Archive for the 'nature' Category

Newscientist: Horizontal and vertical: The evolution of evolution

Published on Tiu's Day, January 26, 2010 in evolutionary programming and nature. 0 Comments Tags: , .

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527441.500-horizontal-and-vertical-the-evolution-of-evolution.html?full=true&print=true

Lately, I’m increasingly thinking, especially after reading this article, that evolutionary computing would benefit greatly from using a more bacterial type of evolution, where genes are shared between often unrelated organisms, rather than brute inheritance. Another way of looking at it, is it might be good to deal with the complexities of subroutine sharing (which functional programming would make easier) than the complexities of sexual reproduction which make my eyes glaze over to read the solutions offered for. Maybe I’m just not clever enough (my earlier post on genetic programming had a little ruby script and it only uses asexual reproduction).

I am skeptical of the article’s claim that the shared genetic code of all organisms must mean that genes were shared between organisms like bacterium do today. Firstly, bacterium don’t all share some common genes due to the passing of genes between species as it is. Secondly, clade evolution – where clades that are just better at evolving edge out others over time could be sufficient explanation. Surely DNA-based life had immense advantages over life with less fault-tolerant code. Just the same, the article makes a good point that biologists are, being human macro-centric – they focus on multi-cellular organisms even though most of the biomass, even more of the variety, along with the vast, vast majority of the history of life on this planet, is prokaryotic.

Thoughts on “Avatar”

Published on Saturn's Day, January 23, 2010 in art, nature and society. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Today, I had to see what all the buzz was about. Me and my wife saw Avatar in 3D before she had to go to work. The  3D was a nice effect, but after over two hours of that, I had pretty bad motion sickness getting out of the theater. I think I’d enjoy the movie more minus the nausea.

spoiler alert ** do not continue if you don’t want the plot revealed (this is really intended reading for people who watched the movie anyway, not a proper review; I don’t do movie reviews)

Continue reading ‘Thoughts on “Avatar”’

My Proposal – EcoTax

Published on Moon's Day, January 18, 2010 in ecology and society. 3 Comments Tags: , .

There is a deep, serious flaw in our tax system – it is too damn complicated. Which is to say, administrative costs dig in to what revenue it brings in and it is spurious (which means it is unfair). Whatever incentives and breaks might be won for the sake of the lower classes, there is an inherent bias in favor of those who can afford good accountants. Also, the process of having a governmental cash-ectomy would at least be less painful if it was quick.

There are a number of tax reforms, mostly proposed by the Right, to make things “fair” (same law applies to everyone) and simple. Some of them are quite ingenious and appealing, but I’ll explain why they all suck and mine is better (even though I’m not an economist… I hope a real economist gets a hold of the idea and fills in the cracks). I for one am not a right-winger (quite the opposite) but rather I think like a programmer. Where I see spaghetti code, I want to untie it and I see more spaghetti in our legal system than in an Italian restaurant (zing!)

FairTax

This taxes products at the end of the value chain – when purchased by the end-user. This replaces all the complicated mess of even paying taxes with a tax on final goods sold. The beautiful part is ordinary people don’t have to fill out paperwork. If you own a business, you simply have to pay the sales tax on what you sell. Genius. One problem with this is that, naturally, as you get richer, the proportion of your money you use to buy things decreases (the likes of MC Hammer and Steve Martin’s character in The Jerk notwithstanding). In this way, it disproportionately taxes the poor. FairTax partially gets around this through (p)rebates to families based on income.

On the Wikipedia article, you’ll see this picture. Yeah, that’s what I mean by untying spaghetti code. All those books are our current tax code, and that man is holding FairTax. Awesome.

Negative Income Tax

I believe this was Milton Friedman’s brainchild or at least he’s commonly associated with it. I think it sort of fell out of fashion among Libertarians in to FairTax, but it is also a good system. You pay the government a fixed percentage of your income, minus a fixed amount, the percentage and amount being the same for _everyone_. If it happens to be a negative amount (which happens if your income divided by the percentage is less than the fixed amount), the government pays you. Your tax is a linear equation. If you took math in middle school you are halfway to being a CPA. Awesome.

The system is, however, likely to be a lightning rod for fraud. Tax evasion now is simply a loss of income for the government (and therefor taxpayers), but if you could convince the government you make nothing, you automatically receive welfare. This also still has the disadvantage of making every citizen go through the trouble of filling their taxes. Okay, next.

EcoTax

Now to my proposal, EcoTax. Turn FairTax on its head. Instead of only taxing things at the end-product level, we only tax raw materials as they are taken out of the Earth. We’re not talking about any tariffs right now, since that’s complicated and really another subject. As far as product created within America is concerned, the tax is at the beginning and it’s up to these primary producers (homotrophes, to use an analogy to ecology) to increase their prices to offset their costs. In this way, the costs of things to a greater degree reflect their true ecological costs. This would naturally mean no subsidies for farmers (rather, they would be taxed for the water and soil they use).

The way EcoTax would work is this: the EPA would be given a new job assess the degrees to which various natural resources are renewable, the degree to which various activities are harmful to human health, etc. They will make no fiscal decision, but rather calculate a schedule of ratios. The income needed by the government to meet its operations and economic predictions will be factored in to create a multiplier. The taxes for the different activities will simply be the ratio in question times the grand multiplier. It’s so simple. The only thing an accountant needs is the latest copy of this (which the government should supply as a free PDF, too). Perhaps the government could supply free software with source code for this purpose to make it even simpler. The important thing is for the ratios to not be politically determined or for other concerns to be taken into account (that’s the job of politicians setting fiscal policy on how to use revenue and what to set the multiplier to).

Note this is related to the idea of Ecotax (or Pigovian taxes in general), but it’s different (you can tell because I capitalize the T). The best way to summarize the difference is this: I propose the only tax being Ecotaxes and the rationale is slightly different. The capital in the free market is derived from two main sources – labor and natural resources. I say you own that which your labor created, but that which is derived from our common natural heritage or which clearly has a negative externality you don’t truly own. Certainly, no one owns the atmosphere, though a section of it will be on your land at any given time and a part of the water table, which you also don’t own, may happen to be under your property. I don’t want to get into the specifics of well rights, etc, but just to point out the obvious fact that, as aging hippie douche would say “you can’t own the ocean, man!”

EcoTax isn’t meant to be the panacea of environmental protection. Rather, we’re removing the artificial economic incentive to destroy that which you do not own. Protecting our species’ viability, wild places, natural habitats and so on cannot rely entirely on the government. Indeed, to the degree people value these things (which they should), they shall donate to private charities that buy up land, such as the Nature Conservancy. The government must not force people to be eco-conscious (it’s not the government’s job to make people do the right thing all the time), but to protect that which is everyone’s property from the few.

The biggest drawback I can see with this is there may be a drop in revenue unless the multiplier is set high enough to put some good companies out of business. There should be a transition period where the old scheme is slowly replaced with the new to give people a chance to switch to other industries. There could temporarily be harsher tariffs against countries that use too much farming subsidies to give our companies enough time to compensate, then the tariffs must be dropped again. This may also make things hard on small farmers, but that could be remedied by in the short term paying for Dutch farmers to teach Americans better efficient farming techniques. A purist Libertarian may scoff at the idea that government intervention is needed to counter the ill effects of government intervention, but it is a fact. “Government intervention” refers to too broad a category for that scoff to be taken at face value.

Evolution… Politically Correct?

Published on Woden's Day, November 4, 2009 in nature and society. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

I was in the book store last weekend (one of my favorite places, of course!) and looking through the biology section to see if there’s something else I should read for the fun of it. As usual, the Biology section contains things that should be filed under “politics” or “fiction” – the likes of Dembsky and Behe – that have to be sifted through to find actual science books (I’m tempted by Gould’s outrageously thick “The Structure of Evolutionary Theory”… maybe after I finish another bio class or so…) One of these mis-filed political tomes was The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism... Now, I’ve seen that cover a million times and never thought much of it, other than what any rational thinking person would think, “yeah, withhold the politically,” but there’s another outrageous claim embedded in the title that occurred to me – the notion that natural selection is politically correct or in any way liberal.

Creationists and their ilk make this claim that Darwinism is a liberal conspiracy almost in the same breath as saying that it justified social Darwinism, a nebulous term except in that it refers exclusively to Right-wing ideologies. I have to ask – which is it? Liberals are all kinds of things but we’re certainly not social Darwinists. The answer is it is not a liberal conspiracy, but there were individuals who committed the naturalistic fallacy (deriving an ought from an is) and advocated modeling society after evolution – a mindless process that produces mostly extinctions and a lot of misery and pain. Take a breath. A bunch of animals throughout the world just met their bloody end to the claw. The theory of natural selection tells us how things got the way they are, but it’s certainly no model on how things ought to be – it’s the reason why Darwin’s rottweiler, Dawkins, says, “I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to the science of how life has actually evolved, but a passionate ANTI-Darwinian when it comes to the politics of how humans ought to behave.” Indeed. Remember – a fact can never be good or evil, but almost always useful. At worst, a fact is of little use. That is the underlying philosophy behind science. It would only ever break down if we were living in a Lovecraftian universe where the truth drives men mad.

“Fair enough,” you might say, “well-meaning liberals are planting the seeds of social Darwinism because they’re a bunch of Godless atheists and their atheism is the reason they want to teach Darwinism.” Yes, the headwaters of this notion that there is something liberal about Darwinism must be the association with atheism. I don’t know if anyone told these guys, but most liberals (in America, anyway) are not atheists. In being an atheist, I am unusual among liberals (though that’s the least of my divergence with mainstream liberals). Don’t confuse “secular” with “atheist”. Secular is a rather broad term that includes non-religious people as well as religious people who don’t believe society should be centered around religion. Liberals don’t want to hurt people’s feelings; this is the essence of what “politically correct” means. They don’t want to tell people that their own culture’s beliefs are wrong. This leads me to my last point here – the biggest threat to students getting a good education in “sensitive” subjects, beyond the barriers that might otherwise exist for any subject, isn’t creationists, but overly careful, well-meaning, politically-correct liberal teachers.

僕の生物工学を学ぶ理由

Published on Saturn's Day, October 31, 2009 in nature and worldview. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

僕がもうビジネスの学士学位を持ってて、もうコンピュータープログラマーです。もう生物学を勉強しています。学位が要らなそうで、夜の授業には忙しそうから友達がよく「なんで生物工学を学んでる？」と聞きます。このポーストで答えます。理由は以下です。

僕は大きい子供です。趣味が物を作ることです。プログラミングを習う理由はテレビゲームを作りたかったからです。仕事がプログラマーなのにまだプログラムを作るのが楽しいです。だから、発明家になりたいです。色んな能力を集めたら、いい有名な発明家になれると思います。実はプログラミング力と生物工学が合うと思います。特にメディカルデバイスには特に便利です。虫よりもちっちゃいロボットを人間の体に通って何か直すロボットなどを作りたいです。

暗い未来を防ぎたい理由もあります。だんだん地球の人口が増えています。それで、餓死が増えています。森とかが経ています。それが悪いことは悪いけど、科学技術の新法によって防げます。料理オタクだから、よく貧乏のアフリカの村を何か発明した生物工学で救済するイメージを見ます。人間が必要なビタミン１００％のトウモロコシを作りたいです。などなどなど。

最後に生物が確かに好きです。僕には水草が気持ち悪くないです。１週間に３回ぐらい、朝に森の中にジョッギングします。太っているアメリカ人にならないためだけじゃなくて、自然に親しむためです。僕は宗教的じゃないです。逆に無神論だけど、自然の経験がよく僕には宗教的です。教会より大きい杉、天使より多い鳥、神様よりずっと理解すれば理解するほど理解できない宇宙。

Is O.J. Simpson the Victim of Brain Damage?

Published on Woden's Day, October 21, 2009 in funny and nature. 0 Comments

Study Indicates Higher Rate of Dementia in Former N.F.L. Players – NYTimes.com

One of the first things I thought upon seeing this is, oh shit, OJ probably went crazy from too many concussions. People often forget the obvious fact that murder isn’t something done by mentally healthy people. Sure, if you go to jail, you are legally sane, which is to say sane enough to know what you did is wrong, but almost always there is a pathology at the headwaters of the deed. I can’t help but wonder if a tackle too many knocked something loose upstairs.

Thoughts on Forest Fires

Published on Sun's Day, August 30, 2009 in nature. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Look at all the fancy folk of La Cañada Flintridge worrying about their expensive homes in the foothills. Yes, the cost of proximity to the forest is the very wildness that draws them – nature, in her sheer spontaneity may bring bright flames just as well as she might bring songbirds, but I cannot say that they are taking the good with the bad. The good and the bad are the same substance. To love nature is to love her for all her “faults”, for you couldn’t love only the parts of her that aren’t so destructive anymore than you could only love certain parts of your friend or lover. If you only love parts, you have no relationship to the whole. I like Lewis Black’s comedy, but that doesn’t mean I like him as a person, for I do not know the person except through the comedy itself.

Okay, great, so the wealthy fools really just love greenery and hummingbirds sipping at their invasive backyard plants. They also like coyotes and cougars (when they keep their distance) and rivers and steep terrain. How could they like so many things that spring from nature and not nature herself? No, they must have an admiration for nature (the biophilia we all have in us), for I even see them admiring the same fire that even still threatens their homes. Part of them may see the fires as a mistake – a threat to the stasis that doesn’t exist they erroneously equate with the “balance of nature” and a threat to their investments – but at the same times I see them walking along foothill with cameras. The spectacle of the fire is beautiful in itself, even as it destroys so much beauty. Even as it may hurt people and destroy houses. Even as it surely is bringing countless forest creatures to a twisting, agonizing end, their only crime being being at the wrong place, time.

My ambivalence towards forest fires is a reflection of the paradox (not struggle nor contradiction) of when we materialists try to be spiritual. There is a sense of awe one can get from the natural world, but at the same time, there is also surely a sense that the world is deficient (surely it isn’t made with us in mind). Both sides of this coin are very eloquently and hilariously, respectively, pronounced by negro Carl Sagan, a.k.a. Niel DeGrasse Tyson:

a final “sermon” on cosmic perspectives

stupid design

I heard that 3 homes burnt down that were “deep in the … forest.” I wonder what it’s like to have such a home. I would love to have a cabin in the woods. The cost of such would be the possibility of having to build it again if a fire goes through. I surely wouldn’t be foolish enough to put more possessions I care about in it than I could fit in my Corolla. Actually, being required to keep it simple sounds fun. Hmmm…

Oh, lastly, here’s a crappy view of the fire that’s currently blazing near my place. Psh.

Naturalistic Animism, Part II

Published on Tiu's Day, August 4, 2009 in animism and nature. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Here is a simpler argument for a notion I have I call “Naturalistic Animism,” which is a nod to Spinoza’s “Naturalistic Pantheism.” My earlier post was here. It’s also referred to in Bron Taylor’s writings on “Dark Green Religion,” meaning the idea itself isn’t my invention, though at one point I thought it might be.

There is no supernatural spark, no dual nature to make a thing have life rather than not. There also isn’t a specific definition of life that is universally accepted in the scientific community, though there are characteristics we can observe – many orders of magnitude more complex and organized than non-life, being able to maintain homeostasis and being able to reproduce and evolve. There are other, more specific chemical characteristics, but they may not be universal to all life, though they may be for all terrestrial life. In any event, what we have isn’t a strict definition, but some general characteristics that some non-life could be said to have, but just to a lesser degree. We know of entities such as prions and viruses, though their origins are with what we generally recognize to be life (bacterium or rogue DNA sequences that become parasitic). However, if we go back to the beginning of life (where things get more speculative, of course), there would have been non-life becoming more and more like life and then life becoming less and less like non-life.

Life and non-life, then, are of the same substance and type, differing only in degree. This is an important realization as it may turn out, for example, that universes are subject to a crude form of evolution, with more stable universes such as ours becoming more common in time (this notion is known as the hard anthropic principle). Certainly, entities that are inherently more stable persist and those that don’t, don’t. Who knows what whacky particles were there at the big bang for just a few gazillionths of a second? This is so obvious, it’s hardly worth mentioning except for the fact that this basic property of matter is the first step it always must take towards becoming life. The universe weeds out the unstable. Evolvability evolves and when it reaches a certain threshold, what we all agree to be life then begins. This is when an entity can create copies of itself with unprecedented accuracy, though it only gets better at doing this as time goes on.

Now, we like to think there is something special about life and that, all other considerations being equal, it should deserve consideration. It seems we live in a world like what Zoroaster described, except we know that in the end it is instead the wicked Ahriman who prevails – our universe is doomed to a thermodynamic death where no life is possible. The fact that I just depressed you with that analogy means that you, too, see value in life! Even if we humans become extinct, we hope that life on our planet or somewhere else can at least give birth to some other beings that can contemplate the universe and be depressed by it.

The problem we run into is that the laws of physics tell us that life isn’t anything special (well, it kind of is, but only in the sense that humans are special – we’re simply more intelligent, more social – the “spark” is a difference in degree!). This basic notion is what is called hylozoism (everything is alive or life and non-life are indistinguishable – this term is a doozy and it’s really only defined in a few writings, most of which seem to be attacking the notion). Reality is however the fuck it wants to be, but how we describe reality is up to us, so long as we’re not misleading or lying to ourselves (like religion tends to, almost without exception). Whether we say that life is nothing or whether we elevate the non-life to the status of living – animism – is a spiritual, not scientific question and I make the claim that it is not deception to say that the universe is alive or that it is at least filled with proto-life and pseudo-life everywhere. I would almost go as far to say that it is an enlightening idea that will let us see intuitively what will one day be known concretely about the universe.

Spirituality through nature. It’s not just for dirty hippies, weirdoes and head hunters.

Strange! Humans Glow in Visible Light – Yahoo! News

Published on &Thorn;unor's Day, July 23, 2009 in nature and worldview. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Strange! Humans Glow in Visible Light – Yahoo! News

Looking at the last few paragraphs – isn’t it so Japanese to look for problems by looking at the light coming from bodies? We Westerners, informed by perverted notions such as Luther’s that the soul and the body are seperate entities, the latter just happening to contain the former, always want to look at the individual parts.

I Created Life!

Published on Frigg's Day, April 17, 2009 in evolutionary programming and nature. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Here is a ruby script I quickly whipped up to teach myself genetic programming/evolutionary programming, and also to demonstrate basic principles of biology (please see below to see how it works.. if you’re on my front page, click to read more first). I think I’m going to write something more sophisticated in erlang (I don’t know erlang, but I’m intrigued) after I get further down the road in gp, but here’s what I quickly whipped up. Since writing it, I have started reading A Field Guide to Genetic Programming and already notice some things I should have done a little different. But in some respects, having a simple string of characters change their role in different modes is elegant and I think I prefer that way of doing things, despite shortfalls in statistical bias. Here are some observations I have at this point:

I know the people researching gp are really smart, so there’s probably something I’m missing, but I don’t see how genetic programming is supposed to quickly find solutions. Evolution is as slow as molasses. You need to dig through millions of years of dirt to see actual changes. I can only see gp quickly finding solutions if the process is being run continually, with multiple challenges or “resources”. I was glad to see, after having this thought, mention of multi-objective (5.1.3) and coevolution (5.4) in the book. It makes me think I’m on the right track. I also remember a while back reading in the article Discover had about Avida that when there was only one resource, one species would quickly capitalize on that and then the evolution would stagnate, but having multiple resources would create diversity and even better solutions at attacking that one resource. The ability of organisms to repurpose adaptations is important in evolution and without it, most complexity would not have been possible.

This leads me to another point. It seems gp works best when it works the most like evolution in the real world works. The rate of mutation is low and, despite my initial intuitions that a high mutation rate would lead to a good solution more quickly, I found that it was actually harmful to do so. Even though, in this script, there is a bias towards shorter programs (the longer the chromosomes, the more calories it takes to create just one offspring), when I had a higher mutation rate, like, say, 1 out of 5 copies, the length of the genes would get really, really long as a defense against mutations. This could happen because if the last parenthesis of the mini-lisp program is closed prematurely, the rest of the genes are ignored. Junk dna. In my program, at least, junk dna was a defense against mutation since I would get really short programs that have long tails of junk after them, but decreasing the mutation rate shrunk those tails down to almost insignificant. Weird. Please try downloading this and edit it to see for yourself.

While mutations should be rare, it helps to have variety. I did just substitutions at first and it worked, but it took a while. I also added stutters, insertions and deletions. Once I added stutters, it helped a lot! Even before adding stutters, I found that, when the “challenge” was 6 * x, I would get x + x + x + x + x and something like 7 * x competing with each other for a long time (5x or 7x often becomes the leading candidate after a few generations and it takes forever for any 6x to show up). Adding the stutters seemed to get multiplication through addition happening faster, though.

Download yeasties or copy/paste from below (requires ruby and clisp):

Continue reading ‘I Created Life!’

Prescribed Burn…

Published on Sun's Day, January 25, 2009 in olfaction. 0 Comments

The one in Lone Pine Cañon is making Wrightwood smell like a campfire. Mmmmmm.

I’m a real believer in leaving something aside for non-human nature to use for whatever she wishes, but where the boundary lays, I can be okay with the more pragmatic stewardship approach.

New Year’s Resolutions

Published on &Thorn;unor's Day, January 1, 2009 in nature and personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

I succeeded (#3) and gotten in stepwise directions towards (#1 and #2) my last year’s resolutions. Because of that, and because I’m awesome, I know I’ll be at least partly successful in these three resolutions. I have very good reasons to be more specific this year:

  1. Have at least one, preferably two, software products of mine become successful and attain a customer base. Likely contenders include CalCast/Maintenance Cast and a v2.0 RoR’s version of band-collab (what’s up right now is a bloody Drupal mess I wouldn’t wish upon my worst foes).
  2. To get one study of mine published in a peer-reviewed journal. Wait a minute, I don’t have any credentials! That little factor will make it all the more challenging and interesting. I have my eyes on certain food science journals. More details forthcoming…
  3. To acquire a patent. Provisional patent or patent pending will count for this one.

In addition to these, I’m serious about continuing my last year’s resolutions. That means two things – be good to my girlfriend, who I love, and try as hell to make better money than I did last year.

Oh, and to make things interesting, I’m going to make a deal with my friends that they can dunk me or something evil like that if I don’t make all three. And these are all fiendishly hard, aren’t they!!!

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What’s this Shit?

Published on Sun's Day, December 7, 2008 in art and nature. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Looks like the artist who did an artist’s rendition of a living Mars did a pretty good job:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:TerraformedMarsGlobeRealistic.jpg

Except one big, glaring hole – the craters! Why isn’t Earth all crater-y like that? Oh yeah, because we have erosion and biological processes erase and cover them up. I don’t believe we have any craters like that you can see from space, though we’ve been bombarded by Mars no less, I’ll bet. Psh.

Naturalistic Animism…

Published on Saturn's Day, December 6, 2008 in animism, nature and worldview. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

Here is an idea that I’ve been swirling around in my head for awhile. I feel that it isn’t quite cooked up yet, but has great potential. But let me know what you think! And be brutal, but don’t be dumb (unless you are dumb, in which case you can’t help it and I’ll allow it).

Spinoza layed outa quasi-religious, yet non-supernatural (one could say, Atheistic) system called naturalistic pantheism. Naturalistic pantheism approaches spirituality through nature from a Judeo-Christian starting point (the way I see it; his audience was Christian). Spinoza begins with the all-powerful God of the Hebrews and ends with an all-powerful, consisting of all things, logical, unthinking “God” (you can just call “him” the universe if you want).

Spinoza’s views have been very influential. Albert Einstein, Arne Næss (founder of the deep ecology movement), Steven Hawkings and countless philosophers have been influenced by Spinoza’s naturalistic pantheism. It has been used as a way to understand human behavior and the universe. Our brains aren’t general-purpose calculators, so there is power in phrases such as “I want to read God’s thoughts.”

I propose a biocentric spirituality that is to animism what Spinoza’s views are to pantheism and deism.

The way is to look at the nature of life itself, which leads us to realize that more things are living than those that have DNA, are carbon-based or eat and shit. I do not speak of extraterrestrials (though I do hope I can meet an alien, even if it’s single-celled, in my lifetime, so long as it’s not murderous), but to a wall that astrobiologists constantly run into.

How do we define life? When going to other planets in search for life (what life chauvanists we are), all we know to look for is something carbon-based (since carbon bonds with, like, everything) and that’s based on water (high specific heat capacity, low freezing point, high melting point, our understanding of pH is based on it, hydrogen stops oxygenation, etc…). However, the truly fascinating thing about astrobiology is that distant lifeforms can be stranger than we ever imagined. That leads us to propose more generic ideas of what life is, but depeding on how we word it, we can exclude things like virii and prions or include things like entire ecosystems or social movements (in extremely broad cases).

I would say something is living if it has an ability to maintain homeostasis in a chaotic environment and adapt (even if the individual can’t, if it can reproduce, then that counts as adapting since even simple asexual reproduction allows a slow sort of evolution). But just as a multicellular organism is made up not only of countless cells, but also a symbiosis of bacterium in the case of animals (you’ve probably heard this before, but bacterial cells outnumber human cells in your body 10 to 1 – that’s probably the main way you keep bad guys out most of the time), an ecosystem containing individual species can itself be a lifeform (please see Lovelock’s work.. this idea isn’t as crazy as it sounds). When we get broad like this, it might seem silly, but it’s just because of what you’ve been taught.

I would accept a broad definition of life, but then lay down an important dividing line – if the lifeform exists within a specific substance and has a clear boundary, within which only it maintains homeostatis, then I say it is a true lifeform (examples: ladybugs, whales, acetobacter). If it exists throughout time and place and has no definite boundary, then it is a spirit (examples: the Earth’s ecosphere, various ecosystems, religious movements).

What Hegel calls a gheist, what Smith calls the invisible hand, what Lovelock calls Gaia, what Jung calls an archetype, these are all spirits. ‘Wait’, you might say, ‘these are radically different concepts, you nit-wit!’ Ah, but cyanobacteria is a very different concept from a flying snake. So there. I know there are holes in this idea and maybe something essential is missing that would improve it greatly. So, have at it, folks!

Cultural Diversity as Analog to Biodiversity

Published on Woden's Day, July 9, 2008 in nature and society. 7 Comments Tags: , , , , .

(If you know all the arguments about why biodiversity is awesome, or think you do, go ahead and skip down to Cultural Diversity)

Biodiversity

This is an ecology blog! Or at least that’s what the title claims. So, we’re going to talk a little bit about biodiversity. We all know that over the course of life on this planet, there have been many mass extinctions and life rebounded each time. Not only that, life rebounded more quickly. The universe didn’t change its hostile, no, indifferent stance towards us. It is life itself that grew stronger.

After a catastrophe, there will always be at least a few species that miraculously thrive in the new environment, turning a greater tragedy into personal gain. You know, like those assholes who short-sell stock during recessions (a shady practice that only became legal again last year) or Apu in the Simpsons Movie (“please, please, can’t you all just be happy for me?”)

With more diversity of species, more such species will exist. Biodiversity protects biodiversity. Biodiversity means possibilities, and this vast pool of possibilities gave birth to our own species! So, we should respect this vast pool and realize it holds even more potential than we could even imagine. Maybe a rogue earthling bacterium transported by an asteroid is already colonizing another planet right now, slowly fermenting a possible sequel to man.

Too spiritual for you? Too ecocentric? Okay, let’s look at a more pragmatic argument that is just as strong to make sure you’re on the same page as me (even though this doesn’t pertain directly to this post’s point). Let’s start with medicine/biotechnology.

The human body is a vast, complex thing. We understand it more and more all the time, yet some things still allude us. We would like to believe we could build a human body from scratch and therefore reengineer it to fix any problem. The fact is, we still are to biology what a teenage hacker is to code. He knows not how to write a working program, but he can splice code with mixed success and even edit code. One time, he fixed a bug in a perl script, but doesn’t remember how he did it. So we are with our own bodies. We could not, for example, engineer regenerating tissue from scratch, but seeing that sharks have this ability, we just might be able to copy what we see. In fact, many technologies are copied directly from nature.

I just mentioned sharks, right? Here’s one good example of this. A few years back, noting that shark skin seems engineered to repel parasites of all sorts, the guy who discovered this looked at the molecular structure of the skin and made synthetic shark skin to use on navy ships. I just about guarantee that we would not have created such unless we discovered it.

I’ll end the pragmatic side of this argument by pointing out that our species (just like any other) relies heavily on a healthy ecosystem of ecological services, like filtering pollutants and recycling waste. Biodiversity decreases disruption in ecosystems from external factors. For example, if an area becomes warmer due to shifting currents or whatever, trees won’t disappear from the forest but instead a different tree will dominate. The soil will remain fertile, the area will remain not too hot, etc.

Even if you don’t buy all my arguments above, as long as you believe that biodiversity, i.e., the diversity of life, is good for life as a whole, we are good to go… (you needn’t accept that life as a whole is inherently valuable to accept that humanity as a whole is!)

Cultural Diversity

Now, you can basically replace “biodiversity” with “cultural diversity” and “life as a whole” with “humanity” above and you will still be making good sense. There are a variety of ways any cultural dimension can be, and the society or culture in question still function well and the people be happy. Given biological constants, there are amazing variations in thought patterns, taboos, norms, folkways, etc. Most cultures have their own strong points and weak points with regard to human happiness. So what could the advantage of diversity be? Many!!

We can see from histories of ideas that certain kinds of ideas came from certain kinds of cultures. If we had all the same people, but all thinking more similarly, then some ideas are less likely to have arisen or will have much more slowly, since different cultures are focused on different things. Zen Buddhist techniques of teaching intuition will some day revolutionize the West (computer science is just the start), while human rights are enjoyed in nations such as Japan where it is unlikely for such concepts to have arisen (since these peoples don’t buy into erroneous notions of the self we enjoy in the West, such as that of free will). The wonderful thing about ideas is they can be shared! So, when we talk about diversity, the best biological analog is to that of bacteria, where genes can jump from one species to another in a way that it doesn’t with more complex life forms. So, diversity of cultures means a vast marketplace of ideas with which to better society.

We also must be honest with ourselves and recognize that all cultures have advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes, a culture has a fatal flaw in it (and it may even be our culture that has such a flaw in it) that may lead to its own destruction, need for a painful transition or otherwise to great unhappiness for its people. If a culture copies itself, rudely edging out others like cancerous cells, then it may spread said flaw, causing vast unnecessary happiness. Whoever you are, please don’t delude yourself into thinking your culture must be better in every way. After all, you have an intimate knowledge of your own culture and at best a thorough knowledge of others (“at best” meaning if you’ve spent 30+ years in another country).

So, we must preserve cultures’ ability to copy good from other cultures if necessary and also to preserve (and even create!) diversity. This means that cultural imperialism or cultural genocide are no-nos.

The one negative of diversity that cannot be overcome is that no two peoples will always have the same understanding of a situation or even of what reality is. This is why the idea of getting two people to agree fixing a war doesn’t work (miraculous failure of Israeli-Palestinian dialogs demonstrate this, though there may be other ways to end the struggle without both sides agreeing…). Of course, attempts to fix this problem have caused just as many violent clashes as the problem itself. Meaning, even if we really tried to kill cultural diversity, we couldn’t destroy it completely. Look at the religious conflicts through the history of Europe that created no consensus (paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson). So, it’s better to let this thing flourish and be healthy and enjoy its fruits while being mindful of its thorns.

Against Missionaries, be their religion Christianity or Capitalism (or Communism)

Now, I mentioned yesterday my opposition to missionaries. Heh, no secret. I think in an early blog post, I jokingly suggested retaliation by cannibalism to such an offense. Absolute belief that your own culture is correct while others are sadly mistaken is not only bigoted, it’s highly illogical. As proselytizing reduces cultural diversity, I’m of course opposed to it. If everyone were religiously similar, their cultures would be since religion and culture are inseparable. To think otherwise is to not understand how very different modes of thinking can be. It’s important also to be humble and recognize that you may be wrong. Your own culture might be preparing to disappear up its own asshole.

So, you clever people might say to me, “well, you aren’t a Christian, so of course you are going to be against Christian missionaries!” Well, I am at least 90% certain that even if I were a Christian, I’d still be against Christian missionaries. How do I know? Because of my opposition to the violent proselytism on the part of a cult I do belong to – “freedom and democracy”. You see, our nation believes that attacking countries that don’t have basically our political system and installing said will result in world prosperity. It worked for Japan right? Well, ever since adding democracy, freedoms have decreased in Iraq, with the installation of Sharia law. When we hung Saddam, “the international community” (which means all the powerful nations) thought “justice” while Iraqis thought “revenge”. Even if it is beneficial for these people to “become free” (based on our culture’s limited definition), the fact is we failed to help them achieve that goal and we must respect their culture’s right to evolve on their own, at their own pace towards their own valid version of a happy society.
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