31 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Hero of "Brave New World"
The hero of Brave New World is John, a young man who grew up on an Indian reservation in New Mexico. The reservation is inhabited by primitive peoples and maintained by the benevolent world government as a tourist attraction. It exists so that the civilized tourists can observe from a distance the nasty and brutish lives of people who have the misfortune to be unprotected by the cushions and comforts of technology. On the reservation, traditional religions and traditional customs are tolerate...29 NOV 2013 by ideonexus
Survival of the Stable
Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name. It may be a unique collection of atoms, such as the Matterhorn, that lasts long enough to be worth naming. Or it may be a class of entities, such as rain drops, that come into existence at a sufficiently high rate to deserve a collective name,...One of the characteristics of a successful species is stability.