and sperm banks previously mentioned. But would this be enough? Would I also have to go on semenary roadtrips across foreign lands, seeding the population like johnny appleseed? That's what Attila the Hun had to do, but I don't know if I could act like that. How would I be able to overcome my moral repugnance to the actions of the selfish genes? I was truly concerned that my moral sense was going to be a competitive disadvantage. Poisoned by memes! For surely nothing so disadvantageous as morality could have a genetic component? You have to forgive me for worrying about such silly things as selfish genes: I was extremely young and uneducated. I don't worry about that stuff any more. My genes aren't anthropomorphic things that define me and dictate my actions. They have brought me where I am, but then leave it up to me to decide what to do with it. Surely you can think of examples of choices that make sense for the individual but not for their genetic legacy? Surely you don't think that becasue genes are passed on, that that becomes more important than the choices you make? Monks make choices; they find those choices to be more important than passing on their legacy. Their genes are still circulating in the community of other humans; it is no loss to the pool. Their genes wouldn't care even if they did have a say. Evolutionary principles may tell us what happens, but they can never justify those choices. Your arguement could equally be used to rationalize male polygamy because of evolutionary tendancies. LEAVE DARWIN OUT OF IT. Mathematics has never been used to dictate morality.
And with cockroaches. There is actually a company called BrainGate that is in human trial phase for a complex electrode fiber implant sheith that will go over the brains of the severly handicapped to allow them to regain fine tuned control over computer screen elements. Eventually they would like to produce "wearable robots"; essentially a hydrolic exoskeleton directly controllable via "natural" movement commands from the brain. There are also groups trying to devise means of implanting a surrogate nervous system that would stimulate the muscles and allow a severly injured individual to regain direct control over their limbs. This last bit is highly speculative, but all have been considered.
None have very much to do with this particular technology.
Their list seems pretty arbitrary in some places. How are eyes and photosynthesis so amazing? They even function in similar fashions: make a chemical that will absorb frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. Simple energetics, and really only a matter of time before these sort of systems would appear. Also sex. Give me a break! Sex had to happen. Evolution is a numbers game. As soon as you start being able to transfer elements of heredity, you improve those cell's odds of having a legitimate set of functioning enzymes. Immense selection, really not that surprising. Far more interesting is the immunological response systems. Think of it: how are we able to have around 30k genes, and yet each one of our bodies can produce millions of unique antigen receptors? Well, I'll tell you. We trapped a transposon, that's how. We trapped it, activate it in our leukocytes and make it randomly reshuffle our Antigen receptor dna to produce a unique antigen binding surface. We trapped the devil to catch the devil! And that's just a beginning. I think slashdot can beat their silly list. Cmon, creationists; give us your best shot.
Did I just read that? Corporations certainly do "just get money." They get it through tax breaks, subsidies, disproportial amount of business, or externality management. Sometimes, as with the airline industry, they are considered too integral to our economy to allow to fail, and are subsidized. Other times, as with pet companies run by Senators, they are given wide tax breaks, under the pretext of stimulating the economy to ward of external competition (this is a form of protectionism). Often, as with the industrial military complex, our reliance on a particular private sector product so empowers that sector that they begin to distort our continuing preference for that product even though our continuing need has diminished. Finally, as with the oil industry, externalities such as wildlife preservation, roadways, and extranational reserves are managed by national resources, effectively saving the industry that cost by distributing it to all of us, the tax payers. The difference between NASA and corporate handouts is just in the fraction of subsidy. What makes these corporate handouts different is their motivation: NASA takes our money to forward an idealistic vision and forge a collective legacy. Corporations take our money to make us pay for the cost of reassembling an elite aristocracy. This is not a project that distinguishes our legacy from any of the other miserable historic states of mankind. It is not in my interest, it is not in America's interest, in is not in the interest of mankinds plight, nor mankind's betterment.
Corporations do just "get money." They get it through tax breaks and subsidies.