Month: July 2012

I’ve certainly expressed neo-pan-Darwinian views on natural evolution that might be called “group selection” – in fact I’ve even defended group-selection per se. I am one of those who sees evolution by natural selection as the best idea anyone ever had, that I’m happy to apply it to practically any situation – even one where cause and effect benefits of any change may be explained in real-time, in a single “generation”.

So I’m guilty as charged here by Pinker. Clearly if we’re going to limit the word evolution to original-Darwinian natural selection – where it’s numbers of copies we’re valuing, and mutations are entirely blind to their effects. Then “group selection” in human affairs – and the affairs of social creatures generally – is something entirely different. Sure it is.

Sure we’re valuing other qualities of life and measures of existence than just head-count and group-count. And sure, in communities of less intelligent creatures, where individual immediate choice can be barely if at all aware of causation effecting future group and individual benefit, then all group behaviour including relative behaviour between group members, is ultimately, reductively, seated in attributes of the individuals. Tell us something we don’t know.

The interesting ground is the middle ground.

At one extreme, parallels in ant analogies and hive rhetoric are surely more poetic than scientific, and undoubtedly more concerned with the natural processes of group-effects on group member selection, and group success, than selection of the groups themselves. Nevertheless real effects.

And at the other, if it were purely a numbers game, then let’s just give up now and admit the bacteria as champions. But, as intelligent humans, with far more sophisticated values than arithmetic, we’re sadly arrogant enough to believe our knowledge gives us control over cause and effect, over multiple time-scales, here and now, later in our lifetimes, and in the legacy bequeathed to future generations.

In reality what we’re concerned with is natural processes of change over one or more cycles, given our imperfect knowledge. These cycles are indeed fractal over many different layers and time-scales and definitely involve – if not blindness – uncertain feedback against the imperfect knowledge and facility used on each cycle of change.

Real allure, wrong definition. The real difference between the sides in the group selection debate are differences in what to value, what matters. Definitions and numbers are very low value indeed.

Latest (3rd of 4) of Niall Ferguson’s Reith Lectures The Rule of Law and its Enemies – The Landscape of the Law, first broadcast last week, continues the agenda that simple law is best for global economic progress.

The point of law is fundamentally property and contracts rights – wide-acceptance, cost-effective execution and reliable-enforcement – thereby minimising overhead cost and risk of doing business beyond your immediate social neighbourhood. Interesting that laws of precedent must (do) rest on common law of what is good, and what is law good for (and that common law is based on social interaction between neighbours, extended by communication to wider society – one source of hypocrisy – imperfect empathy as well as imperfect knowledge). The point of precedent being to ensure that evolutionary changes in law, as society and environment change, are always coherent – consistent within a shared narrative – proceeding step-wise from precedent, anchored but not fixed by precedent. Another of these clear “progressive evolution requires institutional conservatism” messages.

Beyond Law-101 above, the point is primarily one of balance between private and public institutions for setting and enforcing laws of business, without either becoming an over-powerful dead hand – monopolistic on one hand, bureaucratic on the other. The bureaucracy of complex legislation leads to the rule of lawyers (as in the US), rather than law. Ultimately we depend on the true independence of judiciary, rather than judiciary (and executive politics) as extensions of the legal profession.

Let’s hope there is more than Law 101 in the 4th and final extended lecture tomorrow.

Look I still don’t buy it.

A particle suggesting / equivalent to the Higgs ? So all the attempted explanations / metaphors / fancy visualizations to date, tell us that the Higgs Field is about “stuff” that resists the movement of other particles and explains the inertial resistance to movement of those particles we know as “mass”.

So how is it the Higgs Boson has more that 130 times the mass of any other sub-atomic particle ? Where does “it” get its mass from. How can the field explaining mass of other particles comprise particles that already have (lots of) mass ?!? What does a Higgs Boson actually have to do with the Higgs Field ?

All these poxy metaphors are failing to tell us something. Emperors and clothes spring to mind.

[Post Note: Also good to see rejection of the God Particle metaphor – not just because of the two-way offence at bringing God needlessly into the political science debate – but because it grossly inflates the significance of the Higgs Boson – it’s just one potential missing piece in the standard model, with plenty more missing pieces – gravity anyone – and many more opportunities for the standard model itself to be proven entirely wrong.]

Interesting (from Forbes via LinkedIn) story of how storm power outages put Amazon Cloud down – how much depends on Amazon resources and how resilient the cloud actually is – a lot and not very it seems.

A variation on an early theme, but it seems some women may have the power to perceive many more colours than the rest of us. (Interestingly, converse to the fact that colour-blindness – two-cones – is most closely associated with men, “tetrachromats” – four-cones –  apparently tend to be women.) Hat tip to Catless at Bif Riv.

(NB “Mary the Colour Scientist” is part of a thought experiment where the individual perception of colour cannot be shared between us or related to any empirical scientific explanatory knowledge of colour as electromagnetic wavelengths of light. Mary for gender-equality-political-correctness-of-science in this case, not the super-human power of women.)