"Hence what they discovered here: natural selection favours the kind of genome that can tolerate mutations when they happen anyway."
That's true more or less by definition, but I think you're overlooking something simple. A more complex organism has more opportunities for nonfatal mutations. That is, Mycoplasm genitalium, probably the simplest known bacterium, is extremely vulnerable to deleterious mutations. If it loses a gene that codes for a vital self-component, odds are it hasn't got a backup process for that component--it's dead. Whereas a more metabolically complex bacterium may have multiple pathways that produce necessary components. So it's not surprising that when we look at complex genomes, we see the capability to withstand mutation.
So greater complexity (more genome) means more opportunity for mutation, but also more redundacy and failure tolerance. So it's no surprise that
It's really not like Paycheck at all. Apart from the 'mind wiping,' but seriously, you might as well say it's just like 'Men In Black.' Of course, to be fair, the movie 'Paycheck' didn't have all that much to do with the short story, either.
Actually, most modern scientists would be willing to defend much of Darwin's early work, which is one reason why the modern synthesis of evolution is often labeled 'neo-Darwinism.' At the same time, of course, he didn't know the whole story, so it's not surprising that as new knowledge become available, some major pieces of what he hypothesized have proven inaccurate, and others have been vindicated.
And if you don't think there's no dogmatism in science, then you don't know all that much about the history of science. Even with evidence on your side it can take a long time to overthrow established ideals. When Einstein published on relativity, some of the best scientists of his age stood up to decry his work as ludicrous; pure mathematical abstraction with no provable physical reality underlying it. Yet evidence accumulated and today we agree that Einstein was right. Science is inherently forward-looking and self-correcting, but it's also a human institution, which means it's unavoidably subject to the same biases as anything else we do.
"The paths of the six 90 kilo raptors do not overlap where the animals walked alongside a river or stream. '"The odds of these tracks being made by different individuals that just happen to be moving in the same direction, without their tracks stepping on one another, are small," said Jerry D. Harris, director of paleontology at Dixie State College."
Wow, they must really be smart. They travel single-file, to conceal their number.
What you suggest is possible, but consider this: how many people recovered from an infection with the 1918 Spanish flu before it reached its most lethal permutation? And while the crowded World War I army bases that played a role in the previous evolution of the flu might not be around any more, I'd be more worried about the poultry farms in southeast Asia, where you have high volume commercial crops as well as smaller bird farms both exposed to migratory waterfowl, and both living in close proximity to human handlers (and in many cases, pigs as well). It creates an environment where it's much more likely that you'll get the genetic shuffling of multiple strains that could result in a pandemic.
Put it this way: much of the fear is overhyped, but not all of it.
Obviously your sig is appropriate. I can't quite get into Torchwood--I expect some zaniness and silliness from Doctor Who, but it seems like if you're the black ops types who pirate alien tech to build weapons for the human race, you ought to be a little sharper. And a little less interested in constantly shagging whatever man/woman/time traveling alien the producer thinks would be most 'edgy.'
It's true that the odds of any single person dying from a pandemic flu outbreak are low, particularly if you're not living in a high risk area. However, there's nothing that specifically prevents another pandemic on the scale of the 1918 flu. Urbanization and globalization have put much greater densities of people within easy reach of other places with great densities of people. Plus there's a much greater tendency toward centralized medicine today: if I get sick and want to see my doctor, he doesn't make a house call from the office he works in by himself. Rather, I go into the medical center he works in with a dozen other doctors, which means that after I infect my doctor, he can infect others. True, once the pandemic is recognized a lot of places will shut down, but the lag between recognition and response is uncertain. And also figure that society is a lot more dependent now than it used to be, so when the people responsible for providing electricity, water, and food to the public at large are indisposed (dying, sick, or just too scared to go to work) there will be further deaths due to infrastructure failure. There are too many unquantifiables to make any sort of certain predictions.
Right, but of course, the key in all of these is to use them before the virus starts kicking your ass, because once high volumes of replication begin, you're pretty much toast. And it's not at all clear that most folks would recognize the risk/respond within the effective window. So while there may be evidence of high EFFICACY, the real-world EFFECTIVENESS is questionable. Not to mention that any inhibitory molecule designed to neutralize a specific viral functional protein will work only so long as that protein remains in its original form; depending on the specifics of how the protein, its target, and the inhibitor interact, resistance may arise rapidly.
See, I thought that too, but I read Richard Dawkins' book 'The God Delusion' (obviously, he has a strong feeling on the matter, so grain of salt). He makes the argument that true rationality is completely inconsistent with religious belief: for a scientist, affirmative statements are made based on evidence with the recognition that new evidence might necessitate new affirmatives. The idea of a system of thought where affirmative statements are based on no objective evidence (religion) is utterly incompatible. I can't really disagree with him: your eyes can be open or shut, but they can't be both at once. Religious folks can argue about the whys of existence 'til the cows (or the Messiah) come(s) home, but what gives their ideas any more face validity than, say, the ancient Greeks who believe in Zeus, and Hera? Or the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Oh no, Reason is alive and well. It's just that once you're crazy enough to believe the teachings of a 2000 year old cult, you're too far gone for it to reach you.
The really pathetic thing is that, if I read the article correctly, the creationists aren't even interpreting his findings correctly. He basically says that as the earth started to cool, chemical compounds could arise that would remain stable in the environment, and that it would take some source of energy to assemble them into something more complex. In contrast, one creationist web site mentioned by the article describes the paper as meaning that "within a few minutes, all the various parts of the living organism had to make themselves out of sloshing water." Nothing like a little creative misinterpretation to give your dogmatic nonsense the air of scientific legitimacy.
First, I don't see how you can argue the fact that the world changes faster than our brains can. Evolution is a long, slow process, and the modern world hasn't been around nearly long enough for appropriate reactions and behaviors to become hard wired yet. Humans are more resilient to rapid change than, say, hamster, because we have much less inborn, instinctive behavior and much greater capacity to learn and develop. But the more the world changes, the more out of step our instincts become, and the more important our learned experience becomes.
And the comment about brains and computers at the end has nothing to do with the rest of his argument. There are lots of things computers can do better than human brains--doesn't mean brains are inferior. So what point are you trying to make?
Your airplane analogy doesn't really work because unlike the human brain, the airplane was designed all at once, and assembled in accordance with that design. In contrast, the brain has evolved in a stepwise fashion that incorporates new elements as they become necessary and discards the old as they become superfluous. If you look at the brains of reptiles, and lower mammals, and primates, and finally humans, you can plainly see the development of more complex structures piled on top of the old ones. It's this incremental appearance that I'd label patchwork. We may not have a concept of an 'ideal' brain, but we can see clearly different steps that have been reached along the way.
The ability to conceptualize abstract risk and the ability to understand it intuitively (at a gut level, if you like) are two different things; Schneier never says we can't do the first--as you pointed out, we can think very easily about the risk of rare events. However, abstract risks don't pose a threat day to day--as a result, there's no selection pressure that would drive us to evolve the kind of neural wiring we'd need to do it.
In the sense that brains in general started off in a much simpler state with no need to handle many of the things it's currently capable of (binocular vision, manual dexterity, doing calculus) and it got to where it is one incremental improvement at a time, then yes, it most certainly is a patchwork. You can see it in the gross structure: you've got the reptilian hindbrain that keeps your body functioning in a narrow homeostatic envelope all the way at the bottom, atop which sits a cerebellum that allows for things like emotion (great for pair bonding and knowing to run away from big things with pointy teeth), and atop all of that you've got the cerebrum that enables most of your higher intellectual activity.
The fact that this magnificent hodgepodge seems to be so perfectly attuned to our needs is almost definitional, as well as being a kind of survivor bias. That is, our brains are great at what we need them to do precisely because they evolved to do those things; brains that were evolved to do other things, or that did the same things, but not as well as ours, died off. Schneier's point is that the modern world has changed a lot faster than our brains are able to, and as a result, we're maladapted for some of the tasks facing us today, like assessing remote risks.
I found your post pretty laughable, to be honest. I mean, it's easy to watch the news and cherry-pick examples of bad parenting, excess PC, and general worthlessness on the part of the youth of the day, but has it occurred to you that it's precisely because those cases are exceptional that they get any attention? I grew up in a fairly average middle-class family in a fairly typical American town. Did I sit inside and play Nintendo? Sure, but often as not I'd be outside running around with other kids in the neighborhood. And although mom and dad shuffled me around to Scout meetings and karate classes, they did so because I wanted to do those things. I never got the belt as a kid, but there was no question that if I acted like a jackass, I'd pay for it later. Although my parents could afford to give me pocket money, when I was old enough to handle a broom I worked under the table for my dad's shop, and later got my own job to pay for my own car and (and least in part) my own education. And I'm not an unusual case--many of my peers would tell similar stories.
So relax, grandpa. If TV news stories about the coming hordes of lazy, stupid kids scare you, there's probably a Matlock rerun on somewhere.
I'm not exactly an expert on this popularity thing, but I'm pretty sure if you're walking around town with your internet tablet so you can Facebook/MySpace/whatever on the go, you probably need more social networking aid than any computer can provide.
"There is some degree of logic in a system like this, just not in the predictive sense. A system like this is much better used to make assessments of what conditions are like. As in what outcomes are favored by a change in conditions."
Even this doesn't really hold water, though, because reality isn't like a big equation, where you can take the partial derivative of x and know how the result will change as x varies. Whether x is the population of China, the number of nuclear missiles in the US arsenal, or the odds of a given world leader being assassinated in the next year, changing x is going to change other variables in ways that aren't necessarily obvious; it's not possible, in reality, to hold all else constant. And even if you could isolate one variable, how do you determine the likelihood of a change in that variable off a given consequence? It's not as though there's any deterministic way of reaching a conclusion beyond wild-ass guessing.
"Because no government in history has ever significantly and permanently reduced its power or revenue through the process of democracy, and certainly not through the process of bureaucracy"
Not to be picky, but didn't the Weimar Republic vote itself out of existence? Granted, an n of 1 doesn't make for much of an argument, but...
I think you're looking at it backwards. Ad firms don't spend millions advertising because they know how people will respond to stimuli; they spend millions precisely because there's so much uncertainty. Firms don't buy Super Bowl ad time because football fans are more susceptible to commercials--they do it because if you get your message out to such a massive audience, odds are much better you'll hit a few takers. And much of the money that's spent goes into research precisely because they want to determine, before they launch a campaign, how people will really respond to it. Even then, some things flop, and some things take off in ways nobody foresaw--do you think Geico expected the caveman to become as popular as it did?
As for predicting group behavior, what is the stock market but the grouping of millions of individual workers into neat little quotable companies? The market vastly simplifies an enormous amount of economic activity into a fairly concise set of numbers, and yet the best experts still can't do much more than guess about what the market will do at any given time. Read 'The Black Swan' by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, where he points out that every time a new model of the market is produced and its predictions are retroactively compared to reality, the model turned out to be horribly wrong. Yet we maintain this intellectual conceit that if we knew just a LITTLE bit more about the present, if we had just a BIT more computing power, we could decode everything. Silly people.
Didn't that happen in an episode of 'The X-Files?' The evil AI takes out its creator by locating the coffee shop he's in, and then phoning every convicted drug dealer in the area to tell them that a snitch from their gang would be in the coffee shop. Once the place is full of a bunch of trigger-happy gangbangers, the AI calls the US Marshals office and tells them that a terrorist fugitive is hiding inside. Voila, instant bullet festival. Very cool; written by William Gibson, as I recall.
At the same time, though, I think many people would argue that there is greater social value in spending $100 million on, say, textbooks for underprivileged students than spending $100 million on Internet pornography and rubber chickens. In both cases, the cash will flow through the economy providing benefit, but on the whole, society is likely value one scenario more highly than the other. Of course, this depends on your relative preferences for education, porn, and latex fowl, and I'm not necessarily convinced/. is a representative sample in this case.
That reminds me of a story (maybe apocryphal) about how some foreign country with which there had been recent tensions knew the US was about to attack because one night at the Pentagon they observed a ton of people working after hours and a steady stream of late night pizza deliveries.
Slashdot Mirror
A thrill ride? I thought it had too many secrets.
"Hence what they discovered here: natural selection favours the kind of genome that can tolerate mutations when they happen anyway."
That's true more or less by definition, but I think you're overlooking something simple. A more complex organism has more opportunities for nonfatal mutations. That is, Mycoplasm genitalium, probably the simplest known bacterium, is extremely vulnerable to deleterious mutations. If it loses a gene that codes for a vital self-component, odds are it hasn't got a backup process for that component--it's dead. Whereas a more metabolically complex bacterium may have multiple pathways that produce necessary components. So it's not surprising that when we look at complex genomes, we see the capability to withstand mutation.
So greater complexity (more genome) means more opportunity for mutation, but also more redundacy and failure tolerance. So it's no surprise that
It's really not like Paycheck at all. Apart from the 'mind wiping,' but seriously, you might as well say it's just like 'Men In Black.' Of course, to be fair, the movie 'Paycheck' didn't have all that much to do with the short story, either.
Actually, most modern scientists would be willing to defend much of Darwin's early work, which is one reason why the modern synthesis of evolution is often labeled 'neo-Darwinism.' At the same time, of course, he didn't know the whole story, so it's not surprising that as new knowledge become available, some major pieces of what he hypothesized have proven inaccurate, and others have been vindicated.
And if you don't think there's no dogmatism in science, then you don't know all that much about the history of science. Even with evidence on your side it can take a long time to overthrow established ideals. When Einstein published on relativity, some of the best scientists of his age stood up to decry his work as ludicrous; pure mathematical abstraction with no provable physical reality underlying it. Yet evidence accumulated and today we agree that Einstein was right. Science is inherently forward-looking and self-correcting, but it's also a human institution, which means it's unavoidably subject to the same biases as anything else we do.
"The paths of the six 90 kilo raptors do not overlap where the animals walked alongside a river or stream. '"The odds of these tracks being made by different individuals that just happen to be moving in the same direction, without their tracks stepping on one another, are small," said Jerry D. Harris, director of paleontology at Dixie State College."
Wow, they must really be smart. They travel single-file, to conceal their number.
What you suggest is possible, but consider this: how many people recovered from an infection with the 1918 Spanish flu before it reached its most lethal permutation? And while the crowded World War I army bases that played a role in the previous evolution of the flu might not be around any more, I'd be more worried about the poultry farms in southeast Asia, where you have high volume commercial crops as well as smaller bird farms both exposed to migratory waterfowl, and both living in close proximity to human handlers (and in many cases, pigs as well). It creates an environment where it's much more likely that you'll get the genetic shuffling of multiple strains that could result in a pandemic.
Put it this way: much of the fear is overhyped, but not all of it.
Obviously your sig is appropriate. I can't quite get into Torchwood--I expect some zaniness and silliness from Doctor Who, but it seems like if you're the black ops types who pirate alien tech to build weapons for the human race, you ought to be a little sharper. And a little less interested in constantly shagging whatever man/woman/time traveling alien the producer thinks would be most 'edgy.'
But, you'd need an army of ghosts, and maybe a team of guys to run the machine capturing the energy. Maybe they could be based at Canary Wharf.
Pardon if it's too obscure, but based on your sig, I thought you might get it. Cheers!
It's true that the odds of any single person dying from a pandemic flu outbreak are low, particularly if you're not living in a high risk area. However, there's nothing that specifically prevents another pandemic on the scale of the 1918 flu. Urbanization and globalization have put much greater densities of people within easy reach of other places with great densities of people. Plus there's a much greater tendency toward centralized medicine today: if I get sick and want to see my doctor, he doesn't make a house call from the office he works in by himself. Rather, I go into the medical center he works in with a dozen other doctors, which means that after I infect my doctor, he can infect others. True, once the pandemic is recognized a lot of places will shut down, but the lag between recognition and response is uncertain. And also figure that society is a lot more dependent now than it used to be, so when the people responsible for providing electricity, water, and food to the public at large are indisposed (dying, sick, or just too scared to go to work) there will be further deaths due to infrastructure failure. There are too many unquantifiables to make any sort of certain predictions.
Right, but of course, the key in all of these is to use them before the virus starts kicking your ass, because once high volumes of replication begin, you're pretty much toast. And it's not at all clear that most folks would recognize the risk/respond within the effective window. So while there may be evidence of high EFFICACY, the real-world EFFECTIVENESS is questionable. Not to mention that any inhibitory molecule designed to neutralize a specific viral functional protein will work only so long as that protein remains in its original form; depending on the specifics of how the protein, its target, and the inhibitor interact, resistance may arise rapidly.
See, I thought that too, but I read Richard Dawkins' book 'The God Delusion' (obviously, he has a strong feeling on the matter, so grain of salt). He makes the argument that true rationality is completely inconsistent with religious belief: for a scientist, affirmative statements are made based on evidence with the recognition that new evidence might necessitate new affirmatives. The idea of a system of thought where affirmative statements are based on no objective evidence (religion) is utterly incompatible. I can't really disagree with him: your eyes can be open or shut, but they can't be both at once. Religious folks can argue about the whys of existence 'til the cows (or the Messiah) come(s) home, but what gives their ideas any more face validity than, say, the ancient Greeks who believe in Zeus, and Hera? Or the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Any thoughts?
Oh no, Reason is alive and well. It's just that once you're crazy enough to believe the teachings of a 2000 year old cult, you're too far gone for it to reach you.
The really pathetic thing is that, if I read the article correctly, the creationists aren't even interpreting his findings correctly. He basically says that as the earth started to cool, chemical compounds could arise that would remain stable in the environment, and that it would take some source of energy to assemble them into something more complex. In contrast, one creationist web site mentioned by the article describes the paper as meaning that "within a few minutes, all the various parts of the living organism had to make themselves out of sloshing water." Nothing like a little creative misinterpretation to give your dogmatic nonsense the air of scientific legitimacy.
Put perfectly. That's exactly what I was trying to convey previously.
First, I don't see how you can argue the fact that the world changes faster than our brains can. Evolution is a long, slow process, and the modern world hasn't been around nearly long enough for appropriate reactions and behaviors to become hard wired yet. Humans are more resilient to rapid change than, say, hamster, because we have much less inborn, instinctive behavior and much greater capacity to learn and develop. But the more the world changes, the more out of step our instincts become, and the more important our learned experience becomes.
And the comment about brains and computers at the end has nothing to do with the rest of his argument. There are lots of things computers can do better than human brains--doesn't mean brains are inferior. So what point are you trying to make?
Your airplane analogy doesn't really work because unlike the human brain, the airplane was designed all at once, and assembled in accordance with that design. In contrast, the brain has evolved in a stepwise fashion that incorporates new elements as they become necessary and discards the old as they become superfluous. If you look at the brains of reptiles, and lower mammals, and primates, and finally humans, you can plainly see the development of more complex structures piled on top of the old ones. It's this incremental appearance that I'd label patchwork. We may not have a concept of an 'ideal' brain, but we can see clearly different steps that have been reached along the way.
The ability to conceptualize abstract risk and the ability to understand it intuitively (at a gut level, if you like) are two different things; Schneier never says we can't do the first--as you pointed out, we can think very easily about the risk of rare events. However, abstract risks don't pose a threat day to day--as a result, there's no selection pressure that would drive us to evolve the kind of neural wiring we'd need to do it.
In the sense that brains in general started off in a much simpler state with no need to handle many of the things it's currently capable of (binocular vision, manual dexterity, doing calculus) and it got to where it is one incremental improvement at a time, then yes, it most certainly is a patchwork. You can see it in the gross structure: you've got the reptilian hindbrain that keeps your body functioning in a narrow homeostatic envelope all the way at the bottom, atop which sits a cerebellum that allows for things like emotion (great for pair bonding and knowing to run away from big things with pointy teeth), and atop all of that you've got the cerebrum that enables most of your higher intellectual activity.
The fact that this magnificent hodgepodge seems to be so perfectly attuned to our needs is almost definitional, as well as being a kind of survivor bias. That is, our brains are great at what we need them to do precisely because they evolved to do those things; brains that were evolved to do other things, or that did the same things, but not as well as ours, died off. Schneier's point is that the modern world has changed a lot faster than our brains are able to, and as a result, we're maladapted for some of the tasks facing us today, like assessing remote risks.
I found your post pretty laughable, to be honest. I mean, it's easy to watch the news and cherry-pick examples of bad parenting, excess PC, and general worthlessness on the part of the youth of the day, but has it occurred to you that it's precisely because those cases are exceptional that they get any attention? I grew up in a fairly average middle-class family in a fairly typical American town. Did I sit inside and play Nintendo? Sure, but often as not I'd be outside running around with other kids in the neighborhood. And although mom and dad shuffled me around to Scout meetings and karate classes, they did so because I wanted to do those things. I never got the belt as a kid, but there was no question that if I acted like a jackass, I'd pay for it later. Although my parents could afford to give me pocket money, when I was old enough to handle a broom I worked under the table for my dad's shop, and later got my own job to pay for my own car and (and least in part) my own education. And I'm not an unusual case--many of my peers would tell similar stories.
So relax, grandpa. If TV news stories about the coming hordes of lazy, stupid kids scare you, there's probably a Matlock rerun on somewhere.
I'm not exactly an expert on this popularity thing, but I'm pretty sure if you're walking around town with your internet tablet so you can Facebook/MySpace/whatever on the go, you probably need more social networking aid than any computer can provide.
"There is some degree of logic in a system like this, just not in the predictive sense. A system like this is much better used to make assessments of what conditions are like. As in what outcomes are favored by a change in conditions."
Even this doesn't really hold water, though, because reality isn't like a big equation, where you can take the partial derivative of x and know how the result will change as x varies. Whether x is the population of China, the number of nuclear missiles in the US arsenal, or the odds of a given world leader being assassinated in the next year, changing x is going to change other variables in ways that aren't necessarily obvious; it's not possible, in reality, to hold all else constant. And even if you could isolate one variable, how do you determine the likelihood of a change in that variable off a given consequence? It's not as though there's any deterministic way of reaching a conclusion beyond wild-ass guessing.
"Because no government in history has ever significantly and permanently reduced its power or revenue through the process of democracy, and certainly not through the process of bureaucracy" Not to be picky, but didn't the Weimar Republic vote itself out of existence? Granted, an n of 1 doesn't make for much of an argument, but...
I think you're looking at it backwards. Ad firms don't spend millions advertising because they know how people will respond to stimuli; they spend millions precisely because there's so much uncertainty. Firms don't buy Super Bowl ad time because football fans are more susceptible to commercials--they do it because if you get your message out to such a massive audience, odds are much better you'll hit a few takers. And much of the money that's spent goes into research precisely because they want to determine, before they launch a campaign, how people will really respond to it. Even then, some things flop, and some things take off in ways nobody foresaw--do you think Geico expected the caveman to become as popular as it did?
As for predicting group behavior, what is the stock market but the grouping of millions of individual workers into neat little quotable companies? The market vastly simplifies an enormous amount of economic activity into a fairly concise set of numbers, and yet the best experts still can't do much more than guess about what the market will do at any given time. Read 'The Black Swan' by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, where he points out that every time a new model of the market is produced and its predictions are retroactively compared to reality, the model turned out to be horribly wrong. Yet we maintain this intellectual conceit that if we knew just a LITTLE bit more about the present, if we had just a BIT more computing power, we could decode everything. Silly people.
Didn't that happen in an episode of 'The X-Files?' The evil AI takes out its creator by locating the coffee shop he's in, and then phoning every convicted drug dealer in the area to tell them that a snitch from their gang would be in the coffee shop. Once the place is full of a bunch of trigger-happy gangbangers, the AI calls the US Marshals office and tells them that a terrorist fugitive is hiding inside. Voila, instant bullet festival. Very cool; written by William Gibson, as I recall.
At the same time, though, I think many people would argue that there is greater social value in spending $100 million on, say, textbooks for underprivileged students than spending $100 million on Internet pornography and rubber chickens. In both cases, the cash will flow through the economy providing benefit, but on the whole, society is likely value one scenario more highly than the other. Of course, this depends on your relative preferences for education, porn, and latex fowl, and I'm not necessarily convinced /. is a representative sample in this case.
That reminds me of a story (maybe apocryphal) about how some foreign country with which there had been recent tensions knew the US was about to attack because one night at the Pentagon they observed a ton of people working after hours and a steady stream of late night pizza deliveries.