dagblog - Comments for "How Beauty Is Making Scientists Rethink Evolution"

#MeToo?

PeraclesPlease — Mon, 14 Jan 2019 09:37:47 +0000

In reply to Re: we must also question how

#MeToo?

Re: we must also question how

artappraiser — Mon, 14 Jan 2019 08:32:42 +0000

In reply to How Beauty Is Making Scientists Rethink Evolution

Re: we must also question how an animal’s eyes and brain shape its perceptions of reality and how its unique way of experiencing the world can, over time, profoundly alter both its physical form and its behavior.

There's only one good girl here! pic.twitter.com/cnleFi2yhV
— Puppies (@PopularPups) January 14, 2019

Thus Todd Rundgren's "I Want

PeraclesPlease — Sun, 13 Jan 2019 17:40:00 +0000

In reply to budgies like their men to be

Thus Todd Rundgren's "I Want to Be Your #1 (Lowest Common Denominator)".

Beat Me, Whip Me, Make Me Solve Complex Quadratic Equations. Geeks are fer shure date bait, *everyone* knows that.

budgies like their men to be

artappraiser — Sun, 13 Jan 2019 17:29:21 +0000

In reply to "There's no accounting for

budgies like their men to be computin' machines, they don't care what you look like so much:

Succesfully solving a problem makes male budgies more attractive to females https://t.co/zzsd4tkexn I myself solve lots of problems pic.twitter.com/4BOe0RVtzl
— Neuroskeptic (@Neuro_Skeptic) January 12, 2019

(thought some of the comments on that one to be good computin')

"There's no accounting for

PeraclesPlease — Sun, 13 Jan 2019 09:06:00 +0000

In reply to How Beauty Is Making Scientists Rethink Evolution

"There's no accounting for taste" => "We're accounting for taste now, & it's coming back like a motherf*cker..."

I see how it explains metrosexuals, but not mullets - waiting for the grand unified scheme.

Is there a gene for attraction? Are there undetected electromagnetic signals? (something that's been discovered between plants & insects). Rather than just an inclination for survival & one for beauty, is there a whole range of selectors - more complex than binary "I like Gucci" or "I'm more Mark Jacobs" in each category? Are we pre-programmed with measurable inclinations towards violence/aggression, laziness, cultural inquisitiveness, humor, depression, et al? Is there a hidden double helix of human evolution we're just starting to glimpse?

It also amazes me that Science will indoctrinate on a particular viewpoint for decades or even a century, and then occasionally find itself flat-footed wrong or deeply flawed. Are all the Doubting Thomases then rehabilitated, brought back from their re-education camps? Not likely. The brittleness of Evolution/Natural Selection has been a natural target for Evolutionists who felt beauty couldn't be explained by a bunch of chimps at a chromosomal keyboard trying to type out Da Vinci or monarch butterflies, so they naturally substituted their God for the appalling lack of explanation/hand-waving (which extends the philosopher Feuerbach's idea that we fill in our image of God with the best of our qualities - in this case we added Science's as well, unsurprisingly).

[wait for the coming Linguistics reformation that Tom Wolfe went out flagging in "The Kingdom of Speech" in his usual flamboyant style]

PS - epigenetics is also changing much, essentially "neoLamarckism" much more subtle than the giraffe-stretching-for-leaves, it pays attention to how genetic traits aren't simply turned on at birth, but reveal themselves through a complex set of environmental triggers or circumstance. So come Saturday night, my fashion chromosomes light up either Dolce & Gabbana or Comme des Garçons, and that decides how my evening will go. Or in a desperate anti-evolutionary stance, I decide to say "Fuck it" and just stay home - are we men or are we machines?