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agalmics: A form of economics concerning the "study and practice of the production and allocation of non-scarce goods," primarily via free-market trading, open-source initiatives, and flexible standards for intellectual property. Consult Robert Levin's "The Marginalization of Scarcity" for more information…
In scientific thought we adopt the simplest theory which will explain all the facts under consideration and enable us to predict new facts of the same kind. The catch in this criterion lies in the word 'simplest'. It is really an aesthetic canon such as we find implicit in our criticisms of poetry or painting. The…
Broadly speaking, to discover new regularities and laws we either follow top–down or the bottom–up approach (Fig. 1). In the top–down approach, the search begins with an external observation e.g., Newton’s laws of motion. The observer intuitively imagines a set of elements, a set of interactions and a mathematically…
In scientific jargon, law describes a true, absolute and unchanging relationship among interacting elements. Unlike in some fields, social customs and authorities do not determine the establishment of laws in science. Given that laws are derived from empirical observations, it implies that laws symbolize regularities…
Auto-toxic Dangerous to itself. Highly auto-toxic memes are usually self-limiting because they promote the destruction of their hosts (such as the Jim Jones meme; any military indoctrination meme-complex; any "martyrdom" meme). (GMG) (See exo-toxic.) bait The part of a meme-complex that promises to benefit the host…
This flat conceptioning is manifest right up to the present in such every¬ day expressions as "the wide, wide world" and "the four comers of the Earth." As mentioned before, "up" and "down" are the parallel perpendicu¬ lars impinging upon this flat-out world. Only a flat-out world could have a Heaven to which to…
It is interesting to note how many fundamental terms which the social sciences are trying to adopt from physics have as a matter of historical fact originated in the social field. Take, for instance, the notion of cause. The Greek aitia or the Latin causa was originally a purely legal term. It was taken over into…
The increasing technicality of the terminology employed is also a serious difficulty. It has become necessary to learn an extensive vocabulary before a book in even a limited department of science can be consulted with much profit. This change, of course, has its advantages for the initiated, in securing precision and…
If you believe the cosmos is made up of omelette, you build instruments specifically designed to find traces of intergalactic yolk. In that paradigm you reject phenomena like pulsars and black holes as paranormal garbage. In an omelette cosmos, the beginning of the universe becomes a chicken and egg problem, doesn’t…
So glibly do the phrases 'higher animals' and 'lower animals' trip off our tongues that it comes as a shock to realize that, far from effortlessly slotting into evolutionary thinking as one might suppose, they were - and are - deeply antithetical to it. We think we know that chimpanzees are higher animals and…