Summer 2022 Newletter

  • What follows are free links to recent writing and an excerpt from the most recent. I’m very happy with how it evolved, btw. 

But first, a note about Medium:

  • Subscribe good; Follow bad.
  • If you Subscribe then you’ll get a few paragraphs and a link when I hit publish. If that hasn’t happened blame Follow

Links

After a few years of wallowing in the problems, I’m starting to see the vague outline of solutions. That starts with this one:

We Need a Bigger Boat:
Add a Bigger Us to the Long Now and a Wider Here

Jaws — PR Photo & “Great white shark” by Gussy (Luke) is marked with CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Longer Now, Wider Here, Bigger Us

The Concept

In 2003, Brian Eno explained the insight behind the name of the Long Now Foundation.

After noting that he liked to move around, see the shops, and meet people in any neighborhood he lived in, he described going to a house-warming party in New York in the late ’70s.

The taxi delivered him to an address in a bad neighborhood. He suspected he was at the wrong address until, arriving at the top floor, he found himself in a “multi-million dollar palace.” He asked the host if she liked the neighborhood? The reply: “Oh, the neighborhood? Well, that’s outside.”

Read More

Hope it’s okay if I’ve added a few of you to my quarterly newsletter. I’ve very much appreciate the feedback you all have been providing.
Thanks for reading!

Al



good tribe / bad tribe – reverend al mix

You can read a prettier version of this on Medium.  Please ‘Clap’ if you do.

Image for post

Love and Hate

We are hard-wired for deep empathy with our ‘brothers and sisters’…even brothers and sisters well outside narrow family connections.

We are hard-wired to hate and even kill anyone we feel threatens us and our people. Empathy freezes. Antipathy switches on.

The same neurotransmitter, oxytocin, is likely central to both reactions.

Continue reading good tribe / bad tribe – reverend al mix

good tribe / bad tribe — nerdcore mix

Theories of Human Evolution

Reading Dawkins

Dawkins’ Selfish Gene carries a lot of weight.

I discovered that back in 1975 when I first threw it across the room.

This happened right after the opening paragraph where he dismisses all philosophy written before Darwin. I hadn’t even gotten to the ‘lumbering robots’ part twenty pages in.

That was another toss.

Continue reading good tribe / bad tribe — nerdcore mix

Darwinian Interlude – References

Short version (extended quotation below):

“Three billion years ago, life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them.

Evolution was a communal affair.

But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell separated itself from the community and refused to share.

The Darwinian interlude had begun.

Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over.

— Freeman Dyson

original quote from Visions of Discovery: New Light on Physics, Cosmology, and Consciousness
see The Darwinian Interlude  by Freeman Dyson

———————————————————————————————

From Our Biotech Future by Freeman Dyson, NYRB, 7/19/2007

Whatever Carl Woese writes, even in a speculative vein, needs to be taken seriously. In his “New Biology” article, he is postulating a golden age of pre-Darwinian life, when horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not yet exist.

Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them. Evolution was a communal affair, the whole community advancing in metabolic and reproductive efficiency as the genes of the most efficient cells were shared. Evolution could be rapid, as new chemical devices could be evolved simultaneously by cells of different kinds working in parallel and then reassembled in a single cell by horizontal gene transfer.

But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, separated itself from the community and refused to share. Its offspring became the first species of bacteria—and the first species of any kind—reserving their intellectual property for their own private use. With their superior efficiency, the bacteria continued to prosper and to evolve separately, while the rest of the community continued its communal life. Some millions of years later, another cell separated itself from the community and became the ancestor of the archea. Some time after that, a third cell separated itself and became the ancestor of the eukaryotes. And so it went on, until nothing was left of the community and all life was divided into species. The Darwinian interlude had begun.

The Darwinian interlude has lasted for two or three billion years. It probably slowed down the pace of evolution considerably. The basic biochemical machinery of life had evolved rapidly during the few hundreds of millions of years of the pre-Darwinian era, and changed very little in the next two billion years of microbial evolution. Darwinian evolution is slow because individual species, once established, evolve very little. With rare exceptions, Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct so that new species can replace them.

Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over.

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