In "The Parts of Life," Karl Zimmer takes a close look at evolving computer networks and concludes that modules and minimal connections facility efficient evolution.
[A]s networks become more efficient, they become more modular. But once the parts of a system emerge, natural selection may then favor modules themselves, because they make living things more flexible in their evolution. Once life’s Legos get produced, in other words, evolution can start to play.
At Scientific American, Michael Shermer points out that not all of those who are obtuse about science are conservatives. Many liberals hold views that conflict with basic science:
41 percent of Democrats are young Earth creationists, and 19 percent doubt that Earth is getting warmer. These numbers do not exactly bolster the common belief that liberals are the people of the science book. In addition, consider “cognitive creationists”—whom I define as those who accept the theory of evolution for the human body but not the brain. As Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker documents in his 2002 book The Blank Slate (Viking), belief in the mind as a tabula rasa shaped almost entirely by culture has been mostly the mantra of liberal intellectuals, who in the 1980s and 1990s led an all-out assault against evolutionary psychology via such Orwellian-named far-left groups as Science for the People, for proffering the now uncontroversial idea that human thought and behavior are at least partially the result of our evolutionary past.
Anti-evolutionists like to point to the eye as though it is proof that God exists, in that the eye is so complex that it requires a designer. There are many problems with this argument. For instance, just because eyes are incredibly complex doesn't mean that "God" exists--perhaps we just don't know enough to explain eyes. The lack of an explanation is merely the lack of an explanation. But we actually do know a lot about the evolution of eyes, as David Attenborough explains in this 3-minute video.
Daniel Dennett had this to say, at Edge.org:
The vision of the brain as a computer, which I still champion, is changing so fast. The brain's a computer, but it's so different from any computer that you're used to. It's not like your desktop or your laptop at all, and it's not like your iPhone except in some ways. It's a much more interesting phenomenon. What Turing gave us for the first time (and without Turing you just couldn't do any of this) is a way of thinking about in a disciplined way and taking seriously phenomena that have, as I like to say, trillions of moving parts. Until late 20th century, nobody knew how to take seriously a machine with a trillion moving parts. It's just mind-boggling. The idea is basically right, but when I first conceived of it, I made a big mistake. I was at that point enamored of the McCulloch-Pitts logical neuron. McCulloch and Pitts had put together the idea of a very simple artificial neuron, a computational neuron, which had multiple inputs and a single branching output and a threshold for firing, and the inputs were either inhibitory or excitatory. They proved that in principle a neural net made of these logical neurons could compute anything you wanted to compute. So this was very exciting. It meant that basically you could treat the brain as a computer and treat the neuron as a sort of basic switching element in the computer, and that was certainly an inspiring over-simplification. Everybody knew is was an over-simplification, but people didn't realize how much, and more recently it's become clear to me that it's a dramatic over-simplification, because each neuron, far from being a simple logical switch, is a little agent with an agenda, and they are much more autonomous and much more interesting than any switch. The question is, what happens to your ideas about computational architecture when you think of individual neurons not as dutiful slaves or as simple machines but as agents that have to be kept in line and that have to be properly rewarded and that can form coalitions and cabals and organizations and alliances? This vision of the brain as a sort of social arena of politically warring forces seems like sort of an amusing fantasy at first, but is now becoming something that I take more and more seriously, and it's fed by a lot of different currents.I've posted on these issues before, but Dennett's article advances the topic much further.
There's snow on the ground outside of my house. It's thus a good time to take a look at the beauty of snowflakes, from a scientific perspective: And check out this video featuring Physicist Ken Libbrecht at Discovery TV (embedding disabled). Finally, a meditation on snowflakes with Satie playing in the background: