OK, I'm down for some alternate hypothesis discussion, but trash-talking bait with a link to a pseudo-scientific website? I could even handle some "conspiracy theory" discussion about editorial bias in peer-reviewed journals. But seeing a reference to the supernatural right off the bat with the supposed purpose of attempting to change a scientific concept -- I just can't take that seriously at all.
My eyes might be destined to stay this way for the rest of my life, but as is mentioned in the article, our brains are more than capable and ready to handle the information processing side. So, the issue is really a matter of sensors, and we're more than capable of making small electronics that can capture specific ranges of EM waves and transmit that information as patterned electric impulses. Various sensory and motor augmentation experiments (BrainPort article here on Slashdot, also see BBC article on Rhesus monkeys and robotic arms among many others) have demonstrated the plasticity of adult primate brains, so I doubt it'll be too long before the solution is available as outpatient surgery for those with enough money / power.
The "conspiracy theorist" in me thinks the ROKR... limitations... might have some relationship with Apple having been held back by troubles with Moto's PowerPC CPUs, particularly the 1+ year G4 500MHz ceiling and their inability and/or unwillingness to produce a G5.
Actually, "we" have evolved since the beginning of the agricultural age. This report (OMIM here and PubMed here) demonstrates a shift in the frequency of an allele of a gene that is expressed in the brain.
Re:So it almost seems evolution follows a... desig
on
Is Evolution Predictable?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Darwin lived a long time ago. He developed his ideas without the deep knowledge we posess today, and yet, as Ernst Mayr pointed out, the theory of evolution was enhanced by molecular biochemistry, not weakened. So, to criticize a modern scientist for not being a pure Darwinist is really to congratulate that inidividual for staying current in the field.
As for the ID attempt to bring about a paradigm shift in science: good luck. Seriously! The crux of ID is that of bias in observation of the natural world, and as such, ID attacks a fundamental difference in philosophy that separates spirituality from science: un-biased falsification. My mind spins at the notion of how that kind of paradigm shift would change what we call "science" - perhaps we could classify the current experiments involving neural imaging and Buddhist meditation as such. A revolutionary scientist is not attached to any particular scientific paradigm.
That being said, the only thing that creates new species is the human mind. Species do not exist: individual organisms exist. Individual organisms exhibit their characteristics (phenotype) based on the expression of their hereditary information (genotype in the form of nucleic acids) in their particular environment. The current model for biological evolution is really quite simple: it's a change in the frequency of alleles of genes in a population of organisms over multiple generations. And that brings me back to Darwin and your comment on the directionality of biological evolution. Of course it isn't random! J.T. Bonner's model for evolution is quite nice and has but a few basic ideas, as follow. The unit of evolution is the life cycle, not the individual. At the smallest stage in the life cycle, novel changes are introduced into the DNA. The life cycle develops through an interplay between its genetics and environment, during which time the weakest and unluckiest variations of the life cycle will die. The life cycle that develops to it's pseudo-largest stage will be able to reproduce, but will do so selectively. The frequency of alleles of genes in the population of life cycles changes in that moment of producing an offspring, and so evolution happens under the influence of both random and intelligent change.
But perhaps this is where the creationist root of ID takes charge, because ID always seems to want the intelligence to be outside the limits of the natural world. I think I'd have a lot less of a problem with the notion of intelligent design if the designer could be a sufficiently advanced product of biological evoltuion.
I doubt this game would cause any sort of uproar with proponents of "intelligent design"... mostly because this game is all about intelligent design, and maybe even includes some aspects about the heritability of acquired traits. I'm still excited about playing Spore, both personally and professionally (I'm a high school biology teacher and a biology education researcher). I'm hoping to get this loaded on all of our laptops in school (that is, if they have the horsepower...) and have the students play as a part of our evolution curriculum. My suspicion is that the game will help students to imagine the results of population changes through generations, while also giving me an opportunity to talk about the differences between "evolution" in Spore and biological evolution in our world.
I'm not convinced that "Intelligent Design" is really as powerful an external stimulant as some of us "evolution" people presuppose. Rather, I'm beginning to suspect that it is a particularly useful coping mechanism for some people to be able to construct a modest level of understanding of complex scientific ideas. As a secondary biology teacher, I often use analogy to structure and scaffold student learning, and to be more specific, I often anthropomorphize (with disclaimers that I'm just making an analogy and it doesn't actually work this way). However, a lot of students just latch on to the analogy, without embracing the idea that I'm only trying to provide a loose structure for the knowledge. So, either ID is partially my fault as a teacher because I'm willing to accept some middle ground - I'm happier that the student have the analogical structure than not to have any change from their prior knowledge.
Also, I find this site useful when I'm teaching about primate evolution, so I thought I'd share it with the group. It focuses a bit on the Middle Awash region of Ethiopia and the discovery of "Lucy".
I'm sure he's interesting, but I'd find that response about ID - the science and religion relationship - disappointing. Yes, they do address different questions - but they co-exist in a lot of people's minds. In fact, a lot of different contexts - learning or otherwise - tend to activate both scientific and religious thoughts at the same time. Brushing the relationship off by saying that they address different domains of information does not result in forward progress.
I'd even take this a little deeper and suggest that the main benefit is to the germ line cells - in a sense, the body is really just a complex vehicle for the reproductive cells. Human ova are partially developed - partially through meiosis - even before the female fetus is born. Although there has been some recent contention, it is generally thought that new female reproductive cells do not develop after birth (or are limited in number relative to the quantity that develop while in the womb). So, the fetal environment doesn't just affect the fetus - it affects that fetus' offspring, too. Furthermore, sociological research (like the Human Life History Project) shows that "the longer a woman lived after the end of her reproductive years, the more successfully her children's reproductive lives would be."
But if we look at the weaker forms of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it really isn't that interesting. All it is saying is that previous experience colours our view of the world and affects the ease of picking up new information according to how closely related it is to our previous experience.
Clarifying question - are you suggesting that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has weaker forms in publication, or that there are less extremist ways to interpret and apply the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
You are suggesting that prior experience is the active force here, but another interpretation of these types of results is that epistemology affects learning (in chemistry, physics, and biology [PDF or "View as HTML"]). Within this framework for science education research, cognition is modeled from a "knowledge-in-pieces" perspective, wherein certain cognitive resources are active when a mind is thinking in a particular context about some particular concept or field of content. So, although prior experience certainly shapes the development of personal epistemology and personal epistemological cognitive resources, these aren't actually prior experiences, they are "filters" that, in a very "Kant-ian" sense, determine what information is "read out" from the environment and also affect the way that information input is processed.
That's so obvious that it almost goes without saying! Everyone knows that someone who studied maths in school will likely pick up new mathematical concepts more easily than someone who studied art or history. Everyone knows that we have cultural and political biases from our background which affect our ability to interpret new information.
So, to continue looking at this from an epistemological perspective, we can see that it's much more complex than just prior experience, even within a given domain. If a student has taken a bunch of math classes, but has had horrible experiences in those learning environments, they won't necessarily be any better at learning new math than someone who doesn't have the same experience in the subject. Of course, you can substitute just about any subject in for "math" in the above scenario. I would argue that it's more appropriate to think about culture and political frameworks as influencing personal epistemological development than it is to say that they affect cognition directly.
The weaker hypothesis just really doesn't say anything interesting. And the strong form is ridiculously bad logic (a language where it is you have a concept that can't be understood by someone without pre-existing knowledge of that language, is a language that can't be learnt, and therefore can't exist. After all, nobody is born knowing a language!)
I'm not sure that I agree here, either. Imagination is a powerful cognitive resource. There is a further "extreme" to your logic game, and that's at the level of generating language itself. I think your argument breaks here, and the reason is that we can imagine, and then use analogy to build the new image for another brain. See recent developments in mirror neuron research.
So in the end, we are left with the weaker form that is almost a truism, and doesn't give us any predictive power towards the boundaries of previous experience as influence on new information
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I'm down for some alternate hypothesis discussion, but trash-talking bait with a link to a pseudo-scientific website? I could even handle some "conspiracy theory" discussion about editorial bias in peer-reviewed journals. But seeing a reference to the supernatural right off the bat with the supposed purpose of attempting to change a scientific concept -- I just can't take that seriously at all.
My eyes might be destined to stay this way for the rest of my life, but as is mentioned in the article, our brains are more than capable and ready to handle the information processing side. So, the issue is really a matter of sensors, and we're more than capable of making small electronics that can capture specific ranges of EM waves and transmit that information as patterned electric impulses. Various sensory and motor augmentation experiments (BrainPort article here on Slashdot, also see BBC article on Rhesus monkeys and robotic arms among many others) have demonstrated the plasticity of adult primate brains, so I doubt it'll be too long before the solution is available as outpatient surgery for those with enough money / power.
The "conspiracy theorist" in me thinks the ROKR ... limitations ... might have some relationship with Apple having been held back by troubles with Moto's PowerPC CPUs, particularly the 1+ year G4 500MHz ceiling and their inability and/or unwillingness to produce a G5.
Actually, "we" have evolved since the beginning of the agricultural age. This report (OMIM here and PubMed here) demonstrates a shift in the frequency of an allele of a gene that is expressed in the brain.
As for the ID attempt to bring about a paradigm shift in science: good luck. Seriously! The crux of ID is that of bias in observation of the natural world, and as such, ID attacks a fundamental difference in philosophy that separates spirituality from science: un-biased falsification. My mind spins at the notion of how that kind of paradigm shift would change what we call "science" - perhaps we could classify the current experiments involving neural imaging and Buddhist meditation as such. A revolutionary scientist is not attached to any particular scientific paradigm.
That being said, the only thing that creates new species is the human mind. Species do not exist: individual organisms exist. Individual organisms exhibit their characteristics (phenotype) based on the expression of their hereditary information (genotype in the form of nucleic acids) in their particular environment. The current model for biological evolution is really quite simple: it's a change in the frequency of alleles of genes in a population of organisms over multiple generations. And that brings me back to Darwin and your comment on the directionality of biological evolution. Of course it isn't random! J.T. Bonner's model for evolution is quite nice and has but a few basic ideas, as follow. The unit of evolution is the life cycle, not the individual. At the smallest stage in the life cycle, novel changes are introduced into the DNA. The life cycle develops through an interplay between its genetics and environment, during which time the weakest and unluckiest variations of the life cycle will die. The life cycle that develops to it's pseudo-largest stage will be able to reproduce, but will do so selectively. The frequency of alleles of genes in the population of life cycles changes in that moment of producing an offspring, and so evolution happens under the influence of both random and intelligent change.
But perhaps this is where the creationist root of ID takes charge, because ID always seems to want the intelligence to be outside the limits of the natural world. I think I'd have a lot less of a problem with the notion of intelligent design if the designer could be a sufficiently advanced product of biological evoltuion.
I doubt this game would cause any sort of uproar with proponents of "intelligent design" ... mostly because this game is all about intelligent design, and maybe even includes some aspects about the heritability of acquired traits. I'm still excited about playing Spore, both personally and professionally (I'm a high school biology teacher and a biology education researcher). I'm hoping to get this loaded on all of our laptops in school (that is, if they have the horsepower...) and have the students play as a part of our evolution curriculum. My suspicion is that the game will help students to imagine the results of population changes through generations, while also giving me an opportunity to talk about the differences between "evolution" in Spore and biological evolution in our world.
I'm not convinced that "Intelligent Design" is really as powerful an external stimulant as some of us "evolution" people presuppose. Rather, I'm beginning to suspect that it is a particularly useful coping mechanism for some people to be able to construct a modest level of understanding of complex scientific ideas. As a secondary biology teacher, I often use analogy to structure and scaffold student learning, and to be more specific, I often anthropomorphize (with disclaimers that I'm just making an analogy and it doesn't actually work this way). However, a lot of students just latch on to the analogy, without embracing the idea that I'm only trying to provide a loose structure for the knowledge. So, either ID is partially my fault as a teacher because I'm willing to accept some middle ground - I'm happier that the student have the analogical structure than not to have any change from their prior knowledge.
Also, I find this site useful when I'm teaching about primate evolution, so I thought I'd share it with the group. It focuses a bit on the Middle Awash region of Ethiopia and the discovery of "Lucy".
I'm sure he's interesting, but I'd find that response about ID - the science and religion relationship - disappointing. Yes, they do address different questions - but they co-exist in a lot of people's minds. In fact, a lot of different contexts - learning or otherwise - tend to activate both scientific and religious thoughts at the same time. Brushing the relationship off by saying that they address different domains of information does not result in forward progress.
I'd even take this a little deeper and suggest that the main benefit is to the germ line cells - in a sense, the body is really just a complex vehicle for the reproductive cells. Human ova are partially developed - partially through meiosis - even before the female fetus is born. Although there has been some recent contention, it is generally thought that new female reproductive cells do not develop after birth (or are limited in number relative to the quantity that develop while in the womb). So, the fetal environment doesn't just affect the fetus - it affects that fetus' offspring, too. Furthermore, sociological research (like the Human Life History Project) shows that "the longer a woman lived after the end of her reproductive years, the more successfully her children's reproductive lives would be."
Clarifying question - are you suggesting that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has weaker forms in publication, or that there are less extremist ways to interpret and apply the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? You are suggesting that prior experience is the active force here, but another interpretation of these types of results is that epistemology affects learning (in chemistry, physics, and biology [PDF or "View as HTML"]). Within this framework for science education research, cognition is modeled from a "knowledge-in-pieces" perspective, wherein certain cognitive resources are active when a mind is thinking in a particular context about some particular concept or field of content. So, although prior experience certainly shapes the development of personal epistemology and personal epistemological cognitive resources, these aren't actually prior experiences, they are "filters" that, in a very "Kant-ian" sense, determine what information is "read out" from the environment and also affect the way that information input is processed.
So, to continue looking at this from an epistemological perspective, we can see that it's much more complex than just prior experience, even within a given domain. If a student has taken a bunch of math classes, but has had horrible experiences in those learning environments, they won't necessarily be any better at learning new math than someone who doesn't have the same experience in the subject. Of course, you can substitute just about any subject in for "math" in the above scenario. I would argue that it's more appropriate to think about culture and political frameworks as influencing personal epistemological development than it is to say that they affect cognition directly.
I'm not sure that I agree here, either. Imagination is a powerful cognitive resource. There is a further "extreme" to your logic game, and that's at the level of generating language itself. I think your argument breaks here, and the reason is that we can imagine, and then use analogy to build the new image for another brain. See recent developments in mirror neuron research.