Memes
When Science is Debated in the Courtroom
When Rachel Carson made us aware of the dangers arising from the mass application of toxic chemicals, she presented her arguments in the manner of an advocate, not a scientist. In other words, she selected the evidence to prove her case. The chemical industry, seeing its livelihood threatened by her action, responded with an equally selective set of arguments, chosen in defense. This may have been a fine way of achieving justice, and perhaps in this instance it was scientifically excusable; b...
notesRachel Carson and the Chemical Industry presented their selective version of the facts in the debate over the environment, which is not a scientific process and hurts the ultimate understanding of the truth when one side wins.
We Exaggerate the Magnitude of Ice Ages
The history of Earth's climate is one of the more compelling arguments in favour of Gaia's existence. We know from the record of the sedimentary rocks that for the pst three and a half aeons the climate has never been, even for a short period, wholly unfavorable for life. Because of the unbroken record of life, we also know that the oceans can never have either frozen or boiled. Indeed, subtle evidence from the ratio of the different forms of oxygen atoms laid down in the rocks over the cours... notesIce Ages did not encroach on over 70 percent of the Earth's surface, meaning they were not as significant of an event as we tend to imagine them.
Life as "Improbable Distribution of Molecules"
At the end of the last century Boltzman made an elegant redefinition of entropy as a measure of the probability of a molecular distribution. It may seem at first obscure, but it leads directly to what we seek. It implies that the probably life or one of its products, and if we find such a distribution to be global in extent then perhaps we are seeing something of Gaia, the largest living creature on Earth.
But what, you may ask, is an improbable distribution of molecules? There are many poss... notesOur search for life means looking for distributions of molecules that are unlikely, be they atmospheric proportions or solid constructions.
Cybernetics as a Trait of Living Organisms
One of the most characteristic properties of all living organisims, from the smallest to the largest, is their capacity to develop, operate, and maintain systems which set a goal and then strive to achieve it through the cybernetic process of trial and error. The discovery of such a system, operating on a global scale and having as its goal the establishment and maintenance of optimum physical and chemical conditions of life, would surely provide us with convincing evidence of Gaia's existenc... notesThe feedback look, sensation and response to it, are a crucial characteristic of living beings. We feel that cold is a punishment, prompting us to find warmth, while learning skills involve feedback loops of rewarding.
Lovelock Gets the Second Law of Thermodynamics Wrong
Let us again look at the laws of thermodynamics. It is true that at first sight they read like the notice at the gait of Dante's Hell; but in fact, tough as they are and although like income tax they cannot without penalyt be evaded, they can with forethought be avoided. The Second Law states unequivocally that the entropy of an open system must increase. Since we are all open systems, this means that all of us are doomed to die.
1 He gets this backwards. The Second Law only applies to closed systems. We and our planet are not closed systems, we are open systems; therefore, mortality is not required of us. In fact, the second law states that, so long as we can keep exporting entropy by taking in energy from outside sources, we can live forever.
Microscopic and Macroscopic Perspectives in Science
In science, simultaneous macroscopic and microscopic exploration is quite customary, especially in biology. Molecular biology, for example, which derived from the application of chemical analysis to biological problems and led to the discovery of DNA and its function as the carrier of information for every form of life, has developed independently from physiology, which concerns the whole animal and the way it functions as an integrated living system. In like manner, the difference between th... notesSeeing the trees for the forest and forest for the trees.
What Makes Humans Remarkable
What is remarkable about man is not the size of his brain, no greater than that of a dolphin, nor his loose incomplete development as a social animal, nor even the faculty of speech or his ability to use tools. Man is remarkable because by the combination of all these things he has created an entirely new entity. When socially organized and equipped with technology even as rudimentary as that of a Stone Age tribal group, man has the novel capacity to collect, store, and process information, a...
1 It's the the characteristics we share will other species on Earth, but the way we combine those characteristics.
The Fascinating Ability of Humans to Walk Upright
We stand upright-after a little practice-on a ship that rolls because we possess an array of sensory nerve cells buried in our muscles, skin, and joints. The function of these sensors is to provide a constant flow of information to the brain about the movements and location in space of the various parts of our bodies, as well as the environmental forces currently acting on them. We also have a pair of balance organs associated with our ears which work like spirit-levels, each having a bubble ...A wonderful description of everything that goes into the process of walking and standing upright.
Atoms Within Our Bodies Still Release the Energy of an An...
Explosions are seldom one hundred per cent efficient. When a star ends as a supernova, the nuclear explosive material, which includes uranium and plutonium together with large amounts of iron and other burnt-out elements, is distributed around and scattered in space just as is the dust cloud from a hydrogen bomb test. Perhaps the strangest fact of all about our planet is that it consists largely of lumps of fall-out from a star-sized hydrogen bomb. Even today, aeons later, there is still enou...High amounts of uranium in the Earth's core suggest our sun was in the vicinity of a supernova event, and the atoms within our bodies, if measured with a Geiger counter, can be found to still be releasing the energy from that event.
Life as the Reduction of Entropy
During the present century a few physicists have tried to define life. Bernal, Schroedinger, and Wigner all came to the same general conclusion, that life is a member of the class of phenomena which are open or continuous systems able to decrease their internal entropy at the expense of substances or free energy taken in from the environment and subsequently rejected in a degraded form. This definition is not only difficult to grasp but is far too general to apply to the specific detection of...Definition of life as something that generates syntropy within itself while exporting entropy, and the problem with this definition as it would include fire and hurricanes as being living.
