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...
  1  notes
 
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...
Folksonomies: wonder dna
Folksonomies: wonder dna
  1  notes

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...
Folksonomies: evolution time
Folksonomies: evolution time
  1  notes

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
  1  notes

Bacteria evolve into different species in order to adapt to the different environments at the bottom and top of a test tube.