Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss discuss Something from Nothing

Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss recently sat on the stage at the Australian National University to discuss "something from nothing." What follows are my notes from that conversation. (9) Dawkins offers two methods for illustrating the long periods of time that are critical to understanding natural selection. (13:30) The key idea is that we might be getting something from nothing. Life comes from non-life. Matter appears to come from the lack of matter. (14:47) We are dealing with the new version of "nothing." (16:00) It is plausible that everything started with no matter,and maybe no loss. It might not violate any laws for matter to come from the lack of matter. Especially in physics, scientists have learned to ignore the common sense. The total energy of the universe might be "zero." It might nonetheless be a bubbling brew of virtual particles, and this offends some people. (20) Krauss: The universe doesn't care what we like or what we understand. We need to deal with this. (21) Dawkins: Natural selection has equipped us to be bad physicists and we have to work to overcome this. (22) Space is curved, but we cannot visualize this. Our picture of natural/normal reality is myopic. [More . . . ]

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The ability to engage in a culture jump started human animals

What gives human animals such an advantage over so many other animals? Culture is the answer according to Susan Okie at TruthDig, commenting on a new book by Mark Pagel:

About 45,000 years ago, members of our species, Homo sapiens, reached Europe after earlier migrations out of Africa via the Middle East. The newcomers’ arrival must have come as a shock to the Neanderthals, a separate human species who had inhabited Europe for some 300,000 years. As Pagel notes, the new arrivals “would have carried a baffling and frightening array of technologies”—not only new kinds of weapons and tools, but also perhaps sewn clothes, musical instruments and carved figures. “It would have been like a scene from a science fiction story of a people confronted by a superior alien race.” The aliens likely didn’t owe their advantages to dramatically superior genes, but to a development, some 40,000 years prior to their arrival in Europe. Something happened that had immensely speeded up their ability to learn, adapt and acquire new strategies for taking over the planet: Homo sapiens had acquired culture.

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Laughing at silly old record album covers.

Have you ever seen this collection of record album covers that are no longer cool ... No longer hip ... Or are they no longer funky, rakish, chic, ultracool or spiffy? You see, even the words for fashionable go out of fashion. And as we chuckle at these album covers, there is something a bit uneasy about what we're doing. Yes, some of these covers were failures from Day One, but others have that high school yearbook thing going on--they look silly to us because they have elements of oldness to them that should remind us that no matter how fashion-tuned we are, some of the photos of us will someday be snidely chuckled at. If not our clothes, it will be our phone or our food or our method of transportation or the type of gadget we use for playing our music. The only constant is that everything is social.

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Applications of natural selection outside of the field of biology

This afternoon I decided to gather uses of evolutionary explanations in fields other than biology. This post features Daniel Dennett discussing evolution in fields other than biology, including languages and music. This discussion is in the video between 15 min and 21 min. Here is a wealth of other applications of natural selection including mention of Gerald Edelman's work (it is often called "neural darwinism," though I didn't use that term in this article). This same post also discusses Randolf Nesse's work on "Darwinian Medicine." Here's a video featuring Nesse. This same article also mentions Geoffrey Miller, who has relied on Darwin's work to explain the evolution of art and consumer behavior. I previously wrote a long post on Geoffrey Miller's work on consumer behavior here. Gad Saad also discusses consumer behavior by reference to evolutionary theory. An article in Discover Magazine, "We All Live in Darwin's World," discusses yet other applications of natural selection outside of biology. This article includes the following quote:

"Natural selection is a source of insight that is unbelievably powerful,” [David Sloan] Wilson says. And its power is not limited to the life sciences. The same selective paradigm can describe the rise of complexity in inanimate systems: stock markets, transit schedules. Though other mathematical models are capable of simulating complex phenomena, only Darwin’s approach shows how certain complex systems not only arise but also adapt over time to the constraints imposed by their environment, as living systems do.

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E. O. Wilson’s Theory of Everything

The November 2011 edition of The Atlantic presents E. O. Wilson's "Theory of Everything." Wilson's theory takes into account the "eusocial" status of human animals, something that we share with ants and bees, but very few other species. Eusocial animals build complex societies wherein "individuals specialize in various activities and sometimes act altruistically." Wilson has taken the position that eusociality is not the result of close genetic similarity (the explanation offered by "kin selection"). Rather, he is a strong advocate of "group selection." By the way, E. O. Wilson is no relation to another Wilson who has strongly advocated group selection, David Sloan Wilson (and see here). Here's how E. O. Wilson presents group selection, according to a passage from The Atlantic:

In his new book, Wilson posits that two rival forces drive human behavior: group selection and what he calls “individual selection”—competition at the level of the individual to pass along one’s genes—with both operating simultaneously. “Group selection,” he said, “brings about virtue, and—this is an oversimplification, but—individual selection, which is competing with it, creates sin. That, in a nutshell, is an explanation of the human condition. “Our quarrelsomeness, our intense concentration on groups and on rivalries, down to the last junior-soccer-league game, the whole thing falls into place, in my opinion. Theories of kin selection didn’t do the job at all, but now I think we are close to making sense out of what human beings do and why they can’t settle down.” By settling down, Wilson said, he meant establishing a lasting peace with each other and learning to live in a sustainable balance with the environment. If Wilson’s new paradigm holds up—“and it will,” he insisted in an e-mail exchange several weeks after visiting Gorongosa—its impact on the social sciences could be as great as its importance for biology, advancing human self-understanding in ways typically associated with the great philosophers he criticized. “Within groups, the selfish are more likely to succeed,” Wilson told me in a telephone conversation. “But in competition between groups, groups of altruists are more likely to succeed. In addition, it is clear that groups of humans proselytize other groups and accept them as allies, and that that tendency is much favored by group selection.” Taking in newcomers and forming alliances had become a fundamental human trait, he added, because “it is a good way to win.”
This article is a wide ranging work that offers much insight into Wilson's history and accomplishments, and more. For instance, Wilson, an early outspoken advocate of sociobiology, takes some shots at Stephen J. Gould, who he calls a "charlatan." Several decades ago, it was the now-deceased Gould who led the attack against Wilson regarding sociobiology. This is an excellent read, and I highly recommend it.

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