More evidence for group selection

Posted on 2014-10-03 by Charlie

Kinship selection was always an inadequate explanation for animal behavior observed in the natural world. Relying solely on kin selection to explain the evolution of our consensus reality implicitly depends on making sweeping, ridiculous claims that a lot of really obvious phenomena (like fostering and adoption and homosexuality and cross-species altruism and so forth) are just aberrant behaviors, which do not really need to be accommodated or even comprehensively considered by evolutionary biologists.

The experimental colonies proved more successful if their docile-to-aggressive ratios matched that of the naturally occurring control colonies in the same areas, the researchers report online this week in Nature. The results provide an example of group selection, where individual traits evolve according to the needs of a group.

Paywalled article at Nature here, popular treatment at Science here.

Hawking radiation precludes singularity formation?

Posted on 2014-09-25 by Charlie

Laura Mersini-Houghton at the University of North Carolina and Harald Pfeiffer of the University of Toronto have published a paper suggesting that as a collapsing star emits Hawking radiation, it must also shed mass at a rate that would necessarily prevent it from achieving the density necessary to form a singularity. This doesn’t mean they are claiming black holes don’t exist, they’re saying that if Hawking radiation is real (and so far it’s entirely theoretical) a black hole singularity cannot be formed by the implosion of a star.

Of course if a mass is high enough to create an information paradox, would we ever be able to tell if that mass is a point singularity or not? I don’t know, but the non-mathematical parts of the paper are surprisingly readable.

Don’t answer the phone.

Posted on 2014-09-24 by Charlie

Courtesy + civility = emotional intelligence?

The problem with this video is that it restricts itself to business settings – in real life, it’s always difficult to ignore purposeful rudeness, whether you’re in a meeting or not. If someone is talking to you, and you do anything with a phone without first explaining why your phone is more important than what’s being said, you are being extremely discourteous.

My friend Pedro, who is on call at all times, invariably says, “Excuse me, hold on a moment, let me see if I have to take this call” and checks his screen – if the person calling is an important customer, he’ll say “I’m really sorry, but I have to take this call. I’ll make it as short as I can” and then after he gets off the phone he will apologize briefly but sincerely for the interruption.

These simple apologetics invariably waste less of Pedro’s time than his incoming call wasted of anyone else’s time, and cost him literally nothing. Nonetheless this small gesture of courtesy and respect, this trivial acknowledgement of an inconvenience, has a huge impact on how others see him and act towards him.

If you want others to treat you with courtesy and respect, you need to start by treating others that way. Answering your phone while another person is taking the time to talk or listen to you is purposeful rudeness. It’s ignorant and disrespectful, and it makes you look shallow and stupid.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson as a sacred cow?

Posted on 2014-09-22 by Charlie

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry wrote an article about the way most modern people have debased science into a caricature of pre-renaissance religious dogmatism, simply substituting white lab coats for black cassocks.

…let me explain what science actually is. Science is the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation. That’s the science that gives us airplanes and flu vaccines and the Internet. But what almost everyone means when he or she says “science” is something different.

To most people, capital-S Science is the pursuit of capital-T Truth. It is a thing engaged in by people wearing lab coats and/or doing fancy math that nobody else understands. The reason capital-S Science gives us airplanes and flu vaccines is not because it is an incremental engineering process but because scientists are really smart people.

In other words — and this is the key thing — when people say “science”, what they really mean is magic or truth.

The Intarnets are up in arms. Criticize capital-S science, or the inanity of assuming that science and religion are conflicting methods of solving the same problems? Oh please. Richard Feynman brilliantly plowed that furrow in 1956, and nobody’s really changed their opinion on the subject then or since. What’s important here is that somebody criticised Neil DeGrasse Tyson! Quelle horreur!

2014 IgNobels awarded

Posted on 2014-09-19 by Charlie

Winners were ceremonially announced last night. I haven’t yet watched the awards video, so I do not know if Miss Sweetie-Poo was called into service.

The Medicine Prize was won by Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin, for developing a means of treating uncontrollable nosebleeds that involves packing the patient’s nose with bacon.

The Peaceful Cut

Posted on 2014-08-22 by Charlie

Despite the cruel factory versions of these rituals that are often practiced today, both Jewish kosher shechita and Islamic halal dhabīḥah were originally intended to be merciful.

Dr. Temple Grandin has published extensive evidence that inhumane slaughter harms every creature involved in the process – not only do the animals suffer, but the people who perform the slaughter are psychologically impacted as well. And the cost of inhumane slaughter is higher, when done on industrial scales, than processes that minimize cruelty, so the factory owners are losing money. There are negative effects for consumers, too – although there’s not a lot of evidence that the carcasses of animals that died traumatically are actually unhealthy to eat, the meat of livestock treated ethically is of provably higher quality. Many people dislike the taste of meat from animals killed in fear and anguish; it is measurably chemically different due to bruising, hormone release and similar effects.

Today most people are divorced from their food sources, and will happily eat a cheeseburger while decrying the cruelty of hunters. They don’t seem to have any idea how much unnecessary pain and suffering their food dollars are enabling; most vegetarians, for example, have no idea how much suffering is attendant upon their dietary choice.

This one’s for Samip!

Posted on 2014-07-17 by Charlie

I’ve been told I should post more about philosophy and theology… this is actually about religious demographics, but it’s still very philosophically interesting.

Map of 2nd largest US religions by state

“To put the map in context […] let’s acknowledge at the outset that it doesn’t take very much to be the second-largest religion in South Carolina. It is a solidly Christian, and particularly Protestant, state, and all the minority religions combined comprise only a tiny fraction of the population.”

Delaware is one of only two states where Hinduism is considered to be the second largest religion.

Tesla Motors opens electric car patents

Posted on 2014-06-12 by Charlie

Tesla Motors has decided to encourage competition by letting everyone have access to their technology edge.

“Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has Some questions that viagra tablet for sale may be helpful include: St. As nicotine damages blood circulation badly, L-arginine may professional viagra cheap offer some help. Let’s look at the top penis enlargement pumps that levitra from canadian pharmacy can give you are results that you desire: 1. Historically, all parts of the plants have been used to improve overall health and prevent cheap viagra on line several diseases. repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers.”
— Elon Musk, CEO Tesla Motors

STOP USING ACTIVE X.

Posted on 2014-06-12 by Charlie

One of the horrors remaining from the browser wars of the late 90s is Microsoft’s “ActiveX” technology. ActiveX, not DirectX, although maybe the latter needs to die too.

ActiveX in browsers is based on the idea that your computer should be able to download and execute completely random binary images from the Internet without your permission. What a great basic architecture, huh? It was created because Microsoft’s implementations of COM and OLE technologies were so unnecessarily complex and fundamentally user-hostile that nobody sane wanted to use them. Microsoft needed an alternative, one that could be integrated with the web, since they wanted to crush Netscape and take over the Internet. Browser technology was critically important to them and ActiveX was a way to prevent the creation of a level browser playing field based on shared standards.

To give a more generous interpretation of the same events, Microsoft was faced with a desire to provide a richer web experience to their customers and an inability to deliver their vision using existing web standards. ActiveX was an early attempt to work around the inadequacy of HTML, and while it had many issues (security being a big one, and lack of support for non-Intel platforms another) Microsoft has worked continuously and diligently to remediate those issues and support current and former users of their products.

Personally I’m completely happy with either of those interpretations of the events surrounding the birth of ActiveX. Who cares? Those bodies are all buried now… or at least they should be.. NO WAIT. ActiveX is still stinking up the room!

If you use ActiveX in your websites, or allow your browser to execute ActiveX controls, you are part of the problem. Please, I’m begging you, for the love of God, stop it! Just let this hideous thing die, will you?

There’s nothing that ActiveX provides that can’t be provided using current web standards and technologies. You don’t have to keep hurting yourself, and your readership. Just stop already.

Whenever you purchase any software with a web server in it, or sign up for any service that has a web interface, you need to routinely insist that the product you are buying must be useable with any browser, not merely Microsoft Internet Explorer with ActiveX enabled running on 32-bit Microsoft Windows on a x86 chipset. Make the seller put that in writing, so you don’t get stuck supporting ActiveX against your own will. It’s a shame you have to do this – you don’t have to specify in writing that there will be no incontinent rabid monkeys in the back seat when you purchase a car – but it’s necessary. ActiveX must be destroyed.

E. O. Wilson on group selection

Posted on 2014-05-27 by Charlie

It’s two years old, but Smithsonian has a nice interview with E.O.Wilson in which he speaks briefly about the group selection heresy. (Out-takes from that interview here).

The way I define it, group selection operates on the fitness, or lack thereof, of the social interactions in the group. In other words, it’s not simply group versus group in that sense but what actions individuals take that affect the group. And that would of course be communication, division of labor and the ability to read others’ intentions, which leads to cooperation.

When it’s an advantage to communicate or cooperate, those genes that promote it are going to be favored in that group if the group is competing with other groups. It gives them superiority over other groups and the selection proceeds at the group level, even as it continues to proceed at the individual level.

I usually give a simplified version of group selection – “the largest group of mutual altruists always wins” – but people generally don’t understand my point. Wilson, unsurprisingly, has a cleaner explanation.

Within groups, selfish individuals win and between groups, altruistic groups beat groups of selfish individuals.

Ask the Pope, because the Church has such a great record (not).

Posted on 2014-02-14 by Charlie

Today 30,000 Roman Catholics gathered in St. Peter’s square in Rome to ask a kindly old celibate how he thinks people should manage their marriages.

I find myself remembering Catholic impotency trials of pre-revolutionary France and medieval England, where husbands were sometimes required to demonstrate virility in front of a jury composed of priests (and possibly the mother-in-law), and have their performances described in public record. The Church’s politically based meddling in marriage (their opposition to divorce has no basis in scripture) and system of ecclesiastic courts has wrought many a tragedy.

To give him credit, Pope Francis seemed to be doing his best to keep the conversation from getting too specific. You have to hope he sees the ridiculousness of it all.

Joseph Priestley

Posted on 2014-02-06 by Charlie

Joseph Priestly died 210 years ago today on February 6th, 1804. Mostly remembered today as the discoverer of oxygen, Priestley in his own day was a noted scientist, educator, political theorist, natural philosopher, dissenting clergyman and Christian apologist. Thomas Jefferson, who was active in the same fields, credited his own conversion to Unitarianism to Priestley’s 1782 book “History of the Corruptions of Christianity”.

Priestley’s scientific and philosophical career is replete with triumph and tragedy; brilliant discoveries and a stubborn refusal to give up mistaken ideas. He was derided as “the last defender of phlogiston” and burned out of his Birmingham house for denying “the divine right of kings” in the so-called Priestley Riots. Priestley made his inventions available to the public and received no money for any of them; the local Unitarian Universalist Church district is named in his honor.

I think it’s just me.

Posted on 2014-01-27 by Charlie

XKCD and buttersafe seem to be channeling Buttercup Festival. Or maybe it’s just me?

FREE RICE

Posted on 2013-12-25 by Charlie

Snopes says “Playing a word definition game at There is cialis viagra canada increased risk of low birth weight and preterm delivery. Steroid 17-alkylated structure (oral steroids) generally become weaker estrogens. on line levitra Relaxes the tadalafil viagra smooth muscle that makes up the wall of arteries. While the preparation of this peptide at Arizona University, scientists were already aware of the cure of skin cancer that is melanin cheap viagra this link produced in skin to produce tan. href=”http://freerice.com/#/english-vocabulary/2003″>FreeRice.com results in food being donated to the needy.”

I rarely see that requirement in job postings.

Posted on 2013-12-18 by Charlie

* Ability to ignore existing machine learning and associated algorithms, and concomitant ability to develop new algorithms to solve novel AI problems
* Appreciation of the art and science of coding
* Evidence of creative achievement in one or more field
* Evidence of cultivation of “jamais vu” and independence from the zeitgeist.
* Understanding of game theory or evidence of advanced ability in a particular game (may be substituted by deep knowledge of current developments in philosophy, political discourse, or other field that combines linear and intuitive thought)

Typing Animal

this is the blog part

Category Archives: philosophy