Bill @wjbeaver@qoto.org

#originoflife #informationtheory #ComplexSystems #CollectiveBehavior #evolutionarydynamics #biogels #informationtheory #philosophy #philosophyofscience #philosophyofmaths #qotojournal #biology #evolution #economy #incomedistribution #anthropology #culturalevolution #archeology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBkFu1g5PlE

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#originoflife #informationtheory #ComplexSystems #CollectiveBehavior #evolutionarydynamics #biogels #informationtheory #philosophy #philosophyofscience #philosophyofmaths #qotojournal #biology #evolution #economy #incomedistribution #anthropology #culturalevolution #archeology

"History is a pack of tricks we play on the dead" Voltaire

Tobler's First Law of Geography is: "... everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things." In spatial statistics this is formalized in the notion of correlation, near objects in space are more correlated than far objects. This applies to time also, near events in time are more correlated than distant events in time. Using Steven Jay Gould's famous "tape of Evolution" thought experiment for human history, rewind the tape back a week and then replay history. Would we notice much difference? Rewind it a thousand years? We might notice a difference. certain things correlate further back in time than others. Evolution gives us correlations going back billions of years. Species millions of years. Human cultures are much shorter, "Western Culture" as a global culture only goes back a few hundred years and for the most part was violently imposed upon the world. Archeology has returned to listening to the stories of remaining native peoples and in North America it has been shown that these peoples are direct ancestors to the peoples of the great pueblos of the southwest and the mound builders of the eastern woodlands. The concerns, participation, support, and stories of native people are now an important part of archeology. One critique of ethnographic studies is that it is difficult to tell just how far back current beliefs, stories, and practices can go, the past is a foreign country even to those whose ancestors lived it. This is a reasonable critique. It is hard for a society that has downloaded its knowledge first into writing and now onto silicon, to understand passing cultural knowledge strictly through memory. Any trial lawyer will tell you about how fallible human memory is yet cultures survived and thrived without writing. Just how was this accomplished?

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#originoflife #informationtheory #ComplexSystems #CollectiveBehavior #evolutionarydynamics #biogels #informationtheory #philosophy #philosophyofscience #philosophyofmaths #qotojournal #biology #evolution #economy #incomedistribution #anthropology #culturalevolution

Stephen Jay Gould once stated that human cultural evolution is Lamarkian rather than Darwinian. Lamarkian can be a trigger word for some biologists so I will refrain from defending it. There are differences. Cultural transmission is much different than genetic transmission and the method of transmission is different, not discrete like genes, there is no evidence of memes like Dawkins has suggested. In addition, there are no lineages as such. Darwin had no idea of transmission either. Dawkins's attempt at memes is based on the fact that humans are biological entities subject to Darwinian evolution and culture is a human phenotype and thus is subject to Darwinian evolution. This idea has been accepted and rejected at different times by the social sciences, mainly because of the stigma of Social Darwinism and the failure of Darwinian Evolution to provide coherent answers. Yet, culture is still a biological artifact, like an ant hill is a biological artifact so somehow this conceptual gap needs to be closed.

Lewens, Tim. “Cultural Evolution.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2020. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/evolution-cultural/.

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#originoflife #informationtheory #ComplexSystems #CollectiveBehavior #evolutionarydynamics #biogels #informationtheory #philosophy #philosophyofscience #philosophyofmaths #qotojournal #biology #evolution #dawnchorus

https://wjbeaver.wixsite.com/mysite/post/what-is-the-dawn-chorus

#originoflife #informationtheory #ComplexSystems #CollectiveBehavior #evolutionarydynamics #biogels #informationtheory #philosophy #philosophyofscience #philosophyofmaths #qotojournal #biology #evolution #economy #incomedistribution #simpleeconomy

In biology, there is the concept of constraint, what physical and chemical laws impose on the possible direction of evolutionary change. Adam Smith came up with the idea of “the invisible hand of the market.” Using ideas from statistical mechanics, models have shown simple rules of exchange to be a possible valid constraint in economics. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with a so-called “free market.” A simple model always reaches an equilibrium of inequality in income distribution. One can argue that this is a toy model of a very complex system. Yet toy models can reveal underlying structure. The current and historic wealth distribution data show a similar structure but even worse inequality. One takeaway from this is that an individual will win or lose in a market not because of any latent talent but just dumb luck. This is an equilibrium model and any complex system will be far from equilibrium and complexity can perhaps mediate this dismal condition. A fair market would require a fair distribution of income which also favors individual human autonomy and heterogeneity. How to build this fair market? I have found nothing that touches on this, perhaps the writings of the late David Graeber are a start.

Chakrabarti, Bikas K., Anirban Chakraborti, Satya R. Chakravarty, and Arnab Chatterjee. Econophysics of Income and Wealth Distributions. 1st edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Shout out to https://mastodon.social/@marshall_0i for turning me onto Dan McShea.

Rosenberg, Alexander, and Daniel W. McShea. Philosophy of Biology: A Contemporary Introduction. Routledge Contemporary Introductions to Philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge, 2008.

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#originoflife #informationtheory #ComplexSystems #CollectiveBehavior #evolutionarydynamics #biogels #informationtheory #philosophy #philosophyofscience #philosophyofmaths #qotojournal #biology #evolution

I continue to hear from scientists and non scientists alike that biological life evolves through more complex forms. I would argue that the bacterial assemblages in a biogel are at least as complex as any organism. An alternative is not to think about how life has changed but what it has done. Life survives, it continues, 4 billion years and counting. It does this by constantly expanding into and modifying new environments. This is accomplished by budding out new states of complexity, the major transitions of life are real but there is no goal of more, there is no goal, the result, however, has been survival.

#ornithology #birds #informationtheory #network #dawnchorus #networkdynamics #gotojournal #complexsystems

Found this from NPR "Hidden Brain." Foundational paper on weak ties

Granovetter, Mark S. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 78, no. 6, 1973, pp. 1360–1380. SNAP: Stanford.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/225469

#ornithology #birds #informationtheory #network #dawnchorus #networkdynamics #gotojournal #complexsystems

Hye my next article will be about the Dawn Chorus. Does anyone study this?

#originoflife #informationtheory #ComplexSystems #CollectiveBehavior #evolutionarydynamics #biogels #informationtheory #philosophy #philosophyofscience #philosophyofmaths #qotojournal

There is an idea in biology called folk biology. Ordinary people know what things are. They know what a dog is although dogs come in a wide range of sizes, colors, and shapes. Hunter gatherer societies know what a species is to the level of any trained naturalist yet defining the term species in biology is an ongoing struggle. So to with other terms like gene or even individual. There is a problem with meaning, we know what objects are but when we delve into meaning all sorts of issues appear. So we drop meaning and look at knowledge. How do we have knowledge of an object?

https://wjbeaver.wixsite.com/mysite/post/what-is-a-chair

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