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Three or four times in the past week, there's been front-page stories on HN that have reminded me of this. Rob Newman [0] (UK activist / comedian) has recently
by Jedd 11y ago
Three or four times in the past week, there's been front-page stories on HN that have reminded me of this.
Rob Newman [0] (UK activist / comedian) has recently been considering evolution[1], particularly in response to the Selfish Gene approach to evolutionary biology. He's not a fan.
Over the past couple of months his new radio show - the Entirely Accurate Encyclopaedia of Evolution[2] - has been broadcast in the UK on the BBC - a delightful combination of droll + biology/science in jokes + enlightenment.
Mentioned partly because it deals with these kinds of claims in the abstract.
Primarily because it deals with these kinds of claims specifically. In one episode he speaks about Cyclosa tremula [3] spider, who builds spider replicas from her prey - they are grey, while she is striped black & white (we finally return to the zebra analogy). When birds come to prey upon her, she bounces up and down quickly, turning herself grey - to match these replicas. He makes mention of a throw-away phrase from another paper on the subject, suggesting that Cylocsa tremula builds these facsimiles out of loneliness.
The point being that we can never really know what mechanisms other organisms are using to evolve.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Newman_(comedian)
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/comedy/10322813/Robert-Newman-The-universe-Richard-Dawkins-imagines-couldnt-exist-for-five-seconds.html
[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06jm72p
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclosa
- acqq 11y ago"What I think Dawkins has done is brought back a particularly virulent form of original sin. He’s actually a deeply religious thinker – ‘We are born selfish therefore let us try to teach altruism’, 'If your genes are selfish, you are.'" Both are surely not the quotes from Dawkins but Newman's own and wrong conclusions. Genes != whole animals (or humans). Especially the "interest" of the genes doesn't have to reflect in all aspects of the behavior to eliminate cooperation.
- goldbrick 11y agoThis is a really scary movement, not only because he's blatantly straw-manning both Dawkins and Darwin, but because he's a populist without proper scientific credentials subtly pushing an agenda -- we could call him the Glenn Beck to Russell Brand's Joe Rogan. Nobody properly doing science ever suggests that we ever have all the answers and it frightens me that celebrities are so often given a podium of regressive anti-intellectualism on which to challenge the corpus of established scientific knowledge and even to misrepresent it.
- awl130 11y agoI agree with your point and will add that such movements are not isolated to the non-scientific: Dawkin's use of his own public platform to push his own shockingly bad agenda. Which is to say, emotional outbursts of any kind are noise and cancel each other out in time.
- firethief 11y agoOrganisms don't evolve; evolution is a statical process of species. The organism's metacognition about this behavior doesn't affect its evolutionary fitness, regardless of whether the spider is lonely, or thinking strategically, or perhaps just acting on instinct without any anthropomorphic higher level thought process. Whyever they think they're doing it, apparently it works.