Fit As A ...

https://slate.com/technology/2020/01/darwin-competition-collaboration-evolutionary-biology-climate-change.html?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=1348bf2cbd-briefing-dy-20200127&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-1348bf2cbd-44635989

I have a couple of problems with this otherwise interesting article.

First, let’s be clear that John Gould, not Charles Darwin, identified these various birds as all finches.  The article mistakenly declares that, “… Darwin noticed small variations in the beaks of a few finches, unlocking, we are told, the mystery of life’s variation over time and space.”  In fact, Darwin erroneously believed that the birds were different species and not all finches.  It was only after ornithologist Gould corrected him, that Darwin was able to make his insightful deductions.

Second, the article’s statement that, “Scientists are slowly understanding collaboration’s role in biology, which might just help liberate our collective imagination in time to better address the climate crisis”, ignores the fact that some scientists realized that cooperation was an excellent example of fitness from the very inception of Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

The article is correct, of course, in stating that many Western scientists have been very slow to recognize this essential element.  This is especially true of non-scientists who prefer the non-Darwinian concept developed by Spencer which has been mislabeled “social Darwinism”.

However not all scientists were so foolish.  There were always those who were more clear sighted, especially those not quite so prejudiced by the heavily colonialist and racist attitudes that were normative in Western 19th century culture, who realized that fittest did not automatically mean most brutal and most exploitive.

The most famous example being a Russian prince.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/slate.com/technology/2012/10/evolution-of-cooperation-russian-anarchist-prince-peter-kropotkin-and-the-theory-of-mutual-aid.amp

> Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species sparked major battles. The most famous may have been between science and religion, but there were disputes within science as well. One of the most heated was whether natural selection favored cooperative or competitive behaviors, a battle that still rages today. For almost 100 years, no single person did more to promote the study of the evolution of cooperation than Peter Kropotkin.

Kropotkin traveled the world talking about the evolution of cooperation, which he called “mutual aid,” in both animals and humans. Sometime the travel was voluntary, but often it wasn’t: He was jailed, banned, or expelled from many of the most respectable countries of his day. For he was not only the face of the science of cooperation, he was also the face of the anarchist movement. He came to believe that his politics and science were united by the law of mutual aid: that cooperation was the predominant evolutionary force driving all social life, from microbes to humans. 

... He challenged Darwin’s followers, most notably Thomas Henry Huxley, and their claims that natural selection almost always led to competition. Yes, Kropotkin admitted, sometimes that happens, especially in the tropics, but mutual aid was just as common, if not more so. <

Ultimately Krepotkin agreed with the point of the first article.  We must learn to cooperate in order to better solve the problems of humanity.

> But what Kropotkin cared about more than anything was that understanding mutual aid in animals might shed light on human cooperation and perhaps help save humanity from destroying itself. Whether that happens remains to be seen. <

The important point here is to recognize that survival of the fittest means exactly that. Survival of those most fit to survive. Being fit to survive may or may not be related to cooperation. It may or may not be related to fierceness.  Fitness depends upon the environmental circumstances in which an organism is set.  

For example, complex life is all eukaryotic life. And what is a eukaryote? It’s a cell that has a nucleus and other organelles contained within it. So how did that situation evolve?  It is widely accepted that symbiosis between a bacterium and a procaryote occurred, probably by accident.  Possibly by one eating the other and failing to digest it!

In other words, all complex life is based on two formerly competitive lifeforms learning to cooperate. Survival of the fittest. Survival of the most cooperative.

American Horror Story

I was planning a rather lengthy post for this particular topic but I’m unable to actually create it. The reason is explained at the very end of this truncated version. It all started with a Facebook conversation.

A friend who has fallen down the rabbit hole into the very deep depths of Trumpsterism posted an advertisement for actors to aid in a disaster simulation. This is a perfectly normal event which happens in various places around the country on a regular basis. Later on in the conversation, I pointed this out to someone who was refusing to believe that the advertisement was anything but a recruitment for people to fake a mass shooting at the Virginia gun rally so that the government could once again blame poor, pitiful and totally nice gun owners who were actually innocent.  The specific point I made was that we had drills of this type once a year at my school. It was to train first responders, our staff, yes and even the children, to be ready in case a disaster actually did occur.  It also tested our response systems and allowed for us to improve them.

Another poster commented with a montage composed of actual mass shootings with Sandy Hook right in the center. The point was that these were all faked by some evil cabal of who knows what?

I responded by declaring that those who attacked murdered children and their grieving parents, that is, people like her, were so morally disgusting,so repugnant, that she literally made me sick to my stomach.

Several hours later I decided that I would make this into a post in the manner in which I usually do. That is, I would simply copy everyone’s comments and post them with my own additional commentary. As always, I would protect both the innocent and the guilty by using only a single initial to identify them.

However, when I tried to look at the post, I could see only the beginning of her comment, “And you can crawl…”

This was followed by the declaration:

The comment may have expired or it may only be visible to an audience you’re not in. 

I would like to have seen what comment she made. I’m curious as ro exactly where she wants me to crawl. Unfortunately I have no access to the post, not even other parts of it.  In fact, I did crawl into bed shortly after I made my post. That’s because I wasn’t joking. She literally made me sick. I’m so upset at these moral degenerates who insist that mass shootings are all somehow staged events, including the horrors at Sandy Hook, that my blood pressure shot up high enough to trigger a vertigo attack. Thankfully, I was able to sleep for three hours and feel a bit better now. Naturally, that’s not the end of it. Once I have an actual serious vertigo attack,  I remain extra sensitive to them for a week thereafter. So I need to be careful and not deal with the most despicable of the conspiracy theorists for that time period. I suppose that means it’s a good thing I got blocked.

I also suppose it would give her a lot of satisfaction to know that her hateful attack on murdered children and their grieving parents actually succeeded in making me sick. Then again, the fact that it was my moral revulsion at her which sent my blood pressure soaring might have given her pause. No. I seriously doubt that she would stop her self degradation at any level.

In conclusion let me say, 🤮

Profile In Infamy

Again this post is very short but it should be extremely provocative and thus I think is worthy of repeating here in my blog.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-partisan-impeachment-a-profile-in-courage-11579220188

The impeachment was not partisan. Johnson was a vile, hateful, racist, bigot. He undid much of the benefits gained with the deaths 600,000 Americans. He returned Blacks to a kind of non-citizenship in the South, the consequences which we are still suffering today. The man was justly and properly impeached and John F. Kennedy was a fool to consider the despicable acts of Sen. Edmund G. Ross  a profile in courage.  It was a profile in racism. A profile in infamy.

Democracy? What Democracy?

In response to a friend’s post referring to an article which declared that we are not a democracy, we are a republic, and that this is a good thing because it prevents tyranny of the majority, I commented as follows. This makes for a rather short post but it is one which should be sufficiently provocative to generate a great deal of discussion.

In fact, we are republican democracy.  A blend of both.   We are not a pure democracy. Neither are we a pure republic.

The electoral college was created for the specific purpose of guaranteeing the power of the southern states by allowing them to count their slaves as 3/5 of a person for their share of representation. It was intended to create a tyranny of the minority. It has succeeded. 

Have no doubt. The electoral college is an artifact of our heritage of slavery. It is intended to ensure that the American people are not allowed to rule themselves because the founding fathers, imperfect as they were, felt that ordinary people should not be allowed to even vote. Only white, wealthy men should be allowed that power. I disagree with them on that point.

Where Have All The Teachers Gone?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/604702/

This article is somewhat interesting. However, what I find most compelling is a segment of the introductory comments, > In 1988, a teacher most commonly had 15 years of experience. Less than three decades later, that number had fallen to just three years leading a classroom. <

This is a serious problem. One of the finest benefits of the former situation was that young teachers were surrounded by colleagues who were able to help and support them in learning to be better teachers. When you have a staff composed almost entirely of the inexperienced, you lose that resource. The next question, the most important question, is why aren’t there more experienced teachers in our education system?

My own belief is it the American educational system is driving them out.   Good teachers want to teach, not train children to take standardized tests. Yet training children to take standardized tests is exactly what teachers are required to do under today’s structures created by educational “experts” who have never actually taught a child in the classroom, much less a classroom full of children.

Strong on credentials, mighty in theory, appallingly ignorant of reality, and firmly grounded in political ideology; these individuals have guaranteed that a good education is a distant memory in the United States.

The Flying Giraffe

So today I learned why pterosaurs could get so much larger than birds. I wondered about that. How could it be that an Azdarchid like Quetzalcoatlus could be the size of a giraffe (!!) while the largest bird was much, much smaller.

I’ve been watching presentations by the Royal Tyrell Museum and found one on pterosaurs.  It turns out that birds are stuck using only their two hind limbs to leap into the air to begin their flight. This limits them. They only have two legs to accomplish sufficient heights to begin flapping. If the hind legs get stronger so they could leap higher, it would add weight and that would require a stronger stroke and larger wings for flapping, which would require more muscle, which would add more weight… this works up to a certain point, but after that you just can’t balance the ratio of the weight to be overcome with the wing load. Eventually the situation degrades into a positive feedback loop.  Birds can only get so big and still be able to fly.

Pterosaurs, however, walked on all four limbs as modern bats do when they are on the ground. And like modern bats, the evidence is that they used all four legs to push themselves up into the air. So the muscles of the wings did add weight, but they also provided extra strength to the wings. This allowed them to leap higher into the air, and still maintain an adequate wing load. They could grow to the size of a giraffe and still fly.

(So why can’t bats get that big? It is peoposed that the answer is due to the fact that bats simply can’t find enough food if they get much larger.  That does not mean that, in the future, bats might not evolve to be as big as, well, a giraffe.)

I found this to be a very satisfactory explanation. I love it when science manages to answer a perplexing question.

I remember teaching science class. I always told the children science was like a never ending mystery story. Every time a mystery was solved it opened up the door for more questions to be answered. It’s one of the things I most love about science. One of the greatest mysteries which fascinated my generation when we were children was how the dinosaurs died out. Paleontologists were also obsessed with the problem, but never could come up with a good answer. A new hypothetical solution would be proposed every few years, only to be quickly be debunked by other scientists.

I remember my excitement when the now accepted impact proposal was first made by Luis Alvarez. Watching it slowly become more and more proven and finally accepted was intellectually exciting and engaging. So also with the mysterious moving rocks of Death Valley or the mystery of how a bumblebee could fly. On the one hand it’s very sad to see the mystery solved, but on the other hand it’s so exciting to learn that there is indeed a resolution and watch the process of that resolution being calculated and determined, and to see how it is finally proven.

My inability to function mathematically put an end to childhood dreams of a scientific career, but my love of science continues.

Unfortunately, I cannot figure a way to post the illustration here. But if you will Google simply three words you’ll get to see it. Type in azdarchid, giraffe, man: and you will see an amazing picture.