streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 8:57 am on February 13, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: drugs ( 7 ), life ( 33 ), space ( 4 ), time ( 6 )   

  The human body is a temple by design, 

  halfway between heaven and earth. Thais try to help this process along by allocating extremely tall pointed hats to children as if they were antennas to keep them in touch with the man upstairs. Drug use is about returning to the world of light speed from which we came, to which we belong. It takes a certain escape velocity to break loose from Earth orbit. These efforts are misguided and doomed to failure, of course, but still not reprehensible. We all carry memories of that other world of time with us here in this world of space. They call drug use ‘getting spaced out’ but it might really be more like getting ‘timed out’, if users are really accessing that other world. If I want to get spaced out, I’ll hop on a jet. We’ve got all the space in the world here. We just don’t have much time. If there is a ghost or spirit world, then it might be just the opposite. They might have all the time in the world, but no space. The perfect world would have both. You just have to make the best of these fistulas and slow spots that comprise life as we know it.

   

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  hardie karges 10:09 am on February 12, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Cultural drift, like genetic drift, takes humans in directions never intended 

  by a simple butterfly effect of a simple random action having untold, but manifold, effects. But here the notion of causality has meaning. That’s what humans do, causing things to happen for specific effects. One of the more interesting things going on in the scientific world is the use of microbiologic techniques in linguistics, that is, documenting and comparing mutations to uncover past history. A more interesting tack, as if anything could truly be more interesting then language acting like DNA, would be to determine if language could possibly have any effect on genetic evolution, possibly as the ‘transfer particle’ between DNA and memory. Such an approach would assume that there is some sort of Chomskyian quantum ‘mentalese’ eidetic language that exists in all organisms regardless of their ability to formalize such, and that higher relativistic Sapir-Whorfian cultural functions may come into play later. The problem is the vast amount of time involved to show any effect in genetic evolution, regardless of how fast culture now evolves. If it could be shown that human DNA evolves faster than that of other species, or even faster than it used to, that would be a starting point from which to begin to try to isolate the causes of such a differential, whether it be drugs, diet, or the Holy Grail itself, language.
   
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  hardie karges 10:12 am on February 11, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Errors in reproduction create new races and species 

  for lack of a better plan, or so the Darwinian explication would have us believe. I’m not so sure. ‘Inheritance of acquired characteristics’ may be making a comeback. A respectable modern biologist speaks of ‘natural selection of habits’ somehow related to memory. Whoa! What are the transfer particles? What carries memory from one generation to the next? Vague references to ‘instinct’ don’t cut it. Does DNA do more than code for proteins? The path in biological, as well as linguistic, evolution is toward smaller multi-purpose units. As the Earth fills up, its inhabitants grow smaller, though smarter, at least until now. Smaller units tend to be more adaptable. Language mutates and evolves faster than DNA, at least in humans. Language reproduces like bacteria. It can evolve at such a rate that some day soon generations may not be able to communicate with each other, as almost happened in the 60’s. Of course it evolves whether there is any ‘reason’ or not. ‘Reason’ is only an anthropomorphism of evolution. In reality, there may be rhyme, but certainly no reason, at least not in Darwinian evolution. The ‘natural selection of habits’ is an interesting proposition, with the implication that somehow habits get memorized genetically and become instinct. But this would require resurrecting Lamarck and going through that entire dialog and dialectic again. Neither position can offer any firm proof, only anecdotal evidence of cause and effect. The Lamarckian position is the more common-sense one while Darwin appears more scientific, at least on the surface. More important, perhaps, is that Darwinism is more materialistic and Lamarckism more idealistic, literally, ‘wishful thinking’ to its detractors. Still, to my knowledge, no product of evolution has ever been specifically linked to any given mutation, much less proven that such mutation would yield that effect again. Scientists don’t believe their own doctrine, still using the language of causality for supposedly random mutations, and still searching the heavens for our long lost relatives without a shred of evidence that such a thing would happen, even if it could.

   
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  hardie karges 7:31 am on February 10, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Given enough time, anything can, and will, happen. 

  Much of what is credited to the spooky actions of ‘natural selection’ are nothing more than a pathetic boring law of averages playing itself out over time and across space. The act of choice is nothing more than victory in the competition to reproduce fastest. Adaptation is the convergence, accidental or otherwise, of skill and opportunity. No beaver ever asked for a big-ass tail, but it works well for paddling water. No owl ever asked for night-vision goggles, but it works well for such. The science of evolution is simply a roll call of those left standing.

   
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  hardie karges 5:49 am on February 7, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Darwin ( 3 ), EVOLUTION ( 21 ), LaMarck   

  Lamarckian ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’ 

  was dropped by the scientific community because it has never been experimentally verified. Has natural selection ever been experimentally verified? Has it ever even been proved that a specific random genetic mutation can lead to a specific beneficial biological advantage or even a specific trait? If a genetic mutation is admittedly neutral at the local level, then how does it become transformed into a biological advantage at the species level? Presumably the law of large numbers comes into play, and we assume that given enough time, these things just happen. Since no particular instance can be proven over such a large span of time, we simply invoke the most convenient logic, or in this case, the most scientific logic. Though ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’ was dropped from the biologists’ lexicon, it’s never been dropped from the popular imagination. It would seem to be the ‘wishful thinking’ option, however, rendering it less scientific than the Darwinist rap. Still scientists talk about a species ‘adapting’ anagenetically, though this requires no mutation. Still human brains keep expanding in size with no apparent change in the DNA sequence, frequently invoking life’s challenges as explanation. Still we keep scanning the stars for radio signals, as if the exact same random genetic sequence might accidentally occur again. Certainly natural selection is not wrong, because it’s a tautology: those that survived were certainly the fittest. An impeccable scientific theory must be useful in making predictions, also, however. Just because it’s not wrong doesn’t mean that it’s right, nor does it mean that Lamarckism is wrong.

   
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  hardie karges 12:53 pm on February 6, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: EVOLUTION ( 21 ), founder effect   

  It’s a law of nature that a male keeps as many females as he can service. 

  One guy gets the harem; everyone else gets the hand. Lions do with brute force what men do with money, extrapolate themselves and their line into the future, and create the world in their own image and likeness. This genetic selfishness also inadvertently strengthens the species. The strongest stud propagates the new generation. This is the ‘founder effect’: “I found her; you can’t have her.” Cloning would not only take all the fun out of it, but would weaken the species by separating it from the usual trials of natural selection. Love is finished when there is no forward movement, just up and down, in and out. Evolution appreciates motivation and inspiration, punctuated equilibrium.

   
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  hardie karges 2:46 pm on February 5, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: EVOLUTION ( 21 ), Hippos   

  Hippos shit with a little automatic butt-wiper 

  of a tail flicking off the poop steadily. Otherwise it’d be drooling down their legs, I guess. I can’t imagine one getting into a crouch. It’d never get back up. Natural selection never rests. If it’s difficult to envision the transition of land mammals to sea mammals, one only has to look at the hippo to see the transition, overweight and water-logged, gliding through the water, bouncing on all fours, incapable of swimming. They’ll learn. You watch them fight with their mouths and compare to the methods of some of the sea cows currently extant and you realize that this is something not likely to happen, but something that has already happened, though still in progress. Some of the different varieties of current sea mammals might as likely have resulted from different waves of evolution from the same branch stock rather than evolution of unrelated stocks, evolution differentiated by time as well as space.

   
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  hardie karges 8:42 am on February 3, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  The cat goes upstairs while the dog stays down. 

  It’s a class system based on ability. The puppy can’t yet climb the stairs, so the kitten gets a break. Otherwise the kitten gets to play the role of chew toy for a growing puppy eager to flex his jaw muscles. This is the law of the ‘hood’; big dog bullies little cat. It’s different on the open savanna. There, the cats rule. Dogs don’t even show up, unless you want to count the scavenger hyenas. Dogs do better up north with their big bad ass cousins, the bears. Bears are a further evolution of the same family which produced the dog, like apes and monkeys, bigger and badder. Given their ability to function on two legs, it makes you wonder if they might not have become the most intelligent animals if apes hadn’t got there first. We talk about dinosaurs with awe and reverence as if that were a historical freak that could never happen again, given the modern tendency of land-based animals to be smaller, more adaptable, units. Whales are as big or bigger than dinosaurs ever were, but not quite as glamorous, their big blubber butts washed up on beaches in helpless prostration to the gods of ignorance, having made a wrong turn down a dead end or their sonar failing them. Everything seems more romantic in retrospective, though I doubt a couple of brontosaurs nibbling ferns were really so astounding. Could humans have co-existed with dinosaurs? Would we have driven them to extinction like all the others?

   
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  hardie karges 12:46 pm on February 2, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: creation, EVOLUTION ( 21 )   

  I refuse to believe that man’s skeleton, optimal for erect posture, 

  
  didn’t somehow derive from his distinct preference for an erect posture in preceding generations, and his decreasing need for a four-legged stance or even the intermediate knuckle-walking. The same would hold for distinct hands and feet, two of each, as opposed to four feet or four hands, as found in other species, arising from a new preference for savannas as opposed to forests. The only question is: by what mechanism would something like that occur? What would stimulate imperceptible evolutionary changes in a specific direction toward a general goal? A quantum mechanic must look for a transfer particle. Darwinism invokes mutation, without ever proving a single instance in which a specific mutation caused a specific trait to be selected for long-term adaptation. Darwinism has merely been accepted, not proven. The mechanism I’m looking for must have something to do with memory, re-programming, visual basic, feedback, something similar to creativity, without invoking creationism nor ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’. Genetic drift must be inherent to the process of evolution, itself to be selected or rejected for usefulness, and re-directed in another direction. Evolution must be inherently directional, whether or not purposefully, adrift in a sea of probabilities.

   
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  hardie karges 1:11 pm on February 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  The Big Bang created a universe like a big balloon, 

  the outer surface right here right now as far as the eye can see; the past occurred somewhere inside, now physically inaccessible. The outer edge that we inhabit is the thin green line where heat meets cold, where lava meets the sea, where past meets the future. We reside on the outer edge of the balloon, looking in, at the past, all we can see. If we resided on the flip side, then maybe we could see the future, probably wouldn’t have much choice, actually. If you could see far enough in any one direction, you’d see yourself, back to the lens, staring off into space. In the future will be the past staring us in the face demanding an explanation. In the future we’ll have to start all over. The only thing certain is the past; the future is pure abstract logic, mathematical probability. An old person leaving this world of space and attraction is even more beautiful than a new pink blob of consciousness coming in, the same thing really, though the unformed future can hardly compete with a well-formed past. Everything’s different now: logic is suspended, reason waits its turn in line. We stand at the crossroads of our lives and history. There’s no going back without re-booting. The moment past is accessible only in memory, measured by the half-life of mental images. The future is Heaven; the past is Hell, a Hell of your own making.