Philosophistry

Similarities Between Weather and Happiness (Chart)

I learned in my evolution class today that hotter, more tropical climates have less fluctations in temperature than do colder climates. Therefore, climate changes not just impact the average temperature but also the range of temperatures. And since wider temperature fluctuations can cause more variability in the supply of food, life becomes twice as hard for animals: once because its colder, and another time because food supply is not stable.

This double-impact is also in the relationship between mood swings and happiness. Emotional dips are bad in general, but the presence of high emotional instability also reduces the overall level of happiness. Therefore, emotional dips are a double-whammy.*

This parallel between happiness and temperature demonstrates the tight coupling in some systems between the variance and the average.

Why the climate changes are interesting for evolution:

Warmer rainforests covered Earth during the time period (early Paleocene 65-34 million years ago) when modern primates evolved. Because these rainforests also had less temperature fluctations, primates were therefore adapted to stable supplies of plants and fruits. When Earth's climate cooled in the Oligocene Era (34 million years ago), temperature fluctuations increased in colder regions, reducing flora tenability, and therefore making it difficult for primates to survive. Many of the primates went extinct except those living in existing rainforests and the newly evolved anthropoids (apes, chimps, humans). These anthropoids compensated with other evolved skills, such as social skills, to make up for the instability of food supply.

* Emotional highs do not have the same effect of raising the average; rather its the absolute fluctuation that affects the average.

On a separate note: I recognize that this is kind of a crackpot parallelism. I'm just appreciating the important relationship between variances and averages; usually we overlook how modifying the variance of a system can also have an impact on the average (and vice-versa).
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Gain 1000D Vision: WebCams from Around the World

Visit EarthCam, where I recommend you try its World Map Interface to access the most extensive webcam aggregation that I have seen.

The history of evolution can be traced through the evolution of vision. It starts with one-dimensional vision of early chordates, or eel-like creatures in the ocean, who could detect the presence or lack thereof of light with bundles of nerves on one end of their tube-like bodies; this was about a billion years ago. Then 2D vision evolved in modern chordates 544 million years ago with eyebuds; 3D, stereoscopic vision evolved in predators; 4D vision came through via the development of consciousness or memory.

Humans, through intricate social networking, have developed 1000D vision. Twenty Homo sapiens standing in a circle around a tree can see it from all sides and share that information with each other. In addition, interaction with reconaissance humans returning to the tribe gives everyone vision of locations far and wide. The invention of microscopes and telescopes add scale as another dimension. The development of psychoanalysis, computer science, physics, and chemistry gives us a vision of processes that go on deep within the fabric of normal, physical presence. This webcam site is just another extension of that evolution.

Note: I found this site randomly through StumbleUpon, but you'd be surprised, what with all the Google glut out there, how hard it is TRY to search for a good index of webcams. I also credit Neil Robert Miller for his 1000D vision idea.
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I love the touch of your hands Lucy--perhaps this is how hominids beat other monkeys

Comparing the human hand and the orangutan's reveals how small changes to physique matter for evolution:

This brings up of one of the traits you probably take for granted every day -- the precision grip. Specifically speaking, the human precision grip is the ability to touch the tip of your thumb to the tips of your fingers at the midpont of your hand (that's about 1 inch directly outward from the center of your palm). It allows you to write with a pencil, eat with a fork, play Operation, and a whole range of other fine motor tasks.

You're looking fine Lucy--Perhaps this is how hominids learned to walk.

Humans evolved the ability to walk upright because of its social benefits. Good posture, the development of larger brains, increasing group size, and the complexity of human tribes, all evolved in tandem between four and two million years ago, and thus there is a common story running through those features. Walking upright fits in because it projects more information about the hominid. Rather than having heads toward the floor, focused on an individual ape's consumption of flora and fauna, the upright Adripithecus is instead concerned with a conversation with his fellow hominids. Posture is tantamount to connecting with others: shaking hands, kissing, sharing tools, hugging, and spooning.

These ideas come from Neil Robert Miller's rambling, but provocative, essay On Upright Walking - Posture, Affection, Cognition, Intelligence, Solving
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Other competing theories for how we got "bipedalism" involve the following:

• Standing tall above the grass, early hominids could better find prey.
  
• So as to hold javelins better.
  
• In the hot African sun, standing tall provided thermal benefits. Sunrays would come at an angle rather than dead on the back of an ape, and the single bed of hair on the head blocked most of the sun, while as the lack of body hair enabled cooling. Plus, they could always turn their bodies if one side was getting too hot.
  

I doubt these arguments because I don't believe in the centrality of "survival and reproduction of the fittest" argument in evolutionary biology. Sure "Survival of the Fittest" is the overall grand evolutionary engine, but more powerful auxiliary evolutionary technology developed on top of natural selection to give evolutionary arcs advantages over other arcs. For example, humans, reptiles, birds, and fish all share the fundamental feature of bones. In fact, comparisons of the human fetus in various stages of development look shockingly similar to the development of other animals--tails, gills and all. So the technology that has been abused since the Cambrian Explosion is not mere "natural selection" but the "reconfiguration of the skeletal template." Through sexual selection, a small preference for above-average (or below-average) sizes of certain bone structures can rapidly reconfigure the shape of members of a species.

In the case of walking upright, sexual selection may have had a preference for socially adept hominids. This is certainly the case today, as anybody lacking charm or money (a social skill as it involves creating value in the eyes of other humans) is on a path to reproductive doom. So on the Serengeti, lines of hominids that had strong preferences for social hominids had ever inflating social networks and thus, survival benefits over others.

Simple "natural selection" alone has seemed too slow to account for the complexity of the eye. Embedded within natural selection, though, is a deeper hierarchy of mini-natural selections, involving competing technologies like "skeletal templates," "network effects," or whatever hidden code modules are in DNA. There must be a larger invisible group of actors behind what can be seen in fossil records to explain the vast complexity of Earth's biology. Otherwise, simply mutating genes--which is like playing the lottery--and then perpetuating the best mutants' children, would take trillions of years, not four billion.

More ideas like these are in my previous articles on runaway sexual selection and templatization

My Take on the Law of Accelerating Returns (myLAR) Part II - Templatization

Read more about tools and algorithms that aid biological evolution, and in tandem systems of accelerating complexity.

Groups of related organisms are 'variations on a theme' -- the same set of bones are used to construct all vertebrates. The bones of the human hand grow out of the same tissue as the bones of a bat's wing or a whale's flipper; and, they share many identifying features such as muscle insertion points and ridges. The only difference is that they are scaled differently. Evolutionary biologists say this indicates that all mammals are modified descendants of a common ancestor which had the same set of bones. (Introduction to Evolutionary Biology)

Mammals for example, all share a similar underlying framework, while the various common parts are simply scaled differently. A bigger brain here, a longer leg here, shorter mandible there, and voila you get a wonderfully different organism.

Scaling is also easy, as we discussed with runaway sexual selection. Relative bone size increments or decrements within a specie could be selected for constantly, allowing those parts to grow over time. So imagine a little bud of a claw on some rodent, being stretched into the huge leg of a dog. Or imagine if the females of our ape-like ancestors were attracted to males with the largest skulls of the group, then overall capacity of the brain would definitely expand.

Templates with even a modestly sized feature set can allow for tremendous complexity. Take the 206 bones of the adult human body. If the size of 30 of those were cut in half and another 30 doubled, the nature of our existence would be dramatically changed. We'd seek different food, we'd have different capabilities, the tools we would make would be different, etc. In other words, our niche in the ecosystem would shift.

Since the nature of our actions is based on the combination of all of our parts, changes to a small set of features propogate large changes to the whole system.

This ability for small changes to have large impacts is important for rapid adaptations. As environments change and competition for resources becomes fiercer, a species cannot be re-written from scratch. So groups of organisms that can make small modifications to a templated organism will be better suited at discovering new niches as old ones disappear.

Templatization appears naturally in other systems. Look at blogging for example. The ability to create date-based journal entries existed about as early as I can remember on the Internet with places like BluesNews. It wasn't until somebody made a standard template of imagery, dated entries, and links that we have this "revolution" called Blogging. By the simple scaling of those three features we get a tremendous range of complexity in blogging. Take Howard Dean's Blog for America. There we see the imagery using a patriotic color scheme, with his picture in there showing he's active, and a general cleanliness that evokes a sense of pure democracy. Then look at the scaling on the dated entries. His blog updates so frequently that he puts himself into the category of a "mega-blogger." But even beyond that, these entries are scaled up by allowing for mulitple authors form his campaign team plus the comments of visitors. Then look at his blogroll or list of links. The number and choice of various pundits and other Dean sites turns his site into a portal for political change. All Dean did was cater the style to a certain message, scale up the date-based entries, ramp up the size of the blogroll, and all of a sudden Dean has created a standarbearer for an emerging genre of "blog-portals." (Note, by Dean I mean whoever created his blog).

Similarily, the same blog template can be used for a personal diary. I could scale the blogroll down to zero, and use a default style, and focus on daily entries of the same tone.

Once again, small changes in scale, large changes in purpose.

Templates are readily apparent in human systems, such as business hiearchies, programming systems such as object-oriented-programming, or religious frameworks such as "Christianity." If you make a few changes to any of those templates, you get a unique organization with a rich new set of pursoses to fulfill.

Templates are a powerful expedient of complexity. And since they occur naturally within systems that seek creative ways to fulfill niches, it's no wonder than accelerating returns happens as fast as it does.

My Take on the Law of Accelerating Returns (myLAR) - Part I - Runaway Sexual Selection

My conversion from Catholicism to Agnosticism coincided with my first exposure to Darwinian natural selection in the 9th grade. In Natural Selection I saw the beginnings of what seemed like a better sketch than Christian genesis. However, I had my doubts about Natural Selection; Darwin's theories still made it seem like it would take forever to bore out only average or gray species. How was this simple thing supposed to ever spontaneously produce life, or create something as complex as the eye?

These questions remained unaswered for me until I read Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines, wherein I first learned about hidden mechanisms and algorithms laced within the structure of order and time that showed how rapidly increasing complexity was the rule.

This begins the first of a long-series--hopefully daily--of metaphors and vignettes that will make you feel more confident about the power and truth of the law of accelerating returns.

The first one that's simple is runaway sexul selection. Sexual selection is a subset of natural selection. This is a process where features are selected for during the mating process, such as having big muscles or colorful plumage.

Here is an excerpt from Introduction to Evolutionary Biology

Evolution can get stuck in a positive feedback loop. Another model to explain secondary sexual characteristics is called the runaway sexual selection model. R. A. Fisher proposed that females may have an innate preference for some male trait before it appears in a population. Females would then mate with male carriers when the trait appears. The offspring of these matings have the genes for both the trait and the preference for the trait. As a result, the process snowballs until natural selection brings it into check. Suppose that female birds prefer males with longer than average tail feathers. Mutant males with longer than average feathers will produce more offspring than the short feathered males. In the next generation, average tail length will increase. As the generations progress, feather length will increase because females do not prefer a specific length tail, but a longer than average tail. Eventually tail length will increase to the point were the liability to survival is matched by the sexual attractiveness of the trait and an equilibrium will be established. Note that in many exotic birds male plumage is often very showy and many species do in fact have males with greatly elongated feathers. In some cases these feathers are shed after the breeding season.

In this model, features can explode out of nowhere. For example, among human populations, there could be various subpopulations with different preferences for male height. In one particular subpopulation for example, the women could favor men who were at least one standard deviation above the mean. Over time, this would pressure the mean height to rise. If this increase were successful for this subpopulation in its survival rate, then this preference for height would propagate to other human subpopulations.

This illustrates a sexual selection based on intraspecies relativity, and not just feature-existence. By women having a preference for the best of a group, a consistent pressure for quality-increases emerges. Eventually, the utility of the quality-increases could surpass its use for survival. Well, having a knack for speedy quality-increases could be what gives a certain species a competitive edge over other species.

This also makes it obvious how intelligent homo sapiens could have evolved from not so intelligent ape-like ancestors. If subpopulations of women (or men) continuously favored the handful of smart members of their group, then the overall mean intelligence would drift up.

To further accelerate this process, throw in the growing ease of communication among humans throughout history (dark ages excluded). The more connected we became, the faster trophy mates would become norm, giving rise to a higher standard for trophy mates. Even today, celebrities probably get laid the most for (previously) good evolutionary reason. A phenotype that is celebrated the most by a species should have its genotype spread proportionally as well in order to improve the overall quality of the species.

The impact of increased connectivity on evolution would be an example of a network effect. More on this later.

Evolutionary Neoteny

J. Z. Young and Excerpts from An Introduction to the Study of Man

Co-operation to drive, trap, and kill large prey such as antelopes or even elephants requires a reduction of competitive and aggressive behavior between individuals. In a sense this could be said to involve in man the continuation throughout life of the characteristic features found among juveniles of monkey and other animal communities. There are indeed several signs that the evolution of man had involved a process of 'juvenilization' or even 'foetalization'. Such a change, technically called neoteny (or paedomorphosis), has in fact occurred often in the course of the evolution of diverse animals (De Beer 1958).

(A missing assumption is that competitiveness is something advanced later in life)

neoteny definition: "Retention of juvenile characteristics in the adults of a species".

(Thanks Peter)

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Craig W. Reynolds CV

Craig W. Reynolds

A man who has travelled the depths of evolutionary computation.

neurogenesis

Be on the look out for neurogenesis. Good flash overview of human evolution. Tree of Life follow connections between organisms.

And of course, very fitting... from The Matrix.

Agent Smith: I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure.

Spandrels

Evolutionary Biology BLOG!

"Spandrels, the spaces above an arch, exist as a necessary outcome of building with arches. In the same way, they argued, some features of organisms exist simply as the result of how an organism develops or is built. Thus researchers, they warned, should refrain from assuming that every feature exists for some adaptive purpose." I'm going to be talking about this a lot in the future. I will probably argue over whether religion is a spandrel and also the improper or uninformed usage of the word "spandrel."