WE ARE ALL DESIGNISTS:

Richard Dawkins on reverse engineering evolution’s optimal beauty (Richard Dawkins, 9/17/24, Big Think)

Reverse engineering assumes that the object facing us had a purpose in the mind of a competent designer, a purpose that can be guessed. The reverse engineer sets up a hypothesis as to what a sensible designer might have had in mind, then checks the mechanism to see if it fits the hypothesis. Reverse engineering works well for animal bodies as well as for man-made machines. The fact that the latter were deliberately designed by conscious engineers while the former were designed by unconscious natural selection makes surprisingly little difference…

Sublime. Dawkins has always been a self-parody.

THERE ARE NO SPOTTED OR BARRED OWLS, JUST OWLS:

Hybrids between two species can produce “swarms” that flourish (RICHARD PALLARDY, 7/30/2024, Ars Technica)

When two related species overlap geographically, they may form what are called “hybrid zones.” Some of the most obvious hybrid zones occur at the boundaries of divergent ecosystems. A plant species adapted to one soil type may exchange genes with a related plant adapted to another, and their offspring thus develop a population that thrives in an intermediate area with characteristics of both soil types.

These hybrid zones are often quite stable over time, with insignificant introgression, or breeding back, to the parent populations. That’s because the genes that serve the organisms in the hybrid zone may not be particularly useful to those outside of it, so they do not spread more widely.

Sometimes, however, hybridization events become something more. They turn into swarms. The first instance of the term “hybrid swarm” occurred in 1926 in a Nature article about New Zealand flora.

“As far as biologically defining the difference between that zone and a swarm, I’ve been struggling to find a nice, clean definition,” Fant said.

“A hybrid swarm is the ultimate erosion of two species into some other thing that’s a combination of both,” suggested Scott A. Taylor, an associate professor at the University of Colorado who has worked on hybridization in chickadees.

Sic transit species.

MORE TURTLES!:

Scientists unveil ‘missing’ law of nature in landmark discovery (Harriet Brewis,

In a paper published in the PNAS journal on 16 October, a multidisciplinary team from some of the US’s top institutes and universities, unveiled a new law claiming to do just that.

In a nutshell, their law states that evolution is not limited to life on Earth, it also occurs in other massively complex systems – from planets to atoms.
This means that these systems naturally “evolve” to states of greater diversity, and complexity.

In other words, the researchers found evolution to be a common feature of the natural world’s complex systems which, according to the Carnegie Institution for Science, comprise the following characteristics:

“They are formed from many different components, such as atoms, molecules, or cells, that can be arranged and rearranged repeatedly.”

They are subject to “natural processes that cause countless different configurations to be formed.”

And only a small fraction of these configurations survive via a process of natural selection called “selection for function”.


According to the researchers, regardless of whether the system is living or nonliving, when a new configuration works and function improves, evolution occurs.

Shorter nutshell: stuff that works works.

PITY THE POOR DARWINISTS:

Hybrid ‘Brolar Bears’ Could Spread Through The Arctic as The Planet Warms (CARLY CASSELLA, 11/17/22, Science Alert)

In 2006, a hunter in the Canadian Arctic shot a bear that didn’t look like the others. DNA testing would later confirm the animal was actually part grizzly, part polar bear.

In the years since, ‘pizzlies’ or ‘brolar bears’ have popped up more and more in North America, and now researchers in Siberia are warning the same could happen elsewhere in the icy north.

WE JUST BICKER OVER THE DESIGNER:

PODCAST: Samuel Wilkinson — What Evolution and Human Nature Imply About the Meaning of Our Existence (Skeptic, 3/04/24)

With respect to our evolution, nature seems to have endowed us with competing dispositions, what Wilkinson calls the dual potential of human nature. We are pulled in different directions: selfishness and altruism, aggression and cooperation, lust and love.

By using principles from a variety of scientific disciplines, Yale Professor Samuel Wilkinson provides a framework for human evolution that reveals an overarching purpose to our existence.

Wilkinson claims that this purpose, at least one of them, is to choose between the good and evil impulses that nature has created within us. Our life is a test. This is a truth, as old as history it seems, that has been espoused by so many of the world’s religions. From a certain framework, Wilkinson believes that these aspects of human nature—including how evolution shaped us—are evidence for the existence of a God, not against it.

MORALITY IS THE CONTROL OF EMOTION:

Rock, Paper, Scissors, and Race (ARNOLD KLING, FEB 23, 2024, In My Tribe)

In thinking about The End of Race Politics, a new book by Coleman Hughes, I came up with a description of the race debate using the metaphor of the game Rock, Paper, Scissors. I assign a stance to each of the three symbols.

Rock is individualism. Treat people as individuals, not as members of a race.

Paper is equalitarianism. Treat differences in average outcomes by race as evidence of unfairness.

Scissors is realism. Explain differences in average outcomes by race by appealing to heredity and culture.

In the game, paper covers rock, scissors cuts paper, and rock breaks scissors. Translating from the metaphor, the most compelling argument against individualism is equalitarianism. The most compelling argument against equalitarianism is realism. And the most compelling argument against realism is individualism. […]

The problem with individualism (Rock) is that people intuitively find inequality offensive. If we treat people as individuals, and the resulting outcomes are unequal by race, this will not be acceptable. The unequal outcomes will be viewed as a sign that something is wrong with our society.

The problem with equalitarianism (Paper) is that it requires people to deny, implicitly or explicitly, that average differences by race in inherited or cultural characteristics can be significant. The realists want to confront the equalitarians over this.

The problem with realism (Scissors) is that it uncages the demon of racial stereotyping and prejudice. The individualists will insist that we should pay attention to differences across individuals, not differences across races.

CAIN WON:

Hunter-gatherers were violently wiped off the map by farmers, DNA reveals (Bronwyn Thompson, February 12, 2024, New Atlas)

Researchers from Sweden’s Lund University analyzed skeletons and teeth found in what is now Denmark, and found that 5,900 years ago, the region underwent a swift and total population change. Prior to this, Danish Mesolithic people of the Maglemose, Kongemose and Ertebølle cultures – genetically related to other Western European hunter-gatherers – were prominent inhabitants. But when Neolithic farmers arrived, an abrupt shift can be seen in DNA records, with next to no genetic contribution from the local hunter-gatherers.

Tracing the DNA timeline, the researchers could see that the hunter-gatherers had been swiftly wiped out by the late Stone Age, in what they suspect was a very bloody and very thorough takeover.

LIBERTARIANISM FOR THE PRETENTIOUS:

Robert Sapolsky is Determined to be Wrong (Richard Cocks, 12/12/23, Voegelin View)

In episode 693 of the podcast Modern Wisdom, Sapolsky, brought up an Orthodox Jew, reveals that at the age of fourteen he realized categorically that determinism is true, there is no purpose, and that there is no God. This bleak conclusion has never left him. This is the kind of age where one might consider the possibility that one’s parents and other people are actually robots and that solipsistically, one could be the only conscious actual human; whether other people are really seeing the same colors as you, and so on. Such puerile speculations normally recede into oblivion. Not for Sapolsky.

It’s like letting that teen reading of Atlas Shrugged determine your adulthood.