http://bytesizebio.net/index.php/2009/07/04/from-predator-to-plant-in-one-gulp/

"Two researchers have shown a striking example of endosymbiosis forming now: in 2005 Noriko Okamoto an Isao Inouye reported on a unicellular organism called Hatena. Hatena (”enigma” in Japanese) leads a curious life cycle. Hatena is a single-cell organism, swimming around in the water, using a little feeding apparatus to eat cells and organic material smaller than itself. At some point, it would feed on another unicellular algae, the Nephroselmis. Once Hatena swallows Nephroselmis, it does not digest it. Rather, Nephrosolmis makes a rather comfortable home inside Hatena. Actually, the algae starts growing inside Hatena: it grows to about 10 times its original size, filling up most of Hatena. The alga also seems to lose most of its own organelles, except for the chloroplast. The chloroplast actually grows bigger.

"Hatena changes too as a result. Before ingesting the alga, it has a rather complex “mouth”, or feeding apparatus. After ingesting the algae, this mouth disappears. Instead, it is replaced by an eyespot from the algae. The eyespot is a light sensing organelle, a very primitive eye that guides algae to light sources. In this case, it also guides the host, Hatena, to light. Hatena has obvioulsy stopped feeding, and least through its mouth. It is now swimming to the light, letting the alga photosynthesize its food for both of them.

"Hatena reproduces by binary fission. So once it splits itself, what happens to the symbiotic alga? Well, one daughter cell gets the alga, and the other gets ot be a predator.. at least until it eats another alga. So here we are, looking at a fascinating evolutionary snapshot: two creatures, they can live apart or together. One is not quite an organelle yet, but definitely on its way."

Interesting speech made by the US's new secretary of energy, back last year. He's the first member of the cabinet to also be a Nobel Prize winner.

One of the biggest mysteries for me lately is why some (most?) people tend to be so contemptuous of other people and of other things, or other types of people, or just get annoyed very easily. Being (perhaps too) good-natured myself I am seldom bothered by stuff, I don't get in bad moods, I don't get annoyed by much, I enjoy even bad things, I've never even played a game I didn't like or meet a person I didn't like. And I know others like that as well. So the mystery to me is what creates this difference. There are a lot of options.

It could just be diet, but I doubt that because wynand has a pretty typically bad diet from what I've seen and he's fairly good-natured, and newedition has a pretty great diet but is easily annoyed and generally dislikes other people. But she has gotten less that way since changing her diet, and to some degree harlockhero did too, so diet is currently my biggest lead and best guess (although it still begs the question, which part of the diet? I suspect Omega 3's, because they're so closely related to brain chemistry).

It could be childhood experiences and whether they were loved and accepted when growing up, but I'm unsure about that, and it's hard to test because self-reported memories of the past are unreliable, when someone says they've had a bad or a good childhood you can't really take them at their word because it could also just be that ill-tempered people remember things differently and will always say they've had a bad childhood remembering and identifying it with the bad parts, and good-natured people would always say they've had a good childhood, remembering and identifying it with the good parts. And this explanation has always seemed too Freudian to me.

Another possibility is philosophy or religion or worldview. But to some degree I believe worldview follows temperament, not the other way around -- in other words, I think that being good natured leads one to a positive worldview, rather than a positive worldview leading one to be good natured. Physiology is usually more important than mentality, existence precedes experience.

Another possibility is brain hemisphere dominance. The left side of the brain tends to be more critical, seeing the rest of the world as separate, distinct, foreign, and possibly dangerous, and sees reality piecemeal and more critically, whereas the right side of the brain is more holistic and sees the interconnections of systems and sees reality as a whole, and oneself as a part of it. This is also a good guess and very possible. Which then begs the question: how does brain dominance work?

Another possibility is greater understanding -- it's hard to hate something when you understand it, so it could be that the people who have a better understanding of reality are more good-natured. I doubt this is the main cause though, because there's a two-way effect here, if you like something you're more likely to try to understand it than if you don't like it (and yes, I know this entry is about me trying to understand something I don't like, but there are exceptions).

An observation regarding the ill-tempered is that they never recognize it as undesirable, even when it's usually the source of their unhappiness. Maybe it even isn't really undesirable, that's a possibility, it could have its uses -- hatred motivates people to act perhaps more than love does, because in love one is too satisfied with the status quo. The great rebels of history, the people who overthrew oppressive regimes, were largely hateful people, and we are today made better by their hatefulness, to an extent.

But just on an individual level, I still think it's a bad thing, because it's the source of a large amount of unhappiness. So even though in theory I can recognize its virtues, in practice I'm put off and disturbed by it whenever I see it. Especially in people I'm friends with or admire. And that I've no real way to change it for them or to even let them know that it's possible not to be like that is upsetting too.

The LHC goes online next Wednesday. It is the largest and most complex machine ever created, 17 miles in diameter. Many fear it will destroy the world. Others feel it will open a gate to the demon world.

Undead, zombie bacteria found hundreds of feet under the bottom of the ocean.

Microbes that metabolize so slow that it'd take them hundreds or thousands of years to double their numbers. And perhaps much of life on earth are these deep barely-living cells that exist on time scales far slower than any other form of life; it's unknown how or even if they ever die. They can survive so long because they consume and use almost no energy at all. They could survive most any disaster, so even if something wiped out all other life on earth, they'd still be there.

Free will implausible.

Not that I find free will totally plausible, but I notice one error in that article's interpretation of this study: just because a decision was made ten seconds before we were aware of it doesn't mean that *we* weren't making the decision. Decisions don't have to be conscious to be ours.

Unsolved problems in physics.

There's a bunch of them.

Scientists manage to create cells from scratch.

This is probably as close to proving that life can originate from a chemical soup as you're going to get -- previously nucleotides and amino acids have been formed in this way, but now an entire cell has. It's a very basic cell, without organelles or ribosomes or protein, but it's a cell.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/colleen-dealy-and-taylor-baldwin/sex-and-the-american-mom_b_101403.html

I'm surprised they're so surprised by this -- I once read a book called the myth of monogamy and they had better surveys than this (i.e. not opt-in internet surveys) and it was more like 70%, not 33%. Similarly, something like one out of three people was fathered by someone other than who they believe their father to be.

I'm not sure how useful statistics are to know, though.

I mean, I guess sometimes it's useful in making predictions. For instance, if you know that only 5% of murderers are actually caught, and 95% of people who murder get away with it, it may make you more likely to murder than if you believe the chance of being caught is higher than it is. (Note: this is not an endorsement of murder, I'm just using it as an example.)

But usually, there's no real way to use this information. There's nothing it's good for. I'd prefer if they'd investigate information that was worth knowing because it can be applied to every day life, rather than information that just made for sensational news stories.

http://www.invincibledefense.org/research.html

I don't know how to feel about this, since it probably needs some explanation.

"A day-by-day study of a two-month assembly in Israel in 1983 showed that, on days when the number of participants in this Unified Field-based approach to defense (“TM Group Size,” right) was high, war deaths in neighboring Lebanon dropped by 76% (p < 10-7). In addition, crime, traffic accidents, fires, and other indicators of social stress in Israel (combined into a Composite Index) all correlated strongly with changes in TM group size. Other possible causes (weekends, holidays, weather, etc.) were statistically controlled for (Journal of Conflict Resolution 32: 776-812, 1988)."

"The likelihood that these combined results were due to chance is less than one part in 10^10, making this effect of reducing societal stress and conflict the most rigorously established phenomenon in the history of the social sciences (Journal of Social Behavior and Personality 17(1): 285–338, 2005)."

In other words, large group meditation has been shown to reduce deaths and crime (or at least be correlated with it -- it's also possible daily fluctuations in crime and deaths affect the size of meditation groups). And it's not just this one study, they have many like this over the course of the last 25 years or so.

I'd like to not believe in such things, since it sounds so supernatural. But observations are observations, no? There's still a problem that the group doing this research is associated with the group meditating, so it'd be nice to see an independent investigation.

A few ideas semi-prevalent in science which I disagree on:

Time - I've discussed this with Taernost before, I think physicists assume that just because time is best modeled as a 4th dimension that it actually is a 4th dimension, overlooking the crucial difference that unlike the spatial dimensions, information not at our current point is forever destroyed, never to return: not only the future but also the past isn't objective, only the present is.

Entropy - I've never seen a convincing large-scale proof of entropy. What's true on the small scale -- any enclosed system which we can handle -- many not necessarily be true on the large scale, and it shouldn't be assumed that it works that way, there are things which are true in some scales but not true in other scales.

That the mind is only in the brain - I've written about this one in LJ previously, such as in the entry about the guy who had a thin layer of cells in his skull, and no brain, and yet was otherwise a normal person. The mind also likely includes the other organs, the immune system, hormones in the blood, the spine, and so on.

That the scientific method is responsible for advances in science - It's usually just responsible for checking science, not for coming up with it, which is more the job of imagination and other thinking skills. The method is indispensable, but being good at it doesn't make you a good scientist, it makes you good at confirming things are true.

Taxonomic particle physics, for the reasons described in The End of Physics (buy it on Amazon if curious). Just because particles show up in certain extreme conditions doesn't mean they are relevant to any other conditions, and so far I haven't seen any evidence that, say, pretty much any hadron at all, is important.

As mentioned under Time, I don't like the idea in history that the past is objective; the past *was* objective, but no longer is, it's now reconstructed. This doesn't mean it can be anything we want it to be, but it means that we can't really know it, even where records are detailed the amount of detail lost over time is enormous, so enormous that selective attention applies to any reconstruction, not just in general things like "how did Rome fall" but even in more specific things like "did Jesus exist". There's no way to know either way for either of those, because there's no way to check it, empiricism doesn't apply. Sometimes you can be pretty sure, but I'd be careful about making positive claims about any past event, even ones you personally remember (memory's often wrong too).

Most of statistics. It works, but because it's not clear why, it should be distrusted, at least because measuring standard deviations isn't often accurate (especially not in both directions from the average) and most of statistical results relies upon what the standard deviation is; the whole standard deviation model is its weakest part: what actually is a standard deviation, metaphysically?

The whole idea that the goal of science is to prevent mistakes rather than to know truth. It's too cautious (never mind that my entry is a list of cautions). It's better to be right and not know why you're right than to be wrong and know why you're wrong. The point is to find out what's right, and secondarily to check that and make sure it's right, not primarily to check everything we already think is true to make sure it's right.

I wanted to save a theory I expressed to konami recently but haven't written about here.

The idea is that humans are not adapted to grow up and live in safe environments, we were adapted to have to struggle for survival: to be constantly on the lookout for things to hunt or things hunting us, including other tribes, to have to work hard all day and make life and death decisions fairly regularly.

Today, especially in industrialized countries, but even to a good degree in third world countries, that's all gone. In the past you had to work extremely hard to live to 10, now you can pretty much do whatever you want, even just laze around all day and expend no effort whatsoever, and live to be 80. The difference is tangible and unimaginable.

I'm not saying we should go back to the old ways, only that we should recognize that this change has brought along problems and maladaptions. I'll go through a few.

Take habits for a big example. Habits were originally intended to get us to repeat things which help us survive and not repeat things which do not. But today, no matter what you do, you will probably survive. You don't need habits anymore. Really, habits are completely useless today, even though they were life-saving and indispensable 50,000 years ago.

I'd even go so far as to say that our propensity to habit is a very big liability today, particularly because they work by detecting what helps you survive and repeating it over and over; this leads to addictions, but more importantly this leads to repeating arbitrary actions over and over simply because those actions don't kill you; your brain reasonably believes that if you're doing something and you're still alive, it must be a good thing to repeat.

A second thing is free time. Our brains weren't built for idle thought; thinking without action is the cause of most psychological problems. Knowledge exists as a supplement for action, the only reason we're as good as we are at thinking is because it helps us choose better actions. But collectively humanity has become so good at choosing actions that we've pretty much eliminated the need to choose actions.

In other words, humanity is so good at thinking that there is no longer any reason for any person to think. You can think like Einstein or you can think like Forrest Gump and chances are you'll live the same amount of time either way. Maybe you'll gain another three years on average if you're a better thinker, by avoiding unhealthy foods or whatever, but big deal.

Because this is so, thinking, like habits, has become counter-productive. In most people, it causes more problems than it solves. I'm not saying we should abandon thinking, because we can't; we can't abandon it any more than we can abandon habit. But we should recognize that most of the time thinking causes more problems than it solves, just as having habits causes more problems than it solves.

I don't mean normal thinking like figuring out how to best get from point A to point B on a map or figuring out how to tie your shoes. I mean abstract thinking, such as whether mankind is inherently noble or ignoble, or whether or not this movie is Kurosawa's best movie, or who killed JFK. That type of thinking doesn't actually help you do anything, it makes no tangible difference in your actions, it's for all intents and purposes waste heat, which exists because that type of thinking was once useful in your evolutionary past but no longer is. Most habits are bad, and most thoughts are bad. Even when the thought is factually correct, it can still be morally bad to dwell on it, to have it consume you.

The cause of most political and social problems is at root psychological, that humans are not yet adapted to always being safe and never having to fight for survival. And we probably never will be adapted for that, for biological reasons (particularly because, genetically, extremely large populations evolve extremely slowly, and there's 6 billion of us -- there's a reason the cockroach hasn't changed much in so long: there are so many of them).

But what can't be changed genetically can be changed through culture, and I think a culture in which we foster things adapted to civilization has been developing for some time. There are pretty major ways that culture tries to adapt you to civilization, things which are completely alien to tooth-and-nail life: various moral ideas are just the start, entire emotions (or more specifically emotional interpretations) have been fabricated and brought into being which didn't previously exist, yet feel just as real as can be.

There are deep manipulations of someone's psychology going on as they grow up that aren't noticeable, even when we look for them. They mainly take the form of expectations about ourselves, such that we usually falsely believe such things are part of human nature when they are not which only becomes obvious when you read ethnographies of peoples still living in prehistorical ways and notice, say, that 90% of them aren't monogamous or that most of them don't see murder as a serious crime if it's done to someone outside your tribe or that most of them don't have a concept of falling in love (and neither did even Western civilization until recently).

But back to my point: we are built for tough lives, not soft lives, and the more comfortable your life is the worse you feel. Happiness comes from the achievement of goals, but if you're handed those goals before you're even born (supermarkets to provide easy food, sinecures to provide easy funds to buy that food, and the rest is entertainment) there can be no happiness in the sense that someone who struggles to survive knows happiness.

There are no real answers to this problem. You can't just become a hermit in aboriginal Australia (well you can, but not practically), nor can you accept the full comforts of modern society and expect to be happy (not even content), and any attempt to mix the two will also fail because they can't be mixed, either life is constantly dangerous or it isn't, either you're living on the edge of death or you're not.

The best answer I know of is Karma Yoga: to do good work and to focus all your energy on doing good work. It doesn't matter if that work is making games or baking cakes or building watches, as long as it can't be done automatically (a living death) and especially as long as there is a constant struggle to do it better and better and some type of prideful record of one's work, like a stack of novels you're written that's getting ever taller. If done correctly this maintains the safety of modern society while avoiding most of its problems (it avoids habit because it provides an constant, if artificial, challenge, and it avoids thinking too much because there's no time to be idle).

Preferably the work should do good for others and be useful, but that isn't even mandatory, building houses out of cards and trying to get ever better at that, or juggling 7 balls and then 8 balls and then 9 balls and trying to become a master juggler -- both of those sound pretty useless but they're still Karma Yoga. My personal preference is that the work be useful, but even someone pursuing mastery of juggling is better off than someone who just entertains themselves by watching X-Files or going to concerts or all the other millions of things that people become stuck in habits around, and certainly better off than people who think all the time and never do anything and create psychological problems which eventually end in suicide.

EDIT: And yes I know this entry is doing exactly what I say we shouldn't do (thinking too much), but in my defense I'm so overactive at thinking that I can come up with theories like this over the course of the few minutes it takes to drink a cup of coffee, and I type at 100 wpm and this entry only took a few minutes to write, so it doesn't really take up much of my time, most of which is spent on making and playing games (or, more recently, on getting Ron Paul elected).

"Later, a colleague at Sheffield University became aware of a young man with a larger than normal head. He was referred to Lorber even though it had not caused him any difficulty. Although the boy had an IQ of 126 and had a first class honours degree in mathematics, he had "virtually no brain". A noninvasive measurement of radio density known as CAT scan showed the boy's skull was lined with a thin layer of brain cells to a millimeter in thickness. The rest of his skull was filled with cerebrospinal fluid. The young man continues a normal life with the exception of his knowledge that he has no brain."

http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/science/is_the_brain_really_necessary.htm

If this is true and not some type of mistake, this is evidence for my theory that we are our entire bodies, not just our brain, and that a brain transplant (if it were possible) or "uploading your mind into a computer" (which I still think is ridiculous) would pretty much destroy a personality.

So much of what a person is like is stored in the rest of the body: the immune system (which is intricate enough to be called a second nervous system), the different organs (which tend to be associated with different emotions -- love really does have something to do with your physical heart for example), the glands and their characteristic hormone levels (which influence behavior and disposition), the spinal cord (which stores a lot of your muscle memory), and so on. It's still not even clear were memories are stored, they could be in the white blood cells for all we know.

The idea that the mind is in the brain is pretty simplistic considering that someone with no brain but with a thin layer of nerve cells on the inside of his skull about a hundredth of the weight of the brain can be conscious and an honors math graduate.

Granted, half of the people in this condition turn out retarded, but a surprising amount don't: "Of the 253 subjects in the study, 9 were found to have approximately only 5% of the normal amount of brain tissue. Despite this, 4 [of those 9 with only 5% of the normal amount of brain tissue] had IQ's of above 100, the national average, and another 2 had IQ's of above 126, while one of the subjects proved to be as intelligent as those studying him, he had a first-class degree in maths."

And why aren't things like this news in the mainstream media? Instead they're talking about how a US senator is gay and voted for anti-gay bills or whatever.

For those who don't know what this topic is about, I suggest this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

I was talking about this over the past weeks or so on and off with Patrick Dugan and I want to summarize my thoughts on this. This is not addressed to him or anyone else, it's just a record of my arguments against this theory.

The basic idea is that the rate of change (in complexity, technology, population growth, etc.), because it's increasing at an exponential rate, will eventually reach a point (the singularity) where change is infinitely fast. Millions of people now believe this, with many devoting their lives to reaching that point as fast as possible (I've called it a religion in the past).

I've some problems with this idea:

First, "technology", "change" and so on aren't measurable, they're abstract qualities rather than quantitative phenomena. Technology isn't a thing, it's a category of things, a thought about things. So to say that "technology" or "change" are accelerating is to say nothing at all, it's no different than if you said "virtue" or "goodness" was accelerating, or if you said "love" or "spirituality" was accelerating -- it sounds nice, and it even has some truth to it, but it's still too vague to mean much, it's not something you can or should predict the future with.

Most objections to the accelerating change theory I've read still allow in that basic premise, there are arguments that the "rate of change" has slowed down, but no arguments that I know of (except mine) that the very concept of a "rate of change" is an empty concept, something which sounds like it means something but actually means nothing.

One particularly strange claim is that humanity's knowledge of the universe doubles every year. How Kurzweil arrives at that is unknown. Information isn't knowledge, so even if it were true that the amount of written or other information doubles every year (which it does not, but let's grant that) it wouldn't be true that our knowledge of the universe doubles each year, just the amount of stuff we've written down about it.

Second, while true that if you look at any given field, inventions and technological improvements seem to be speeding up. Between the years 0 AD and 1000 AD, the amount of change in technology, at least on the surface level, seems less significant than the change between 1000 AD and 2000 AD. Even the change between 1000 AD and 1800 AD seems less than the change between 1800 AD and 2000 AD. Subjectively, anyway. It can't be measured, but it sure seems like more has changed in the last 200 years than in the 800 years before that.

There's two simple explanations for that observation: that the amount of people has similarly increased drastically during that time (and more people means more inventors), but more importantly, that because we are stationed at this moment in time, recent changes have been recorded in more detail than changes thousands of years ago, and seem more spectacular.

The computer seems like a more spectacular achievement to us than the printing press or the invention of written language. Electricity seems more amazing to us than steam power or burning wood. But that's just because such things are more recent, more recent things seem unduly brighter and more significant than things that people did a thousand years ago.

He also mentions that the speed of computers doubles every 18 months. That's actually not accurate, computers have stopped doing that for a couple of years now, since about 2000 or so. The fastest CPU you can buy today on an average income is about 3.4ghz. And 18 months ago, it was about 3.0ghz. I know clock speed means little and there are other factors, but nobody in or knowledgeable about the computer industry believes that the speed of computers is doubling every 18 months anymore.

Similarly, with population. Our population isn't accelerating that fast anymore, it's slowed down and it's predicted to stabilize around 10 billion sometime around 2050, at which it'll reach replacement level. I personally don't think it'll remain at 10 billion forever, after we begin colonizing other planets it may start increasing again, but the idea that our population will increase exponentially forever is clearly wrong.

Another thing is that it's easy to fudge charts like this. All you have to do is be selective about what you consider significant, and you can make anything fit in a line to anything.

Anyway, there's a lot about Kurzweil I like. I like his dedication to extending human lifespan. And I do think that eventually we'll create something that'll be intelligent, and in some ways more intelligent than us. But he's a sloppy thinker, most of his ideas aren't rigorous, and most are hyperbolic to the point of being poetry (I'm thinking of that "rend a tear in the fabric of human history" quote), yet the man has millions of followers and is almost a cult leader in how uncritically what he says is accepted.

He's more like a prophet than a scientist -- and most prophets have been wrong, and those that haven't weren't because they kept their predictions vague. And many of his prophecies are religious in nature, that they predict events which have never happened before on earth and predict them fairly soon. Of course, that doesn't mean they won't happen, but when his arguments for those predictions are so fudged and so many people believe in them so wholeheartedly it's disturbing how easy people fall for things like this, these pseudoscientific people give religious people justification in saying that science is a religion rather than a method.

Our verified longest-lived humans seem to take a sharp downward turn near 114/115. Observe:

Number of people who died at age 114 or older: 60
Number of people who died at age 115 or older: 21
Number of people who died at age 116 or older: 9
Number of people who died at age 117 or older: 5
Number of people who died at age 119 or older: 3
Number of people who died at age 120 or older: 2
Number of people who died at age 122 or older*: 1

"A supercentenarian (sometimes hyphenated as super-centenarian) is someone who has reached the age of 110 years or more, something achieved by only one in a thousand centenarians (based on European data). In turn, only about one supercentenarian in 44 lives to turn 115 (2% of 110-year-olds can expect to survive five more years)." (Wikipedia)

*Source: Validated Supercentenarian Cases Aged 114 and Above. L. Stephen Coles. Rejuvenation Research Dec 2006, Vol. 9, No. 4: 503-505.

So it turns out Einstein may have been right: god does not play dice. Even better, what they describe there might be a physical basis for Indra's Net: (roughly speaking) quantum entanglement isn't the exception, but the rule.

If all particles in the universe can be influenced by all other particles, it's then possible not just randomness or probability that causes the seemingly random behavior at the quantum level (like for example half-life), but rather that behavior could be the result of faster-than-light interaction with all other particles.

Or in other words, the universe might be deterministic, but deterministic in such a way that every single particle matters in the determination of future events.

Gah, I ordered Clausewitz's On War as a reference for my future game Ziggurats for Red Turtle but found that it was the abridged version, and the chapters dealing with tactics and strategy had been cut out to make room for the "philosophy of war" stuff. Oh well, that stuff's important too in its own way.

Speaking of "the science" -- everything is made better if you aren't ignorant of empirical reality. Harlock doesn't understand it, but it's one of the principles of aesthetics! For instance, in one of his novels Harlock defies the laws of physics by making a guy throw a knife forward on a moving train and then having the knife come back and hit him. What kind of physics foolery is that? He later re-wrote it, but if he didn't it would have ruined the scene for everyone (both those who know that physics doesn't work like that and children gullible enough to think it might), it ruined the scene for me the first time I read it in any case. Whereas if he had a 'physics desk reference' or something and had looked it up that travesty could have been avoided.

If you're knowingly bending the laws of reality for some specific purpose, and know what aspects of reality you're going against, that's one thing, but to write something great in ignorance of what is possible and impossible leads to problems. Harlock tells me that Dostoevsky's notes for Brothers K are filled with things like "find out whether it's possible to lie between the train tracks of a speeding train and survive" -- clearly D knew that one must know about the science relevant to one's work before that work can be great. D didn't just make up that it was possible or impossible based on what seemed right to him, he found out.

I actually think a science education in a university is one of the best preparations for a life of creating art possible, but I'm biased cause I majored in biochemistry.

http://www.mattfraction.com/5FoS/5Ffcoversmall.gif

"Only now can the tale be told-- in which Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla collided with Thomas Edison and J. P. Morgan, an evil science cabal merging the Black Arts and the Industrial Age. Turn of the century New York City sets the stage for a titanic battle over the very fate of the mankind."

http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/050922/brainevolution.shtml

The genetics of the genes that control brain size, if you look at the dates of their mutations, roughly correspond to the great events of human history. For instance, the discovery of agriculture corresponded with an increase in brain size, as did the formation of the first civilizations in 4000 BC.

So! Dark matter has finally been observed, sort of.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-12/m-vhf121406.php

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6586235597476141009&q=documentary&hl=en

Good video on a scientific worldview. Feynman's pretty great.

(17:38:37) Paul Eres: http://space.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524911.600
(17:38:54) Paul Eres: 13 scientific issues that are unexplained
(17:39:01) Atheism: Why don't they make sense?
(17:39:12) Paul Eres: because the results don't seem to follow any theory that would account for them
(17:39:28) Atheism: Interesting, but they're recognized as occuring?
(17:39:34) Paul Eres: yes
(17:39:41) Atheism: But they don't make sense?
(17:39:43) Paul Eres: the first one for example is the placebo effect
(17:40:07) Paul Eres: one example of it is
(17:40:41) Paul Eres: they use morphine on someone, and replace it with water, and it still relieves pain, they then put in anti-morphene substance which blocks morphene into the water, and it stops relieving pain, even though there is no morphene to block
(17:40:46) Atheism: It's hillarious when anyone calls reality nonsensical, especially the sort of reality that don't include its own thought process
(17:41:21) Atheism: Why doesn't that make sense? the psychological distortion is very powerful
(17:41:34) Paul Eres: no, the people didn't know that they had put in an anti-morphene blockers
(17:41:36) Paul Eres: the*
(17:41:52) Atheism: Yes, I know what the placebo effect is
(17:42:06) Atheism: It can be explained though, I'm sure
(17:42:25) Paul Eres: in other words, the placebo effect can be countered by something which would block the substance that the person *thinks* he is getting
(17:42:30) Paul Eres: even though he isn't getting that substance
(17:42:35) Paul Eres: and doesn't know about the blocking agent
(17:42:36) Atheism: It's more than mere cogitation
(17:43:19) Atheism: It's some sort of a biological process which seems odd that science would neglect that
(17:43:31) Paul Eres: yes
(17:43:41) Paul Eres: i think it's possible the body itself mimics the chemical the person believes he is getting
(17:43:47) Paul Eres: so the blocking would block what the body is doing

(17:16:52) Paul Eres: also, a study was published recently that showed
(17:16:58) Paul Eres: that humans are not 99.9% identically genetically
(17:17:03) Paul Eres: that we have vast genetic variance
(17:17:26) Paul Eres: we vary quite a bit in how many copies of different genes they have
(17:17:35) Paul Eres: and that many of our traits
(17:17:38) Paul Eres: may have more to do with
(17:17:43) Paul Eres: the number of copies of a gene we have
(17:17:47) Paul Eres: than whether we have that gene at all
(17:18:00) Paul Eres: if you have 5 copies of a gene, it's actually 'expressed' more, meaning
(17:18:09) Paul Eres: more of that protein will exist in the body
(17:18:15) Paul Eres: since each gene codes for a protein

(17:18:51) Paul Eres: so intelligence being genetic could be as simple as the number of intelligence-promoting genes a person has copies of
(17:29:01) Paul Eres: our differences are more differences of number of copies of genes
(17:29:17) Paul Eres: the 99.9% genetically identical thing
(17:29:24) Paul Eres: only means that we share 99.9% of our genes
(17:29:30) Paul Eres: not that we share the exact number of copies of each

(17:34:38) iamthevoid242: Generating intelligence logically cannot be controlled by something that stupid
(17:34:48) Paul Eres: it's not stupid
(17:35:12) Paul Eres: it's not 'generating' per se
(17:35:33) Paul Eres: there are many possible ways this could be done
(17:35:35) Paul Eres: a simple one is
(17:35:50) Paul Eres: imagine if in the past when conceptuality first evolved we were much more intelligent
(17:36:15) Paul Eres: but it was found that we survive better by making some members of a tribe less intelligent
(17:36:19) Paul Eres: leaving intelligence as rare
(17:36:31) Paul Eres: there would then be evolutionary selection toward that arrangement
(17:36:47) Paul Eres: the tribes that had that arrangement conquered the other tribes and populated the world
(17:37:20) Paul Eres: now imagine if there is a gene that reduces intelligence
(17:37:30) Paul Eres: the very smartest people would have only 1 or 2 copies of that
(17:37:35) Paul Eres: with others getting 5, 10, 50
(17:38:00) Paul Eres: each copy releases a protein which increases mental dullness
(17:38:08) Paul Eres: by making the brain work less effectively in some way

I've been reading On the Nature of Things, which if you do try to read I recommend a prose translation, not the lyrical one on Project Gutenburg.

I'm really really surprised how good this is. Not only its true aspects, but the way it argues. For instance, yes, he has a 'matter is neither created nor destroyed' thing, like modern physics has, but it's not really that amazing that he would say that, what's amazing is *how* he says it; he goes into what it would mean for it to be otherwise (which most people at that time and even most people today believe), and shows its absurdity that way, whereas modern physicists simply state it as a proven fact without much argument. The same thing is true for atoms, free will, the validity of the senses, the social contract, and everything else he gets into, the arguments for them and against alternative positions (such as the popular four elements theory) are ingenious. My only disappointment is that from the table of contents there doesn't seem to be much about Epicurean ethics in it; there's some, but that's what I was really looking forward to.

The rest of the Nobel prize winners for 2006 are going to be announced over the course of the next week or so, but the most important ones (chemistry, physics, and physiology-medicine) have been announced. The other prizes -- literature, peace, and economics -- are usually poor choices so I usually ignore those. All five of the winners below are American: we totally swept the science Nobel prizes this year.

*

Physics 2006 is Mather and Smoot "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation".

This one I'd heard of -- it's basically evidence of the birth of the universe, left-over waves from the big bang. This gives the big bang theory more credence than it previously had; the previous evidence for it was simply that the universe is expanding from a central point and has been for billions of years -- in other words the big bang is still going on, we are right in the midsts of a multi-billion-year explosion.

*

Chemistry 2006 is Kornberg "for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription".

Interesting is Kornberg's father won the same Nobel prize in 1959, and his younger brother discovered DNA polymerase II and III. I once heard that most of the most important technological inventions and scientific discoveries in the 19th and 20th centuries came out of 12 family lines, which was part of why I don't totally dismiss the "genius is genetic" idea. Anyway, his discovery: "Roger Kornberg worked with X-ray crystallography to solve the 3-dimensional structure of the proteins involved in the transcription process."

*

Physiology-Medicine 2006 is Fire and Mello "for their discovery of RNA interference - gene silencing by double-stranded RNA".

I've no idea what this one means (even though I took genetics and biochemistry in college) so I'll just quote the Wikipedia article:

Published in the journal Nature, the paper[3] detailed how tiny snippets of RNA fool the cell into destroying the gene's messenger RNA (mRNA) before it can produce a protein - effectively shutting specific genes down. [4] More specifically, Fire and Mello investigated the regulation of muscle protein production (in worms) using different forms of RNA. Both mRNA and an antisense RNA sequence had no effect on protein production. However, double-stranded RNA (sense & antisense together) successfully silenced the gene. Mello later wrote a review speaking of the 'RNA Revelation': "RNA has always been in control of the cell, not DNA".

http://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/Physics10/old%20physics%2010/pages01/NatureofWar.html

That physics professor (the one from those Berkeley lectures I've been urging everyone to watch) predicted the Afgan and Iraq wars 10 days after 9/11.

He's also the guy behind the nemesis star theory -- the idea that our sun has a hidden twin, a red dwarf sun. Whether it does or not will be discovered in 2009, when a particular NASA mission reaches an area which can observe that hypothetical star.

He also wrote a novel of historical fiction: The Sins of Jesus, which looks great (seems to go into the nuts and bolts of exactly how Jesus could have faked miracles during the founding of Christianity -- how he turned water into wine, how he faked the resurrection of Lazarus, etc.).

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2762611569114451741&q=owner%3Aucberkeley+courses

Videos of all the lectures of Berkeley's class "Integrative Biology 131" are available on Google Video. They have videos of other courses up too, on chemistry and physics. If any of you have never taken and don't plan to take college-level science classes (like god_of_atheism, hehe), those three would probably be a great self-education tool.

This first lecture on biology is pretty entertaining: at the start of it you see this box with flower decorations that looks like it's holding a cake, but soon the professor puts on gloves, and takes out a real human brain out of that box! She also picks two students at random for every lecture, and takes those two to lunch. And people say college professors are inferior teachers to public school teachers! In my experience college professors on average are many times superior at teaching.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/09/03/survival_of_the_harmonious/?page=full -- link from euphonicsilence

Article on the evolution of music and possible hypothesis for its evolutionary role. They're pretty good hypothesis but I think I tend to agree with Pinker -- that music's just a byproduct of language. It might have helped with the other things mentioned (singing to babies to calm them, music as a way to attract mates, music as a way to keep a tribe socially cohesive), but I don't think any one of those dominated music's evolutionary role so much that it's okay to say that music evolved "for" that purpose rather than evolved and then was used for that purpose.

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/williams_interview.html

Frans Roes: In your latest book, you describe the biological creation process as being both "evil" and "abysmally stupid." What do you mean when you say this?

George Williams: Natural selection maximizes shortsighted selfishness, no matter how much pain or loss it produces. There are far more losers than winners, and great losses often arise from trivial gains. The killing of monkey infants for minor male reproductive gain is the example that most persuasively led me to use words like evil.

As to its stupidity, natural selection produces what seem to be ingenious devices, like eyes and hands and the human capacity for language, but a close examination shows these devices to be just the sorts of things that can arise from trial and error, with no modifications that would arise from any real understanding of the problems to be solved. As a result, all organisms are burdened with maladaptive historical legacies, such as the many problems that arise from the close association of the human reproductive and excretory systems.

[Copying and pasting that poll code has become tiresome and should also end.]

http://www.wtopnews.com/index.php?nid=535&sid=829873 (Study found via flicker in wynand's LJ.)

Amazing. The number of close friends (defined as someone you can "confide in") the average person has is now 2, down from 3 in 1985. And 1/4th have no friends at all.

I suspect, and this is only my interpretation, that the reason for this is not so much that people are less friendly or care about social matters less, rather that they are more secretive and less trusting of others, less willing to open up, perhaps due to the greater atmosphere of guilt that exists today (which has a variety of causes, from the resurgance of religion in the 90s to the internet allowing a greater feeling of personal freedom and thus more to feel guilty about).

-58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
-42% of college graduates never read another book.
-80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
-70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
-57% of new books are not read to completion.
From Para Publishing via theferrett

I showed this to abi_dierecte & we got to talking over whether this means that movies, videogames, and music are superior art media; I say no because there are some themes that only work as novels, and because there are more great novels than there are great movies or great videogames or great music.

link via euphonicsilence: http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/07/01/060702033323.x2oko4pl.html

These are possible, I'd like to see them studied more. Everyone too easily blames obesity on diet and lack of exercise, but there's just as much (if not more) evidence that it's linked to the use of air conditioning and a virus related to the common cold.

I've encountered this theory before but Patrick Dugan wrote the best expression of it I've ever read, so I'm quoting it here for you all.

"Lets go back even more years, like a few hundred thousand, to the evolutionary history of the hominid. Evolutionary Psychology suggests that one of the primary pressures that drove the evolution of bigger brains, and thus the evolution of language and technology, was infidelity. Sounds crazy right? I'll tell it like a story.

"Thack is a good guy, honest, hard working; he knows a few basic things in life and thats good enough for him: how do kill boars and skin them, that his woman is attractive, that certain plants will kill you if ingested. Thats about the extent of Thack's awareness. Uma is roughly as intelligent, but her awarenss is vastly different from Thack's. Then we have Bob. Bob looks up at the stars sometimes and sees a multiheaded bear creature feasting on an endless river of celestial salmon. He wonder's about things, about the future, about what happens when he throws a stone in a particular way. Bob is friend's with Thack, and Bob is friends with Uma, and Bob also really enjoys his woman, Mwhafuma. But that isn't enough for Bob, because Bob has a lot going on inside of him and sometimes he feels trapped in his own tongue, so to speak. Bob is the most interesting hominid in a fifty mile radius, but nobody knows it but him.

"Bob's imagination and wanderlust can be expressed by simply as his ability to reason in three dimensions. Not only does this help him time his stone throws, it helps him socially as well. He reasons that if he sleeps with Uma and Thack finds out, Thack'll be angry and maybe even kill him. But he really wants Uma, and Uma has an undescribable (given the langauge of the time) attraction to Bob, so she lets him in while Thack is out hunting. Nine months later and Thack is raising Bob junior, and so on. The Bobs of the world could even make a career out of this, cuckholding every honest moron within walking distance. And so the stuff that dreams are made of, sexuality, pushes the "smarter" genes to proliferate, and the rest is pre-history."

http://storytronics.blogspot.com/2006/05/p-is-for-prism.html

And this continues even to this day. And it's quite common, too -- I heard of a study that showed (through genetic testing) that something like 20% of children were fathered by someone other than who they believe to be their father. However: think about what other traits are promulgated as a result of this -- dishonesty and so forth. So if this is the cause of the evolution of intelligence, this could also be the cause of the evolution of "human nature" in the negative sense that the term is sometimes used.

http://www.livescience.com/technology/060518_light_backward.html

Time travel! Evidence for determinism, perhaps.

"We sent a pulse through an optical fiber, and before its peak even entered the fiber, it was exiting the other end. Through experiments we were able to see that the pulse inside the fiber was actually moving backward, linking the input and output pulses."

"The pulse of light is shaped like a hump with a peak and long leading and trailing edges. The leading edge carries with it all the information about the pulse and enters the fiber first. By the time the peak enters the fiber, the leading edge is already well ahead, exiting. From the information in that leading edge, the fiber essentially 'reconstructs' the pulse at the far end, sending one version out the fiber, and another backward toward the beginning of the fiber."

The animation it links to is pretty scary. A wave of light is going along, then suddenly in the future another wave of light appears, and sends some light backwards to counteract itself, nullifying itself from the past and jumping straight through an area.

Perception, 2005, volume 34, pages 319 - 340; Attractiveness of own-race, other-race, and mixed-race
faces.

Abstract. Averaged face composites, which represent the central tendency of a familiar population
of faces, are attractive. If this prototypicality contributes to their appeal, then averaged com-
posites should be more attractive when their component faces come from a familiar, own-race
population than when they come from a less familiar, other-race population. We compared the
attractiveness of own-race composites, other-race composites, and mixed-race composites (where
the component faces were from both races). In experiment 1, Caucasian participants rated own-
race composites as more attractive than other-race composites, but only for male faces. However,
mixed-race (Caucasian/Japanese) composites were significantly more attractive than own-race
composites, particularly for the opposite sex. In experiment 2, Caucasian and Japanese partic-
ipants living in Australia and Japan, respectively, selected the most attractive face from a
continuum with exaggerated Caucasian characteristics at one end and exaggerated Japanese
characteristics at the other, with intervening images including a Caucasian averaged composite,
a mixed-race averaged composite, and a Japanese averaged composite. The most attractive face
was, again, a mixed-race composite, for both Caucasian and Japanese participants. In experi-
ment 3, Caucasian participants rated individual Eurasian faces as significantly more attractive
than either Caucasian or Asian faces. Similar results were obtained with composites. Eurasian
faces and composites were also rated as healthier than Caucasian or Asian faces and composites,
respectively. These results suggest that signs of health may be more important than prototypicality
in making average faces attractive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners

2005

* Agricultural History - Presented to James Watson of Massey University, New Zealand, for his scholarly study, "The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley's Exploding Trousers."

* Physics - Presented jointly to John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland, Australia, for patiently conducting the so-called pitch drop experiment that began in the year 1927 -- in which a glob of congealed black tar pitch has been slowly, slowly dripping through a funnel, at a rate of approximately one drop every nine years.

* Medicine - Presented to Gregg A. Miller of Oak Grove, Missouri, in the U.S.A., for inventing Neuticles -- artificial replacement testicles for dogs, which are available in three sizes, and three degrees of firmness.

* Literature - Presented to the Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, for creating and then using e-mail to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters -- General Sani Abacha, Mrs. Mariam Sanni Abacha, Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq., and others -- each of whom requires just a small amount of expense money so as to obtain access to the great wealth to which they are entitled and which they would like to share with the kind person who assists them. (see advance fee fraud)

* Peace - Presented jointly to Claire Rind and Peter Simmons of Newcastle University, in the U.K., for electrically monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while that locust was watching selected highlights from the movie "Star Wars."

* Economics - Presented to Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for inventing an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people DO get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday.

* Chemistry - Presented jointly to Edward Cussler of the University of Minnesota and Brian Gettelfinger of the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin, for conducting a careful experiment to settle the longstanding scientific question: can people swim faster in syrup or in water? It was found that the increase in drag in a syrup pool is canceled out by the increase in "push" a swimmer gets on each stroke.[2]

* Biology - Presented jointly to Benjamin Smith of the University of Adelaide, Australia and the University of Toronto, Canada and the Firmenich perfume company, Geneva, Switzerland, and ChemComm Enterprises, Archamps, France; Craig Williams of James Cook University and the University of South Australia; Michael Tyler of the University of Adelaide; Brian Williams of the University of Adelaide; and Yoji Hayasaka of the Australian Wine Research Institute; for painstakingly smelling and cataloging the peculiar odors produced by 131 different species of frogs when the frogs were feeling stressed.

* Nutrition - Presented to Dr. Yoshiro Nakamatsu of Tokyo, Japan, for photographing and retrospectively analyzing every meal he has consumed during a period of 34 years (and counting).

* Fluid Dynamics - Presented jointly to Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of International University Bremen, Germany and the University of Oulu , Finland; and Jozsef Gal of Loránd Eötvös University, Hungary, for using basic principles of physics to calculate the pressure that builds up inside a penguin, as detailed in their report "Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh -- Calculations on Avian Defaecation."

Footnote: It is worth noting that Ig Nobel stalwart and 'keeper of the broom' Roy Glauber was unable to attend the 2005 Ig Nobel ceremony, having just won the Nobel prize for Physics.

That link also has the ones for the years back to 1991.

An executed baby's head was visible in the top-left region of my forehead, but only in a mirror. I was dreaming; more accurately, nightmaring. It was frightening. I was young in this dream, my room was the way it was when I was a kid, and I had run from to it to my mother's room, which was the way it was when I was a kid too. I told her of what I was seeing in the mirror; it was (in this dream) five in the morning and she was loathe to either believe it or wake up. I remember shaking in fear and trying to explain to her how scary it was. I described it as looking like an executed baby's head, and like Humbaba, from the Gilgamesh epic -- as if anyone had ever knew what he looked like.

I wondered myself what it was. The ghost of an actual baby that was executed in my room, long ago, wanting to make itself remembered? How odd that the room I spent most of my life in would have that; this undoubtedly had an effect on my development, it might explain how strange I became, or how ruthless.

I convinced my mother to come back with me to my room to check out this supernatural visage. When we were both in my room, you'd expect it not to appear when looked at in the light, right? Wrong: this was a dream, and anything's possible. It appeared, and she saw it, but she didn't really want to look at it. She kept looking at me rather than at the spot in the mirror on my forehead where the face appeared. I repeated to her: "look at the mirror, not me!" but she only looked at it in short glances. I don't know why, this was a dream, this was unreasonable. It took a lot of bravery -- even for something taking place inside a dream -- for me to look at it. It was smaller than it used to be, that face. Less scary. When I did eventually awake, I would be panting a bit from the remenant fear, intentionally dissipating it.

Dreams are one of the few places remaining where I see anything supernatural; which means: unexplainable, which means: uncaused. The supernatural, you see, is the realm of the unexplainable. There's a reason why reasonable people don't believe in most supernatural phenomena, and that reason is that such phenomena are causeless phenomena. They don't have reasons. Reason is, in its primary, original meaning, the art of identifying reasons. Reasoning is identifying a string of such reasons: w causes x; y because z. Classically speaking, logic is associated with identification, and reason is associated with causality (I really hate when people equate logic and reason, by the way: the two are not the same thing. Both are good, but they are distinct, and using them as synonyms is sloppy, like equating forks and spoons and calling both of them sporks.)

The supernatural, as said, is the uncaused. It's the false idea that something we experience could have no reason behind it. But calling it a false idea underestimates it: human civilization began with the supernatural, and so does each individual human. It's only later that reason develops. During most of our childhood, we operate superstitiously. We sometimes believe in Santa Claus, we usually believe ghosts are possible, we might even believe in God; we have really wild ideas at that time, much like primitive men did, inventing gods in every nook and cranny. Most people of course still dwell in the supernatural at least in part, but children dwell in it through necessity and not knowing any better, adults dwell in it through choice.

The banishment of the supernatural is the onset of reason. Why? Because we begin to demand explanations. For everything. We ask "Why?" over and over until it's gone. But that's not an easy process, it's a long process, requiring relentlessness, and achieved in different degrees in different people. To keep a child from asking why, or worse, to not answer those whys, is to reduce the child's capacity for reason, to keep them in the supernatural. The complete banishment of the supernatural, especially during times of great trauma and stress and sickness, is the greatest achievement anyone can ever accomplish. All the other feats of body and mind, including the development of abstract intelligence, are less important because they rely on (and correlate with) this primary mental achievement.

There's a lot not to like about rationalization (and by that I mean explaining things incorrectly, such as saying that Zeus causes lightning or saying that your friend died because the stars weren't right that day), but one thing should be said for it, grudgingly: that it sometimes is necessary to patch the holes of reason so that the flood waters of the supernatural don't break through the dam of reason and destroy the town of life with floods. Optimally you never need to use it, that requires the ability to deal with uncertainty, to say "I don't know" and just leave a hole in that part of your knowledge of the universe. But such holes are difficult to monitor, it's easier to temporarily fill that hole with a wrong, but reasonable, explanation. Rationalization can thus be looked at as reasoning's protective mechanism, like the body's ability to create scar tissue when cut. Like scarring, it's ugly, and hard to remove once it's in place, but like scarring it prevents you from bleeding to death.

Rationalization doesn't always involve obviously mockable rationalizations. Sometimes it's quite subtle and cloaked. Why did I do bad on this test? Because I was having "a bad day". No, that's not the truth, you actually did bad on it because you didn't study. But it's easier to blame your mood, and those around you for causing it. Why can't I draw? Because I wasn't "born with talent". No, that's not the truth, you actually can't draw because you never really put the effort into drawing. But rationalization works even when the actual reason for something is unknowable to you, in fact, it especially works in such cases. Why do I feel bad today? Because "I didn't have a good breakfast." No, it's because five years ago on this day your cat died, and you don't remember. Why do I like the taste of raspberries? Because they "just taste good". No, it's because someone you liked once gave you raspberries, and you've forgotten.

So both reason and rationalization can be described "interpretors" of all phenomena you come across. A supernatural object is something that is unexplainable. Such things don't exist. And that's good. But we believe they do, unless and until we use reason or its evil twin. Reason is best envisioned as a series of whys, going further and further back. In the novel trilogy Red, Blue, and Green Mars there's a character named Sax, and he teaches these kids who tease him by asking "why?" to everything he says. He always has an answer, even if that answer is (although this is rare, and is usually at the end of a long string of whys) "that's how things are", which isn't really a good answer but is sometimes the real, true, and only answer for certain questions, such the question "why do things exist?"

Reason is misrepresented, even by those who like it. Reason is not a light, although it can mistaken for such because it clears away darkness. Reason is bright, to be sure, but not as bright a sunny day after a snowstorm: with light, too much of it will blind you, which isn't the case with reason. Nor is reason a fire, because although it can spread between people it doesn't burn. Analogies fail it, as they do all great things. If you have to use one, make it something that you can't live for long without, like your heart; reason is to the mind what your heart is to your body.

In today's culture reason is commonly associated with three widely hated objects: Western Civilization, Ayn Rand, and science. I'll go into each, briefly.

Associating reason with Western Civilization is premature. While true that most reasonable people have come out of it, most people in Western Civilization, now and historically, are, like the rest of the world, still locked in superstition, still not in the habit of seeking out explanations for things. But the leaders of the West often are steeped in reason, although rationalization is common too. Reason is so powerful that an entire civilization can be associated with it simply because it has a slightly higher incidence in that culture, much like freshly ground cinnamon is so powerful only a dash of it enough to make an entire pound of sugar smell just the same as a pound of cinnamon. It's indicative of that power, but it's inaccurate, and as I said, premature. We don't call Japan the civilization of suicide because it has a slightly higher incidence of it, for instance. And reasoning well is far rarer than suicide. Even in Europe during the Enlightenment, I'd wager.

The reason the West is hated *is* the result of reason, however: reason makes you powerful. The technological instruments the West has used to build its empire are echos of the reason of somebody or another. But you shouldn't blame reason for their use, no more than you should blame ancient Greece for ancient Rome. The gap is usually that large. There's a quote I like about the Nazi's, by Ken Wilber, which goes: "Auschwitz is not the product of reason; Auschwitz is the product of reason hijacked by tribalism."

Associating reason with Ayn Rand is okay, she was a reasonable person, but what's most interesting about her is that she popularized elitism. Now, there were people who argued for elitism before, and in the ancient past elitism was taken for granted as a good thing, but I expect that most people who consciously prefer elitism -- and by that I mean the idea that some people are better than others, and that this is unavoidable -- have read her, and at least once, liked what she wrote.

Objectivism is roughly speaking the romanticization of reason. The Enlightenment was too to some extent, but the Enlightenment was largely scientific in tone, not romantic (passionate, sharply seperating of dichotomies, essentializing, full of moral indignation, and so on) in tone. Everyone who succeeds Ayn Rand (and succeed is a better term than follow, although both literally mean the same thing, the tone is different) may not be rational, but they are all passionate for the cause of reason.

And for that she's one of the most popular philosophers -- among the masses, ironically. She often introduces people to reason. Now, most people who read her don't follow through on it; as the moderator of a forum about her I come across this weekly. Basic logical fallacies being abused, or else reactionary emotional thinking, or else senile theorizing in the air, stuff like that. Still, it's an amazing accomplishment to take one of the massminded and make them desire to be more, and to do it so subtlely that they believe they always wanted it and were never part of those who work only by superstition and borrowed ideas.

Science isn't so much hated as it is disliked, or treated as something that has to be "kept in its place". It isn't yet seen as essentially human, it's seen as something in an ivory tower, or better, it's seen as something on Mount Olympus. It's taught that way too, which is unfortunate, but better than nothing. The scientific method, as it's usually stated, is not quite reason, but it's of the same family; it's sort of a "social" reason, in the good sense of the word social. Science is impossible to do alone, you need at the very least a friend to report it to. Its methods tend to discourage personal experience though, which reason when used on an individual basis can't do without; it also has too much emphasis on controls, which while useful, are not always necessary, because something can be its own control (for instance, if you exercise and get stronger, the time when you did not exercise and did not get stronger is your control).

But what science shows us about reason is not so much the scientific method (although that is important), but through its imitation, psuedo-science. That psuedo-science is growing is actually a good thing, because it shows that superstition now has to pretend to work like science in order to be taken seriously. So you have mock-studies which show that prayer helps people heal faster, and stuff like that. But remember this: that superstition didn't even bother with that kind of facade until recently.

Being able to use reason, while rare, is not as rare as being able to understand reason. Even reasonable people believe a lot of unreasonable things about reason, but it's not unexpected: think of what is trying to be done, a mere few pounds (how much does the brain weigh again?) of matter trying to model the way those pounds of matter work. It's like a program trying to read and understand itsself, even as you read it, it changes and is something new to read. And there's nothing to directly sense it with either, there is no internal eye. So it's difficult, but not impossible: to study epistemology is to understand the technical details of reason -- the process of abstraction, the very difference between instances and universals, how induction works, and all that. My topic is not how reason works, however, but why.

And that's an interesting thing: if you ask "why use reason?" you're using reason. To ask why, to seek for some cause or because, is to use it. The only way not to use it, is to not wonder why to use it, or why anyone else uses it. And that's increasingly impossible. It used to be possible, you could go your entire life without seeking the causes and effects of the things around you, but that's only easy when your environment contains a small set of things which you can understand on the basis of accepted wisdom and declarations from the tribe, it's less easy when your environment includes many strange things that never existed before and that the people around you disagree about. Just like reason caused the modern lifestyle, the modern lifestyle is causing reason. The same is true of its other creations, such as philosophical tomes, and the internet. It's self-perpetuating. It's not unbeatable, and it is corruptable -- broadly speaking "postmodernism" is a virus which counters it -- but in most conflicts, including most wars, you want to be on its side.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/02/07/papua.species.reut/index.html
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&ncl=http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/popup%3Fid%3D1589230

Egg-laying mammals and many other new strange species discovered in a secret forgotten area of Indonesia. The animals have never seen humans before, or been seen by them, and so are oddly docile and don't run away when approached. Also, many animals believed extinct have been found alive there.

Excellent! He also compares Moses to Hitler and calls the New Testament a "sado-masochistic doctrine"!

Details: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=48252

It's good that a mainstream scientist is finally taking this stance. Most scientists are more cowardly and compromising.

Awhile ago I once wrote about the the influence of Toxoplasmosis on personality, and linked to this article.

Well, I found two more articles exploring more recent findings: [1], [2]. It seems toxoplasmosis can increase the risk of schizophrenia (or have schizophrenia-like symptoms), and it might also increase intelligence in women.

I love cats, but we shouldn't forget how dangerous their parasites are to us. Millions of people die each year from it, according to one of the researchers. It's also one of the leading causes of birth defects and miscarriages and schizophrenia. Fully 30%-60% of the world (80% in France and Germany) is infected with an organism that evolved to help cats catch rats by making rats less afraid of cats and slowing down their reaction time, an organism which infests the brain and alters its workings. This should recieve more news than it does. It should at least be classified along with the bird flu, AIDS, cancer, heart disease, the unhealthy modern diet, and all of that.



EDIT: Very amazingly coincidentally, I came across this excellent blog entry on the same subject right after posting this.

I came across it on http://reddit.com/ which is a site where people can comment on any link on the internet and see the comments of others on that link if any have left them. It's a pretty interesting idea.

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,68076,00.html

Funniest quote from that article: "You can't expect any of these devices to revolutionize the world for another 10 to 15 years" -- as if that were a *long* time. That nano-armor by that Israel company I mentioned is just one among many.

"
Various feminists proclaim that women are 'under siege', that a monstrous social bias against them, if not a virtual war, is going on, that women have little respect or power (Steinem, Faludi, Tavris, etc.) Yet the notion of the American woman as a powerless "victim" is one of the most absurd notions ever foisted upon anyone. American women live, on average, seven years longer than men. They control 86 % of all personal wealth [PARADE Magazine, May 27, 1990], and make up 55% of current college graduates. Women cast 54% of the votes in Presidential elections, so they can hardly claim to be left out of the political decision-making process! They win almost automatically in child custody disputes. Women suffer only 6% of the work-related fatalities (the other 94% are suffered by men). Women are the victim of only about 35% of violent crimes, and only about 25% of all murders, yet because of our society's exaggerated concern and respect for them, special legislation has been passed to punish "violence against women" as if it were a more heinous crime than "violence against men". (Feminists claim to want "equality", and this is an example of what "equality" means to them, i.e., preferential treatment to address their concerns). Two out of every three dollars spent on health care is spent on women, and even if you don't count pregnancy-related care, women still receive more medical care than men - yet feminists still holler that womens health is being "neglected", and far too many of us credulously believe them. Of the 25 worst jobs, as ranked by the Jobs Related Almanac based on a combination of salary, stress, security, and physical demands, 24 of them are predominantly, if not almost entirely, male, which might explain why men commit over 80% of all suicides.
"

from http://www.debunker.com/patriarchy.html
link via ubermensch

Most of the rest of the site is worth reading as well. While I really don't like that it uses ad hominem attacks -- for example, "While feminists scream that "fat is a feminist issue!" and insist that being hugely overweight is just fine, however scientific research shows that obesity in women promotes dementia (which may go a long way towards explaining contemporary feminist doctrines)." -- the essence of the site is accurate.