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How we evolve (Benjamin Phelan)
17 years ago
The article of culture as selective pressure (a positive feedback loop) for enhanced intelligence, aswell as our possible nemesis, denial and evidence of evolution that's yet to catch up to our change of life, natural selection in large populations, seeing racism where there is none, Human Genome project and its more important version - HapMap, several near misses with extinction, tenuous perch atop the food chain, finding ourselves wishing we'd lacked the intelligence to monkey with howitzers, and so on, and so on...
"Culture is not an escape from conditioning environments. It is an environment of a different kind."
It's a long, and possibly heavy, read. But it's worth it - it sums up alot of things very well.
And in case you don't find yourself dumbstruck after reading that, here's a shorter, lighter read on Art and evolution.
And plenty of interesting lectures dealing with art+science and the resulting ideas.
"Culture is not an escape from conditioning environments. It is an environment of a different kind."
It's a long, and possibly heavy, read. But it's worth it - it sums up alot of things very well.
And in case you don't find yourself dumbstruck after reading that, here's a shorter, lighter read on Art and evolution.
And plenty of interesting lectures dealing with art+science and the resulting ideas.
The first article was fun how it suddenly changed at its conclusion.
Interesting, but I'm not too suprised for some reason. Too great numbers, rule of great numbers has to apply somehow, man is arrogant to think he has power over nature, blabla. But yeah, not my field, I weren't suprised out of a naive idea.
On the second, there seems to be a trend (probably since Darwin) of applying the blind watchmaker to alot of aspects of life. Evolutionary psychology, economics, game theory, programming, whatever. You can even think about things like memes. It would be an interesting read, but probably that's it. Like Freudian psychoanalisis doesn't do anything good to literary criticism (penises, vaginas and complexes EVERYWHERE, DAMN). People nod, yeah that was cool, had to be done, ok, and go on. Maybe, I can't think of anything else about it right now.
I need to watch the third when my attention span charges up again.
Good points, but i guess my emphasis was elsewhere... I like these articles mostly as attempts of showing where and how exactly the conventional mindsets to applying the same age-old principles perform a faceplant in face of new data.
I guess the trend of applying the blind watchmaker principle to lots of fields stems from the fact that it's quite successful at explaining certain things (most notably, anything having to do with how Life works), or dealing with certain kind of tasks. Like take genetic algorithms in programming for instance - that's a whole different tool for solving problems; kind of fun leaving the data to solve itself after you successfully asked your question. (Can't find the exact link, but a few projects over there deal with genetic algorithms. the patterns and images they produce are fascinating.) Then again, applying the same principle to explain sociology is a bad idea, as WW2 has effectively shown. The principle itself does stem from a gene-centric view, which seems a bit outdated - Darwin's no longer alone, there's this epigenetic thing creeping over his shoulder lately. (Here's an interesting quote i've found: "Well there’s 25,000 genes, so each could be on or off. So there’s 2x2x2x...25,000 times. Well that’s 2 to the 25,000th. Right? Which is something like 10 to the 7,000th . Okay? There’s only 10 to the 80th particles in the whole universe. Are you stunned?") (I also liked the implied suggestion in the first article, that culture could be considered as a form of epigenetics. And not just human culture...)
Freudian psychoanalysis was important mainly for what it started and for questions it asked, not for its usefulness for dealing with practical problems. As you say - it had to be done, now we move on. On the other hand, if it wasn't done, we'd still be inspecting bumpy craniums and calling it science... Then again it wasn't concerned with literary criticism. Under that context it would've failed miserably... haha, it's fun to imagine just what such a critique would look like. I guess there's a reason why Freud didn't exactly like the surrealists.
That third link is kind of time-consuming. I still haven't gone through all of them.
With genetic programming, I really love it when evolving movement/creatures starts bringing out things similar to that in life. It's expected, yeah, but still eerie. Or evolving simple creatures that bring out out totally different results ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUXc6mckGLE ).
May I ask your occupation/field of studies though?
Literary criticism on the other hand was concerned with Freud and did/does have a psychoanalitic trend. I meant that. I come across it alot too (Victorian children's literature, whatever. I just stumbled onto some on Tolkien's The Hobbit the other day. The criticisms look pretty predictable though, phalluses, wombs, complexes, maturing, all that.)
I hate quoting wikipedia, but I can't remember anything specific to point at right now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho.....rary_criticism (ok and something in Randel Helms' Tolkien's World )
My occupation? I'm studying printmaking & graphic design; sometimes I do gigs as an illustrator. I just happen to be fascinated by biology - i read articles and research papers in my spare time.
May I ask what's yours?
Ah, now i see. I thought you ment literary criticism in general. Yeah, that one looks pretty predictable.