Archive for July, 2010
Книжное обозрение – Пушки, микробы и сталь написана Джаред Даймонд – основные причины распространения сегодняшней власти и богатства во всем мире (по-английски)
Jul 20th
(Потому что наши русские читатели очень важны, мы сейчас в поисках профессионального переводчика. Мы приносим свои извинения, что на данный момент, мы можем лишь предоставить текст на английском языке.)
What would a roundabout superficial brainstorming session yield as answer to the question of why is the global arrangement of wealth and power distributed in the way we see it now-days? Why did the European colonialists manage to dominate and decimate the Maya, Inca, and Aztec empires or the nomadic hunter gatherer tribes of the Americas, Africa, and Australia, but not the other way around?
Can the shallow assumptions about the genetic inferiority, concerning either intellectual or brute physical fitness, that the conquered societies purportedly were the phenotypic manifestations of, be the correct explanations for the observed happenings? Could the Conquistadors’ genes have made them more easily adaptable to whatever environmental pressures nature contrived in their path towards conquering the major societies of the Americas?
Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel will offer an au courant, astute explanation about the systemic distribution of wealth all around the world, and will flat-out deny one of the premises that started this article, the one concerning the supposedly intellectual inferiority of the hunter gatherer tribes. The genes responsible for the mental abilities of the less wealthy, less powerful, less literate, less industrialized societies that roamed all continents, and that still roam certain places on this planet are certainly, Jared argues, not to be considered as having any significant importance into the developments of the last 10000 years. Hunter gatherer tribes are not more primitive, but are the result of the environmental hold backs, be it the scarce resources, geography, or the improper climate that bedeviled these tribes in one form or another during the lapse of time.
So if this purported difference in intelligence between Eurasians and their conquered societies is not a reason worth taking into account if we want to answer the above questions, what are the real causes for the observed differences in wealth and power? Why wasn’t Africa, with its more than 5 million years of human evolutionary history, the launch pad of colonizations, technology, and industrialization? What are the ins and outs of the causes that made it almost sure that Eurasia will satisfy the adequate conditions in which industrialized societies based on literacy, steel, and technology could easily evolve and conquer the rest of the world?
The answers to the above questions are rather counter-intuitive, and some are certainly cynical. First of all to put an end to all theories that struggle with human genetics as a cause for the observed facts let me state this: There would be little time for much significant differential evolution of intelligence in the different tribes that roamed the various continents of our planet; the few hundreds of ancestors of all living humans today took an exit out of Africa some 100.000 yrs ago, too early for significant genetic mutations to have happened. More to that, look at industrialized societies today! Besides the assault of useful information of course, today’s children grow with a shallow view of life, being bombarded all day long with stupid useless hogwash memes generated by their TV programs or their Facebook account.
Contrary to them, the children of the remaining hunter gatherer tribes that live in our times (Papua New Guinea) stretch out their mental muscles early in their lives, having to cope with wild life, scarce resources, spatial memory and navigation, territory memorizing, and other types of issues that take their survival skills to the edge. So, maybe society and culture, not genetics, should be considered a significant factor in the overall intelligence of today’s humans. Therefore, you can hardly say people of hunter gatherer tribes are intellectually inferior to us. So for the sake of argument, Jared argues, let’s consider them equal.
In 11000 B.C. all things were dull, similar, and un-experimented. All tribes looked almost the same, and behaved almost the same as if nothing significant had happened since the time our ancestors escaped Africa 100.000 yrs ago. But a strange force accelerated the evolution of the tribes from the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of civilization from Western Asia, which included the once fertile regions of Mesopotamia and the Levant, delimited by the dry climate of the Syrian Desert to the south and the Anatolian highlands to the north. In this region plant and animal domestication began to appear.
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Book Review – “The Selfish Gene” written by Richard Dawkins – We’re slaves of the genes, programmed by memes, no god supervenes
Jul 4th
Why are people? The title of chapter one properly defines the reason for this book’s existence. Why their worries, why their struggles, fears, lovings, hatings? What is our purpose on this planet and ultimately in the universe? Why all the bad things in order to feed our visceral hunger for pleasure? Why does the phrase “nature red in teeth and claw” make such a perfect opening epigram for any biology book?
Naive lily-livered eschewers run all their lives on the treadmill of ignorance diverting their thinking from the answers to the above questions, beguiling themselves to some hopped destination where all things must be about peace, pleasure, and the good of man. Call it heaven, nirvana, ultimately the reason for all this life of struggle. These are the theists not famished at conception with the love for the real truth, be it white, gray, or black. They will never have the guts to face reality, they will always be driven and controlled by emotions. And what do you expect to happen when you have individuals with this kind of agenda up their sleeves? The Bible, brain-washed children, a general milieu of malevolent ineluctable set of memes from which society can have no hope of freeing its fettered limbs from the leashes of nature. And in the middle you have the people who didn’t have the time to make up their minds, and this book is for them in particular.
Yes, life can be fun. But there are myriad of antithetical examples both in the animal kingdom and in the human society in which life is anything but innocuous. This book is about the truth of these facts and the reasons for it being this way. Its purpose is not to feed the emotional thirst for positiveness, safety, and well being. Its embodied astute goal is to climb the ladder of truth, blithely analyzing the causes and effects, the ontology and systemic organization of nature and its products: Us and all living things that roam planet Earth.
What is this book’s mission? To explain biology’s gears, levers and pulleys, individual selfishness, altruism, behavioral strategies in animals and consequently in us humans, presenting all of these using the gene, that is, the slightly small set of bits from the chromosome that is capable of surviving meiotic division a significant amount of time for it to be considered a long living sequence of DNA, as the single unit of natural selection.
So, although counter-intuitive, the consequences of adopting this point of view apparently transforms us human beings into mere puppets, zombie vehicle robots designed, programmed and polished for eons by our genes in order to preserve their prodigiously long chain of nucleotides. That is, blindly designed, blindly programmed, for genes are only mechanistic stable arrangements of molecules that sprouted in the non-steered, full of ingredients but lacking design, primordial soup; genes are the software that bootstrapped themselves in the Multiverse from shabby tooled beginnings. Atom by atom, molecule by molecule, this software began to be assembled by the environmental machinery that is planet Earth some 4 billion years ago.
Therefore, Natural Selection does not select between ecosystems, or species, or groups, or even individuals, but between genes. This so counter-intuitive approach is tantamount, Richard argues, to the cyclic change in perception when one looks at a Necker Cube; from time to time, as you look at the cube, it seems that the point of view from which you look at it changes its position. The same thing happens when we analyze what does the “Necker Cube of Natural Selection” act upon when it selects between structures that need to survive. But unlike in the Necker Cube analogy where any point of view might be the right one to look at, in the case of analyzing natural selection’s inner workings some points of view might be more needless than others. Ecosystems, groups, species, and individuals do not fight for dominance, instead, the structures they emerge from do it: their Genes. There is no act done for the good of species. Instead they’re acts done for the good of the genes, more exactly, for the good of complexes of genes. The genes’ blind, blithe, and most importantly, unconscious acts are iconoclastic image destroyers for the mis-construed whelps of group selection. Let’s analyze this book chapter by chapter.
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Рецензия на книгу – ‘Эгоистичный ген’ написана Ричард Докинз – Мы рабы генов, запрограммированные мемов, не бог наступит (по-английски)
Jul 4th
(Потому что наши русские читатели очень важны, мы сейчас в поисках профессионального переводчика. Мы приносим свои извинения, что на данный момент, мы можем лишь предоставить текст на английском языке.)
Why are people? The title of chapter one properly defines the reason for this book’s existence. Why their worries, why their struggles, fears, lovings, hatings? What is our purpose on this planet and ultimately in the universe? Why all the bad things in order to feed our visceral hunger for pleasure? Why does the phrase “nature red in teeth and claw” make such a perfect opening epigram for any biology book?
Naive lily-livered eschewers run all their lives on the treadmill of ignorance diverting their thinking from the answers to the above questions, beguiling themselves to some hopped destination where all things must be about peace, pleasure, and the good of man. Call it heaven, nirvana, ultimately the reason for all this life of struggle. These are the theists not famished at conception with the love for the real truth, be it white, gray, or black. They will never have the guts to face reality, they will always be driven and controlled by emotions. And what do you expect to happen when you have individuals with this kind of agenda up their sleeves? The Bible, brain-washed children, a general milieu of malevolent ineluctable set of memes from which society can have no hope of freeing its fettered limbs from the leashes of nature. And in the middle you have the people who didn’t have the time to make up their minds, and this book is for them in particular.
Yes, life can be fun. But there are myriad of antithetical examples both in the animal kingdom and in the human society in which life is anything but innocuous. This book is about the truth of these facts and the reasons for it being this way. Its purpose is not to feed the emotional thirst for positiveness, safety, and well being. Its embodied astute goal is to climb the ladder of truth, blithely analyzing the causes and effects, the ontology and systemic organization of nature and its products: Us and all living things that roam planet Earth.
What is this book’s mission? To explain biology’s gears, levers and pulleys, individual selfishness, altruism, behavioral strategies in animals and consequently in us humans, presenting all of these using the gene, that is, the slightly small set of bits from the chromosome that is capable of surviving meiotic division a significant amount of time for it to be considered a long living sequence of DNA, as the single unit of natural selection.
So, although counter-intuitive, the consequences of adopting this point of view apparently transforms us human beings into mere puppets, zombie vehicle robots designed, programmed and polished for eons by our genes in order to preserve their prodigiously long chain of nucleotides. That is, blindly designed, blindly programmed, for genes are only mechanistic stable arrangements of molecules that sprouted in the non-steered, full of ingredients but lacking design, primordial soup; genes are the software that bootstrapped themselves in the Multiverse from shabby tooled beginnings. Atom by atom, molecule by molecule, this software began to be assembled by the environmental machinery that is planet Earth some 4 billion years ago.
Therefore, Natural Selection does not select between ecosystems, or species, or groups, or even individuals, but between genes. This so counter-intuitive approach is tantamount, Richard argues, to the cyclic change in perception when one looks at a Necker Cube; from time to time, as you look at the cube, it seems that the point of view from which you look at it changes its position. The same thing happens when we analyze what does the “Necker Cube of Natural Selection” act upon when it selects between structures that need to survive. But unlike in the Necker Cube analogy where any point of view might be the right one to look at, in the case of analyzing natural selection’s inner workings some points of view might be more needless than others. Ecosystems, groups, species, and individuals do not fight for dominance, instead, the structures they emerge from do it: their Genes. There is no act done for the good of species. Instead they’re acts done for the good of the genes, more exactly, for the good of complexes of genes. The genes’ blind, blithe, and most importantly, unconscious acts are iconoclastic image destroyers for the mis-construed whelps of group selection. Let’s analyze this book chapter by chapter.








