The first story on this mp3, The Mappist by Barry Lopez, is probably one of the better suggestions i can make for a spare 34 minutes sometime this sunday -- listen
This short story was produced for NPR's Selected Shorts - subscribe to their #podcast athttp://www.selectedshorts.org/podcast/ for an often superb stream of short #fiction. (beats the shit out of tv)
Check out this truly amazing representation of the molecular machinery at work within each of our cells.
..
One thing that helps understanding these processes is to remember that at these scales, molecules are knocking around at much more than a million times per second - so it isn't that the right molecules miraculously find and fix themselves exactly where they belong in order to perform these very complex tasks (as these depictions sort of suggest), but rather that they are perpetually colliding at incredible speeds, and that it is only the (relatively) rare collision that is successful enough to allow the process to move forward.
All these random accidents accumulate, with the basic rule that what can persist, does, and on larger timescales seemingly miraculous complexity emerges.
Still, judging by the glimpse we get from this video, it's no wonder that evolution (a process that works with that same basic rule from above) took longer with these inner workings of a cell (2.8 billion years) than all the further developments on the tree of life combined (1 billion years)
http://radio.seti.org/episodes/Aware_Am_I_ http://traffic.libsyn.com/arewealone/BiPiSci12-02-13.mp3
Above is SETI's Big Science podcast with an episode on us self-aware animals. Within is a fascinating bit on bonobos, our closest relatives, and their peaceful, matriarchal, and hyper-sexual society. The bonobo bit starts 16 minutes 30 seconds into the show but the whole show is worth the listen.
I'll try a bit of summary here.. Bonobos, instead of being male dominated with lots of violence in their societies like the chimpanzees, are matriarchal with little to no violence and aggression - they enjoy much more open relationships, with much less tension, much less fear of manipulation, and much greater cooperation. Chimps are excellent cooperators too, but their cooperation breaks down when emotions get in the way (like with us humans, emotion often constrains cooperation).
This reduced social tension and increased openness and trust is presumably linked to the bonobo's focus on play and their constant and indiscriminate sexual activity - between all members of the group with little regard for gender or age - sex as greeting and social bonding - sex for conflict resolution and sex for post conflict reconciliation.
Anyway, give it a listen - Vanessa Woods, the author of The Bonobo Handshake takes the comparison between our two closest cousins nicely further. The bonobo handshake, by the way, is when two females rub clitorises together with ever increasing frenzy until orgasm - this fosters great bonds between the females who cooperate to 'correct' any of the much larger males if they begin to exhibit chimp-like violence or aggression. Oh and males have their version of the handshake too.
"I just came back from a community that holds the secret to human
survival. It’s a place where women run the show, have sex to say hello,
and play rules the day.”
"Chimpanzees are well known for their aggression. Unfortunately,
we have made too much of an emphasis on this aspect in our narrative of
human evolution. Bonobos are the other side of the coin."
Every 3 or 4 years, memory suitably dulled, the great purple divining rod pulls in a particular direction, and i am drawn to the spine of Tom Robbins' skinny legs and all (or its entry in my e-readers index) - the useful thing about time and losing one's memory, all the surprises and wonder remain intact.
The brainstem and the mammalian brain. Deeper and wider than the new, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart neocortex. What we think of as 'mind' is only a sort of jumped-up memory machine, piggybacking on the older mammalian mind and the positively ancient reptilian brainstem, but our cortex and our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda. And makes us buy things. --mostly william gibson
... and from someone else:"For it appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again."
" ..Our system has become a Frankenstein monster which acts upon its own institutional behalf.
It encourages the least desirable of human traits -- greed, short-term thinking, lack of accountability, hierarchy, propaganda and self-obsession -- while simultaneously dismissing and discouraging the best of human traits -- long-term planning, reason, mutual aid, empathy, and resource allocation.
If we don't construct society in a manner which embraces the latter, we damn our children to a miserable existence, and we won't survive as a species"
(taken from a comment by Jason Boissonneault in a trnn comment thread)
09 October 2011
Steve Jobs died a few days ago and I wrote the following in a facebook comment thread
In response to all the idolatrous mourning in here, and surely bouncing around in mainstream media right now, (i havent yet poked my head around to see)
Nice design and innovation, but I could have done without most of his contribution toward making closed technical ecosystems and hardware more desired and desirable, and here's why.
I fear that it might be us, the consumers of new technologies, that willingly hand over the gains made possible by these technologies, back to monopolies and empire, simply because we are driven by desire for the shinier toy, and the easier playground.
It would be nice if google+ extended the circle metaphor to include public circles, that people can discover and join, giving us a way to easily make and follow channels with a narrow subject on Google+
What this would solve is the following basic problem:
I don't want to hear mumbles on random topics, from people I follow for one subject in particular. For example, if I follow you for your technology knowledge and opinion, I dont want to hear about the food you're eating on your latest visit to china.
I should be able to join your technology circle, provided you've made it public, and by so doing I should be able to see only the posts you send to your technology circle.
Questioning our own motives, and our own process, is critical to a skeptical and scientific outlook. We must realize that the default mode of human psychology is to grab onto comforting beliefs for purely emotional reasons, and then justify those beliefs to ourselves with post-hoc rationalizations. It takes effort to rise above this tendency, to step back from our beliefs and our emotional connection to conclusions and focus on the process. The process (i.e science, logic, and intellectual rigor) has to be more important than the belief. —Steven Novella
