22 NOV 2017 by ideonexus
Get Away from the Metaphorical Understanding of Meaning
Propositions are supposed to be idealizations, rather like numbers or vectors or some other abstract formulation. It looks at first very powerful, and for some purposes it’s very useful. But it takes you away from enlightenment because it gives you this false sense that you haven’t understood something really until you’ve figured out how to articulate, how to point to, how to identify the proposition that a particular meaningful event has. No. There are all kinds of meaningful events th...23 APR 2012 by ideonexus
It's Raining DNA Outside
It is raining DNA outside. On the bank of the Oxford canal at the bottom of my garden is a large willow tree, and it is pumping downy seeds into the air. ... [spreading] DNA whose coded characters spell out specific instructions for building willow trees that will shed a new generation of downy seeds. … It is raining instructions out there; it's raining programs; it's raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading, algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn't be any plainer...There is DNA everywhere, in seeds in bacterium, it's all around us, this programming for life.
20 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
Evolution Takes Time
True, breeders haven’t turned a cat into a dog, and laboratory studies haven’t turned a bacterium into an amoeba (although, as we’ve seen, new bacterial species have arisen in the lab). But it is foolish to think that these are serious objections to natural selection. Big transformations take time—huge spans of it. To really see the power of selection, we must extrapolate the small changes that selection creates in our lifetime over the millions of years that it has really had to work...A river formed the Grand Canyon, so we know that small processes can have huge effects given enough time.
20 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
Speciesization in a Test Tube
We can even see the origin of new, ecologically diverse bacterial species, all within a single laboratory flask. Paul Rainey and his colleagues at Oxford University placed a strain of the bacteria Pseudomonas fluorescens in a small vessel containing nutrient broth, and simply watched it. (It’s surprising but true that such a vessel actually contains diverse environments. Oxygen concentration, for example, is highest on the top and lowest on the bottom.) Within ten days—no more than a few ...Folksonomies: evolution experiment
Folksonomies: evolution experiment
Bacteria evolve into different species in order to adapt to the different environments at the bottom and top of a test tube.