20 JAN 2014 by ideonexus

 IDIC - Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations

IDIC basically states that we should delight in the differences amongst people, not hate people because they are different. It seems that the human race has found a large number of ways to hate (different sex, color, religion, nationality, political party, social class, etc) and has emphasized hate over co-operation, caring, and compassion. The result has been a world torn by big and small wars, religious and philosophical differences, and alienation of one person from another. This has take...
Folksonomies: diversity tolerance
Folksonomies: diversity tolerance
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A good overview of the Vulcan philosophy from Star Trek.

08 JAN 2013 by ideonexus

 Evolutionary Biology and the Punk Scene

Evolutionary biology historically has focused on a particular kind of change in heritable traits. Some traits enable an organism to have more offspring than other organisms in a population. In this way, a heritable trait can become more abundant in the next generation. It's a simiple numbers game. New traits appear first in a single organism (like the debut songs on a pioneering punk album). But they can appear in increasing numbers of organisms with each :h new generation if they help organi...
Folksonomies: evolution memetics
Folksonomies: evolution memetics
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An interesting comparison, that demonstrates the natural selection of memes in culture works the same as genes in biological fitness.

18 JUL 2011 by ideonexus

 Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny

The similarity between different vertebrate embryos is indeed remarkable. Since the early 1800s, embryologists have been struck by the parallel between early development in various animal species and their evolutionary relationship, a resemblance conveniently abbreviated by the saying "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." Of course, each of us does not really pass through a "lizard" stage on our way to a fully developed human form. But it is true that animals who are more closely related in ter...
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Living things go through the forms of their ancestors, not specifically but generally, because it is easier for evolution to add a mutation to the end of a complex sequence of developments than to re-engineer earlier in the process.