What's the meaning of life? Physics.

nationalgeographic |  According to your book, physics describes the actions or tendencies of every living thing—and inanimate ones as well. Does that mean we can unite all behavior under physics?

Absolutely. Our narrow definition of the discipline is something that’s happened in the past hundred years, thanks to the immense impact of Albert Einstein and atomic physics and relativity at the turn of the [20th] century.

But we need to go back farther. In Latin, nature—physics—means “everything that happens.”

One thing that came directly from Charles Darwin is that humans are part of nature, along with all the other animate beings. Therefore all the things that we make—our tools, our homes, our technologies—are natural as well. It’s all part of the same thing.

In your magazine and on your TV channel, we see many animals doing this—extending their reach with tools, with intelligence, with social organization. Everything is naturally interconnected.

Your new book is premised on a law of physics that you formulated in 1996. The Constructal Law says there’s a universal evolutionary tendency toward design in nature, because everything is composed of systems that change and evolve to flow more easily. That’s correct. But I would specify and say that the tendency is toward evolving freely—changing on the go in order to provide greater and greater ease of movement. That’s physics, stage four—more precise, more specific expressions of the same idea.

Flow systems are everywhere. They describe the ways that animals move and migrate, the ways that river deltas form, the ways that people build fires. In each case, they evolve freely to reduce friction and to flow better—to improve themselves and minimize their mistakes or imperfections. Blood flow and water flow essentially evolve the same way.

Why does life exist?

quantamagazine |  Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.

England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. “I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.”

His idea, detailed in a recent paper and further elaborated in a talk he is delivering at universities around the world, has sparked controversy among his colleagues, who see it as either tenuous or a potential breakthrough, or both.

England has taken “a very brave and very important step,” said Alexander Grosberg, a professor of physics at New York University who has followed England’s work since its early stages. The “big hope” is that he has identified the underlying physical principle driving the origin and evolution of life, Grosberg said.

“Jeremy is just about the brightest young scientist I ever came across,” said Attila Szabo, a biophysicist in the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at the National Institutes of Health who corresponded with England about his theory after meeting him at a conference. “I was struck by the originality of the ideas.”

Church Lab "Secret" Artificial Genome Meeting

thescientist |  Harvard Medical School’s George Church and his collaborators invited some 130 scientists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and government officials to Boston last week (May 10) to discuss the feasibility and implementation of a project to synthesize entire large genomes in vitro. According to a statement Church provided to STAT News, such an endeavor could represent “the next chapter in our understanding of the blueprint of life.”

While the subject is an exciting one—on a smaller scale, Craig Venter’s group has synthesized the 1-million-base-pair genome of Mycoplasma mycoides—critics immediately took issue with the fact that this meeting was not open to the press. “This idea is an enormous step for the human species, and it shouldn’t be discussed only behind closed doors,” Northwestern University’s Laurie Zoloth told STAT News. She and Stanford University bioengineer Drew Endy published an article in Cosmos documenting their disapproval of the private nature of the meeting.

Church told STAT News that the original intention was to make the meeting open, but in anticipation of an imminent, high-profile publication on this project, he and his collaborators had to respect the journal’s embargo. However, Endy tweeted a photo of what appeared to be a message from the meeting organizers stating that they chose not to invite media “because we want everyone to speak freely and candidly without concerns about being misquoted or misinterpreted.”

Übermensch smile as you humans have that conversation...,

techcrunch |  A species-wide conversation on our future has never before been carried out. We didn’t do it at the dawn of the industrial or nuclear ages for understandable reasons, even though we might have avoided some terrible outcomes if we had.

With a growing percentage of the world population connected to the information grid in one way or another, we now have a limited opportunity to avoid making the same mistake and begin laying a foundation for decisions we will need to collectively make in the future. Given the political divisiveness of this issue, the window will not stay open long.

Such a conversation would involve connecting individuals and communities around the world with different backgrounds and perspectives and varying degrees of education in an interconnected web of dialogue.

It would link people adamantly opposed to human genetic enhancement, those who may see it as a panacea, and the vast majority of everyone else who has no idea this transformation is already underway. It would highlight the almost unimaginable potential of these technologies but also raise the danger that opponents could mobilize their efforts and undermine the most promising work to cure cancers and eliminate disease.

But the alternative is far worse. If a relatively small number of even very well intentioned people unleash a human genetic revolution that will ultimately touch most everyone and alter our species’ evolutionary trajectory without informed, meaningful, and early input from others, the backlash against the genetic revolution will overwhelm its monumental potential for good.

Homo Sapiens of the world, let us begin this conversation.

control of fractal unfolding - impressive, most impressive...

Science | The war against malaria has a new ally: a controversial technology for spreading genes throughout a population of animals. Researchers report today that they have harnessed a so-called gene drive to efficiently endow mosquitoes with genes that should make them immune to the malaria parasite—and unable to spread it. On its own, gene drive won’t get rid of malaria, but if successfully applied in the wild the method could help wipe out the disease, at least in some corners of the world. The approach “can bring us to zero [cases],” says Nora Besansky, a geneticist at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, who specializes in malaria-carrying mosquitoes. “The mosquitos do their own work [and] reach places we can’t afford to go or get to.”

But testing that promise in the field may have to wait until a wider debate over gene drives is resolved. The essence of this long-discussed strategy for spreading a genetic trait, such as disease resistance, is to bias inheritance so that more than the expected half of a subsequent generation inherits it. The gene drive concept attracted new attention earlier this year, when geneticists studying fruit flies adapted a gene editing technology called CRISPR-Cas9 to help spread a mutation—and were startled to find it worked so well that the mutation reached almost all fly progeny. Their report, published this spring in Science (20 March, p. 1300) came out less than a year after an eLife paper discussed the feasibility of a CRISPR-Cas9 gene drive system but warned that it could disrupt ecosystems and wipe out populations of entire species.

A firestorm quickly erupted over the risks of experimenting with gene drives, nevermind applying them in the field. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has convened a committee to weigh the risks and propose safeguards, and the authors of the eLife andScience papers have laid out guidelines for experiments (Science, 28 August, p. 927).

not a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse - this is the real thing

io9  |  A team of biohackers from California successfully induced a temporary sense of night vision by injecting a simple chemical cocktail directly onto the eye.Incredibly, it allowed them to see over 160 feet in the dark for a brief period of time.

The group, called Science for the Masses, wanted to see if a kind of chemical chlorophyll analog — Chlorin e6 (or Ce6) — would create the expected effect.This chemical mixture is found in some deep-sea fish and is often used to treat cancer and night blindness.

 
Back in 2012, a patent was filed by Totada R. Shantha on a mixture  that, when absorbed by the retina, would act to induce night vision — the ability to see nearby objects in low light conditions.

The patent holders claimed it was safe to use for treating a condition known as night blindness, but also for improving night vision in healthy people. The Science for the Masses hackers basically used this same formula, but they created their own concoction by adding both insulin and dimethlysulfoxide(which increases permeability) to the saline solution (normally, just insulin is used in conjunction with Ce6 and saline). The compound works by influencing the way our retina's light-sensing rods work in the dark.

Biohacker Meetups - coming soon to a nerdgathering near you! 

panksepp

helian |  So who is Jaak Panksepp?  Have a look at his YouTube talk on emotions at the bottom of this post, for starters.  A commenter recommended him, and I discovered the advice was well worth taking.  Panksepp’s The Archaeology of Mind, which he co-authored with Lucy Biven, was a revelation to me.  The book describes a set of basic emotional systems that exist in all, or virtually all, mammals, including humans.  In the words of the authors:

…the ancient subcortical regions of mammalian brains contain at least seven emotional, or affective, systems:  SEEKING (expectancy), FEAR (anxiety), RAGE (anger), LUST (sexual excitement), CARE (nurturance), PANIC/GRIEF (sadness), and PLAY (social joy).  Each of these systems controls distinct but specific types of behaviors associated with many overlapping physiological changes.

This is not just another laundry list of “instincts” of the type often proposed by psychologists at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.  Panksepp is a neuroscientist, and has verified experimentally the unique signatures of these emotional systems in the ancient regions of the brain shared by humans and other mammals.  Again quoting from the book,

As far as we know right now, primal emotional systems are made up of neuroanatomies and neurochemistries that are remarkably similar across all mammalian species.  This suggests that these systems evolved a very long time ago and that at a basic emotional and motivational level, all mammals are more similar than they are different.  Deep in the ancient affective recesses of our brains, we remain evolutionarily kin.

If you are an astute student of the Blank Slate phenomenon, dear reader, no doubt you are already aware of the heretical nature of this passage.  That’s right!  The Blank Slaters were prone to instantly condemn any suggestion that there were similarities between humans and other animals as “anthropomorphism.”  In fact, if you read the book you will find that their reaction to Panksepp and others doing similar research has been every bit as allergic as their reaction to anyone suggesting the existence of human nature.  However, in the field of animal behavior, they are anything but a quaint artifact of the past.  Diehard disciples of the behaviorist John B. Watson and his latter day follower B. F. Skinner, Blank Slaters of the first water, still haunt the halls of academia in significant numbers, and still control the message in any number of “scientific” journals.  There they have been following their usual “scholarly” pursuit of ignoring and/or vilifying anyone who dares to disagree with them ever since the heyday of Ashley Montagu and Richard Lewontin.  In the process they have managed to suppress or distort a great deal of valuable research bearing directly on the wellsprings of human behavior.

Evolution of Self-Organized Task Specialization in Robot Swarms

plos |  Division of labor is ubiquitous in biological systems, as evidenced by various forms of complex task specialization observed in both animal societies and multicellular organisms. Although clearly adaptive, the way in which division of labor first evolved remains enigmatic, as it requires the simultaneous co-occurrence of several complex traits to achieve the required degree of coordination. Recently, evolutionary swarm robotics has emerged as an excellent test bed to study the evolution of coordinated group-level behavior. Here we use this framework for the first time to study the evolutionary origin of behavioral task specialization among groups of identical robots. The scenario we study involves an advanced form of division of labor, common in insect societies and known as “task partitioning”, whereby two sets of tasks have to be carried out in sequence by different individuals. Our results show that task partitioning is favored whenever the environment has features that, when exploited, reduce switching costs and increase the net efficiency of the group, and that an optimal mix of task specialists is achieved most readily when the behavioral repertoires aimed at carrying out the different subtasks are available as pre-adapted building blocks. Nevertheless, we also show for the first time that self-organized task specialization could be evolved entirely from scratch, starting only from basic, low-level behavioral primitives, using a nature-inspired evolutionary method known as Grammatical Evolution. Remarkably, division of labor was achieved merely by selecting on overall group performance, and without providing any prior information on how the global object retrieval task was best divided into smaller subtasks. We discuss the potential of our method for engineering adaptively behaving robot swarms and interpret our results in relation to the likely path that nature took to evolve complex sociality and task specialization.

Author Summary
Many biological systems execute tasks by dividing them into finer sub-tasks first. This is seen for example in the advanced division of labor of social insects like ants, bees or termites. One of the unsolved mysteries in biology is how a blind process of Darwinian selection could have led to such highly complex forms of sociality. To answer this question, we used simulated teams of robots and artificially evolved them to achieve maximum performance in a foraging task. We find that, as in social insects, this favored controllers that caused the robots to display a self-organized division of labor in which the different robots automatically specialized into carrying out different subtasks in the group. Remarkably, such a division of labor could be achieved even if the robots were not told beforehand how the global task of retrieving items back to their base could best be divided into smaller subtasks. This is the first time that a self-organized division of labor mechanism could be evolved entirely de-novo. In addition, these findings shed significant new light on the question of how natural systems managed to evolve complex sociality and division of labor.

pan-troglodytic deuterostems are not the endpoint of terrestrial evolution...,

theatlantic |  “Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.”

Among the several questions that jostled for the uppermost in my mind was this: Where is the fiction that can rise to the level of this stupefying reality? (Only one novelist, Julian Barnes, was sufficiently struck to include Rees’s passage in a book, but that was in his extended nonfiction memoir about death, Nothing to Be Frightened Of.) I quite soon came to realize that there was indeed a writer who could have heard or read those words with equanimity, even satisfaction, and that this was J. G. Ballard. For him, the possibility of any mutation or metamorphosis was to be taken for granted, if not indeed welcomed, as was the contingency that, dead sun or no dead sun, the terrestrial globe could very readily be imagined after we’re gone.

As one who has always disliked and distrusted so-called science fiction (the votaries of this cult disagreeing pointlessly about whether to refer to it as “SF” or “sci-fi”), I was prepared to be unimpressed even after Kingsley Amis praised Ballard as “the most imaginative of H. G. Wells’s successors.” The natural universe is far too complex and frightening and impressive on its own to require the puerile add-ons of space aliens and super-weapons: the interplanetary genre made even C. S. Lewis write more falsely than he normally did. Hearing me drone on in this vein about 30 years ago, Amis fils (who contributes a highly lucid introduction to this collection) wordlessly handed me The Drowned World, The Day of Forever, and, for a shift in pace and rhythm, Crash. Any one of these would have done the trick.

For all that, Ballard is arguably best-known to a wide audience because of his relatively “straight” novel, Empire of the Sun, and the resulting movie by Steven Spielberg. Some of his devotees were depressed by the literalness of the subject matter, which is a quasi-autobiographical account of being 13 years old and an inmate in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai. It’s not possible to read that book, however, and fail to see the germinal effect that experience had on Ballard the man. To see a once-thriving city reduced to beggary and emptiness, to live one day at a time in point of food and medicine, to see an old European order brutally and efficiently overturned, to notice the utterly casual way in which human life can be snuffed out, and to see war machines wheeling and diving in the overcast sky: such an education! Don’t forget, either, that young Ballard was ecstatic at the news of the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an emotion that makes him practically unique among postwar literati. Included in this collection is a very strong 1977 story, “The Dead Time,” a sort of curtain-raiser to Empire—Ballard’s own preferred name for his book—in which a young man released from Japanese captivity drives a truckload of cadavers across a stricken landscape and ends up feeding a scrap of his own torn flesh to a ravenous child.

Miracles of Life (a book with a slightly but not entirely misleading title) will soon enough discern that he built on his wartime Shanghai traumas in three related ways. As a teenager in post-war England he came across first Freud, and second the surrealists. He describes the two encounters as devastating in that they taught him what he already knew: religion is abject nonsense, human beings positively enjoy inflicting cruelty, and our species is prone to, and can coexist with, the most grotesque absurdities.

authentic christendom united on ecumenism, ecology, economy...,

time |  How can one not be moved by the criticism of our “culture of waste” or the emphasis on “the common good” and “the common destination of goods”? And what of the vital importance attributed to the global problem of clean water, which we have underlined for over two decades as we assembled scientists, politicians and activists to explore the challenges of the Mediterranean Sea (1995), the Black Sea (1997), the Danube River (1999), the Adriatic Sea (2002), the Baltic Sea (2003), the Amazon River (2006), the Arctic Sea (2007) and the Mississippi River (2009)? Water is arguably the most divine symbol in the world’s religions and, at the same time, the most divisive element of our planet’s resources.

In the final analysis, however, any dissent over land or water inevitably results in what the Pope’s statement calls “a decline in the quality of human life and a breakdown of society.” How could it possibly be otherwise? After all, concern for the natural environment is directly related to concern for issues of social justice, and particularly of world hunger. A church that neglects to pray for the natural environment is a church that refuses to offer food and drink to a suffering humanity. At the same time, a society that ignores the mandate to care for all human beings is a society that mistreats the very creation of God.

Therefore, the Pope’s diagnosis is on the mark: “We are not faced with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather one complex crisis which is both social and environmental.” Indeed, as he continues to advance, we require “an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the underprivileged, and at the same time protecting nature.” It is also no surprise, then, that the Pope is concerned about and committed to issues like employment and housing.

Invoking the inspiring words of Scripture and the classics of Christian spirituality of East and West (particularly such saints as Basil the Great and Francis of Assisi), while at the same time evoking the precious works of Roman Catholic conferences of bishops throughout the world (especially in regions where the plunder of the earth is identified with the plight of the poor), Pope Francis proposes new paradigms and new policies in contrast to those of “determinism,” “disregard” and “domination.”

In 1997, we humbly submitted that harming God’s creation was tantamount to sin. We are especially grateful to Pope Francis for recognizing our insistence on the need to broaden our narrow and individualistic concept of sin; and we welcome his stress on “ecological conversion” and “reconciliation with creation.” Moreover, we applaud the priority that the papal encyclical places on “the celebration of rest.” The virtue of contemplation or silence reflects the quality of waiting and depending on God’s grace; and by the same token, the discipline of fasting or frugality reveals the power of not-wanting or wanting less. Both qualities are critical in a culture that stresses the need to hurry, the preeminence of individual “wants” over global “needs.”

In the third year of our brother Pope Francis’s blessed ministry, we count it as a true blessing that we are able to share a common concern and a common vision for God’s creation. As we stated in our joint declaration during our pilgrimage to Jerusalem last year:

“It is our profound conviction that the future of the human family depends also on how we safeguard – both prudently and compassionately, with justice and fairness – the gift of creation that our Creator has entrusted to us … Together, we pledge our commitment to raising awareness about the stewardship of creation; we appeal to all people of goodwill to consider ways of living less wastefully and more frugally, manifesting less greed and more generosity for the protection of God’s world and the benefit of His people.

essence has no rights absolute capitalism is bound to acknowledge?

Quadrant |  Despite warnings by moral conservatives, advances in genetics and reproductive technology have created the conditions for a consumer-driven mass eugenics industry. Like it or not, science has is about to pose a slather of moral, ethical and societal dilemmas

 A legal, social and biological revolution is taking place worldwide without much serious thinking of the consequences. Consider this: in Britain the House of Commons recently approved the use of “three-parent IVF” to remove defective mitochondrial DNA from babies.[1]

 

Each year in Britain about 100 children are born with mutated mitochondrial DNA, resulting in about ten cases of fatal disease to the liver, nerves or heart. A new in vitro fertilisation (IVF) technique developed at the University of Newcastle allows doctors to replace a mother’s defective mitochondrial DNA with that of a healthy donor, presumably using pre-implantation sequencing and microscopic operation on the zygote. Mitochondrial DNA does not affect appearance, personality or intelligence, and it reduces kinship—genetic similarity—by only about 1 per cent. Still, the resulting child, though its nuclear DNA would come from its main parents, would have three parents.

Critics warned that this would set society off down a slippery slope to eugenics and “designer babies”. A government official, the “British Fertility Regulator”, replied to this warning with the observation that most people support the therapy. This was intended to assuage the concerns expressed. In fact it would seem to confirm them, since widespread support for a product or service indicates a readiness to adopt it. Sure enough, though there had been little public discussion in advance of the Commons debate, the new techniques were nonetheless approved by a large parliamentary majority. Australian scientists have since called for the British policy to be emulated.[2]

Despite half a century of warnings by moral conservatives, advances in genetics and reproductive technology have created the conditions for a consumer-driven mass eugenics industry. Here is the Oxford dictionary definition of “Eugenics”: “the science of improving a population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics”. It has a bad historical reputation because authoritarian governments have denied civil liberties in the name of eugenics. But as we shall see, both the definition and the reputation of eugenics have been overtaken by advances in science, medicine and marketing. Eugenics has since reappeared in many countries in the form of voluntary genetics counselling—a medical service provided to help parents avoid genetic disorders in their children[3]; and IVF has become a sizeable industry that offers parents the genetic screening of embryos and other eugenic choices.

Genetic improvement is becoming a market phenomenon—a situation discernible as long ago as the 1980s when Daniel Kevles, the leading historian of eugenics in the USA, quoted a biotechnology expert thus: “‘Human improvement’ is a fact of life, not because of the state … but because of consumer demand.”[4]

dna printing

NPR |  Here's something that might sound strange: There are companies now that print and sell DNA.

This trend — which uses the term "print" in the sense of making a bunch of copies speedily — is making particular stretches of DNA much cheaper and easier to obtain than ever before. That excites many scientists who are keen to use these tailored strings of genetic instructions to do all sorts of things, ranging from finding new medical treatments to genetically engineering better crops.

"So much good can be done," says Austen Heinz, CEO of Cambrian Genomics in San Francisco, one of the companies selling these stretches of DNA.

But some of the ways Heinz and others talk about the possible uses of the technology also worries some people who are keeping tabs on the trend.

"I have significant concerns," says Marcy Darnovsky, who directs the Center for Genetics and Society, a genetics watchdog group.

A number of companies have been taking advantage of several recent advances in technology to produce DNA quickly and cheaply. Heinz says his company has made the process even cheaper.

"Everyone else that makes DNA, makes DNA incorrectly and then tries to fix it," Heinz says. "We don't fix it. We just see what's good, what's bad and then we use the correct pieces."

evolution in four dimensions...,

evolution-institute |  One of the most mind-expanding books that you’ll ever read is Evolution in Four Dimensions by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb. They remind us that evolution is about variation, selection, and heredity, not genes. Genes provide one mechanism of heredity but there are others, including epigenetic mechanisms, forms of social learning found in many species, and forms of symbolic thought that are distinctively human. They provide a concise history of why evolutionary theory became so gene-centric during the 20^th Century and how it needs to be expanded to include the other three dimensions.

Eva Jablonka is a Professor at the Cohn Institute for the History of Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University in Israel. I talked with her by Skype on November 6 2014. Our conversation provides a panoramic tour of evolutionary theory based on heredity, not just genes.

DSW: Welcome, Eva. I’m so pleased to be talking with you.

EJ: Hello, David.

DSW: I want to talk to you about the definition of evolution and the need for it to go beyond genetic evolution. This is the topic of your great book, Evolution in Four Dimensions, which I have adopted as the first text for almost all of my courses. That’s how much I think of it. Let’s begin by discussing your background. What is your training that enables you to write such a book?

EJ: I am a geneticist. I did a PhD in genetics and molecular biology; in fact, on DNA methylation and chromatin structure. Before that, I did a Masters thesis in microbiology. At the same time, I was deeply interested in philosophy of biology. While I was doing a PhD in genetics, I was also writing papers for philosophy of biology journals. I thought that I should combine the two because theoretical biology and evolutionary biology need a very strong conceptual basis. I ended up being in some kind of twilight zone between the two things. For me it was a productive combination.

DSW: Great! Everyone knows that Darwin knew nothing about genes. For him, evolution was about variation, selection and heredity, a resemblance between parents and offspring. Nevertheless, nowadays, whenever you say the word “evolution,” most people hear “genes.” That’s true for a professional evolutionist, as much as for the lay public. How is it that the study of evolution became gene-centric?

EJ: It is related to the strong focus on heredity that is apparent already in the second 19th century, when many  theories of heredity were developed. Once evolution became an accepted theory it was clear that one has to think very seriously about heredity. In order to have cumulative evolution, heredity is necessary.  Darwin himself had a theory of heredity, which was, in fact, one of the most Lamarckian theories of heredity around at the time!  The point is, however, that he needed a theory of heredity to consolidate his theory of evolution, and he  did develop one.

The other reason heredity became focal was because  of the Industrial Revolution. The population was growing and there was an urgent need to feed people so improvements in agriculture became pertinent. It was clear that breeding and selection were of great importance, and selection must be based on heritable variation. The study of heritable variation was  therefore  important from a practical point of view.

I, for one, welcome our cytobot overlords...

Nature Scientific Reports | The nanoarchitecture and micromachinery of a cell can be leveraged to fabricate sophisticated cell-driven devices. This requires a coherent strategy to derive cell's mechanistic abilities, microconstruct, and chemical-texture towards such microtechnologies. For example, a microorganism's hydrophobic membrane encapsulating hygroscopic constituents allows it to sustainably withhold a high aquatic pressure. Further, it provides a rich surface chemistry available for nano-interfacing and a strong mechanical response to humidity. Here we demonstrate a route to incorporate a complex cellular structure into microelectromechanics by interfacing compatible graphene quantum dots (GQDs) with a highly responsive single spore microstructure. A sensitive and reproducible electron-tunneling width modulation of 1.63 nm within a network of GQDs chemically-secured on a spore was achieved via sporal hydraulics with a driving force of 299.75 Torrs (21.7% water at GQD junctions). The electron-transport activation energy and the Coulomb blockade threshold for the GQD network were 35 meV and 31 meV, respectively; while the inter-GQD capacitance increased by 1.12 folds at maximum hydraulic force. This is the first example of nano/bio interfacing with spores and will lead to the evolution of next-generation bio-derived microarchitectures, probes for cellular/biochemical processes, biomicrorobotic-mechanisms, and membranes for micromechanical actuation.

biology is technology, time is precious, and stupid only gets in the way...,

H+ |  DARPA, the Defense Research Projects Agency, is perhaps best known for its role as progenitors of the computer networking and the Internet. Formed in the wake of the Soviet Union’s surprise launch of Sputnik, DARPA’s objective was to ensure that the United States would avoid technological surprises in the future. This role was later expanded to causing technological surprises as well.

And although DARPA is and has been the leading source of funding for artificial intelligence and a number of other transhumanist projects, they’ve been missing in action for a while. Nothing DARPA has worked on since seems to have had the societal impact of the invention of the Internet. But that is about to change.

The current director of DARPA is Dr. Arati Prabhakar. She is the second female director of the organization, following the previous and controversial director Regina Dugan who left the government to work at Google. The return to big visions and big adventures was apparent and in stark contrast to Dugan’s leadership of the organization.

Quoted in WIRED, Dugan had, for example, stated that “There is a time and a place for daydreaming. But it is not at DARPA,” and she told a congressional panel in March 2011, “Darpa is not the place of dreamlike musings or fantasies, not a place for self-indulging in wishes and hopes. DARPA is a place of doing.”

Those days are gone. DARPA’s new vision is simply to revolutionize the human situation and it is fully transhumanist in its approach.

The Biological Technologies Office or BTO was announced with little fanfare in the spring of 2014. This announcement didn’t get that much attention, perhaps because the press release announcing the BTO was published on April Fool’s Day.

But DARPA is determined to turn that around, and to help make that happen, they held a two day event in the SIlicon Valley area to facilitate and communicate about radical changes ahead in the area of biotechnologies. Invitees included some of the top biotechnology scientists in the world. And the audience was a mixed group of scientists, engineers, inventors, investors, futurists, along with a handful of government contractors and military personnel.

pheromones and the use of pheromones is the ground level of society. aggregate intelligence REDUX originally posted 11/23/14

radiolab |   What happens when there is no leader? Starlings, bees, and ants manage just fine. In fact, they form staggeringly complicated societies -- all without a Toscanini to conduct them into harmony. This hour of Radiolab, we ask how this happens.

We gaze down at the bottom-up logic of cities, Google, and even our very own brains with fire-flyologists, ant experts, neurologists, a mathematician, and an economist.

high energy to solve the challenge of the planets

wired |  Today we know that Americans can reach the “ends” of the Solar System without resort to nuclear propulsion (though a radioisotope system is handy for generating electricity in the dark beyond Jupiter, where solar arrays become impractical). When President Kennedy gave his speech, however, it was widely assumed that “high-energy” propulsion – which for most researchers meant nuclear rockets – would be desirable for round-trip journeys to Mars and Venus and a necessity for voyages beyond those next-door worlds. In his speech, President Kennedy referred specifically to the joint NASA-Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) ROVER nuclear-thermal rocket program. As the term implies, a nuclear-thermal rocket employs a nuclear reactor to heat a propellant (typically liquid hydrogen) and expel it through a nozzle to generate thrust.

ROVER had begun under U.S. Air Force (USAF)/AEC auspices in 1955. USAF/AEC selected the Kiwi reactor design for nuclear-thermal rocket ground testing in 1957 – a major step forward for the U.S. nuclear rocket program – and USAF relinquished its role the program to NASA in 1958. As President Kennedy gave his speech, U.S. aerospace companies competed for the contract to build NERVA, the first flight-capable nuclear-thermal rocket engine.

Nuclear-thermal propulsion was not the only form of nuclear-powered high-energy propulsion. Another was nuclear-electric propulsion, which can take many forms. This post examines only the form known widely as ion drive.

An ion thruster electrically charges a propellant and expels it at nearly the speed of light using an electric or magnetic field. Because charging propellant and generating electric or magnetic fields require a great deal of electricity, only a small amount of propellant can be ionized and expelled. This means in turn that an ion thruster permits only very gradual acceleration despite the speed at which propellant leaves it; one can, however, in theory operate an ion thruster for months or years, enabling it to push a spacecraft to high velocities.

American rocket pioneer Robert Goddard first wrote of electric propulsion in his notebooks in 1906. By 1916 be had begun experiments with “electrified jets.” Interest faded in the 1920s and resumed in the 1940s. The list of ion drive experimenters and theorists reads like a “Who’s Who” of early space research: L. Shepherd and A. V. Cleaver in Britain, L. Spitzer and H. Tsien in the United States, and E. Sanger in West Germany all contributed to the development of ion before 1955.

valigursky made pretty pictures, but ernst stuhlinger was the man...,

wikipedia |  Stuhlinger was born in Niederrimbach (now part of Creglingen), Württemberg, Germany. At age 23, he earned his doctorate in physics at the University of Tübingen in 1936, working with Otto Haxel, Hans Bethe and his advisor Hans Geiger.^[4][5][6] In 1939 to 1941, he worked in Berlin, on cosmic rays and nuclear physics as an assistant professor at the Berlin Institute of Technology developing innovative nuclear detector instrumentation.^[7]

Despite showing promise as a scientist, in 1941 Stuhlinger was drafted as a private in the German Army and sent to the Russian front, where he was wounded during the Battle of Moscow. Following this, he was in the Battle of Stalingrad and was one of the few members of his unit to survive and make the long, on-foot retreat out of Russia in the cold of winter.^[8] Upon reaching German territory in 1943, Stuhingler was ordered to the rocket development center in Peenemunde where he joined Dr. Wernher von Braun's team. For the remainder of the war, he worked in the field of guidance systems.^[9] In 1954, Stuhlinger assisted in the founding of the Rocket City Astronomical Association (Renamed to the Von Braun Astronomical Society following von Braun's death) where he served as one of the five original directors for the observatory built inside Monte Sano State Park.^[10]

 

Research Scientist Stuhlinger was one of the first group of 126 scientists who emigrated to the United States with von Braun after World War II as part of Operation Paperclip. In the 1945–50 years, he primarily worked on guidance systems in US Army missile programs at Fort Bliss, Texas. In 1950, von Braun's team and the missile programs were transferred to Redstone Arsenal at Huntsville, Alabama. For the next decade, Stuhlinger and other von Braun team members worked on Army missiles, but they also devoted efforts in building an unofficial space capability. He eventually served as director of the Advanced Research Projects Division of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA).^[7] On April 14, 1955, together with many other Paperclip members, he became a naturalized United States citizen.^[1]

theory of capital as power: call for papers

bnarchives |  The theory of capital as power (CasP) offers a radical alternative to mainstream and Marxist theories of capitalism. It argues that capital symbolizes and quantifies not utility or labour but organized power writ large, and that capitalism is best understood and challenged not as a mode of consumption and production, but as a mode of power. Over the past decade, the Forum on Capital as Power has organized many lectures, speaker series and conferences. Our most recent international gatherings include "Capitalizing Power: The Qualities and Quantities of Accumulation” (2012), "The Capitalist Mode of Power: Past, Present and Future" (2011), and "Crisis of Capital, Crisis of Theory" (2010). The 2015 conference seeks to broaden the vista. We are looking for papers that extend and deepen CasP research, compare CasP with other approaches and critique CasP’s methods and findings. Articles could be general or specific, theoretical or empirical, analytical or historical. The conference is open to everyone, with submissions vetted entirely on merit. We accept applications from established and new researchers, in and outside academia. However, we are particularly interested in submissions from young researchers of all ages, including MA and PhD students, private and public employees and free spirits. If you have an interest in the subject and something important – or potentially important – to say, please apply. Financial assistance: we may be able to assist presenters by partly covering the cost of travel and accommodation. This possibility is still tentative; it is conditional on ability to secure sufficient funding. Deadline for abstract submissions: March 20, 2015.

Statistical Physics of Self-Replication

neologism: the midgley effect

resilience |  We imagine ourselves to be members of a thoroughly scientific culture and to be scientifically minded. But, what science tells us is that the evolution of the universe and thus of planet Earth and its inhabitants is random. It is following no predetermined felicitous course. This process of change could be favorable to humans or it could be horrifically dangerous to them.

Our technological innovations will not necessarily shield us from this change. In fact, these innovations are part of the change. They influence climate in a way that is deleterious to the human future; they empty fisheries with a swiftness never before seen; they lead to degradation of the soil, not in isolated areas, but worldwide; and they poison the food, the air and the water in a manner that is global in scale.

A friend refers to this as the Midgley Effect. Chemist Thomas Midgley Jr. was heralded for his work in creating leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons. The story of leaded gasoline is rehearsed every time we pull up to a gas pump and fill our automobiles with UNLEADED gasoline. Lead added to gasoline for the purpose of preventing so-called engine knocking turned out to be very bad for human health. Big surprise!

But chlorofluorocarbons were even worse. Used primarily as refrigerants from the 1930s onward and later as aerosol propellants, they escaped into the air. No one thought to track their destination until the 1970s when one scientist, F. Sherwood Rowland, asked where these compounds ended up. They were by design inert--that is, they didn't readily break down--so they must be somewhere.

That somewhere turned out to be high in the atmosphere attacking the ozone layer which protects humans and other living creatures from excessive radiation from the Sun. Had it not been for Rowland asking a very specific question and receiving a grant to fund the answer, we might well be living with little or no atmospheric protection from dangerous levels of solar radiation. Such are the perils of our technology. In this case, only one curious man stood between the human species and widespread disaster. Chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone-destroying chemicals were subsequently phased out worldwide by the Montreal Protocol.

Midgley--who believed he was doing good things for society and received many awards for his discoveries--turned out to have "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history," according to environmental historian J. R. McNeill. And, it wasn't a good impact.

One of the pillars of our modern techno-utopian outlook is that invention is presumed to be good and should not be unduly impeded. It turns out, however, that our own science has shown that inventions can be potentially catastrophic.

So, now we come to the central contradiction of the modern outlook. We rely on science. We say we believe in science. But what science tells us about the trajectory of the universe and thus human beings is no more complicated that what "Planet of the Apes" tells us. There is no particular or preordained direction for the future development of humans or the universe we live in.

Yet, the techno-utopian vision that we cling to as modern people rejects this view even as we say our favored instrument of progress is science. Thus, we must conclude that our dissenting party guest's reply above--"They'll figure something out. They always have."--enunciates a religious belief, not a scientific observation.