We all Wear the same Genes

Dr. Marcotte and hiscolleagues at the University of Texas at Austin have discovered hundreds of genes involved in human disorders by looking at distantly related species.

They have found genes associated with deafness in plants, for example, and genes associated with breast cancer in nematode worms.

We share many similar genes and gene clusters with a diverse array of plants and animals. This takes evolution and homology to new territory.

"To their surprise, the scientists discovered 48 modules shared by plants and people. “There was a lot of screaming in the halls for that one,” Dr. Marcotte said."

Will we ever be able to understand everything

Do You Think Science... from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

Found this video on SpaceCollective.org thought it was a nice simple video that stirs some good thinking about the limits of our potential knowledge.

Multiverse

There is a great article in Discover Magazine this month about cosmic collisions (10/09). The article talks about how our universe might be one of billions of other universes with different properties and cosmological constants. If our Universe collides with another the one with the lower cosmological constant wins, while the other is destroyed... as if it ran into a wall at the speed of light.

I started the idea of the multiverse and found some amazing stuff...

In his newest book, Just Six Numbers, Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, argues that six numbers underlie the fundamental physical properties of the universe.

If the number were only a mite smaller— .006 instead of .007— a proton could not bond to a neutron, and the universe would consist only of hydrogen. No chemistry, no life. And if it were slightly larger, just .008, fusion would be so ready and rapid that no hydrogen would have survived from the Big Bang. No solar systems, no life. The requisite number perches, precariously, preciously, between .006 and .008. And that's just one of Rees's six numbers. If you toss in the other five, life and the structure of the universe as we know it become unlikely to an absurd degree. Astronomer Hugh Ross has compared the state of affairs to "the possibility of a Boeing 747 aircraft being completely assembled as a result of a tornado striking a junkyard."

Faced with such overwhelming improbability, cosmologists have offered up several possible explanations. The simplest is the so-called brute fact argument. "A person can just say: 'That's the way the numbers are. If they were not that way, we would not be here to wonder about it,' " says Rees. "Many scientists are satisfied with that." Typical of this breed is Theodore Drange, a professor of philosophy at the University of West Virginia, who claims it is nonsensical to get worked up about the idea that our life-friendly universe is "one of a kind." As Drange puts it, "Whatever combination of physical constants may exist, it would be one of a kind."

http://discovermagazine.com/2000/nov/cover/?searchterm=multiverse

Why is There Life?

by Brad Lemley

From the November 2000 issue, published online November 1, 2000

This reminds me of a recurring theme of..

The unbearable lightness of being By Milan Kundera

He goes on to make use of Beethoven's theme of Ess muss sein! or It must be!

To me it does not seem like any of this moves us any closer to a why, as Brad Lemeley's article asks... however, we are hopefully further exploring our understanding of the what.

WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?

  Every year, edge.org posts a new question to a group of diverse group of thinkers - scientists, artists, philosophers etc.  In exchange for getting to plug their books, they contribute paragraphs and essays relating their take on the answer to the question posed.

Previous questions were:
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?
WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT?
WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?


This year's question is: WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?

Here are a few quick highlights:

GREGORY PAUL (Independent Researcher; Author, Dinosaurs of the Air) talks about giving our brains an upgrade:

The human brain and the mind it generates have not undergone a major upgrade since the Pleistocene. And they violate the basic safety rule of information processing — that it is necessary to back up the data. Something more sophisticated and redundant is required. With computing power doubling every year or two cheap personal computers should match the raw processing power of the human brain in a couple of decades, and then leave it in the dust.

If so, it should be possible to use alternative, technological means to produce conscious thought. Efforts are already underway to replace damaged brain parts such as the hippocampus with hypercomputer implants. If and when the initial medical imperative is met, elective implants will undoubtedly be used to upgrade normal brain operations. As the fast evolving devices improve they will begin to outperform the original brain, it will make less and less sense to continue to do one's thinking in the old biological clunker, and formerly human minds will become entirely artificial as they move into ultra sophisticated, dispersed robot systems.

Personally I would love a more accurate memory system, one with complete recall, or shall I say Total Recall. I think if we were to then add on some wireless networking capabilities to our brain, we would really step things up.  If you like this idea... here's another article on intelligence enhancement: NICK BOSTROM (Philosopher, University of Oxford; Editor, Human Enhancement) on SUPERINTELLIGENCE.


In another response, MARC D. HAUSER (Psychologist and Biologist, Harvard University: Author, Moral Minds) talks about imagining the impossible he describes a field of study called:

theoretical
morphology, a discipline that aims to map out the space of possible morphologies
and in so doing, reveal not only why some parts of this space were never
explored, but also why they never could be explored.

I love this kind of brain challenge... Try to think of something that is impossible.  Maybe with our new enhanced brains we'll be able to actually pull that one off.

There's many more thought provoking articles in the complete book/web post so go check them out!

Super Brain

I've been digging through the Principia Cybernetica Web some more.. and found this interesting article about the emergence of the "Global Brain".


They describe recent tech revolution

"has produced a global communication network, which can be seen as a nervous system for this planetary being. As the computer network becomes more intelligent it starts to look more like a global brain or super-brain, with capabilities far surpassing those of individual people ...

 A remaining question is whether this transition will lead to the integration of the whole of humanity, producing a human "super-being", or merely enhance the capabilities of individuals, thus producing a multitude of "meta-beings".

This reminds me of the enemy in Orson Scott Cards Sci Fi novel - Ender's Game.  As of now, we're still functioning largely as individuals, as far as I can tell, but the tools available to put the web to enhance our own capabilities really are developing quickly.  If you haven't had the chance yet, make sure to check out Stephen Wolfram's new "Alpha"
Here's som more info on it.

and here's a video from Wolfram:

Get a world view

I've been googling grandiose questions lately... things like "meaning of life" and "world view" thinking google might by chance spit back an answer like in The Hitchhikers Guide:

Unfortunately, that hasn't happened yet... But I did stumble accross this interesting little gem of an article that enlightened me to Belgian philosopher Leo Apostel and his short book entitled "World views, from fragmentation to integration"

In it, the authors make an attempt to initiate an

international forum that may generate a multiplicity of
provisional and evolving world views, allowing ultimately the continuation of growth and
the synthesis of fact and value, of explanation and meaning to be realized.

Because...

Within the scientific world, large-scale movements tending towards unification seem powerless
confronted with the information explosion of research and historicism in the philosophy of
science. Outside of science, we notice also that both religious and secular ideologies claiming
to energize mass movements have collapsed

I like the idea that we can collect various systems of thought to help assemble our world view.  With the emergence of sites like Ted.com, Bigthink.com and edge.org I feal that we are moving towards a greater intermixing of our ideas but the mass of information currently available can also feal overwhelming. 

Here is the Principia Cybernetica Project attempt at a wolrd view ... what's yours?

The Kurzweil Gospel

Ray Kurzweil, inventor and futurist has two new movies coming out about him and or by him.

The first played at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival and is called Transcendent Man:
Here's the trailer:

The second is called "The Singularity is Near - The Movie"  featuring Tony Robbins, Alan Dershowitz and Marvin Minsky, amongst others.  Maybe these films will be the next "What the Bleeps"?! hopefully without all of the secret ploys to get us to join some weird religion.

395 Babies were just born in India.

Dig this video about the exponential growth of everything:

And then you can watch this...  Ray Kurzweil, inventor and futurist, breaks down some of his crazy and not so crazy ideas.. My favorite part is when he references Bono!

Evolution by Intelligent Design

Evolution by Intelligent Design



So I guess we're very close to altering our own genetic makeup now. Thanks to the work of scientist like Mario Capecchi of the University of Utah, Sir Martin Evans of Cardiff University in Wales, and Oliver Smithies of the University of North Carolina.

They proved in 2007 with their Nobel Prize–winning work on mice, that it's possible to alter the genetic makeup of newborn mice, by turning on and off genes through selectively adding or deleting stretches of DNA in the (artificially) fertilized cell. Scientists could knock out genes for a disease like diabetes or insert genes coding for extra height or intelligence.

We are getting into Kurzweil / Gattaga / Brave New World Territory now. I wonder if in our lifetimes, say the next 50 years, we will have to face questions about whether or not to give our children intelligence enhancing chromosomes.

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche

Here's a a thought provoking article on some of the similarities between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and their views on the individual and his perpetual becoming. Through passion, man perpetually yearns for something more than himself.. In Kierkegaard it is something religious.. in Nietzsche, it is to become the superman through the will to power.