Category: Evolution


US military Might …or might not.

Filed under: Evolution, War — Leave a comment
February 12, 2010

War is a driver of evolution.So much of Civilsation is shaped by the mother of all needs …War.

 War itself has clearly  evolved  with Nuclear weapons making War only possible between nations that either don’t possess them or between nations in which only one possesss them.

In the past , throughout our shared history, wars were waged with the belief that they were winnable…hence the effort.Now Wars are becoming less winnable. And they just don’t pay like they used to.

Loot is hard to come   by( compare the cost of War to any possible ‘loot’).The US , UK , Saddam Hussein , Taliban and OBL all lost money( and more ) on their latest round ..theMother of all Wars 2 , the  of the Titans…or civilisations ..or TWAT.(Packaging was thoughtfully  put together).

The US , the mother of all militaries , will only wage war if it knows it will win..( the Powell Doctrine)….hence only minor opponents need  apply .The funny thing is that small players also know they will lose militarily but  that they only have to turn the US Might into a ‘might not bother to finish ’ to declare victory.

Is War  evolving itself out of exsistence.Contrary to the WSJ types…Irans nuclear capability will make war less possible than more probable…look at the hot heads of the Sub-continent and see how they just can’t go to war now.

Economic damage is the way forward.Economic gain from war has had its day.The bombing of Gaza’s factories are the way forward ( from a point of evolution …not my personal desire ).

If we can’t do it militarily …it will just have to go to the new economic arteries of the age …the internet.

The US is marking time with  the video gaming model of UAVs.The Chinese are going for the new model….the jugular..the internet itself.The war does’nt carry on online..it is for the line.

Economic damage through mutually assured destruction (M.A.D) through Government bonds will hold the pair in freeze for the moment though.

But Maximum Economic Damage Warfare is here to stay.(M.E.D for short).

The Chinese ( or Russians )will have an uphill struggle with net warfare .The net itself is a evoltution from ARPANET , a US military project ….designed specifically  survive warfare.

The Archilles heel will always be the internet behemoths..like Micrsoft that are lazy about innovation and just primarily concerned with milking an elderly cash cow…Windows.

Thats why I see large companies like Google and Microsoft as a weakness of the market ..like the oil barons of yesteryears.Not a signature of a healthy market.

Sorry about post….I felt like a waffle.

An afterthought..the waffle continues….

How could the ICANN or WWW consortium be populated with politicians and then we have a new weapon.Remove a country from the Web and trash its economy as punishment from breaking some UN rules.What if the UN security council demands it.If a weapon exists…it will find a user.

I don’t see the web as a uniter of people..its free as Air and about as unifying as the air ‘we’ breathe.But remove the air…we have a killer.

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Mirror neurons , Evil and WiFi .

Filed under: Evolution, Journalism, Psychology, Religion, Terrorism, Uncategorized, War — Leave a comment
February 10, 2010

Posted on Brain Blogger …but with spelling corrections and added thoughts

http://brainblogger.com/2010/02/09/i-feel-your-pain-the-neural-basis-of-empathy/#comment-597971

Its interesting that the level of empathy we have for each other  might have its roots within our sensori-motor mirror neurons…i.e we have to see ( be within sensory reach) to feel anothers pain.That ability is like ‘ line of sight’  WiFi synapsing between different brains….as effective as if they were really hard wired . 
That would be useful because we would’nt be able to compete if we empathised with the competition ( over the hill and out of sight….or mass Media air-brushed ).
Maybe the action of group dance could synchronise a tribe to de-sychronise  & overcome the mirror neurons temporarily when we go spears in hand, face to face,  to kill fellow humans in another tribe.That synchronicity duality would be Media based today.
We co-operate to compete.So somewhere along the line…our ability to empathise must be able to be suspendable  , so that we can  indeed do  terrible things to fellow humans …as that is what we have evolved  to do .
I think we have rituals/memes that do this .Dances..music…media ..dis-information…I believe we pro-actively need to suspend ‘ the humanity ‘ we inherently perceive  in others , who are to be  the object of our terror..so that we can inflict productive amounts of terror upon that other set of individuals .In essence ..a short cut around our mirror neurons.
Its a horrible thing to say in words….but I’m struck by how we always have a need to de-humanise people first ..before we can efficiently co-operate to commit the very evil we declare ourselves to be fighting.

Is Religion such a short-cut ? A steering comittee for mirror neurons that can promotes group self -empathy but can productively short-cut and suspend the ‘empathy ‘neurons.

Spirituality would be the opposite end ( the side that tips the scales  towards more empathy and fewer short -cuts /work arounds  the mirror neurons).

I still believe religion begins from close proximity living..but here is the mechanism that could propagate it.

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Religion evolution

Filed under: Evolution, History, Religion — Leave a comment
January 31, 2010

Waffly post by me from elsewhere

http://brainblogger.com/

Heres a narrative…religion as a conditioner and agency for stressed family groupings (higher densities)

Religion positively promotes and is initially created by close proximity living…such as Caves , or in resource dense areas that can sustain higher densities.
The child is denied free will and has to succumb to a hierarchy through intense parental subjugation.
The loss of free will is compensated by a population that can bear to live much more closely to each other .Emotional outbursts from close living could increase violations of the moral codes. Moral codes ( being innate )are re-ratified through taboo and ritual.That inner repressed self is allowed to burst out / channelled towards a ‘parent God – sinful child who can become good ‘ narrative…the inner child can re-channel the damage done by the branding done by the parent by loving an outer parent…invisible …but very apt for a love that was lost in childhood and kept unconscious.( invisible itself )…
The upshot is higher densities , stratified societies.Very sucessful.So sucessful that they can sustain Atheism…a reaction against that parental authority paradigm or just open defiance from individuals who have a need to express their non- belief….only possible in societies that have grown beyond the sustenace of the religion paradigm and are generating new paradigms.
But when societies fail…its religion that comes back.
We see reason everywhere as we move away from childhood .We serialise , intentionalise everything.
The kernel of emotional damage is never fully assimilated and we are forever projecting it outwardly…so our emotions become to flavour the outer world as they are left orphaned within us….
So we see intentionality in animals and the Sun and rain…..
The inner damage also causes us to seek more security amonsgt each other and that positively re-inforces the hierarchy.
The left brain -right brain hierarchy is the first hierarchy that is the cornerstone .The parent affects the emotional right side and effects changes in the left brain…hence re-inforcing a naturally occuring hierarchy.The right brain spills over into the outer world and the left brain channels new explanations that help it cope ( intentionalizing the inanimate..idols..sun moon….and the animate….animals ) .
Those that are left feeling insecure from the parental ‘conditioning’ seek more security and become ‘conservatives’….those that have a more fluid relationship with both cerebral hemispheres ..can become liberals.Those that have an emotional sides that career wildly within ..uncontainable by the left brain..are potential prophets.
Smaller religious societies require a higher proportion of rightwingers.When they get incredibly sucessful…they need liberals to occassionaly steer them onto novel or new paths ( social democracies).
Sorry if it bit waffly.

SECOND POST

Javaid Akhtar
February 01, 2010 | Permalink

This is my angle ..

Hunter Gatherers have the lightest density footprint and have a flat hierarchy , little or no religion and a looser or no specific bonding between children and parents( unstratified) .They are the baseline of our evolution.
Tribes have lineages ( requires a strong child-parent bond) and require alot of co-operation ,leadership , division of clans = hierarchy ) to compete with other tribes ( high population density) .Hunter Gatherers skim of the landscape and can only exist in a low density pattern.

The Toba event caused the population worldwide to decrease synchronously 60k years ago
and the population increases thereafter synchronised the rise of religions/civilisations
to the last 30k years as population densities recovered.

The first border war we fight as individuals is for the personal/self space we feel that
is ours.An authority figure will puncture this space and demand modulation to your behavioural
output ( the same pathway that makes you vunerable to hypnotherapy in later life…I’m sure Hunter
Gatherers are not hypnotizable ).This involves a loss of self and a gain for the larger group.
The benefits to the larger group eventually accrue back to the individual..which is why religion is so sucessful..This border skirmish is usually a singular event and the parent always win .They are larger physically ( as is God) , all powerful as compared to the child ( as God is), and can punish and withhold their love…all attributes of Gods.
If the insecurity of that breach causes you to seek more security , you are a right -winger ( good for the group).
If it causes some insecurity but only enough for you to despise the cause of the insecurity..
you will become a revolutionary , anarchist anti-authoutarian personality ( no good for
the group).If the insecurity leaves you in neither camp..you can empathise both ways ..you become a
liberal.
If you seek spirituality from a sense of weakness within..you will seek the comfort of the
the establised ‘ church’.This is a religious person in the fullest sense ( a follower , never a prophet)
A spiritual person …has a sense that the locus of the events that matter in a religious sense…are
within them selves..( quite correctly) and not in institutions..more the individual.
These people are irrelevent to the group hierarchy but become nucleators when a large grouping needs to re-align and politically re-define itself.These spiritiual nucleators are always around , but at oppurtune times , the larger group will re-orient itself using a nucleator …a new prophet is born.

The left+up vs the right+down arena of the brain and the relationship of these two are the backbone
for this interplay .

3rd post

I was going by Alan MacFarlane’s description of Hunter Gatherer societies.( less to no religion ..less to no heirarchy …both not characteristics of large scale societies)
I’ve tried an overall wide arc-ing view.Its not binary choices anywhere along the line…
but I expect less religion in early populations as density decreases and religion as positively present in every large scale/ high density grouping.
We evolved under the environmental pressure of other human beings ( we were the environment ) ..so even under conditions 150k + years ago..we had already been exposed to population pressure.( smaller bodies but stable brain sizes indicate that) .But its close proximity living that causes religion.
And religion itself then helps close proximity living.
After a certain tipping point..the Religious memes would have fought each other into existence ( less organised Tribal , Hunter Gatherers get swept aside )..leaving aside a meme ( religion ) that is propagating itself.

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Conservative Right wing Dance ( Politics and line dancing conservatives)

Filed under: Evolution — Leave a comment
January 22, 2010

 Socieites’ Conservatives/ Rightwingers….at Dance

Conservatives have a problem having to resolve between  two or more pathways …in a  cerebral way…They prefer easily defined pathways that  do not require  of them to constantly re-take , re-analyse  decisions.

It can be shown through brains scans within the conflict resolving area of the brain ..the Anterior Cingulate Gyrus.(.it shows up in the fMRI.)

In the links below..you can see  the reflection of that in the dance of two religious conservative societies…an absence of personal direction and hiding within a wider group and led  through pre-programmed steps allows for the ‘freedom’ of the conservative to help  them to partake in a practice that would normally be threatening to a conservative.  i.e the free movement of the body to emotional enticing sound patterns. ( very dangerous = multiple pathway decisions reoccurring in rapid fire repetition).

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-kYf8YKSkc  Arab Line dancing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FXP9Is_i7g USA line dancing

Same thing

 .Individualistic dancing ..say a shamanistic trance would have to be for smaller groups as they do not re-inforce attitudes that lend themselves to large scale human groupings

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Causes of Decussation

Filed under: Evolution, prediction — 3 Comments
January 11, 2010

I think it occurs in all vertebrates because we are all food for some other vertebrate and need resilience in the face of an attack.

If we get hit , attacked on the sides of our body,( fish….the original vertebrate is all ’sides‘) we would still be able to react quickly on that side because the software is located in neural hardware on the opposite site of the ‘crash/fight’ side.i.e the contralateral neocortex.

Otherwise a sideways smash into the body /head would disable us momentarily on that side…causing us to turn into lunch.

By keeping the muscles and the neural controllers separate on  opposing sides , we get  resilience in the face of attack.

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Um…Language is music

Filed under: Evolution, Language and literature — Leave a comment
November 24, 2009

Music predates language and the other half of the cortex involved in language is more musical and emotional.

I think we should view language as a type of data carrying music.Its like morse code……breath out ( vowel= long dash) …obstruct breath ( consonant = dot)..A multi level morse code because we have 5 types of vowels and many consonants but they must alternate  ( a rhythm ) unlike in morse code.We have to have ….vowel , consonant ,vowel , consonant ,vowel . consonant ,etc.

And musical quality of the langauge is preserved by the pitch and intonation….the primieval background quality that points to its origins.

And language must be sung.Thats why we um and ar…um um um…..its about continuing the rhythm of the musical quality of the langauge.

It does  not help to remember what we want to say by inserting an um into the sentence…but it preserves the musical continuity of the sentence rather ( as opposed to a silent gap at the wrong time) than a help to find a word.

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Hello Buddy

Filed under: Evolution — Leave a comment
September 27, 2009

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8268584.stm

Hookworms are now our missing immune system ‘friend’ that we co-evolved with.

What with maggots helping to clean up dead flesh in injuries, I wonder if any other slimies are out there  waiting to be recognised…( Cockroaches..please step up to the mic and tell us what counter-intuitive things you are really up to in the Kitchen …curing cancer ..World hunger?)

I always thought that dust mites came about with the middle-classes ( with the habit of wanting carpets under your feet inside the house and therefore creating huge nylon-wool forests with skin cells for ground foliage teeming with mites roaming freely ..protected from the huge winds caused by the vacuum-in-the-sky  by  dense endless thickets of slender nylon-wool trees. The only thing the vacuum winds can lift is the zillions of leaves laying scattered everywhere..mite poo.Yuk!)

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Help me…I’m not from Africa

Filed under: Evolution — Leave a comment
September 9, 2009

A reply to people who hate the idea of coming from Africa.There is a strand of thought that is arrayed permanently on finding ways of disproving that they ( humans ) have an African ancestry ( which means that ..bluntly to them ..that a Black man is their  Daddy..which is a ‘pea  under the mattress’ to their notions of genetic superiority).This newspaper article seems to suggest  something but doesn’t say anything new at all….but some fools are reading between the lines and nothing else..and see a  flaw  in the Out-Of-Africa model .

 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/a-skull-that-rewrites-the-history-of-man-1783861.html

My reply to some bozo

Its funny how uncomfortable the Out-Of-Africa model made some folks…espicially the non-Africans amongst us..
Desparately seeing a conspiracy by politically correct thugs is a new one on me though.
All Homo Sapiens came from a single African Mother.I’m not African…I could’nt care less  if my ancestors were African or not….but is interesting how a section of the Western Asians  ( call themselves europeans ..thinking they are a continent) & Eastern Asians ( Chinese) love to day dream they are derived from another species…anything but African.
How fragile is a collective ego.
This article only discusses the early family tree of bipedal homonids.Homo-Sapiens ..unfortunately for you…still come from Africa…..sincere commisurations.Hope you get over it.

I have a book on evolution that I bought from Amazon two months ago that already suggested that Hominds may have been introduced back to Africa before flowering into homo-sapiens millions of years later..so I know this is not new ..and does’nt undo anything of the Out-Of-Africa evidence ..which is multiplely proven ..unfortunately for some.

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Artificial Intelligence

Filed under: Comedy, Evolution — Leave a comment
September 6, 2009

An article discussing AI.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327231.100-why-ai-is-a-dangerous-dream.html

“I would rework Minsky’s definition as the science of making machines do things that lead us to believe they are intelligent”

“It is the person who designs the algorithms and programs the machine who is intelligent, not the machine itself.”

“But accepting mind as a physical entity does not tell us what kind of physical entity it is. It could be a physical system that cannot be recreated by a computer.”

This Robotics expert is full of childish shyte.AI does’nt need to mimic a human in form or in sentience.

If a non-human physical system ( a computer system) can take and hold / alter a data-set freely , observe patterns and make accurate predictions with a data-set that is then validated …you have an intelligent system….for example..when we get to the stage a system can theorise  a new aspect of  physics/biology from a self-sustaining data-set  without instigation or input from a human …we then have AI.

It does’nt require it to pee or smell like a human , have legs and look sexy , compete with the fragile ego’s of Metaphysically inclined psuedo-philosophers , or pick up a pair a shoes and ties some  laces up ( all of some of  the extensive  astonishing deeds the human is soooo capable of doing but dumb ass computers can’t…).

Man is  fragile &  ego-centric.A set of Algorithms and a data-set  are going to take a huge  proverbial piss on his fire one day.

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Life on Mars

Filed under: Evolution — Leave a comment
August 6, 2009

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8186314.stm

Long before this I read a convincing account from a renegade scientist who believed that sophisticated searches for life on Mars , back in the 70′s , 80′s , were silly because all that was needed was a check on the presence of methane ( being easily broken down…methane would indicate possibility of life because it would have to continually produced from somewhere .But  the lack of …would indicate an absolute lack of life).

So the  lack of methane was proof of a lack of life. Well..its been found.

I believe that the most astonishing case scenario would be that there is only life on Earth.That would be truly astounding.If the greatest news report of all-time hits the media ..which a life on Mars proof would be treated as ….I’m just going to let rip a big yawn.

Humans have a problem about being objective about their existence ( its soooo special and that we are unique) that if it really is true..that we are alone…that would truly be jaw dropping news.

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