Re: fault is not in the stars but in the brain eating zombies

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response to inmendham: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swyu8QqmGgI

from recent New Scientist article: ""There was a trickle of findings of epigenetic inheritance in animals through the 20th century, and it is turning into a flood about now," says Russell Bonduriansky, at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. One of his favourite recent examples involves the water flea, daphnia. When predators are around, the fleas develop large, defensive spines. If they then reproduce, their offspring also develop these spines - even when not exposed to predators.

For Bonduriansky, this suggests a possible adaptive function of epigenetic inheritance - the fine-tuning of an individual to short-term variations in its environment. "There's no lag time for the offspring to respond to the environment on their own," he says."

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Science & Technology

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• Mat
• selling
• seriously
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• science

[loveisallneed]

Overall, is natural selection being refuted at all? I don't think so. Doesn't matter where the variation comes from, nature is still deciding who wins.

[0ThouArtThat0]

Natural selection is not being refuted. It is still an operative mechanism in evolution. No one denies that. What epigenetics seems to suggest is that natural selection is NOT the sole factor in evolutionary change.

[0ThouArtThat0]

I disagree, I think meaning arises out of communication, not the self. My and your self is a derivative of our ability to relate and communicate. Meaning is shared, never individual.

[loveisallneed]

Interesting idea, but isn't that a little reductionist? If our organization is important, than why must the universe have the same capability as us? Finding meaning is a selfish pursuit - it requires a self. Maybe the universe just exists, no meaning or purpose needed.

[0ThouArtThat0]

I think the deception is thinking that meaning has to be given to the universe by humans. The universe is what we human beings grew out of. If we are capable of making meaning, so is the universe.

[BellaTheHappyLoser]

yes, he does twists a lot what people said to him... been there.

but when he said that people like to give some greater meaning to the universe and put their life to thrones by religion or some other bullshit and in fact we are just like any other animal only with superior intelligence - he is right about that. I can not make peace with that, but I know its true. Its fun to deceive ourself every now and then... I do it all the time.

[0ThouArtThat0]

what things that Gary presented are facts, exactly?

[BellaTheHappyLoser]

I dont like the idea of natural selection either matt, or ideas gary presented in video before his last one - but unfortunately those things he said are facts, and a lot of people cant except them or dont like them. I am one of those people sometimes.

[HaleyMary]

It's interesting that natural selection would not be the sole mechanism. I guess it could be attributed to new discoveries in science being made throughout the ages. Unfortunately I haven't read the book to know enough to have an opinion about the subject.

[0ThouArtThat0]

All I am trying to get epigenetics to do for my general approach to understanding biological evolution is show conclusively that genes are not the cause of evolution, because they are not the cause of organisms (which are the evidence of evolution). Causality/information exchange/communication/semiosi­s is more complex than neo-Darwinist molecular biologists suppose. Intelligence is not the sole province of the human mind. If such a thing as intelligence exists, it exists naturally.