Red Queen

“Survival of the Fittest” suggests a level of knowledge in advance. This is hindsight bias. Normally there is a base level of fitness, and then it is just those who have the specific survival skill required for the randomly selected sorting event. The world is complex, ambiguous, and random. We can work on our base fitness. We can be prepared for a variety of sorting events. If something happens that 95% wipes you out, you want to be in a position to rebuild from that 5%. “The Red Queen” principle in Biology is that evolution is more about running just to stay in the same place, “organisms must constantly adapt, evolve, and proliferate in order to survive while pitted against ever-evolving opposing organisms in a constantly changing environment.”

Let It Be

I was out of action for almost two days on Sunday and Monday with a bug of some sort. My favourite form of medicine is sleep. It tends to get rid of most ailments. I find the bodies ability to fix itself magical. While it does it's thing though, and I tried to sleep, my thoughts tend to go awol. I wasn't knocked out for hours. It was closer to that broken, distracted sleep mixed with dreams that were all over the place.

I feel almost in control of most of my dreams. Like I am directing the story. The problem is the 'almost'. When I am anxious, my dreams will often hit dead ends or caught in a plot twist I do not like at all. They include various relationships - friendships, family, teachers, colleagues, and various other people that I have come across in my life. Normally the anxiety ends up revolving around some sort of misunderstanding. I feel like people just don't understand the truth. If they understood the truth, then everything would be fine. But the dream won't got the way I want it too.

Because I am typically in and out of sleep at these points, I sometimes catch myself. I tell myself I am dreaming. It is not a pleasant dream. Just stop it. But I feel like I am on the cusp of solving some momentous problem that will make everything fall in line. Just letting it be is hard. I dive back in.

After two days of various of these types of fights, I really didn't feel like doing my normal reading trying to understand the various conflicts around the world, and how we chip away at some of the big problems. I do think you need to make space for the mind to switch off. Two ways which, now that I have more time, I find really useful are cleaning and cooking. It is amazing how chores when you are busy, become pleasures when you have space. A lot of things increase in quality when you add space.

Yesterday I made BBC Good Food's Tomato Soup. Not rocket science to follow the recipe. With some music playing and lights on the Christmas Tree, it is much easier to let it be.

Wazzup my Brutha

I am only in the first few chapters of The Red Queen by Matt Ridley, but he brings up a point that seems so obvious, I am not sure why I wasn't struck by it before.

Have you heard the story of the philosopher who did the Emperor of China a great service, and requested payment involving grains of rice and a chess board? Well, he asked that one grain of rice be placed in the bag for the first square, two for the second, four for the third, eight for the next and so on. With each square the number of rice grains would double. The Emperor thought this sounded reasonable and agreed. It didn't take long until he realised he had given away all the rice in China.

Well Ridley applies it to something a little different (not the story, but the doubling). We have two parents, four grandparents, eight grandparents, and so on... you get the picture.

'A mere thirty generations back - in, roughly 1066AD - you had more than a billion direct ancestors in the same generation (2 to the power of 30). Since there were fewer than a billion people alive at that time in the whole world, many of those people were your ancestors twice or three times over. If, like me, you are of British descent, the chances are that almost all of the few million Brittons alive in 1066, including King Harold, William the Conqueror, a random serving wench and the meanest vassal (but excluding all well behaved monks and nuns) are your direct ancestors.'

That is not really all that long ago. Go a little further back and we all came from Africa.

Now clearly, we can't really go that many generations back. But this false belief that we are descended from a specific line based on our father's father's father... is rather silly. Then you take the fact that it all probably mixes far far quicker than we think. Add to that the complete randomness of where you were born, and to who...

then the whole concept of borders and countries and the like becomes a little silly.

This comes from someone who has always been a strong patriot of South Africa. But perhaps one that is fast realising these artificial barriers of any sort are silly.

Except when playing sport...

Hold on!

Craig Venter talks on TED about working on genomes and the creation of synthetic life.

Asked:

Couldn't you be accused of playing God?

He said:

Oh, we aren't playing.

Humour aside, his talk is absolutely fascinating if somewhat inaccessible. Another TED talk I watched talked about how early on we are in the realm of human development and civilization. If you think how long people have been around, then where we were 4000 years ago, then 2000, then 500, then 100, then 10 years ago... the pace of change is quite remarkable.

I have a friend who is doing his PHD in molecular genetics... the rest of our flat at university was doing commerce. He doesn't tell us much about what he does other than that it involves stem cell research and potentially healing quadriplegics!

Between understanding biology, harnessing the exchange and processing of information and getting over many of the biases that have held us back, it is difficult if not impossible to comprehend the world that we could live in in 50 years time.

Trying to keep up.

Talk about something simple like social evolution, people haven't even figured out the etiquette of status updates on Facebook! We aren't used to people knowing everything. We aren't used to communication being so easy. We aren't used to honestly challenging the way we think and changing.

We are used to barriers, prejudice, hiding, lying, fooling ourselves and others, and being in clicques.

Hold on to your seat belts!