The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.
Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University conclude, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others".
Dunning and Kruger proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:
1. tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
2. fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
3. fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
4. recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they are exposed to training for that skill.
Meanwhile, people who find tasks to be relatively easy erroneously assume, to some extent, that the tasks must also be easy for others, and so under-rate their own abilities.
Very interesting, but a couple of things bothered me.
First of all, it's difficult enough to find genetic information from thousands of years ago, let alone from more than 500 million years ago, a time which pre-dates the colonisation of land by plants. I was hoping to read that ancient DNA had been found and inserted into a modern bacteria. Nope. No mention in any article I could find about where the gene actually came from.
Secondly, I could imagine the horrendously bad science news reporting which would follow. Probably something mentioning Jurassic Park and comments from readers about how evil and stupid scientists are. Lets see...
- 'Frankenstein' germ spliced with gene from 500-million-year-old bacteria - Bacteria is now thriving in lab - Some of the 'chimeric' E Coli is now stronger than normal bacteria - Scientists hope to 'restage' evolution
OH NOES!!!
Some comments from that article:
"Sounds like a wild card for more funding"
"we have a mistrust of the responsibility of scientists, since they poured their cultures of Foot and Mouth down the sink and started the biggest epidemic in recent history"
"Dinosaurs would be a lot easier to kill and much safer to have around than a rapidly mutating bacteria"
"It's like a cross between "I am Legend" and "Jurassic Park". Bacteria that died out millions of years ago has not place in today's world. Just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should!"
"Scary what scientists are allowed to play with these days, it will be in the military's hands by the end of the day guaranteed."
"What if something bad was to happen, why do these scientists get funded to potentially put the innocent lives of people at risk?"
"This brings the old saying, "curiosity killed the cat" to the forefront of my mind. Damn Scientists, will they ever learn?"
I wanted to know where the hell this single gene which creates a particular protein actually came from, so I emailed the media relations bloke from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where the research was performed. He sent me a couple of articles, one being the published scientific article itself, and another being a helpful article in relatively plain language:
"The method is analogous to historical linguistics, which reconstructs ancient languages by finding similarities in their descendant languages. Instead of words or sounds, scientists match up similarities in the amino acids of various existing proteins to reconstruct the amino-acid sequences of ancient proteins. They then recreate, or "resurrect," these proteins in the laboratory."
So there you have it. They didn't find 500 million year old DNA and resurrect an ancient bacteria, they recreated a protein which probably existed in the common ancestor of modern bacteria.
"He and Benner then tested what happened to the protein at various temperatures. Between 130 and 150 degrees [Farenheit], it performed best at its task -- which involves translating the information in its DNA through RNA into the completed protein. At hotter temperatures, the ancient protein fell apart.
Benner cautions the findings do not imply that the entire Earth was 130 to 150 degrees a billion years ago or longer, but rather that the bacterium whose genes survived to be relayed into descendant organisms thrived at that temperature. Why it proved so successful is a mystery, he said.
"For some reason, bacteria living at 130 to 150 degrees have made some innovation which allows them to leave their descendants all over the planet, not the other guys that we presume were living in other environments," he said. "And that's an astonishment to me.""
I was just reading some science news and came across an article about developing fuel from algae, which surprised me in that it made a good little summary of how ecologies work. This understanding of ecology is really what underpins permaculture, which I've been very interested in lately. Relevant parts are in bold.
For algae to power our cars and planes, production needs to be low carbon and cost effective, which means working with natural processes, not against them, say scientists.
Algae could become an important source of sustainable biofuel, as production doesn't compete with food crops for land. But we may need to change the way we grow algae from closed systems to open ponds if it is to be low-carbon and cost-effective.
This is because current algae production in closed systems – usually for cosmetic ingredients – uses too much energy keeping the ecosystem isolated from the surrounding environment.
To overcome this issue, scientists from the University of Cambridge suggest that when grown in open ponds, algae should be supplemented with multiple species that help support the algae in some way. This would make the system less vulnerable to outside influences such as predators.
They say that ecosystems with greater numbers of species are more stable and more resilient to change than monoculture systems made up of just one crop. The scientists have coined the term synthetic ecology to describe the creation of artificial ecosystems with multiple species.
"A complex synthetic community mirrors natural communities much more closely," argues Elena Kazamia, whose scientific review is published in the Journal of Biotechnology. "Monoculture is not very natural. There is a tendency towards complexity in the natural environment - communities get more complex with time."
In a natural ecosystem there are plenty of potential roles, or niches, to be filled by species. The more developed the ecosystem is, the greater its complexity as more of these roles will be filled. These complex ecosystems often reach a stable state, which is best adapted to the local conditions, and all of the niches are filled.
It is difficult for any new species to get a foothold in the community as they have to compete against established species in that niche. As new species are unlikely to invade successfully, the ecosystem doesn't change. For the algae, it could mean that no pest species will be able to easily establish themselves in the crop area.
The other species in this artificial ecosystem would have more roles than just protecting the ecosystem against invaders. Adding grazing animals like plankton that eat algae other than the crop might prevent these other types of algae from taking over. Carefully selected bacteria might provide essential vitamins or nutrients for the algae.
"There is a point for all communities where growth is limited by nutrients available in the ecosystem. One thing synthetic ecology can do is look into clever ways to get round this. In a nitrogen poor environment you could use nitrogen fixing bacteria, for example," Kazamia explains.
Nitrogen fixing bacteria convert nitrogen in the air to more easily used nitrate compounds. They are an essential part of most ecosystems, enabling plants to use nitrogen to make proteins. The researchers are also looking at combining algae with bacteria that produce the essential vitamin B12.
"Because we have little or no experience of growing algae on a large scale, we have a good opportunity to try something new, based on the science," Kazamia adds. For the researchers, algae as a new crop represent a chance to start developing techniques from scratch, using science to inform the techniques used and working with nature instead of against it.
There's still a great deal of debate over the best way to harness algal fuels, and industrial trials are few. The scientists have published their work as a call to action for the new algal biofuel industry to put ecological principles into practice.
"Maybe we could do with a better understanding of algal biology but we have enough theoretical knowledge about ecosystems - what we need are some trials in the field," says Kazamia. "We should be looking at how many players we need for a robust system. Earlier studies on land-based agriculture suggest we need 20 species. Is that the same for aquatic ecosystems? It's still very much an unknown."
A Malthusian Catastrophe, in a nutshell, is what is was predicted to happen by Thomas Robert Malthus when population outpaces agricultural production. Too many people + not enough food = problems.
The man did not mince his words:
"The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world".
It's often said that Malthus has been discredited because he predicted a global catastrophe that never happened. The Green Revolution, for example, is one of the many instances where we have found technological solutions to stay ahead of the game and feed an ever growing population.
Malthusian predictions do not (and I'd add cannot) take human ingenuity into account. Does this mean he was wrong, and the catastrophe he described will never happen? Can we assume that people will always find solutions and never run out of food?
I think that these assumptions miss the point. We should look at the idea more broadly. To assume that it is impossible that some countries in the developed world might descend into a food crisis is foolhardy. There is no guarantee that we will find a solution every single time.
I don't see that happening in the foreseeable future. I'm just saying it isn't impossible. In fact, there are places in the world where it's happening right now.
In Somalia, a two-year drought – which is phenomenal in now being the driest year in the last 60 – has caused record food inflation, particularly in the expectation of the next harvest being 50% of normal. Somalia already had levels of malnutrition and premature mortality so high as to be in a “normalized” state of permanent emergency. This is true too in pockets across the entire region.
Somalia is not a developed nation. But this is an example of an entire country which cannot produce enough food to feed itself during drought. They have not developed their own technological solution as some believe is simply an inevitable human response to such a catastrophe. It's true that these people could be saved if there were not so much conflict and violence in the area. It would be easier to deliver aid, for one. But as a closed system, the human population seems to exceed the carrying capacity of the local land. Unfortunately, there just isn't enough water.
There are other regions where significant numbers of people are undernourished.
Map showing areas where significant portions of the population are undernourished.
Globally, total food production could easily feed the world. But because wealth is not evenly distributed, neither is the food. So despite globalisation and industrial agriculture, there are many regions which must rely on their local ecosystems and farming techniques to support them.
In reality, humans CAN and DO create their own food crises. In the future, any combination of the depletion of natural resources, population growth, economic crises and violent conflict could create a crisis in any country. I wouldn't dare predict how, when or where. No prediction of the behaviour of complex systems can be made with 100% certainty. I can't even imagine a famine in any developed nation in the foreseeable future. But to say this is impossible because a particular prediction was wrong, I think, is irrational.
A company called Planetary Resources intends to mine asteroids. I think this could potentially change everything. I've been waiting and hoping this might happen for a long time, thinking about the possibilities. Here is a short outline of what the company hopes to achieve, and where I hope we'll end up.
First the company plans to mine minerals and fuel from asteroids. The minerals will be returned to Earth, which they claim will make formerly rare things like gold and platinum common, and add trillions of dollars to the global economy. Technologies could develop on Earth which were too expensive otherwise. The fuel could make the cost of space travel much, much cheaper.
They're sincere. They have backing from some big investors. Chris Lewicki, President and Chief Engineer, almost started crying at the press conference when he talked about the positive reception from the public. That shouldn't mean anything I know, but it made me think, "shit just got real".
Now I'm going to speculate wildly.
The more mining can be done, the more mining can be done. The wealth it creates will bring greater investment. Rare minerals like gold and platinum will become abundant. All the while, economies of scale, development of new technology and especially the massive amount of fuel mined (which is actually water - it can be split into H and O) will make it ever cheaper.
So we have all these robots out in space, and the tech is improving, and the investment is growing along with it. And there will be space manufacture. We no longer have to build space craft on Earth and waste time and energy to send it up. The material gathered directly from asteroids will be used to build in zero gravity. Space manufacturing enables more spacecraft to be built. Which leads to more mining, and more factories. I'm talking about an exponential growth of the industry.
One of the hardest things to do, but I think one of the most exciting: the colonisation of local space, by building Space habitats.
We may develop Von Neumann probes - self replicating spacecraft which could travel to other star systems, build more copies of themselves and then head off to explore other systems.
Perhaps it would eventually be feasible to finally build a gigantic nuclear pulse propulsion spacecraft to fly to the nearest stars within a human lifetime, rather than the 50,000 years it would take with current technology.
I think this could be a catalyst for exponential wealth and development. A second industrial revolution. The graph below shows population and oil production. If you included average lifespan, literacy, technological development and many other factors, they'd all be doing the same thing - going up exponentially.
Oil production and population
See where those lines take a sharp angle upwards at the end of the graph? I think (hope/speculate) we're again sitting in that corner just before everything changes. This could possibly be one of those moments.
Many people consider purebred dogs to be somehow superior to mongrels.
This is utter bullshit. Because purebreds, as a general rule, are heavily inbred and suffer from more inherited problems than mongrels. So what you end up with is actually a group of animals which are inferior in every way to their ancestors, apart from the fact that their appearance satisfies a set of arbitrary rules invented over the last century by clueless breeders.
Here is a painting from 1790 of a real bulldog:
Painting of a Bulldog from 1790 by Philip Reinagle.
Here is it's modern descendant:
Modern Bulldog
Breeders may tell you that it's low, thick stature, protruding lower jaw and wrinkles (to "channel blood away from the eyes") were all selected to make it better at holding down bulls. None of this is true.
This dog is completely useless for anything other than companionship, and it's characteristics were selectively bred purely for aesthetic reasons. It suffers from hip dysplasia, interdigital cysts, incessant farting, must usually be born via caesarian section, has low intelligence, and trouble breathing because of their short snouts. The original bulldog is extinct as far as I'm concerned.
The bulldog is not an isolated case. Many breeds, especially those bred for shows, suffer terribly from genetic problems.
I thought this was common knowledge. But the more people I speak to, and the more German Shepherds I see with fucked up, downward sloping hips hobbling around, the more I realise that few actually do know. To top it all off, they're willing to pay a lot of money for these wretched creatures.
There was a show aired in the UK called Pedigree Dogs Exposed, and I suggest you watch that if you want to find out more.
I think so. A while ago I emailed an evolutionary biologist with the same question.
My first email:
How long would it take to breed a dog with intelligence comparable to that of a human? how many generations? so it could understand language, read, learn maths and so on. maybe even a few other adaptations so it could speak.
is there any research which looks at this kind of question? all i've really found on the internet is the tamed russian fox stuff.
my guess is that it would take only a couple of hundred generations.
He replied:
This is an interesting question. I suspect that it would take more
than a couple of hundred generations to produce a dog with human-like
linguistic abilities. That would require major restructuring of the
brain, as well as the larynx, tongue, etc. Full human intelligence
would probably require many 1000s of generations, and I don't think a
canine, which is very different from a primate in many ways, could
ever evolve the same kind of intelligence that we have, even if it
could perhaps evolve to be much smarter than it is now.
On the other hand, there's some evidence that certain dog breeds have
acquired an impressive ability to understand human language. Check out
the link below:
I guess It would be easier to select for a breed of dog which was especially good at what the border collie can do in that article. Despite the fact that dogs have much smaller brains than chimps, they're better at reading signals from humans, and know what a pointing finger means - wolves can't do this. So rather than trying to breed towards a human-brained dog, you'd have a creature which was exceptional at what modern dogs are already good at. it might not be very hard to breed a dog which was good at something only humans were previously capable of. I think breeding dogs in this way would be interesting for another reason which you mentioned - they're canines, not primates. If we could increase their brain size to something similar to that of a human, I'm sure their brains would work in a very different way. and you wouldn't have to even get close to human brain size in the first place for some interesting things to happen.
I'm not an evolutionary biologist, but I don't think it would take very long to breed a dog which could understand human language very well. I'm essentially pulling a number out of my arse here, but I think you could do it within 100 years of breeding. I'm talking about really understanding complex sentence structure.
"Can you make sure the cat doesn't eat the parrot while I'm out?"
"Woof!"
"Thanks buddy."
I don't see why this wouldn't be possible. The fact that dogs and wolves are so closely related is amazing enough, and this happened over a very short amount of time. Here's some info about a rapidly evolving lizard, demonstrating how fast large changes can happen under the right conditions:
In 1971, ten adult P. sicula specimens from the island of Pod Kopište were transported 3.5 km east to the island of Pod Mrčaru (both Croatian islands lie in the Adriatic Sea near Lastovo), where they founded a new bottlenecked population.[3][11] The two islands have similar size, elevation, microclimate, and a general absence of terrestrial predators[11] and the P. sicula expanded for decades without human interference, even outcompeting the (now extinct[3]) local Podarcis melisellensis population.[4] Following the Yugoslav Wars, scientists returned to Pod Mrčaru and found that the lizards currently occupying Pod Mrčaru differ greatly from those on Pod Kopište. While mitochondrial DNA analyses have verified that P. sicula currently on Pod Mrčaru are genetically indistinguishable from the Pod Kopište source population,[3] the new Pod Mrčaru population of P. sicula was described, in August 2007, as having a larger average size, shorter hind limbs, lower maximal sprint speed and altered response to simulated predatory attacks compared to the original Pod Kopište population.[11] These population changes in morphology and behavior were attributed to "relaxed predation intensity" and greater protection from vegetation on Pod Mrčaru.[11] In 2008, further analysis revealed that the Pod Mrčaru population of P. sicula have significantly different head morphology (longer, wider, and taller heads) and increased bite force compared to the original Pod Kopište population.[3] This change in head shape corresponded with a shift in diet: Pod Kopište P. sicula are primarily insectivorous, but those on Pod Mrčaru eat substantially more plant matter.[3] The changes in foraging style may have contributed to a greater population density and decreased territorial behavior of the Pod Mrčaru population.[3] The most surprising[5] difference found between the two populations was the discovery, in the Pod Mrčaru lizards, of cecal valves, which slow down food passage and provide fermenting chambers, allowing commensal microorganisms to convert cellulose to nutrients digestible by the lizards.[3] Additionally, the researchers discovered that nematodes were common in the guts of Pod Mrčaru lizards, but absent from Pod Kopište P. sicula, which do not have cecal valves. The cecal valves, which occur in less than 1 percent of all known species of scaled reptiles,[5] have been described as an "evolutionary novelty, a brand new feature not present in the ancestral population and newly evolved in these lizards".[7]
I'm very excited about the potential of crowdsourcing via video games.
Video games are designed to capture and engross players, and motivate them to play for as long as possible. And there are many people who are quite happy to oblige. They struggle and toil to defeat enemies, collaborate and organise themselves to solve problems. Many millions of hours of work are dumped into merely playing video games every day.
At the same time, many people have trouble with motivation, struggle with unemployment, can't get the training they require,etc., or there is simply very little work they can do locally.
To make a car analogy, it's as if the engine (effort from gamers) is revving at 6000 RPM, but no power is being transferred to the wheels (the industrial output of society). Video games can be the gearbox which manages and transfers that power.
In 2010, Jane McGonigal speculated about this in a TED talk:
Since then, what she predicted has happened. Gaming has been harnessed to solve a real-world problem - protein folding.
Obsessive gamers’ hours at the computer have now topped scientists’ efforts to improve a model enzyme, in what researchers say is the first crowdsourced redesign of a protein.
The online game Foldit, developed by teams led by Zoran Popovic, director of the Center for Game Science, and biochemist David Baker, both at the University of Washington in Seattle, allows players to fiddle at folding proteins on their home computers in search of the best-scoring (lowest-energy) configurations.
The researchers have previously reported successes by Foldit players in folding proteins1, but the latest work moves into the realm of protein design, a more open-ended problem. By posing a series of puzzles to Foldit players and then testing variations on the players’ best designs in the lab, researchers have created an enzyme with more than 18-fold higher activity than the original. The work is published today in Nature Biotechnology.
“I worked for two years to make these enzymes better and I couldn’t do it,” says Justin Siegel, a post-doctoral researcher working in biophysics in Baker’s group. “Foldit players were able to make a large jump in structural space and I still don’t fully understand how they did it.”
We've finally dipped our toes in the water and immediately solved a real world-problem, far exceeding all expectations in the process. We should be working like mad to harness this potential. Government funding, private investment, whatever.
And, I propose that once gamers start solving real-world problems, they should get real-world rewards. Money. Employment in gaming.
I also think that the most effective way to do this, is to create games more like WoW and less like Foldit. Most of the time, anyway. I don't see why you can't hide real problem solving beneath a more attractive and viscerally rewarding front-end.
We're all familiar with eusocial behaviour in insects - like bees, ants, termites, wasps and so on. There is a queen which produces a large number of sterile workers who build tunnels, nests and collect food, and there are specialties like the larger guards. They cooperatively care for the young produced by the queen.
I had no idea that there were mammals who had developed the same behaviour. Just 2 kinds - the naked mole rat and the Damaraland mole rat. I've found more info about the naked mole rat in the short time I've spent researching them today, so that's what I'll talk about.
The naked mole rat - image stolen from Wikipedia
It lives in networks of tunnels under Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia.
The queen is the only female who can reproduce, along with about 3 males. Her offspring become the sterile workers. They develop specialties such as burrowing or collecting food. The larger ones are more aggressive in the instance of an attack on the nest.
The queen must always defend her postion from other females, sometimes violently. If she dies, she is replaced by another female who becomes fertile and undergoes physical changes to better handle making babies.
They mine for large tubers, their main source of food. They eat the inside but leave the outside, allowing it to regenerate. They also eat their own feces.
They live in colonies of between 20 and 300.
They live particularly long for a small rodent, up to 28 years.
They're apparently immune to cancer.
They don't feel pain when exposed to acid or capscacin.
They are in no danger whatsoever of going extinct.
That's just incredible to me. I suppose this would be considered a kind of convergent evolution. Shame the universe is so damn big and everything else is terribly far away, I'd like to know if creatures on other planets have evolved the same behaviour.
Here is Lake magenta nature reserve, Western Australia. This area is one of the oldest extant landscapes in the world. The paler stuff to the left is land cleared for farming only a few decades ago.
A large percentage of the farmland is now useless due to environmental destruction.
Size comparison with Europe:
If you find that interesting, watch this documentary:
This was a time of high adventure, rich living and hard dying... but nobody thought so.
This was a future of fortune, culture and vice... but nobody admitted it.
This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks... but nobody loved it.
Three planets and eight satellites and eleven billion people swarmed in one of the most exciting ages ever known. Yet minds still yearned for other times as always.
This is the first paragraph of the novel The Stars my Destination by Alfred Bester. The image above is from the graphic novel based on the book.
I was very excited when I read that first page. Then it immediately goes on about some kind of psychic teleportation and just I lost interest, I'm slightly ashamed to say.
But I love that first bit because it was written in the past about a time far into the future, yet is relevant right now. It's also interesting how much he under-estimated future population growth. 11 billion as early as 2050 is at the upper end of predictions (it'll probably be about 9 billion and will hopefully stabilise at that point).
As Louis C K said: Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy.
The Haber Process - creating ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen
Ammonia is in turn used to make fertiliser.
Growing food becomes a partially linear, rather than completely cyclical process. Nutrients are dug up from mines and transported to be manufactured into fertiliser. The fertiliser is used on our crops, we eat the food and dump the scraps in landfill, and pump our sewerage into the ocean. There are also other points where nutrients leave the system along the way, such as topsoil lost through irrigation and erosion. In one end, out the other so to speak.
I'll make a lego analogy: Let's say I buy a box of lego and build a new object. I play with the thing until it breaks apart. Instead of rebuilding the object out of the bits I've already got, I push the pieces into a pile and buy another box.
My horribly oversimplified lego analogy of the biogeochemical cycle
My horribly oversimplified lego analogy of how artificial fertiliser is used in industrial agriculture
In this short article, I've only touched on 2 ingredients of fertiliser which are necessary for modern industrial agriculture. One of them is running out, and they both require a LOT of fossil fuel... which is also running out.
Even if we had infinite fossil fuel and phosphorus to dig up, we could still have some big problems in the future if, for example, conflict cut us off from cheap oil for an extended period. Our agriculture relies completely on a globally interdependent system. This situation seems a little precarious to me.
Just found this in my front yard, and I have no idea what it is. I've lived in the bush and a number of rural areas all my life, but I've never seen this before.
When I first found it, I thought it was perhaps some rubbish. It kind of looked like a blob of burnt plastic on the ground. Because it looked strange I poked at it with a stick, and it popped out of the ground:
The black and red part shown above was flush with the ground. Here is a side view, showing the pink part which was originally hidden:
Here is the top cut in half:
There was this base part hidden in the ground which the top was originally sitting in:
Here is the base pulled out of the ground, it appears to have some kind of root system:
If you have any idea what this is, please let me know.
The graph illustrates how exponential growth (green)
surpasses both linear (red) and cubic (blue) growth.
Exponential growth
Linear growth
Cubic growth
So what does exponential mean? It's one thing to learn what it means on a technical level, it's something else to understand its significance, and the ramifications of exponential growth - especially with regard to human activity. Watch the video below:
The entire video is fantastic and I highly recommend watching it all, but I decided to upload this bit in particular because it's one of the simplest, shortest and best explanations of exponential growth I've ever heard. I think he's right that few people really understand what it means, which is tragic.
Here's the video description:
Scaling up always creates new problems. Cities can innovate faster than the problems indefinitely, while corporations cannot. Every week a million people are being urbanised all around the world. It's the problem and also the solution. Creativity and wealth comes via cities.
These revolutionary findings come from Geoffrey West's examination of vast quantities of data on the metabolic/economic behavior of organisms and organizations. A theoretical physicist, West was president of Santa Fe Institute from 2005 to 2009 and founded the high energy physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Is there a grand unifying theory of sustainability that can be applied to our cities? Are we sustainable? Are their measurable predictive laws of life? West and his team have tried to find the science of cities. Our future may depend on it.
He's speaking to the Long Now Foundation, then is interviewed by its founder Stewart Brand.
Geoffrey West is a physicist. He was born in a rural town in western England in 1940 and moved to London when he was 13. He received a bachelor's degree in physics from Cambridge and pursued graduate studies in California at Stanford. West eventually became a Stanford faculty member before he joined the particle theory group at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory. After Los Alamos, he became president of the Santa Fe Institute, where he works on biological issues around power laws in biology, or allometric law. He has since been honored as one of Time magazine's "Time 100" most influential people.
Stewart Brand is an American writer, best known as editor of the "Whole Earth Catalogue". He founded a number of organizations including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of several books, most recently "Whole Earth Discipline: An Eco-Pragmatist Manifesto".
Here is the same explanation by someone else, but a bit longer and with a few more details:
A supernormal stimulus or superstimulus is an exaggerated version of a stimulus to which there is an existing response tendency, or any stimulus that elicits a response more strongly than the stimulus for which it evolved.
For example, a moth will spiral into a flame because it is adapted to navigate by the sun (a much more distant lightsource). When it comes to eggs, a bird can be made to prefer the artificial versions to their own,[1] and humans can be similarly exploited by junk food.[2] The idea is that the elicited behaviours evolved for the "normal" stimuli of the ancestor's natural environment, but the behaviours are now hijacked by the supernormal stimulus.
The concept is derived from ethology. Konrad Lorenz observed that birds would select for brooding eggs that resembled those of their own species but were larger. Niko Tinbergen, following his extensive analysis of the stimulus features that elicited food-begging in the chick of the Herring Gull, constructed an artificial stimulus consisting of a red knitting needle with three white bands painted round it; this elicited a stronger response than an accurate three-dimensional model of the parent's head (white) and bill (yellow with a red spot).[3]
Tinbergen and his students studied other variations this effect. He experimented with dummy plaster eggs of various sizes and markings finding that most birds preferred ones with more exaggerated markings than their own, more saturated versions of their color, and a larger size than their own. Small songbirds which laid light blue grey-dappled eggs preferred to sit on a bright blue black polka-dotted dummy so large they slid off repeatedly. Territorial male stickleback fish would attack wooden floats with red undersides—attacking them more vigorously than invading male sticklebacks if the underside were redder.[1]
Lorenz and Tinbergen accounted for the supernormal stimulus effect in terms of the concept of the innate releasing mechanism; however this concept is no longer widely used. The core observation that simple features of stimuli may be sufficient to trigger a complex response remains valid, however.
Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett argues that supernormal stimulation govern the behavior of humans as powerfully as that of animals. In her 2010 book, Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose,[4] she examines the impact of supernormal stimuli on the diversion of impulses for nurturing, sexuality, romance, territoriality, defense, and the entertainment industry’s hijacking of our social instincts. In the earlier book, Waistland,[2] she explains junk food as an exaggerated stimulus to cravings for salt, sugar, and fats and television as an exaggeration of social cues of laughter, smiling faces and attention-grabbing action. Modern artifacts may activate instinctive responses which evolved in a world without magazine centerfolds or double cheeseburgers, where breast development was a sign of health and fertility in a prospective mate, and fat was a rare and vital nutrient.
An episode of the PBS science show NOVA showed an Australian beetle species whose males were sexually attracted to large and orange females—the larger and more orange the better. This became a problem when the males started to attempt to mate with certain beer bottles that were just the right color. The males were more attracted to the bottles than actual females.
No one has the time to become an expert on everything.
With the division of labour, individuals can develop skills in a specific discipline to a much higher degree than if we were to learn them all - we're no longer a "jacks of all trades, masters of none". We now have modern societies where specialised individuals have to rely completely on each other for even for the most basic and fundamental needs.
There's nothing wrong with that. Division of labour is closely associated with increased productivity, the rise of capitalism, and... the modern world, really. When someone spends their entire life perfecting skills in anything, it benefits us all. You don't have to invent the telephone and microwave by yourself. You don't need to build your own house or fix your own car. You don't have to develop an antibiotic and fashion a syringe to administer it - there are experts you can turn to who will do a much better job than you ever could.
So, every day we depend on the opinions of experts. Some might claim this is an appeal to authority, a logical fallacy: since they are a figure of authority, they cannot be wrong. For example, it would be silly to accept that the earth is flat simply because the prime minister of Australia said so.
But it is not fallacious when a consensus exists among legitimate experts on a particular matter in their field of specialisation.
Scientific consensus is not in itself a scientific argument, and it is not part of the scientific method. But for those of us who are not expert scientists on the subject in question, it is the best way to gain an understanding of the current state of the science. No need to point out that science cannot be decided by popular vote - scientific consensus is entirelydifferent from a poll of public opinion.
A scientific consensus also lets us avoid putting all our eggs in one expert's basket. For laypeople, it is much better to understand the scientific consensus, rather than the opinions of a single scientist. A quote from Brian Dunning, author of the Skeptoid podcast:
When you hear any claim validated by the fact that some "scientists" support it, be skeptical. You need to know who they are, what their interest is, and especially what the preponderance of opinion in the scientific community is. You need to know if the scientist being quoted actually has anything to do with this particular subject, or if his specialty is in an unrelated field. Look to see if this scientist has authored a good number of publications on the subject in legitimate peer-reviewed journals. Find out what other published scientists in his field say about him. Determine whether his views are generally in line with the preponderance of opinion among his peers in his discipline. Fringe opinions are on the fringe for a reason: they're usually wrong.
Unfortunately, most people are not very good at gathering an accurate impression of scientific opinion. Few know what peer review is or how it works, and many develop strong opinions about scientific matters despite having poor knowledge.
Added to this, even when we do receive information from scientists, we tend to choose those experts who agree with our preconceptions.
...scientific opinion fails to quiet societal dispute on such issues not because members of the public are unwilling to defer to experts but because culturally diverse persons tend to form opposing perceptions of what experts believe. Individuals systematically overestimate the degree of scientific support for positions they are culturally predisposed to accept as a result of a cultural availability effect that influences how readily they can recall instances of expert endorsement of those positions.
This results in instances where some people decide that the majority of experts agree with their opinion, when in truth it's the opposite. If 97% of experts are in a consensus, they'll simply listen to the 3% who support their views. A disconnect between scientific and public opinion develops.
Apparently, that's just how human brains work.
In a famous 1950s psychology experiment, researchers showed students from two Ivy League colleges a film of an American football game between their schools in which officials made a series of controversial decisions against one side. Asked to make their own assessments, students who attended the offending team's college reported seeing half as many illegal plays as did students from the opposing institution.
So what exactly am I getting at? Another quote from the above article should explain:
the goal... is not to induce public acceptance of any particular conclusion, but rather to create an environment for the public’s openminded, unbiased consideration of the best available scientific information.
This is all I want. I'm not sure exactly what will solve the problem. But I'm working on an idea which will hopefully help those who don't have the time or inclination to read hundreds of scientific articles in an attempt to get a solid grasp of scientific opinion.
