Tag: evolution

Metazoa by Peter Godfrey-Smith

Metazoa, by Peter Godfrey-Smith

Metazoa is kind of a sequel to “Other Minds”, Godfrey-Smith’s excellent book about the nature of cephalopod intelligence. Metazoa takes a broader view, and explores the nature of minds in general, and how they’re inextricably linked to the animal way-of-being: having a unified, unitary body that can sense and react to the world around it. It was also an interesting book to read in combination with Sean B. Carroll’s “Endless Forms Most Beautiful” about animal body plans, and how they evolved through the use of gene regulatory networks and a meta-genetic toolkit that we share with all bilaterians.

This author kind of feels like a Carl Sagan of Marine Biology — very clearly trying to understand the world within a Materialist / Naturalist framework (which I appreciate) but without losing a sense of the mystical nature of existence. He’s asking “What kind of thing is a mind?” and “How can that kind of thing arise through evolution and be composed of nothing but a particular collection of matter and energy?” Why does this happen at all? How general or common a phenomenon is it?

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Humans as Curators in Troubled Times

We had some of that golden evening light tonight just after house meeting.  The kind that makes you think maybe an apocalypse is just over the horizon.  That the mountains are on fire.  That the gods are angry.  This Saturday I went for a long bike ride up to the Peak to Peak highway with Amy from Picklebric.  At the Sunshine Saddle she pointed out the cheat grass — an invasive species that she works on.  Studying disturbed ecosystems, and how to assemble new approximations of the originals from the parts at hand.  You can’t get rid of the invasives, but maybe you can influence which ones thrive.  Just beyond the divide above us, the mountains covered with red trees, a forest being transformed in a lifetime.  500 years from now will they be the Aspen mountains?  Tim applied for a job at the Nature Conservancy as a landscape ecologist in a similar vein — understanding and managing wild and semi-wild lands for their own sake.  Like the Colorado river pulse.  All this made me think of the ecopoesis that Kim Stanley Robinson portrayed in his Mars books, especially Green Mars.  Humans as gardeners of the no longer quite wild.  From here on out, it’s all gardening. Mandatory gardening.  It’s just what kind of garden do we want?  What will grow in this climate?

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Links for the week of May 22nd, 2010

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Links for the week of March 4th, 2010

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Links for the week of November 15th, 2009

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Links for the week of September 11th, 2009

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Have you seen the light?

As animals, and especially visual animals at that, we have a particular experience of the light.  For us it is illumination, information about our surroundings.  For that purpose moonlight or even starlight will do.  And for tens of millions of years, that’s all we ever saw.  Somehow a few of us made it through the Permian extinction, and into the Triassic, but the ascendancy of the dinosaurs eventually forced us into the darkness of the night.  Our world became dim, and our eyes went colorblind.  Most mammals today see only two colors, but a few of us have re-evolved a third photoreceptor.  Three colors is still inferior to the four or five or six seen by many near-surface fish, birds, reptiles, insects, and other arthropods.  The stomatopods are almost biological spectroscopic imaging systems, with 12 color channels in each of their independently movable trinocular eyes.  We are lesser than the eyes that never left the light.  They stole the colors from us and made us hide within the night.  They kept the sun for themselves, not knowing that our small and furtive ways, our burning endothermy and our fur would see us through the aftermath of the KT impact.

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Shared Links for Mar 14th

The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod

The Evolution of Cooperation was, somewhat surprisingly, a story about math. Math that actually describes a lot of things in life. It’s the story of The Prisoner’s Dilemma.  What makes The Prisoner’s Dilemma interesting, is that the players in the game have conflicting incentives.  You can be rewarded either for cooperating, or for defecting.  Unlike most things we think of as “games”, it is not zero-sum: both players can win, and both players can lose.  Too often it seems like this possibility is forgotten.  The dilemma goes like this.

Two suspected accomplices are taken into custody for a crime and separately interrogated.  Each is pressured to rat out the other.  If neither of them squeals (they cooperate) then both of them get short jail terms.  If both of them rat, they both get fairly long terms.  If only one of them gives in, and the other remains silent, then the fink gets off, and the honorable thief goes away for a long long time.

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