Strega

….and Hamas is the bastard offspring of the Brotherhood. Militant and political Islam as the organizing principle for society was a great idea. And what of the Sisterhood? Oh yeah, I guess they got the hood part anyway.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
vitalism

I think it makes much more sense to say that life is matter that processes resources for its own benefit, than to say that life is that which contains a vital essence.

All living things have electrical and chemical energy coursing round their bodies.  When they die, this activity ceases.  Yet they are not b…[Read more]

I guess vitalism is no longer a bespoke theory 🙂

@Simon – You should find a copy of “What is Life” by Schrödinger. He was based in Dublin and gave a talk on it at Trinity College in 1943/44. His original question, How does matter store information well enough to reproduce itself?, was basically an intellectual fuse-wire and DNA later became the detonation.

I went to a 3 day set of lectures to…[Read more]

Thanks Simon…..just back from work at 21:30. That’s gonna cost them 🙂 See also the post “moral” just before the Sunday Videos…

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Life Is just Matter with Meaning.

This article is super-interesting.  Life is what happens when inert matter starts processing resources in order to promote its own survival.  That’s basically the starting axiom of my evolutionary ethics model.

They say the organism is processing information, which includes r…[Read more]

Have a great week everyone!

Sorry, a very short post today as I have had an emergency call at one of my clients sites……

@jakelafort – There is just no stopping this onslaught of bespoke medical advances. Look at just some of the horrors they have instigated in the last 2 years alone.

Teams from Tel Aviv University, Weizmann Institute of Science and others have identified a micro-RNA molecule that in animal and cell models halts nerve-cell degeneration and even…[Read more]

Here are a few things to watch out for in the next few months, with risks seasonally increasing at social gatherings. Be cautious during gatherings, and increase your awareness in the following weeks and months of news about any spread of RSV, more than one type of avian flu, possibly Covid, and possibly (but less likely) measles. The CDC has been…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
But yes, we made progress in the sense that we evolved to live in all of the Earth’s extremes.

Yes, and we’ve wrecked every single one.  We can’t compare one species with another to say one is better than the other.  Like you say, each is optimised for their environment.

We’ve made progress – but in what kinds of…[Read more]

We did not “progress” relative to other apes. When we diverged we “went our separate paths”. But yes, we made progress in the sense that we evolved to live in all of the Earth’s extremes.

As I prepared Sunday School this week, I noticed that it had quite a few posts about Christian Nationalism. That got me thinking about how Ireland in the past functioned very much like a Christian Nationalist state, even if that term wasn’t used at the time. Not fascistic Christian Nationalism like the U.S. fringe wants today, but a soft tacit t…[Read more]

Have a great week everyone and a peaceful and pleasant Thanksgiving.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
But cooperative breeding, known as ‘alloparenting’, where individuals other than the biological mother help raise offspring did not start with them. Hominins before erectus already had extended childhoods, reduced canines, increased sociality, and group-based foraging, all of which support cooperative care. Homo ere…

[Read more]

Our lineage split from the other apes circa 5–7 million years ago. That’s when the hominin line begins. Homo erectus appears much later, around 1.9 million years ago and evolved in Africa and yes, they were the first major successful wave to leave Africa. I think they first spread in Eurasia.

But cooperative breeding, known as ‘[Read more]

Apparently the first human species to make it out of Africa was Homo erectus, ~2 million years ago, and they were the first species to do cooperative breeding, meaning that a woman could have more than one child at once, because she got help in looking after them.  This meant that human children had longer in which to mature.

The human line must…[Read more]