Jason Laughlin

Every couple of years (it seems), I update my installations of things like wordpress in the belief that the fresh start will lower my inertia and make it easier to return to blogging.  Better luck this time…:-)

Welcome to WordPress. This is the first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!t

I’ve posted photos from the Wedding of Brian Clemmons and Brandi Sharpe. They were married Saturday, May 1st, 2004 in Reidsville, NC.

Finally, some better support for my winter cocoa habit, as if drinking chocolate needs a reason.

Interesting survey of the preference of reason or unreason (emotion), and touches on why some logical tests are easier than others. Unreason’s Seductive Charms

For those people that have a hard time understanding how random mutations and non-directed evolution can still produce something useful enough to appear “directed”, I suggest reading this article on “the adjacent possible”.

But here’s the strange part: Darwin talked about pre-adaptations, by which he meant a causal consequence of a part of an organism that might turn out to be useful in some funny environment and therefore be selected. The story of Gertrude the flying squirrel illustrates this: About 63 million years ago there was an incredibly ugly squirrel that had flaps of skin connecting her wrists to her ankles. She was so ugly that none of her squirrel colleagues would play or mate with her, so one day she was eating lunch all alone in a magnolia tree. There was an owl named Bertha in the neighboring pine tree, and Bertha took a look at Gertrude and thought, “Lunch!” and came flashing down out of the sunlight with her claws extended. Gertrude was very scared and she jumped out of the magnolia tree and, surprised, she flew! She escaped from the befuddled Bertha, landed, and became a heroine to her clan. She was married in a civil ceremony a month later to a very handsome squirrel, and because the gene for the flaps of skin was Mendelian dominant, all of their kids had the same flaps. That’s roughly why we now have flying squirrels.

The question is, could one have said ahead of time that Gertrude’s flaps could function as wings? Well, maybe. Could we say that some molecular mutation in a bacterium that allows it to pick up calcium currents, thereby allowing it to detect a paramecium in its vicinity and to escape the paramecium, could function as a paramecium-detector? No. Knowing what a Darwinian pre adaptation is, do you think that we could say ahead of time, what all possible Darwinian pre adaptations are? No, we can’t. That means that we don’t know what the configuration space of the biosphere is.

It is important to note how strange this is. In statistical mechanics we start with the famous liter volume of gas, and the molecules are bouncing back and forth, and it takes six numbers to specify the position and momentum of each particle. It’s essential to begin by describing the set of all possible configurations and momenta of the gas, giving you a 6N dimensional phase space. You then divide it up into little 6N dimensional boxes and do statistical mechanics. But you begin by being able to say what the configuration space is. Can we do that for the biosphere?

I’m going to try two answers. Answer one is No. We don’t know what Darwinian pre adaptations are going to be, which supplies an arrow of time. The same thing is true in the economy; we can’t say ahead of time what technological innovations are going to happen. Nobody was thinking of the Web 300 years ago. The Romans were using things to lob heavy rocks, but they certainly didn’t have the idea of cruise missiles. So I don’t think we can do it for the biosphere either, or for the econosphere.

Take every Playboy centerfold by decade, then average them together into a composite. The results are a little depressing, but at the same time, it’s nice to know some things don’t change.

Article describing and debunking the techniques of “Rorschach wizards” and how similar their skills are to those used by palm-readers and astrologists.

Finally relaunching jasonlaughlin.com, this time letting Movable Type be the site engine, along with PHP Gallery. Let’s get it on…