Gregory Taylor

Lilli Wessling Hart

This excerpt from Richard Dawkins' new book  The Ancestor's Tale: a Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution apparently engages with an intriguing line of inquiry: If evolution could be re-run, how might the story end differently? To quote Dawkins:

What systems have evolved many times independently, like eyes?
Or "several times", like echolocation? Have some things evolved only
once, or not at all? I suspect that we'd find certain potential evolutionary
pathways which life is "eager" to go down. Other pathways have more
"resistance"....

The cool part of the excerpt, IMHO, is his consideration of evolutionary one-offs. Amazing stuff.


This excerpt from Richard Dawkins' new book  The Ancestor's Tale: a Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution apparently engages with an intriguing line of inquiry: If evolution could be re-run, how might the story end differently?

nourishing-opportunities-for-imagination-book-pointer

Nourishing opportunities for imagination (book pointer)

In the course of a lengthy and wide-ranging discussion with an old friend, we wound up talking about a particular form of anxiety.

Actually, it was a part of that game whereby old friends use some shared experience to chide each other about "aging." If you don't do this already, you will. Trust me.The attractor for this particular bit of chiding was my admission that there are parts of some software that I've used for years and know reasonably well that have grown and improved in such a way that I no longer am immediately comfortable with them, and--in some cases--that I find my once-familiar tool daunting.


Part of it that uneasiness is, no doubt, simple pride. Part of it is easily curable, if my own internal fictions about myself continue to have some basis in actual fact: I'll simply make sense of them when I have a good reason to, as I have always done in the past. I think that it was Marvin Minsky who observed that we miss an interesting part of any discussion about whether or not machines can "think" when we don't ask ourselves how often we think ourselves (the implication being that we only "think" when we must--when our habits fail us, when we are in completely unfamiliar territory, and so on).

But we wound up talking about our own unease instead of those particular fictions, wondering why it was that such a simple moment of anxiety would be so difficult to share with others--especially since talking about the whole business did make us feel a lot better, we agreed.

But here's where things suddenly took a conversational turn into territory that I am still sitting at my desk ruminating about hours later: The observation that there are specific circumstances where we are provided with another way to deal with this particular form of anxiety--the specific rhetoric of change that some forms of conservatism and the world's fundamentalisms in general use to create the notion that our unease about the world derives not from our own pride or a moment of hesitation about our own abilities, but in some greater wrong or unease we can correct by returning to an idealized past.

A corollary: If our anxieties about seeing the things we know grow and potentially become unfamilair can be conflated with the larger web of worry about How Things Are Now that drives various fundamentalisms as flights from an uneasy present, is it possible that one could argue against those fundamentalisms by being a little more upfront about our everyday anxieties in conversation with others and, thereby, reclaim just a portion of the emotional territory? I know that it's probably more efficient to attempt to argue rationally about the non-existence of the idealized past to which fundamentalisms tempt us to return, but that more quotidian worry about how the basic furniture of my world alters a little everday is a far more common part of my life.

In the course of a lengthy and wide-ranging discussion with an old friend, we wound up talking about a particular form of anxiety...

something-that-came-up

Something that came up....

I'm sure that we'll all get our fill of orchestrated images from the Republican National Convention in New York, and that will probably include stuff both inside and outside. Odd as it may be to remember, the whole affair might well be thought of as a huge trade show under seige. here is an interesting collection of how something like this looks to someone who's walking quiety around during the setup and takedown, noticing lots of the things we don't get to see.


Alternately, if imagery about culture and politics wearies or depresses you, you can click here and discover what great thinkers in the field of ethical philosophy should be on your drinking/policy team. While I remain curious as to how percentage data that more closely resembles political prognostication than anything else would give me direction, it would appear that I need to read up on my Aristotle and Aquinas (really? you sure about that?).

Since I am of an age when bifocal lenses are um, necessary, it's a rare pleasure to discover that I can get prescription sunglasses that actually match my real spectacles and wrap as well as those lovely Oakleys. My only quibbles so far are that it's not more of a frugal pleasure and that the cases for them looks a tad too much like the boxes that false teeth sleep in at night or something from David Lynch's version of Dune and don't fit well into cargo pockets. I'll just have to get out more to ju$tify acquiring them to myself (perhaps not driving into things will help remind me).

here is an interesting collection of how something like this looks to someone who's walking quiety around during the setup and takedown, noticing lots of the things we don't get to see...

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