12 DEC 2017 by ideonexus
Wheat Domesticated Homo Sapiens
Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, conFolksonomies: artificial selection
Folksonomies: artificial selection
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notes19 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
notesIf, 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?
08 JAN 2013 by ideonexus
Science is Monism
Monism is the default worldview of natural science. In science, an explanation has to be grounded in empirical evidence. In a slightly different take, for a statement to be considered a scientific explanation, it must be falsifiable—there has to be some kind of test that could be applied to the statement to prove it wrong. For example, the statement that the moon is made of cheese is a scientific statement because it can be falsified. Facts can be brought to bear on the claim (such as the d... 1 notes
notesScientific statements must be falsifiable.
21 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Humans Give Life to Iron
It is by the aid of iron that we construct houses, cleave rocks, and perform so many other useful offices of life. But it is with iron also that wars, murders, and robberies are effected, and this, not only hand to hand, but from a distance even, by the aid of missiles and winged weapons, now launched from engines, now hurled by the human arm, and now furnished with feathery wings. This last I regard as the most criminal artifice that has been devised by the human mind; for, as if to bring de... 1 notes
notesPliny the Elder discusses the good and bad uses for iron and the poetic fact that nature rusts it away from us.
11 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
The Archeologist's Search Image
A fossil hunter needs sharp eyes and a keen search image, a mental template that subconsciously evaluates everything he sees in his search for telltale clues. A kind of mental radar works even if he isn't concentrating hard. A fossil mollusk expert has a mollusk search image. A fossil antelope expert has an antelope search image. ... Yet even when one has a good internal radar, the search is incredibly more difficult than it sounds. Not only are fossils often the same color as the rocks among...Folksonomies: fossils archeology
Folksonomies: fossils archeology
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notesVaries from hunter to hunter, but must be able to find camouflaged bones that might be fragmented into many pieces.
09 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
The Earth Speaks
The Earth Speaks, clearly, distinctly, and, in many of the realms of Nature, loudly, to William Jennings Bryan, but he fails to hear a single sound. The earth speaks from the remotest periods in its wonderful life history in the Archaeozoic Age, when it reveals only a few tissues of its primitive plants. Fifty million years ago it begins to speak as "the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life." In successive eons of time the various kinds of animals leave their rema... 1 notes
notesThe evidence is there, but biblicalists refuse to see the it.
05 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Rocks Contain Impressions of Irreversible Events
Historical chronology, human or geological, depends... upon comparable impersonal principles. If one scribes with a stylus on a plate of wet clay two marks, the second crossing the first, another person on examining these marks can tell unambiguously which was made first and which second, because the latter event irreversibly disturbs its predecessor. In virtue of the fact that most of the rocks of the earth contain imprints of a succession of such irreversible events, an unambiguous working ...
1 Like drawing two strokes on a clay tablet.
30 MAY 2012 by ideonexus
Where Scientific Ideas Come From
No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expens... 1 notes
notesNot just study, but long walks, arguments in bars, and all the ways fine art is produced.
16 MAY 2012 by ideonexus
The State of Mind of Man in Olden Days
We find it hard to picture to ourselves the state of mind of a man of older days who firmly believed that the Earth was the centre of the Universe, and that all the heavenly bodies revolved around it. He could feel beneath his feet the writhings of the damned amid the flames; very likely he had seen with his own eyes and smelt with his own nostrils the sulphurous fumes of Hell escaping from some fissure in the rocks. Looking upwards, he beheld ... the incorruptible firmament, wherein the star... 1 notes
notesWhere he could detect the fires of hell beneath his feet and see the splendor of heaven in the night sky above.
26 APR 2012 by ideonexus
"Peculiar Difficulties" of Geology
Geology has its peculiar difficulties, from which all other sciences are exempt. Questions in chemistry may be settled in the laboratory by experiment. Mathematical and philosophical questions may be discussed, while the materials for discussion are ready furnished by our own intellectual reflections. Plants, animals and minerals, may be arranged in the museum, and all questions relating to their intrinsic principles may be discussed with facility. But the relative positions, the shades of di...Folksonomies: geology
Folksonomies: geology
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notesOther sciences have clear demarcations and methods of experimentation, while Geology is more muddled. I think the author overestimates the certainty of species classification.
