03 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
The Computer is the Solutions to Over-Specialization
Getting ready for the assumed inexorable Armageddon, each applied science and all of the great scientific specialization capabilities only toward weaponry, thus developing the ability to destroy themselves totally with no comprehensively organized oppositional thinking capability and initiative powerful enough to co-ordinate and prevent it. Thus by 1946, we were on the swift way to extinction despite the inauguration of the United Nations, to which none of the exclusive sovereign prerogatives...With computers taking over the responsibility of specializing in computational and processing tasks, human minds are freed to resume our plasticity or "comprehensivlty" as Buckminster puts it.
03 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
Specialization is the Way to Extinction
Now let us examine more closely what we know scientifically about extinction. At the annual Congress of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as held approximately ten years ago in Philadelphia, two papers were presented in widely-separated parts of the Congress. One was presented in anthropology and the other in biology, and though the two author-scientists knew nothing of each other's efforts they were closely related. The one in anthropology examined the case histories o...Specialization comes at the cost of general adaptability. So when the environment changes, the highly-specialized go extinct.
06 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Reasons the Dinosaurs Went Extinct
Why Become Extinct? Authors with varying competence have suggested that dinosaurs disappeared because the climate deteriorated (became suddenly or slowly too hot or cold or dry or wet), or that the diet did (with too much food or not enough of such substances as fern oil; from poisons in water or plants or ingested minerals; by bankruptcy of calcium or other necessary elements). Other writers have put the blame on disease, parasites, wars, anatomical or metabolic disorders (slipped vertebral ...A long list of crazy hypotheses.
30 MAY 2012 by ideonexus
The Chain of Chance to Homo Sapiens
If one small and odd lineage of fishes had not evolved fins capable of bearing weight on land (though evolved for different reasons in lakes and seas,) terrestrial vertebrates would never have arisen. If a large extraterrestrial object—the ultimate random bolt from the blue—had not triggered the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago, mammals would still be small creatures, confined to the nooks and crannies of a dinosaur's world, and incapable of evolving the larger size that brain...Gould lists the improbable events that had to happen in order for us to be here today.