19 JUL 2013 by ideonexus

 Hand Axes as an Extended Phenotype

Two and a half million years ago, our small-brained ancestors evolved the ability to knock flakes from rocks to use as cutting edges. By doing so, they could also make the rocks themselves useful as choppers. This basic tool kit of flakes and choppers served the needs of hunting and gathering for a million years. Then, around 1.6 million years ago, a medium-brained African hominid (Homo erectus) evolved the ability to produce an extraordinary object that archeologists call a handaxe. A handax...
  1  notes

If, as the author assumes, handaxes were genetically-informed because they did not change for hundreds of thousands of years, then why do we not still have the instinct for hand axes?

11 JUN 2012 by ideonexus

 Evolution is Like a Rolling Snowball

Evolution is a blind giant who rolls a snowball down a hill. The ball is made of flakes—circumstances. They contribute to the mass without knowing it. They adhere without intention, and without foreseeing what is to result. When they see the result they marvel at the monster ball and wonder how the contriving of it came to be originally thought out and planned. Whereas there was no such planning, there was only a law: the ball once started, all the circumstances that happened to lie in its ...
Folksonomies: evolution metaphor analogy
Folksonomies: evolution metaphor analogy
  1  notes

With the flakes it picks up being circumstances that amass onto it.

20 MAY 2011 by ideonexus

 Uncle Paul Investigates the Natural World

And so they say that Uncle Paul knows any number of stories. He investigates, he observes for himself. When he walks in his garden he is seen now and then to stop before the hive, around which the bees are humming, or under the elder bush, from which the little flowers fall softly, like flakes of snow; sometimes he stoops to the ground for a better view of a little crawling insect, or a blade of grass just pushing into view. What does he see? What does he observe? Who knows? They say, however...
  1  notes

And learns nature's wonderful secrets.

12 APR 2011 by ideonexus

 On the Nature of Things...

No single thing abides; but all things flow. Fragment to fragment clings-the things thus grow Until we know and name them. By degrees They melt, and are no more the things we know. Globed from the atoms falling slow or swift I see the suns, I see the systems lift Their forms; and even the systems and the suns Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift. You too, oh earth-your empires, lands, and seas - Least with your stars, of all the galaxies, Globed from the drift like these, like these you ...
Folksonomies: science poetry naturalism
Folksonomies: science poetry naturalism
  1  notes

An ancient poem on the nature of reality and science as the guiding light.