The cybernetic structure of a person has been refined by a very large, very long, and very deep encounter with physical reality.
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From this point of view, what can make bits have meaning is that their patterns have been hewn out of so many encounters with reality that they aren't really abstractable bits anymore, but are instead a nonabstract continuation of reality.Jaron Lanier, You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto
What we are finding is that at the molecular level the organism is so dynamic, so densely woven and multidirectional in its causes and effects, that it cannot be explicated as living process through strictly local investigations. When it begins to appear that, as one European research team puts it, “everything does everything to everything,” the search for “regulatory control” necessarily leads to the unified and irreducible functioning of the cell and organism as a whole — a living, metamorphosing form within which each more or less distinct partial activity finds its proper place.
...if all the 'species' ever extant where brought back to life there could be one unbroken chain of fucking going right back to the first creatures that invented sex...Hence the nice picture above, click to enlage, then imagine the scene.
brooks too broad for leaping
harland millerShe used to tease her lovers by keeping them waiting, and by constantly playing about with novel methods of intercourse she could always bring the lascivious to her feet; so far from waiting to be invited by anyone she encountered, she herself by cracking dirty jokes and wiggling her hips suggestively would invite all who came her way, especially if they were still in their teens. Never was anyone so completely given up to unlimited self-indulgence. Often she would go to a bring-your-own-food dinner-party with ten young men or more, all at the peak of their physical powers and with fornication as their chief object in life, and would lie with all her fellow-diners in turn the whole night long: when she had reduced them all to a state of exhaustion she would go to their menials, as many as thirty on occasion, and copulate with every one of them; but not even so could she satisfy her lust.And on the same theme, Seutonius on Caligula [From The Lives of the Twelve Caesars - full text]:
One night she went into the house of a distinguished citizen during the drinking, and, it is said, before the eyes of all the guests she stood up on the end of the couch near their feet, pulled up her dress in the most disgusting manner as she stood there, and brazenly displayed her lasciviousness. And though she brought three openings into service, she often found fault with Nature, grumbling because Nature had not made the openings in her nipples wider than is normal, so that she could devise another variety of intercourse in that region.Procopius, The Secret History, p82 [although I Googled, copy / pasted from here]
He had not the slightest regard for chastity, either his own or others', and was accused of homosexual relations, both active and passive, with Marcus Lepidus, also Mnester the comedian, and various foreign hostages; moreover, a young man of a consular family, Valerius Catullus, revealed publicly that he had buggered the Emperor, and quite worn himself out in the process. Besides incest with his sisters, and a notorious passion for the prostitute Pyrallis, he made advances to almost every woman of rank in Rome; after inviting a selection of them to dinner with their husbands he would slowly and carefully examine each in turn while they passed his couch, as a purchaser might assess the value of a slave, and even stretch out his hand and lift up the chin of any woman who kept her eyes modestly cast down. Then, whenever he felt so inclined, he would send for whoever pleased him best and leave the banquet in her company. A little later he would return, showing obvious signs of what he had been about, and openly discuss his bed-fellow in detail, dwelling on her good and bad physical points and commenting on her sexual performance.
...humans are not magic animals different from all the others, but part of a spectrum...
So imagine the edge of a huge lake, where, for whatever reason, the original community of animals tended to move clockwise. Let's say there's a hill that ends in sharp drop just where the dark gray meets the bright white line, above. So, we have a species breeding at the bright white spot, and as it moves around the lake small, local changes occur. Longer / shorter legs, variations in coloration, and so on, but all [obviously] just a slight genetic difference on average from the animals next door. At every point in the circle, a community is basically indistinguishable from its immediate neighbors, and any individual could belong to either of its neighboring groups. Interbreeding is not a problem, and can extend in both directions some way beyond the neighbors. In practical terms, for creatures of a small size and with a lake of a large size - interbreeding occurs without limits.
But stepping back and looking at the image as a whole, by the time the circle is complete the last two neighboring communities, on either side of the hill / cliff, are quite distinct - different species, despite the fact they are connected by an unbroken chain of communities who can happily mix and breed with their neighbors. This is why the idea of 'species' is not as simple as it seems, either at a point in time, or, more to my purpose, over a very long period of time
My purpose is that if all the 'species' ever extant where brought back to life there could be one unbroken chain of fucking going right back to the first creatures that invented sex. I don't know what to do with this idea, but it seems to be a passion killer.
Carl Zimmer writes:
We are, fundamentally, a fusion. As I wrote in my essay [subscription req'd - I don't have one] for Science on the origin of eukaryotes, there's now a wealth of evidence that our cells evolved from the combination of two different microbes. The mitochondria that generate fuel for our cells started out as free-living bacteria. Today, they still retain traces of their origin in the bacterial DNA they carry, as well as their bacterial structure, including the membrane within a membrane that envelops them.Slightly related post: Matryoshka selves, strange loops and inner voices
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In today's issue of Nature, James Lake [of the University of California, Los Angeles, a veteran researcher on the early history of life] questions whether we may be too quick to assume that only eukaryotes are the result of fusion. He observes that aphids depend on a species of bacterium called Buchnera to digest their food, and Buchnera in turn contains other bacteria on which its own survival depends. These two bacteria are still distinct enough from each other that we can tell them apart. But what if two bacteria joined together billions of years ago and their identities blurred together? How would we tell them apart?
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When scientists dredge up muck from the ocean floor, for example, they often find different species of microbes living together in tight clumps. They have to live close to other species to survive because each species takes care of chemical reactions that their partners can't carry out on their own. That intimacy makes it easier for individual genes to move from host to host, as viruses infect different microbes or as microbes die and other microbes slurp up their genes.
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Our cells, in other words, are not just microbes within microbes; they are microbes within microbes within microbes: a true Russian doll of evolution.
In this future — whose underpinnings, as Drs. Church and Venter demonstrated, are here already— life as we know it is transformed not by the error catastrophe of radiation damage to our genetic processes, but by the far greater upheaval caused by discovering how to read genetic sequences directly into computers, where the code can be replicated exactly, manipulated freely, and translated back into living organisms by writing the other way. "We can program these cells as if they were an extension of the computer," George Church announced, and proceeded to explain just how much progress has already been made.From George Dyson's introduction to A short course on synthetic genomics [July, 2009, Edge Masterclass], presented by Craig Venter and George Church. Videos [mostly difficult for me to understand on one watch] and a pdf from an earlier, related event, at the link
Alien circadian, thermal, kinetic, sensory, nutritional and social environments. A presentation by Frank Forencich to go with the occasional paleo theme of this page.
The point about light / darkness as cues for body chemistry was something I'd forgotten since I stopped working night shifts, 13 yrs ago. The current regime isn't as jarring, but still unnatural. After watching this talk I've been keeping to lower lux mood lights and making use of dimmer switches, with the idea being that as much as possible the general evening on environment is kept as well lit as a tribal camp site on a moonlit night. I have a very tolerant wife.
Related posts:
The process not the outcome
Big fat lie
Stochastic jerks
Paleoconservatism
Juan Enrinquez works with Craig Venter. In this talk at TED 2009, he starts off by giving a fairly right-wing assessment of the economic crisis, then moves on to describing the current and near future state of the art in engineering microbes, tissues and robots. The word isn't said, but it's verging on soft take-off Singularity stuff. The cool thing comes in the last third when he draws out the implications. Now, other speakers and writers always cover the last part along the lines of everything will be awesome, without specifying awesome for who. Enriquez states the obvious, unapologetically. One slide in his presentation shows how in our recent evolutionary history is was more common than not for different species of hominid to live at the same time, and he looks forward to next one to share the stage with homo sapiens, homo evolutus - the rich becoming superheroes. It's an interesting talk.
According to Ray Kurzweil, the logarithmic graph of 15 separate lists of paradigm shifts for key events in human history show an exponential trend. Lists prepared by, among others, Carl Sagan, Paul D. Boyer, Encyclopædia Britannica, American Museum of Natural History and University of Arizona; compiled by Kurzweil.
Researchers report genetic evidence bolstering the socially contentious idea that polygyny—the mating practice where some males dominate reproduction by fathering children with several women—was the norm for sexual behavior throughout human history and prehistory. Because polygyny means other men father few or no children, the study, published today in PLoS Genetics, also shows that, on average, women bequeath more genes to their offspring than men do.Scientific American, [but more at the PLoS link]
All posts labeled sex
An interesting talk by Paul Ehrlich at the Long Now Foundation called The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment.
The first four steps on our path to dominance:
1) Living up in the trees [binocular vision, judging distance, grasping hands]
2) Down from the trees
3) Up on two legs
4) Language with syntax
A considerable gap, then the next four, which are rather obvious, but added for completeness:
5) Agriculture
6) Writing
7) Printing
8) The Industrial Revolution+Kubrick+2001+%28bone+spaceship+transition%29-thumb.jpg){kind=spacer}
Related. An overview of Merlin W. Donald's theory of How our mind, brain and culture evolved. Many of the actual papers, which I've yet to dig through, in pdf form here.
"The story you tell yourself is largely the story you're living"Terence Mckenna in his farewell speech to the community, Posthumous Glory, via Lorenzo
