Modesto Bee | Oakdale pastor leads a look at Adam, Eve and evolution co-existing Modesto Bee He's done more reading on it in recent years and seen an emergence of ideas that are more in the center of the spectrum of beliefs. You can embrace evolution and still believe Adam and Eve were real people, Roberts said in a phone interview Wednesday. |
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Oakdale pastor leads a look at Adam, Eve and evolution co-existing - Modesto Bee
The Orioles farm system is not very good, just about everyone who isnt paid by the Orioles agrees. This has been the case for a few years now. The team has maintained success every other year at the big league level, so it hasnt mattered yet, but they havent had much success in getting mid-tier prospects to turn into MLB-caliber players.
You can see this clearly in the evolution of the annual Orioles top 10 prospects list over the past several seasons. While the Orioles have had some prospects that everybody really liked, including Manny Machado, Dylan Bundy, and Kevin Gausman, these same players were about all the value that the Orioles have gotten at the MLB level from their top 10 guys.
The folks at MLB Pipeline, who do the top 100 prospects in baseball and the top 10 prospects in each organization for MLB.com, helpfully put each list from 2011 onward in one graphic on Twitter:
The strength of the top names kept the Orioles at least in the middle of the pack for a number of these years. Along with the players the Orioles got when they were still picking in the top 5 every year, Jonathan Schoop has proved to be a success story from the farm. There are some others rounding out these top 10 rankings where about all one can do is give a grim shake of the head.
I mean, really, was Xavier Avery and Joe Mahoney really the best they could do prior to the 2011 season? Nick Delmonico and Jason Esposito before the 2012 season? It remains something of a miracle that the 2012 team won 93 games. Other than Machado, they sure didnt get much help from the farm. Outside of Schoop and Gausman, neither did the 2014 team.
That 2011 ranking is so long ago that it still has Mychal Givens the shortstop, and the fact that he re-emerged as a reliever prior to the 2016 rankings was a poor sign for the system anyway. Givens has had some big league success, but for the most part, if one of your best prospects is already a reliever, thats not a good thing.
To be fair to the Orioles, and to any failed prospect anywhere, its hard to get to MLB and stay there. Most minor leaguers, even some that get themselves proclaimed as top 100 prospects in all of MLB, arent good enough. Of the ones who are good enough, many will get hurt and not be what they were supposed to be.
There are a lot of failures that can be laid at the Orioles feet. They havent developed an outfielder since Nick Markakis. All we need to know about their success in developing starting pitchers is that they thought it was a good idea to give up a first round pick to sign Yovani Gallardo and later trade for Wade Miley last year.
Some of these are self-inflicted wounds. Trading Eduardo Rodriguez cost the Orioles, though they did at least have the value of Andrew Miller down the stretch run and in the playoffs that year. Trading Zach Davies cost them more, because Gerardo Parra was awful. The two have combined to start 75 games over the past two seasons.
Still, a starting rotation consisting of Chris Tillman, Gausman, Bundy, Rodriguez, and Davies probably wouldnt leave you feeling much better than you might about the current rotation. This stuff isnt easy to do, and its harder still now that the team is good and theyre not picking in the top 5-10 spots of every round any more.
The thing is, everyones old top 10 prospect lists look pretty bad. Most people in Birdland, myself included, would probably agree that the Boston farm system is always getting hyped. Here is their top prospect lists over the last decade:
Will Middlebrooks had a good half-season in his rookie year and was terrible afterwards. Brentz is 28 and has 90 MLB plate appearances under his belt.
There are success stories, much like the Orioles had. Xander Bogaerts is good. Jackie Bradley Jr., after an abysmal rookie year, is looking good, much to the chagrin of Os fans. So is Mookie Betts, whose ranking below some of those other guys now looks hilarious.
Others, like Yoan Moncada and Manuel Margot, were used as trade bait to fetch top quality MLB talent: Chris Sale and Craig Kimbrel.
Ryan Lavarnway was going to be the Red Sox catcher of the future. Then it was going to be Blake Swihart. Neither one proved to be that. Henry Owens has spent three years as a top 100 prospect in MLB. He also walked 81 batters in 137.2 innings at Triple-A last year. All the prospect people liked Allen Webster, at least until he came up to the MLB level and was bad, and so on.
Ranking prospects isnt a pointless endeavor. The people with expertise still do better than if a bunch of random schmucks were rating prospects. Its something to talk about. Its not an ironclad prophecy received from a blind hermit living on top of a mountain.
Maybe one lesson with the above is that Red Sox prospects get hyped more than they should. But the bigger lesson is just that its hard to find and develop big league talent, even if you have gobs of money and can afford to fail sometimes. Boston still owes Rusney Castillo another $46 million, for crying out loud.
If the Orioles are lucky, another four or five years down the road, the success rate of their top 10 prospects will be better than their ones from four or five years ago. Theyre really going to need it.
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Evolution Gaming has agreed to provide its full portfolio of live casino games to sports betting exchange Matchbook.
Under the agreement, Matchbook will be able to offer Evolutions range of games to customers on desktop, tablet and mobile.
Matchbook, which expects to roll out the content during the second quarter of this year, already offers a host of sports betting options.
Live casino has been a big area of growth for us in the last 12 months already and with Evolution recognised as a leader in live casino, and with this agreement Matchbook players will have increased opportunities to play different games and different tables, across even more devices, Matchbooks Cian Nugent said.
Sebastian Johannisson, chief commercial officer at Evolution, added: We are very confident that Matchbook players will love their new extended line-up of live casino games.
Very importantly, the Evolution games will significantly extend anytime, anywhere access for Matchbooks players.
Mobile access to our live casino games now accounts for over 45% of game revenue across our network.
Related article: White Hat signs up Evolution's Live Casino
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Evolution secures live casino deal with Matchbook - iGaming Business
Image: IEEE Spectrum; Robot photos: Cobalt, Aethon, Simbe, Savioke, Diligent Droids, and PAL Robotics Companies developing indoor robots for commercial spaces include [from left] Cobalt, Aethon, Simbe, Savioke, Diligent Droids, and PAL Robotics.
This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE.
Venture funding for robotics has exploded by more than 10x over the last six years and shows no signs of stopping. Most of this investment has been focused on the usual suspects: logistics, warehouse automation, robot arms for manufacturing, healthcare and surgical robots, drones, agriculture, and autonomous cars.
But after looking into the robotics industry as I set out to launch my own robot company, Cobalt, founded last year and which came out of stealth today, I became convinced thatthere is a new emerging segment about to become one of the fastest-growing in coming years: Autonomous indoor robots for commercial spaces.
For many years, autonomous indoor robots meant one of two domains: 1.Manufacturing or material handling robots in factories and warehouses; or 2.Simple home robots. These robots sit on opposite ends of the structured spaces spectrum:
In years past, robots in factories and warehouses required extremely structured environmentsessentially, automation engineers modified the environment and kept people at arms length so that the robots could perform repetitive tasks in relative isolation. With advances in compliant manipulation (e.g. Rethink Robotics and Universal Robots) and mapping (e.g. Fetch Robotics), this equation is slowly changingbut thats a story for another day.
On the opposite end of the structured spaces spectrum is the home. Homes are notoriously unstructured and dynamic. Homes can change moment to moment and they have extremely high variability, lots of people (adults and children alike), pets, clutter, stairs, and unreliable communications. Of course, wed all love to have a general-purpose home robot (i.e. Rosie from The Jetsons) to clean, do the laundry, feed the pets, etc. But its pretty obvious that inexpensive appliances (like Roomba) and robot toys (look at CES this year) are the only viable home robots at this time: The home is hard!
But theres a massive, untapped market that sits between these two on the spectrum: Commercial spaces such as hotels, hospitals, offices, retail stores, banks, schools, nursing homes, schools, malls, and museums.
Commercial spaces could serve as a great stepping stone on the path toward general-purpose home robots by driving scale, volume, and capabilities. Commercial spaces have a number of key advantages compared to the home:
Owing to these factors, weve started to see a number of autonomous indoor robots for commercial spaces popping up in the last few years. To name just a few:
In fact, each of these companies is building what amounts to an autonomous car,but with different form-factors, value propositions, and customer segments. So while billions of dollars are being spent on autonomous vehicles for R&D and production at scale, these new applications reap the benefits (tech advances and cost savings) on sensors, computing hardware, algorithms, AI, machine learning, and open-source software.
However, indoor robots present some of their own unique challenges. Unlike autonomous cars, indoor robots are required to interact closely with and around people and integrate seamlessly into brand-conscious enterprise organizations. Because of this, factors such as industrial design, human-robot interaction, and psychology become increasingly important. Therefore, it is increasingly important for companies in this new market segment to engage experts in these fields early on (that was certainly the case at Cobalt).
Im excited about the prospect for this new market segment. These companies are eschewing the classic roboticist temptation to building sexy robots for the sake of robots. Instead, they are solving real, diverse problems with real, paying customers. Many, if not most, of the companies mentioned are already starting to deliver robots in the field, so keep an eye out for them. If my intuition is correct, there will be a lot of these robots very soon!
IEEE Spectrum's award-winning robotics blog, featuring news, articles, and videos on robots, humanoids, drones, automation, artificial intelligence, and more. Contact us:e.guizzo@ieee.org
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Why Indoor Robots for Commercial Spaces Are the Next Big Thing in Robotics - IEEE Spectrum
Four years ago, there were no robotics teams at Brentwood Academy. This Saturday, March 4, the school will be hosting the VEX Robotics Tennessee State Championship, where six BA teams, collectively known as the Iron Eagles, will compete against 38 teams from 21 different Tennessee schools.
The electric pace of robotics surging popularity at BA is a testament both to the intellectual precocity of the schools students and to the acumen of dedicated teachers who first saw in robotics a unique learning opportunity.
Because competitive robotics is not just about competition. Its not just about gears and fuses and batteries and wires. Its about constructing a sense of community and instilling a passion for curiosity and practice. Its about different parts learning to work together for a common purpose.
Wendy Stallings was not a competitive robotics expert when she first thought up the idea. The physics teacher simply thought that building robots could be a stimulating, rewarding experience for her students.
I had a group of students who were very into computer programming and mechanical engineering, Stallings said. I asked if they wanted to build a robot, and they said yes and the next thing we knew we had unintentionally won state and started an official robotics team.
It really did happen almost that quickly. BAs first robotics team consisted of five people and was formed in the fall of 2013. The following spring that team was in the world championships in Anaheim, California. The next year, 40 students signed up to be on robotics teams.
We opened it up to the whole school just to see, and it really exploded, Stallings remembered.
In its second year, the program was even more successful than in its first. At the world finals, one BA team won the design award, the second highest award that VEX, the company that organizes robotic competitions, gives out. Another placed 4th out of 450 teams in the tournament phase of the contest.
Stallings currently considers herself the head coach emeritus of BAs teams. She has passed along most of the day-to-day coaching duties to her former assistant coach, Chris Allen, BAs Computer Technology Director.
They are both consistently impressed by the dedication of BAs Iron Eagles, noting how some students will spend up to 40 hours a week in the summer coming to school to work on their robots. Allen estimates that many robotics team members work 600 to 800 hours a year on their machines, including weekends and holidays oftentimes.
Its not that they are required to do so. In fact, Stallings mentioned how sometimes she had to intercede to get students to work less on robotics, but they just love it so much they dont seem to want to stop.
Allen is currently overseeing six teamsteams A through F that will participate in Saturdays state championships. Each team has between three and five students who build a robot each year to compete in whatever contest VEX has designed. This year the game is Starstruck and involves teams trying to get their robots to place Stars and Cubes on their opponents side of a separating barrier.
Brady Cole is a junior on BAs Team E. Hes been doing robotics for two years now, although for one year prior to that he acted as the schools tournament DJ, traveling and playing music while other students competed. Its a lot of 8-bit music and movie soundtracks, is how he describes his ideal robotics playlist.
After all the DJing, Cole sensed that he had more contribute to the robotics program.
I found that I had a knack for the designing process, he said.
That knack has resulted in Cole designing a wildly unorthodox robot for the state championships. Audrey II, named after the man-eating plant from Little Shop of Horrors, is a behemoth of a robot that separates into two parts connected by a tether, and which can extend from 18 to 52 long. Coach Allen said hes never seen anything like it in competition before.
Freshman Katie Ann Edgeworth and senior Will McClellan are on Team C. Edgeworth is a math and science fan who, as a prospective enrollee on a tour of Brentwood Academy, saw a robotics trophy on the wall and immediately wanted to know more.
McClellan is a three-year veteran of the team who got into robotics on a lark. It was kind of just an opportunity I saw, and I just decided to jump on it, he said.
As educators, Stallings and Allen have in mind certain things that they hope these three students, and all of their robotics compatriots, will get out of the program.
For Stallings, the science teacher, that hope revolves around the demystification of science from some sort of abstract, imposing subject to a practice that can be accessible and even thrilling.
I think one of the greatest benefits of a robotics program is providing students insight into how engineering and science really works, with the whole plan, test, rebuild, process, she said. We have a lot of students who might not normally be interested in something like science or engineering because they feel like they dont get good enough grades or they feel like theyre not smart enough, but when they get involved in the process of building and they learn how creative science and engineering fields are, they learn how fun science and engineering can be, and then they learn that anybody can do it. Its about hard work and not text book grades.
Allen sees other potential benefits as well. For example, robotics, he believes, will not only make students smarter, but also help them cultivate practical skills they can use in their day-to-day lives.
Id say the other in terms of skills would be communication skills, time management skills and then social skills, too, he said. Theyre having to work on a team thats maybe not structured like a football team per se, where its a more intimate setting.
For their part, Cole, Edgeworth and McClellan trace their enthusiasm for robotics to a number of factors.
Edgeworth, for instance, especially enjoys the satisfaction that comes with knowing that her hard work is going towards a definable goal and will likely pay off one day.
The more time you put into it, the more you get out of it, she said.
McClellan appreciates that aspect of robotics as well, but also expressed his appreciation for the way tournaments have expanded his understanding of the differences and similarities between different cultures.
It kind of shows how robotics crosses national boundaries, he said. You get to worlds and you see people from all across the world and youd assume itd be so different, but everyone there is committed to a common goal.
Then theres the community part of it as well. Robotics made McClellan feel like he really belonged.
I came onto the team as a sophomore with really low self-esteem and didnt think I could do anything, he said. And before I knew it, I had been to two world competitions and won state tournaments and everything, and it really boosted my self-esteem to have that and to have that group of friends that I could rely on who are not only funny and nice to talk to but who are smart too.
That social side of robotics really stands out for Cole, too.
I enjoy the community, he said. Its a very nice group of people. Whenever things go wrong were always all there more as a school. It sounds really cheesy but we always say, Were all Iron Eagles, andbefore your individual team comes your school. When we need to, we all come together, and its a really nice, close-knit community.
The VEX Robotics Tennessee State Championship will be held all day Saturday, March 4 at Brentwood Academy.
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The high school competition has fast-paced action on the field plus the excitement of a big sporting event with high-energy music revving up the cheering fans and team mascots, but this game has a twist, a technical twist. This game is played by robots.
Since early January, high school students around the world have been designing, constructing and testing their robots, and this week the 2017 FIRST Robotics Competitions begin.
FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics has been dubbed "the varsity sport for the mind." Event founder Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, hopes this program can help "to transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and where young people dream of becoming science and technology heroes."
This year's game is called Steamworks. The premise of this game is that two adventurer clubs, which are alliances of three teams and three robots, are preparing for a long-distance airship race. They need to collect fuel, represented by balls shot into a target, or the "boiler," deliver gears to engage rotors, and then climb aboard by having their robot ascend a rope.
Over 3,000 teams from around the world are participating in events through the World Championships in April. These events are fun, free and open to the public. Sixty-seven teams from Indiana are competing, including the Robodogs from Crown Point High School.
"Everyone first saw the video of this year's game on kick-off day back in January. Then our team spent the day determining our strategy. What were our objectives? Did we want to build an offensive or a defensive robot?" said BC Spear, an engineer and returning volunteer mentor for the team. "One thing the team agreed on is that they hope to make it to the World Championships this year."
With that goal in mind, the team of three seniors, four juniors, two sophomores and two freshmen has worked with their volunteer mentors and parents, often five days a week plus Saturday, and even some Sundays. Spear described the robot they constructed as an offensive robot that can deliver gears, shoot balls into the high (and high point) boiler, and climb the rope at the end of the round.
"There's a lot going on with this robot, and we made it fast so we can do more and score more points each round," said Trina Vargo, a Crown Point junior in her third year on the team.
Vargo is the team's build captain.
"I stay in the pits and do repairs between rounds," Vargo explained. "We try to make the robot perfect, but things happen. Another robot might accidentally bump into it, or something jams or falls off. We have tools and parts in our pit area. We also try to help out our teammates from other schools, even when they're our competitors later on. My favorite part of all this is cheering on a really good team. Even if you're not in the finals, you want a robot that's built right to win."
FIRST has a term for that spirit of competing, and yet assisting, enabling and cooperating whenever you can "coopetition." Participants are also encouraged to display "gracious professionalism" by competing hard yet working with integrity and showing sensitivity.
A culture of safety is another important part of FIRST Robotics.
"Actually the safety captain is the only team position required by FIRST," according to Noah Clark, a Crown Point junior who is this year's safety captain for the Robodogs.
"Everyone needs to wear safety glasses, have their hair tied back and there are different precautions with certain tools when we're building or doing repairs. We have a smaller team so everyone has to take on more than one role, which is good experience. The last couple years I was part of the drive team that would drive the robot on the floor at the competition."
"The competitions are the best part," Clark said. "You see firsthand your work in relation to other teams. It's so interesting to see so many different designs and strategies to achieve the same goal, and the competition is exciting. There's cheering. They play great music. Your adrenaline's pumping."
Their advice to first-time spectators is to first watch a few rounds to become familiar with the game. Then, talk to participants between rounds, and definitely grab a pair of safety glasses and go into the pits. Each team has a 10-by-10 foot pit area with their tools, robot and students and mentors who, time permitting, would be happy to talk about their robot.
The Robodogs and 37 other teams, including Munster HorsePower, and RoboBlitz from Michigan City, are registered for this weekend's Tippecanoe District. This event will run from 9:30 a.m. to approximately 6 p.m. on Saturday, and 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday, with awards to follow, at Harrison High School, 5701 North 50 West in West Lafayette.
Two other Indiana district events are scheduled before the Indiana State Championship on April 6-8 in Huntington, Indiana.
Team Hammond will join the other local teams plus 30 others from Indiana and Michigan at the St. Joseph District on March 10-12 at Penn High School in Mishawaka. The Perry Meridian District will take place in Indianapolis on the weekend of March 23-25.
Robots and fans will pack the UIC Pavilion in Chicago for the exciting Midwest Regional on March 29 to April 1.
Details can be found online at http://www.firstinspires.org, including links to each team website. Admission is free to all of these events.
Also free is Team Hammond's open house and robot demonstration at 2 to 3:30 p.m. Sunday at the Area Career Center, 5727 Sohl Avenue in Hammond. Enter through Door H at the back of the building and take the stairs to the right.
Team Hammond, the Beast, has the distinction of holding the most World Champion titles in FIRST Robotics history with four titles, earned in 1997, 2001, 2002 and 2004. The team has students from Hammond, Clark, Gavit and Morton high schools and the ACCU-Area Career Center.
Best wishes to all of our local teams in the upcoming FIRST Robotics competitions.
Joan Dittmann is a freelance columnist for the Post-Tribune.
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Get used to hearing a lot more about artificial intelligence. Even if you discount the utopian and dystopian hyperbole, the 21st century will be defined not just by advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, computing and cognitive neuroscience, but how we manage them. For some, the question of whether or not the human race will live to see a 22nd century pivots upon this latter consideration. While forecasting the imminence of an AI-centric future remains a matter of intense debate, we will need to come to terms with it. For now, there are many more questions than answers.
It is clear, however, that the European Parliament is making inroads towards taking an AI-centric future seriously. Last month, in a 17-2 vote, the parliaments legal affairs committee voted to begin drafting a set of regulations to govern the development and use of artificial intelligence and robotics. Included in this draft proposal is preliminary guidance on what it calls electronic personhood that would ensure corresponding rights and obligations for the most sophisticated AI. This is a start, but nothing more than that.
If you caught any of the debate on the issue of electronic or robot personhood, you probably understand how murky the issues are, and how visceral reactions to it can be. If you have not caught any of it, now is a good time to start paying attention.
The idea of robot personhood is similar to the concept of corporate personhood, which allows companies to take part in legal cases as both claimant and respondent that is, to sue and be sued. The report identifies a number of areas for potential oversight, such as the formation of a European agency for AI and robotics, a legal definition of smart autonomous robots, a registration system for the most advanced ones, and a mandatory insurance scheme for companies to cover damage and harm caused by robots.
The report also addresses the possibility that both AI and robotics will cause massive job losses and calls for a serious assessment of the feasibility of a universal basic income as a strategy to minimise the economic effects of mass automation of entire economic sectors.
We, Robots
As daunting as these challenges are, lawmakers, politicians and courts are only beginning to skim the surface of what sort of problems, and indeed opportunities, artificial intelligence and robotics pose. Yes, driverless cars are problematic, but only in a world where traditional cars exist. Get them off the road, and a city, state, nation, or continent populated exclusively by driverless cars is essentially a really, really elaborate railway signalling network.
AI is predicted to be humanised through real emotions
I cannot critique here the feasibility of things such as general artificial intelligence, or even the Pandoras Box that is Whole Brain Emulation whereby an artificial, software-based copy of a human brain is made that functions and behaves identically to the biological one. So lets just assume their technical feasibility and imagine a world where both bespoke sentient robots and robotic versions of ourselves imbued with perfect digital copies of our brains go to work and Netflix and chill with us.
It goes without saying that the very notion of making separate, transferable, editable copies of human beings embodied in robotic form poses both conceptual and practical legal challenges. For instance, basic principles of contract law would need to be updated to accommodate contracts where one of the parties existed as a digital copy of a biological human.
Would a contract in Jane Smiths name, for example, apply to both the biological Jane Smith and her copy? On what basis should it, or should it not? The same question would also need to be asked in regard to marriages, parentage, economic and property rights, and so forth. If a robot copy was actually an embodied version of a biological consciousness that had all the same experiences, feelings, hopes, dreams, frailties and fears as their originator, on what basis would we deny that copy rights if we referred to existing human rights regimes? This sounds like absurdity, but it is nonetheless an absurdity that may soon be reality, and that means we cannot afford to laugh it off or overlook it.
There is also the question of what fundamental rights a copy of a biological original should have. For example, how should democratic votes be allocated when copying peoples identities into artificial bodies or machines becomes so cheap that an extreme form of ballot box stuffing by making identical copies of the same voter becomes a real possibility?
Should each copy be afforded their own vote, or a fractional portion determined by the number of copies that exist of a given person? If a robot is the property of its owner should they have any greater moral claim to a vote than say, your cat? Would rights be transferable to back-up copies in the event of the biological originals death? What about when copying becomes so cheap, quick, and efficient that entire voter bases could be created at the whim of deep-pocketed political candidates, each with their own moral claim to a democratic vote?
How do you feel about a voter base comprised of one million robotic copies of Milo Yiannopolous? Remember all that discussion in the US about phantom voter fraud?Well, imagine that on steroids. What sort of democratic interests would non-biological persons have given that they would likely not be susceptible to ageing, infirmity, or death? Good luck sleeping tonight.
Deep thoughts
These are incredibly fascinating things to speculate on and will certainly lead to major social, legal, political, economic and philosophical changes should they become live issues. But it is because they are increasingly likely to be live issues that we should begin thinking more deeply about AI and robotics than just driverless cars and jobs. If you take any liberal human rights regime at face value, youre almost certainly led to the conclusion that, yes, sophisticated AIs should be granted human rights if we take a strict interpretation of the conceptual and philosophical foundations on which they rest.
AI provides a fear of the loss of individual human identity
Why then is it so hard to accept this conclusion? What is it about it that makes so many feel uneasy, uncomfortable or threatened? Humans have enjoyed an exclusive claim to biological intelligence, and we use ourselves as the benchmark against which all other intelligence should be judged. At one level, people feel uneasy about the idea of robotic personhood because granting rights to non-biological persons means that we as humans would become a whole lot less special.
Indeed, our most deeply ingrained religious and philosophical traditions revolve around the very idea that we are in fact beautiful and unique snowflakes imbued with the spark of life and abilities that allow us to transcend other species. Thats understandable, even if you could find any number of ways to take issue with it.
At another level, the idea of robot personhood particularly as it relates to the example of voting makes us uneasy because it leads us to question the resilience and applicability of our most sacrosanct values. This is particularly true in a time of fake news, alternative facts, and the gradual erosion of the once-proud edifice of the liberal democratic state. With each new advancement in AI and robotics, we are brought closer to a reckoning not just with ourselves, but over whether our laws, legal concepts, and the historical, cultural, social and economic foundations on which they are premised are truly suited to addressing the world as it will be, not as it once was.
The choices and actions we take today in relation to AI and robotics have path-dependent implications for what we can choose to do tomorrow. It is incumbent upon all of us to engage with what is going on, to understand its implications and to begin to reflect on whether efforts such as the European Parliaments are nothing more than pouring new wine into old wine skins. There is no science of futurology, but we can better see the future and understand where we might end up in it by focusing more intently on the present and the decisions we have made as society when it comes to technology.
When you do that, you realise we as a society have made no real democratic decisions about technology, but have more or less been forced to accept that certain things enter our world and that we must learn to harness their benefits or get left behind, and, of course, that we must deal with their fallout. Perhaps the first step, then, is not to take laws and policy proposals as the jumping-off point for how to deal with AI, but instead start thinking more about correcting the democratic deficit that exists onwhether we as a society, or indeed a planet, really want to inherit the future Silicon Valley and others want for us.
To hear more about the future of AI and whether robots will take our jobs, listen to episode 10 of The Conversations monthly podcast, The Anthill which is all about the future.
Christopher Markou, PhD Candidate, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge. This article first appeared on The Conversation (theconversation.com)
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Robots and AI could soon have feelings, hopes and rights we ... - The Independent
North Marion High School adds three more robotics teams to its competitive stable
The President's Day weekend was a busy one for the North Marion Voltmasters.
Three new robotics teams, and their robots, joined the North Marion High School roster: Teams C (The Claw), D (DumDum), and E (The Beast), along with Team B (Scorpion), attended the rookies-only tournament on Feb. 18 at Dallas High School.
Though the varsity squad didn't enter its robot, Juggernaut, some of the team members traveled to Dallas to support the younger teams.
The Scorpions made their way through the qualifying rounds and when it all over, Samantha Patton was the last member standing, alone in first place. And with that finish, she had the first choices in selecting other teams to join her alliance heading into the quarterfinals. Her alliance would make it to the finals before falling, earning a second place.
Teams C, with members Daniel Gonzalez, Brice Ferrell, and Grace Bramel, finished in seventh place, while Team D's Hunter Wierstra and Beau Wilson managed to take 10th.
But the newbie tourney wasn't the end of the robotics weekend.
All North Marion robots attended the rescheduled Sandy tournament on Feb. 20 "and most performed respectably against far more experienced teams," said adviser Sherie Moran. "For some members that had been unable to attend the rookie tournament, it was a bit overwhelming, but they still put in a solid showing."
Teams C and E were able to select their own alliances going into the quarterfinals and although none of the teams made it to the semifinals, "a lot was learned about engineering, robotics, and computer science," said Moran. "Now that everyone better understands the challenges, they are eager to return to the classroom to make modifications to their robots, their programs and their strategies as they look toward their home tournament on Feb 25."
North Marion is looking for volunteers to fill in as judges, referees, field setters, greeters, and other helping hands to set up, manage, and tear down. To help, email Moran at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
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Chinese twins wear VR headsets as they ride in a roller coaster simulator at the Wantong VR Park on Nov. 27 in Beijing.
Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
This question originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.
Answer by Kynan Eng, research group leader, neuroscience of VR and applications to rehabilitation:
I think that most of the first uses of augmented realityand virtual realityeye-tracking will be to improve general AR/VR headset comfort and usability. Why? As a direct input device, eye-tracking is actually fairly frustrating and useless. However, as a general contextual signal indicating possible user intent or attentional focus, it is quite useful. Many use cases for eye-tracking will work in the background, and will probably include the following:
Graphics rendering resource allocation: If a person is looking somewhere, more graphics rendering resources can be allocated in that general direction. This can provide better quality output for a given amount of rendering power.
Data prefetch: Some VR data operations require time to complete, e.g. looking up something in an online database. If a person glances in a particular direction, data fetching can begin in the background even before the person selects an item to interact with. This improves the perceived responsiveness of the VR environment, which can be especially useful e.g. over mobile data networks.
Multimodal smart 3-D object selection: In VR, pointing at a small object in a cluttered environment can be quite difficult. Eye-tracking can be used to help disambiguate the object that the user intends to select by combining the information with the controller input.
Automatic headset calibration: A headset that knows where the users eyes are can better adjust its own image output parameters for optimal user comfort.
Balance manipulation: The vestibulo-ocular reflex is a well-known automatic effect linking eye movements to changes in the vestibular system. Knowing eye movements as well as those of the headset (via accelerometers) allow deductions about the likely state of the users vestibular system, and thus enables systematic manipulations to heighten changes in balance or possibly to reduce the effects of motion sickness during VR use.
What all of these use cases have in common is that, when working well, you dont notice that they are doing anything. In fact, I would go as far as to guess that some of these eye tracking use cases are essential for enabling truly useable VR/AR for mass-market applications.
Read more here:
Which New Areas of Virtual Reality Will Use Eye-Tracking? - Slate Magazine (blog)
Graham Sack has never been the sort of guy content to do one thing. He was for many years an actor, on stage and in films. Hes a PhD candidate in comparative literature at Columbia. He recently sold a screenplay about a math genius who gamed the Texas lottery. Combining his interests in literature and movies, he had long dreamed of adapting something by the writer George Saunders, whose writing Sack fell in love with a decade ago when reading a dystopian Saunders story in The New Yorker.
With so many interests, Sack is the sort of person who wouldnt think twice about reinventing himself as a director of virtual reality films, which is what he decided to do a little over a year ago. In late 2015, he and his girlfriend saw someone in a New York caf fiddling around with a VR headset, which theyd never seen before. They approached the stranger, who it turned out was visiting New York from Austin, befriended him, and tried out the headset. Within a few months, Sack decided to fly down to Austin to visit his new friend and attempt to shoot something himself.
While in Austin, Sack was sitting in a caf paging through a local newsletter when he saw that George Saunders was scheduled to speak at Book People, a local bookstore. Sack checked the time: Saunderss talk was actually happening that very minute.
Lincoln in the Bardo VR experience
It all felt like kismet. Some of Sacks favorite Saunders stories had seemed to anticipate emerging virtual reality and augmented reality technologies. Sack wondered: had the author himself actually sampled these technologies? Sack rushed back to his Airbnb, grabbed the VR headset hed been playing with, and called an Uber to Book People.
By the time he arrived, Sack had missed the talk entirely, but fans were in line to meet Saunders and have their books signed. Sack filed into the rear of the line, his VR headset in tow.
Finally, it was Sacks turn to speak to Saunders. Sack introduced himself quickly, and asked: Might Saunders like to sample virtual reality?
In case you havent read George Saunders, know that his short stories are infused with techno-skepticism. Many of them present dystopian science fiction worlds where people are manipulated by, or manipulate each other with, various forms of digital machinery. So approaching the author to ask him to put on a scary VR headset was a big ask.
"I think he was curious, but very off-put at the same time," recalls Sack. Whats more, Sack was proposing that Saunders try VR for the first time in a public place (the managers of Book People were still milling about). When Saunders hesitated, Sack explained: "You are already doing virtual reality." The technology that Saunders portrayed in his stories was here. Wasnt it time he sampled it?
Saunders acquiesced. Soon, Sack was fumbling nervously to get the Samsung headset on his favorite living author. After a few false starts with the menu"super awkward," recalls Sackhe managed to boot up his favorite VR film, Chris Milks "Evolution of Verse," a poetic short whose highlight may be the moment a train charges at the camera before transforming into a flock of birds.
At last, the film was running. One of Americas foremost literary figures now stood with a headset strapped to his face in the back of an Austin bookstore beside the table where he had been signing books a few moments before. "Ah jeez . . ." Saunders said as the VR film progressed. "Oh boy, its coming right at me," he said, bumping into the table.
The film ended, and Sack helped Saunders take off the headset. Sack waited anxiously for Saunderss verdict.
"What else should I see?" asked the author.
Sack told Saunders he would be eager to collaborate sometime. They traded emails. Weeks went by. "It was basically radio silence for a month," recalls Sack.
Then, suddenly, Sack got an email from Penguin Random House. They said that Saunders had been thinking a lot about the VR, and invited Sack in for a talk.
Sack assumed hed have the chance to pitch a VR adaptation of a Saunders short story, so he spent weeks combing through every short story Saunders had written, jotting ideas of which ones might work in the medium. But when Sack got to his meeting at Penguin Random House, they sprung a surprising idea on him: Would Sack be interested in making a companion VR short for Saunderss forthcoming debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo?
Lincoln in the Bardo
Now it was Sack who was slightly hesitant. Saunderss dystopian short fiction was a natural fit for VR, but Lincoln in the Bardo was a period piece (about, among other things, Abraham Lincolns mourning the death of his son, Willie). Was it even suited to a medium of the future like virtual reality?
Sack took the novel home and started reading it. And soon, he came to an early, major scene in the novel, where Lincoln cradles the dead body of his son, a sort of paternal Piet. "I read it, and the tears came, and I was like, I want to do this scene," says Sack. The scene was highly visual, rooted in one place, and had a theatrical qualityall elements VR excelled in handling, Sack had come to feel.
Sack agreed to do the film, entering into a production partnership with the New York Times. (Though the Times has been doing VR journalism for over a year, this is its first foray into scripted, fictional VR. Other production partners for the film are the New York VR firm Sensorium, and the San Francisco literary studio Plympton.) After navigating a complex, precedent-setting contract negotiationnever before has a novel launched with a VR tie-inSack worked on the film through the summer and fall. Finally, by November, Sack had a rough cut of the film to show Saunders.
They met in a New York hotel: only their second in-person encounter.
Again, Sack fumbled to put the headset on Saunders. And as Saunders watched the film, he scrutinized the authors every reaction. He was particularly nervous about what Saunders would think about the moment in the short film where Lincoln cradles Willies body. Would he find it moving, or maudlin?
Sack had by now tested the film on enough people that he knew exactly where they were in the film based on the most subtle movements of their faces. As Saunders approached the big moment with Willie, Sack braced himself.
Finally, the author spoke. "I'm fucking crying in here man," he said.
And indeed, when the film's last moments were over and Saunders removed the headset, his eyes were red. He said that watching Sacks film helped him relive the pathos he'd felt when originally composing the Lincoln-and-Willie Piet.
You can experience the scene now, too, in various forms. Lincoln in the Bardo itself went on sale last week, along with a companion audiobook (featuring performances from Nick Offerman and others). The VR companion piece can be found via the NYT VR app, or experienced less immersively on YouTube.
"Honestly, its the most fulfilling project Ive ever been involved in," says Sack now.
Original post:
The Strange Story Of When George Saunders First Met Virtual Reality - Co.Create
By David Ingram | SAN FRANCISCO
SAN FRANCISCO Facebook Inc's virtual reality unit Oculus has cut $200 from the total price of its flagship hardware set, in a bid to expand the system's base of video game players, the company said on Wednesday.
The virtual reality headset Rift and the motion controllers Touch will together retail for $598, Jason Rubin, Oculus' vice president of content, said in a statement.
Facebook paid $2 billion for Oculus in 2014, believing it to be the next major computing platform. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has said that Oculus would spend $500 million to fund virtual reality content development.
Oculus and other virtual reality makers are struggling to make their products competitive with other gaming systems that sell for much less.
Oculus believes the lower entry price will attract consumers to virtual reality for personal computers at a faster pace, Rubin said. "This price drop was as inevitable as it is beneficial. This is how the technology business works," he said.
A larger user base would lead to easier player matching, better communities and the ability to invest more in gaming titles, he said, calling those results "a virtuous cycle."
Rift used to retail for $599 on its own, while Touch sold for $199.
Rival virtual reality company Vive, a unit of HTC Corp, said it would not match Oculus on price and would not change its "strategy of delivering the best and most comprehensive VR product." Its system is listed at $799 on its website.
"We don't feel the need to cut the price of Vive, as we've had incredible success, and continue to see great momentum in market," Vive spokesman Patrick Seybold said in a statement.
Sony Corp joined the race for virtual reality dominance in October with a $399 headset, the PlayStation VR, which was the company's first major product launch since it emerged from years of restructuring.
(Reporting by David Ingram; Additional reporting by Laharee Chatterjee; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)
WASHINGTON A coalition of 53 companies on Thursday backed transgender rights at the U.S. Supreme Court, signing on to a brief supporting a Virginia student who is fighting to use the school bathroom that corresponds with his gender identity.
RIYADH Drivers from ride-hailing services Uber and Careem are barred from picking up passengers from Saudi Arabia's airports, Al Madina newspaper reported, quoting a spokesman from the kingdom's General Directorate of Traffic.
Elon Musk, an active Twitter user, has been Tesla's mouthpiece to the public, informing them about the electric car maker's upcoming products and plans.
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Facebook's Oculus cuts price of virtual reality set by $200 - Reuters
The startup virtual reality production and training company EON Sports VR announced Wednesday it has expanded its baseball category overseas to the Yokohama DeNA Baystars, a member of the Japanese Central League.
The organization will begin incorporating EON Sports interactive software and baseball virtual reality simulator into its training for this season. It is the first Japanese professional baseball team to leverage EON Sportstraining technology and also the companys first international sports client.
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EON Sports is excited to announce our partnership with the Baystars, Dan ODowd, theex-Colorado Rockies general manager and current EON Sports managing partner,said in a statement. They are joining the growing number of professional baseball teams that are using our technology to enhance and change the way players are prepared and developed within the game of baseball. They are one of the most respected franchises in all of baseball, and we are thrilled to work with them on this next generation of player development.
Added Baystars outfielder Takayuki Kajitani after utilizing the technology: I actually was able to experience the atmosphere in the iCube, standing in the batters box. I felt it was very realistic of what I would see in the game. Im going to take advantage of the iCube to experience the pitching of pitchers who Ive never played against, and will be able to experience it before an actual match.
Last summer, EON Sports VR started working with the Tampa Bay Rays, and other MLB teams use it as well.
EON Sports W.I.N. Series gives players the ability to experience the training system technology with headsets like the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift or smartphone-based displays.
Additionally, users can take advantage of the EON iCube, a multi-projector system that provides players an experience similar to that of facing an actual pitcher. Through data compiled via a ball tracking system, EON is able to reproduce not only the ball flight but the throwing motion as well. With now a dedicated training room that includes a full iCube, Baystars batters can select various kinds of pitches to generate a life-like experience.
Beyond baseball, where MLB clubs and their minor league affiliates have integrated the iCube, EON Sports VR has also partnered with college athletics programs like Penn State and the University of Miami (Fla.) to launch exclusive virtual reality channels, which provides fans with behind-the-scenes content, interviews and practice highlights.
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Some phobias, for instance, can be effectively treated by gradually exposing a patient to his or her worst fear, be it spiders, plane travel or small, enclosed spaces.
TeleSoftas, a Lithuanian firm that develops mobile apps, believes this exposure therapy can easily be achieved from the safety of a health professional's consulting room using the headsets.
"With virtual reality you can create audiovisual therapies in a safe environment for phobics," its CEO Algirdas Stonys told AFP at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the phone industry's largest annual trade fair.
So for instance, someone who is scared of speaking in public would find himself in front of a room full of people, virtually.
TeleSoftas has just received EU funding to finance the development of mental health apps for virtual reality headsets, in collaboration with academics.
Psious, a Spanish start-up, is also in a similar field.
Exposure therapies are designed to encourage the individual to enter feared situations, either in the real world or through imagined exercises.
"But we thought that in this digital age, there had to be something more," said CEO Xavier Palomer Ripoll.
Created three years ago because one of its founders was scared of flying, the firm develops apps for psychotherapists who can download them and use them on virtual reality headsets.
The doctor then choses an adequate environment.
For instance, once kitted out with the headset, a person with vertigo will find him- or herself in a lift going up or down a skyscraper.
Using a computer, the psychotherapist can propel the lift higher and higher, or make the floor transparent to increase the difficulty of the exercise.
They can also gauge how well the patient is doing by seeing for example if they are able to look down.
Psious raised close to a million euros ($1.1 million) in 2015, and provides the technology to some 600 doctors, mostly in Spain.
In parallel, it is currently going through nine clinical trials with universities to get long-term efficacy data.
TeleSoftas, meanwhile, hopes to eventually be able to offer virtual environments to treat obsessive-compulsive disorders, post-traumatic syndromes, alcoholism or smoking.
Several American start-ups are working on these kinds of applications as well.
See the original post here:
Virtual reality hopes to treat mental health problems - Times LIVE
UTSA students are traveling abroad without leaving the classroom. Charlie Cooper shows us how.
Charlie Cooper, KENS 6:54 AM. CST March 02, 2017
UTSA student uses virtual reality to travel the world.
SAN ANTONIO - Students at the University of Texas at San Antonio are getting an opportunity to travel abroad without ever leaving the classroom.
Professor Michael Rushforth teaches Spanish using virtual reality. This gives students an opportunity to travel to foreign lands right from their seats.
This technology gives me a pretty good idea about what the culture is like as well as the beauty of the language, John Pick, a sophomore at UTSA, said.
Its a class where having phones out is encouraged. Students download the Google Cardboard app, put on the virtual reality headgear and are instantly taken to another country.
For instance, we may be talking about the weather and how to express terms about the weather in Spanish and so we'll say what's the weather in Machu Picchu and we'll visit there, Rushforth said.
The 360-degree experience fully engages students for only a fraction of the cost required to actually travel abroad.
It can cost as little as three or four dollars, Rushforth said.
Rushford controls which country the class is placed in, but the students get to control where they look within the environment.
The other type can be more open ended where I tell the students to get on their phones, drop themselves down into a city and once they're in that environment they get to choose where they go, Rushforth said.
Regardless of where they venture, virtual reality in the classroom is taking learning to new places.
( 2017 KENS)
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UTSA students use virtual reality to learn Spanish - KHOU.com
A meme is an idea or behavior that spreads from person to person within a society. The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene in 1976.[1] Dawkins proposed the idea that social information could change and propagate through a culture in a way similar to genetic changes in a population of organisms i.e., evolution by natural selection. Sticking with its roots in genetics and evolution, the term is derived from the word gene, which is a unit of hereditary biological information made of DNA. Compared to a gene, which has a physical existence within a cell nucleus, a meme is far more abstract and this has led to accusations that memetics isnt really hard science.
The idea was subsequently developed to include political philosophies and religions, which were named memeplexes, because they contain vast numbers of interacting memes. Memes that interact favourably will form strong memeplexes, while memeplexes will resist incompatible memes. A political memeplex valuing authority of thought would be incompatible with memes valuing individuality of thought, for example. This goes some way to explaining the polarisation of thought on the political spectrum.
Like genes, memes may be useful, negative or neutral. For example, political philosophies or indeed any philosophy including the philosophies of science are also memes or memeplexes.
Religious mythology is part of the memeplex of religion, as would be the idea that one needs religion. In the same way that Dawkins selfish genes would propagate through populations for their own benefit and not for the benefit of the organisms that carry them, memeplexes propagate through society irrespective of their value to the society. Enduring negative memeplexes are sometimes called mind viruses; with atheist proponents of memetics (e.g. Dawkins himself) citing Christian fundamentalism as one such example.
The internet has been a source for the creation and propagation of many new memes the majority of which are snowclones[wp] on image macros. On the internet an idea can be developed and quickly acquire modifications from users around the world, such that the root idea becomes the basis for multiple spin-off ideas, subsets of ideas, and other similar iterations. In this sense, a meme evolves, taking on a life of its own through the contributions of users of varied cultural backgrounds. Furthermore as large parts of the Internet are durable there is a permanent record of how the memes changed and developed.
Most memes are humorous in nature. All Your Base Are Belong to Us was an early internet meme, and lolcats is a popular emergent meme. Other memes focus on potential dangers, such as cell phones causing fires at gas pumps. Memes quickly lose their humor value weeks after being created, even days. (see: reddit, 4chan)
A scientific study of memetics was attempted with the establishment of the Journal of Memetics, which lasted from 1997-2005.[2] While memetics has gained a few boosters in fields that study culture such as social psychology, sociology, and anthropology, it has largely been ignored as a methodological approach or met with harsh criticism. In the final issue of the Journal of Memetics, Bruce Edmonds argued that memetics had failed to produce substantive results, writing I claim that the underlying reason memetics has failed is that it has not provided any extra explanatory or predictive power beyond that available without the gene-meme analogy.[3]
A common criticism of memetics is that the meme is a more primitive version of the concept of sign in semiotics repackaged in biological and evolutionary language.[4][5] Luis Benitez-Bribiesca has criticized memetics for lacking a well-formed definition of meme and argued that the high rate of mutation as proposed by the memeticists would lead to a chaotic disintegration of culture rather than a progressive evolution. (Not to mention denouncing it as a pseudoscientific dogma.)[6] Benitez-Bribiescas criticisms concerning fidelity and the ill-defined nature of memes feature in many other critiques of memetics as well. Dawkins argues that the fidelity is high enough for memetic copying to work in accordance with evolutionary processes.[7] Dan Sperber and Scott Atran reply that high fidelity copying is the exception and not the rule in cultural transmission.[8][9] Another problem concerning fidelity is the reconstructive nature of memory. Because memory does not store an exact copy of information, we can expect fidelity to decrease both in the process of copying or imitating memes from person-to-person and in the process of each individual recalling memes from memory. Atran also notes that memetics attempts to (and fails to) circumvent the evolved cognitive architecture of the mind. Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson claim that population thinking is more important than a model of genetic inheritance as an evolutionary analogy to cultural evolution.[10]
The issue of the definition of meme features in most of the above criticisms as well. What is, or is not, a meme? Does the meme carve nature at its joints? We know, for example, that computer viruses can follow genetic and evolutionary algorithms.[11] But how far can this application be extended into the cultural realm? Mesoudi, Whiten, and Laland argue that advances in modern genetics have chipped away at the definition of the gene as a discrete unit and so the same criticism might be applied to genetics, but it is still a useful field. However, they also note some of the successes of non-memetic cultural evolutionary models such as Boyd and Richersons population thinking approach in classifying archaeological artifacts.[12] Jeremy Burman claims that the meme was just a metaphor that got taken seriously and reified by a few too many people.[13] Many of the criticisms listed above, however, assert that whether the meme itself can be found or said to exist is irrelevant to its usefulness as it fails to provide a useful framework or systematic set of falsifiable predictions due to the circularity in the definition of fitness. (How do we know which memes are the most fit? The ones that spread the most are the fittest. And which memes spread the most? The ones that are the fittest, of course!)
Memetics has only a passing resemblance to genetics. In genetics, there is a clear separation between genes, genotypes, and phenotypes. That a gene is a proxy code for the phenotype, and the phenotype is what experiences selection pressure, not the gene. This is what allows natural selection to take place based on random mutation and inheritance of the code. A meme, however, is a jumble of the three concepts it acts as a gene but is also its own phenotype. Without this distinction, the evolution of memes is more Lamarckian than Darwinian. This should come as little surprise to those who consider that memes are the result of Dawkins proposing an rough allegory of genetics, rather than a serious science. To underscore the features of genetics that involve passing on information, a fairly legitimate comparison to how humans share and adapt ideas can be made. However, the similarities end there.
In fact, as an object of study, folklore comes closest to the subject proposed by the notion of memes. (For the idea of the meme as it has developed popularly, folklore is just the original name.) Folklorists have always paid attention to the ways that folk culture, arts, and traditions are handed down from one person to another and from one generation to the next. They hit upon the concept of the folk process: the way in whi ch folklore is preserved, edited, and amended in the process of its transmission, a process that keeps the folk culture relevant and useful as it is transmitted.
The folklorists blinkered themselves early on by their insistence on exclusively oral transmission and arbitrary esthetic preferences for the authentic. It wasnt until the 1970s and afterwards that folklorists realized that folklore was also being created by popular interactions with and responses to mass culture. The folklorists also learned to unsee the sharp distinction between the oral, handmade, and authentic versus published and mass-produced cultural artifacts. Technology was turning this into a continuum. Folklore could be spread by self-published broadsheets, by photocopier and fax machine, by email, and on the Internet. (Just like some folks took a while to figure out that folk music could be played on electric guitars.)
When the subject matter of folklore is expanded this way, it would appear in some ways to swallow the idea of the meme. At minimum, folklore offers an alternative vocabulary to discuss the preservation, alteration, and expansion of cultural ideas in the process of their transmission, one that does not need biological metaphors.
Continued here:
Meme RationalWiki
Go here to read the rest:
http://www.rubinghscience.org/memetics/dawkinsmemes.html Dec.1999 Chapter 11 from Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
[ First published 1976; 1989 edition: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-286092-5 (paperback) ],
the best short introduction to, and the text that kicked off, the new science of MEMETICS, (and, also, the text where Dawkins coined the term `meme).
The following, key, paragraph of this chapter may perhaps serve as an abstract:
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: `memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.(3) When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the memes propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isnt just a way of talking the meme for, say, belief in life after death is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.
Highlights ** and text in square brackets are not original.
11. Memes: the new replicators
So far, I have not talked much about man in particular, though I have not deliberately excluded him either. Part of the reason I have used the term `survival machine is that `animal would have left out plants and, in some peoples minds, humans. The arguments I have put forward should, prima facie, apply to any evolved being. If a species is to be excepted, it must be for good reasons. Are there any good reasons for supposing our own species to be unique? I believe the answer is yes.
Most of what is unusual about man can be summed up in one word: `culture. I use the word not in its snobbish sense, but as a scientist uses it. Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission in that, although basically conservative, it can give rise to a form of evolution. Geoffrey Chaucer could not hold a conversation with a modern Englishman, even though they are linked to each other by an unbroken chain of some twenty generations of Englishmen, each of whom could speak to his immediate neighbours in the chain as a son speaks to his father. Language seems to `evolve by non-genetic means, and at a rate which is orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution.
Cultural transmission is not unique to man. The best non-human example that I know has recently been described by P.F. Jenkins in the song of a bird called the saddleback which lives on islands off New Zealand. On the island where he worked there was a total repertoire of about nine distinct songs. Any given male sang only one or a few of these songs. The males could be classified into dialect groups. For example, one group of eight males with neighbouring territories san a particular song called the CC song. Other dialect groups sang different songs. Sometimes the members of a dialect group shared more than one distinct song. By comparing the songs of fathers and sons, Jenkins showed that song patterns were not inherited genetically.Each young male was likely to adopt songs from his territorial neighbours by imitation, in an analogous way to human language. During most of the time Jenkins was there, there was a fixed number of songs on the island, a kind of `song pool from which each young male drew his own small repertoire. But occasionally Jenkins was privileged to witness the `invention of a new song, which occurred by a mistake in the imitation of an old one. He writes: `New song forms have been shown to arise variously by change of notes and the combination of parts of other existing songs The appearance of the new form was an abrupt event and the product was quite stable over a period of years. Further, in a number of cases the variant was transmitted accurately in its new form to younger recruits so that a recognizably coherent group of like singers developed. Jenkins refers to the origins of new songs as `cultural mutations.
Song in the saddleback truly evolves by non-genetic means. There are other examples of cultural evolution in birds and monkeys, but not these are just interesting oddities. It is our own species that really shows what cultural evolution can do. Language is one example out of many. Fashions in dress and diet, ceremonies and customs, art and architecture, engineering and technology, all evolve in historical time in a way that looks like highly speeded up genetic evolution, but has really nothing to do with genetic evolution. As in genetic evolution though, the change may be progressive. There is a sense in which modern science is actually better than ancient science. Not only does our understanding of the universe change as the centuries go by: it improves. Admittedly the current burst of improvement dates back to the Renaissance, which was preceded by a dismal period of stagnation, in which European scientific culture was frozen at the level achieved by the Greeks. But, as we saw in chapter 5, genetic evolution too may proceed as a series of brief spurts between stable plateaux.
The analogy between cultural and genetic evolution has frequently been pointed out, sometimes in the context of quite unnecessary mystical overtones. The analogy between scientific progress and genetic evolution by natural selection has been illuminated especially by Sir Karl Popper. I want to go even further into directions which are also being explored by, for example, the geneticist L.L.Cavalli-Sforza, the anthropologist F.T. Cloak, and the ethologist J.M. Cullen.
As an enthousiastic Darwinian, I have been dissatisfied with explanations that my fellow-enthousiasts have offered for human behaviour. They have tried to look for `biological advantages in various attributes of human civilization. For example, tribal religion has been seen as a mechanism for solidifying group identity, valuable for a pack-hunting species whose individuals rely on cooperation to catch large and fast prey. Frequently the evolutionary preconception in terms of which such theories are framed is implicitly group-selectionist, but it is possible to rephrase the theories in terms of orthodox gene selection. Man may well have spent large portions of the last several million years living in small kin groups. Kin selection and selection in favour of reciprocal altruism may have acted on human genes to produce many of our basic psychological attributes and tendencies. These ideas are plausible as far as they go, but I find that they do not begin to square up to the formidable challenge of explaining culture, cultural evolution, and the immense differences between human cultures around the world, from the utter selfishness of the Ik of Uganda, as described by Colin Turnbull, to the gentle altruism of Margaret Meads Arapesh. I think we have got to start again and go right back to first principles. The argument I shall advance, surprising as it may seem coming from the author of the earlier chapters, is that, for an understandi ng of the evolution of modern man, we must begin by throwing out the gene as the sole basis of our ideas on evolution. I am an enthousiastic Darwinian, but, I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene. The gene will enter my thesis as an analogy, nothing more.
What, after all, is so special about genes? The answer is that they are replicators. The laws of physics are supposed to be true all over the accessible universe. Are there any principles of biology that are likely to have similar universal validity? When astronauts voyage to distant planets and look for life, they can expect to find creatures too strange and unearthly for us to imagine. But is there anything that must be true of all life, wherever it is found, and whatever the basis of its chemistry? If forms of life exist whose chemistry is based on silicon rather than carbon, or ammonia rather than water, if creatures are discovered that boil to death at -100 degrees centigrade, if a form of life is found that is not based on chemistry at all but on electronic reverberating circuits, will there still be any general principle that is true of all life? Obviously I do not know but, if I had to bet, I would put my money on one fundamental principle.This is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.(1) The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity that prevails on our planet. There may be others. If there are, provided certain other conditions are met, they will almost inevitable tend to become the basis for an evolutionary process.
But do we have to go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replicator and other, consequent, kinds of evolution? I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.
The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. `Mimeme comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like `gene. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.(2) If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to `memory, or to the French word mme. It should be pronounced to rhyme with `cream.
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: `memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.(3) When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the memes propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isnt just a way of talking the meme for, say, belief in life after death is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.
Consider the idea of God. We do not know how it arose in the meme pool. Probably it originated many times by independent `mutation. In any case, it is very old indeed. How does it replicate itself? By the spoken and written word, aided by great music and great art. Why does it have souch high survival value? Remember that `survival value here does not mean value for a gene in a gene pool, but value for a meme in a meme pool. The question really means: What is it about the idea of a god that gives it its stability and penetrance in the cultural environment? The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be recified in the next. The `everlasting arms hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctors placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary. These are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied so readily by successive generations of individual brains. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.
Some of my colleagues have suggested to me that this account of the survival value of the god meme begs the question. In the last analysis they wish always to go back to `biological advantage. To them it is not good enough to say that the idea of a god has `great psychological appeal. They want to know why it has great psychological appeal. Psychological appeal means appeal to brains, and brains are shaped by natural selection of genes in gene-pools. They want to find some way in which having a brain like that improves gene survival.
I have a lot of sympathy with this attitude, and I do not doubt that there are genetic advantages in our having brains of the kind we have. But nevertheless I think that these colleagues, if they look carefully at the fundamentals of their own assumptions, will find that they begging just as many questions as I am. Fundamentally, the reason why it is good policy for us to try to explain biological phemomena in terms of gene advantage is that genes are replicators. As soon as the primeval soup provided conditions in which molecules could make copies of themselves, the replicators themselves took over. For more than three thousand million years, DNA has been the only replicator worth talking about in the world. But it does not necessarily hold these monopoly rights for all time. Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subservient to the old. The old gene-selected evolution, by making brains, provided the `soup in which the first memes arose. Once self-copying memes had arisen, their own, much faster, kind of evolution took off. We biologists have assimilated the idea of genetic evolution so deeply that we tend to forget that it is only one of many possible kinds of evolution.
Imitation, in the broad sense, is how memes can replicate. But just as not all genes that can replicate do so successfully, so some memes are more successful in the meme-pool than others. This is the analogue of natural selection. I have mentioned particular examples of qualities that make for high survival value among memes. But in general they must be the same as those discussed for the replicators of Chapter 2: longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity. The longevity of any one copy of a meme is probably relatively unimportant, as it is for any one copy of a gene. The copy of the tune `Auld Lang Syne that exists in my brain will last only for the rest of my life.(4) The copy of the same tune that is printed in my volume of The Scottish Students Song Book is unlikely to last much longer. But I expect there will be copies of the same tune on paper and in peoples brains for centuries to come. As in the case of genes, fecundity is much more important than longevity of particular copies. If the meme is a scientific idea, its spread will depend on how acceptable it is to the population of individual scientists; a rough measure of its survival value could be obtained by counting the number of times it is referred to in successive years in scientific journals.(5) If it is a popular tune, its spread through the meme pool may be gauged by the number of people heard whistling it in the streets. If it is a style of womens shoe, the population memeticist may use sales statistics from shoe shops. Some memes, like some genes, achieve brilliant short-term success in spreading rapidly, but do not last long in the meme pool. Popular songs and stiletto heels are examples. Others, such as the Jewish religious laws, may continue to propagate themselves for thousands of years, usually because of the great potential permanence of written records.
This brings me to the third general quality of successful replicators: copying-fidelity. Here I must admit that I am on shaky ground. At first sight it looks as if memes are not high-fidelity repliators at all. Every time a scientist hears an idea and passes it on to somebody else, he is likely to change it somewhat. I have made no secret of my debt in the book to the ideas of R.L. Trivers. Yet I have not repeated them in his own words. I have twisted them round for my own purposes, changing the emphasis, blending them with ideas of my own and of other people. The memes are being passed on to you in altered form. This looks quite unlike the particulate, all-or-none quality of gene transmission. It looks as though meme transmission is subject to continuous mutation, and also to blending.
It is possible that this appearance of non-particulateness is illusory, and that the analogy with genes does not break down. After all, if we look at the inheritance of many genetic characters such as human height or skin-colouring, it does not look like the work of indivisible and unbendable genes. If a black and an white person mate, their children do not come out either black or white: they are intermediate. This does not mean the genes concerned are not particulate. It is just that there are so many of them concerned with skin colour, each one having such a small effect, that they seem to blend. So far I have talked of memes as though it was obvious what a single unit-meme consisted of. But of course that is far from obvious.I have said a tune is one meme, but what about a symphony: how many memes is that? Is each movement one meme, each recognizable phrase of melody, each bar, each chord, or what?
I appeal to the same verbal trick as I used in Chapter 3. There I divided the `gene complex into large and small genetic units, and units within units. The `gene was defined, not in a rigid all-or-none way, but as a unit of convenience, a length of chromosome with just sufficient copying-fidelity to serve as a viable unit of natural selection. If a single phrase of Beethovens ninth symphony is sufficiently distinctive and memorable to be abstracted from the context of the whole symphony, and used as the call-sign of a maddeningly intrusive European broadcasting station, then to that extent it deserves to be called one meme. It has, incidentally, materially diminished my capacity to enjoy the original symphony.
Similarly, when we say that all biologists nowadays believe in Darwins theory, we do not mean that every biologist has, graven in his brain, an identical copy of the exact words of Charles Darwin himself. Each individual has his own way of interpreting Darwins ideas. He probably learned them not from Darwins own writings, but from more recent authors. Much of what Darwin said is, in detail, wrong. Darwin if he read this book would scarcely recognize his own theory in it, though I hope he would like the way I put it. Yet, in spite of all this, there is something, some essence of Darwinism, which is present in the head of every individual who understands the theory. If this were not so, then almost any statement about two people agreeing with each other would be meaningless. An `idea-meme might be defined as an entity that is capable of being transmitted from one brain to another. The meme of Darwins theory is therefore that essential basis of the idea which is held in common by all brains that understand the theory. The differences in the ways that people represent the theory are then, by definition, not part of the meme. If Darwins theory can be subdivided into components, such that some people believe component A but not component B, while others believe B but not A, then A and B should be regarded as separate memes. If almost everybody who believes in A also believes in B if the memes are closely `linked to use the genetic term then it is convenient to lump them together as one meme.
Let us pursue the analogy between memes and genes further. Throughout this book, I have emphasized that we must not think of genes as conscious, purposeful agents. Blind natural selection, however, makes them behave rather *as if* they were purposeful, and it has been convenient, as a shorthand, to refer to genes in the language of purpose. For example, when we say `genes are trying to increase their numbers in future gene pools, what we really mean is `those genes that behave in such a way as to increase their numbers in future gene pools tend to be the genes whose effects we see in the world. Just as we have found it convenient to think of genes as active agents, working purposefully for their own survival, perhaps it might be convenient to think of memes in the same way. In neither case must we get mystical about it. In both cases the idea of purpose is only a metaphor, but we have already seen what a fruitful metaphor it is in the case of genes. We have even used words like `selfish and `ruthless of genes, knowing full well it is only a figure of speech. Can we, in exactly the same spirit, look for selfish or ruthless memes?
There is a problem here concerning the nature of competition. Where there is sexual reproduction, each gene is competing particularly with its own alleles rivals for the same chromosomal slot. Memes seem to have nothing equivalent to alleles. I suppose there is a trivial sense in which many ideas can be said to have `opposites. But in general memes resemble the early replicating molecules, floating chaotically free in the primeval soup, rather than modern genes in their neatly paired, chromosomal regiments. In what sense then are memes competing with each other? Should we expect them to be `selfish or `ruthless, if they have no alleles? The answer is that we might, because there is a sense in which they must indulge in a kind of competition with each other.
Any user of a digital computer knows how precious computer time and memory storage space are. At many large computer centres they are literally costed in money; or each user may be allotted a ration of time, measured in seconds, and a ration of space, measured in `words. The computers in which memes live are human brains.(6) Time is possibly a more important limiting factor than storage space, and it is the subject of heavy competition. The human brain, and the body that it controls, cannot do more than one or a few things at once. If a meme is to dominate the attention of a human brain, it must do so at the expense of `rival memes. Other commodities for which memes compete are radio and television time, billboard space, newspaper column-inches, and library shelf-space.
In the case of genes, we saw in Chapter 3 that co-adapted gene complexes may arise in the gene pool. A large set of genes concerned with mimicry in butterflies became tightly linked together on the same chromosome, so tightly that they can be treated as one gene. In Chapter 5 we met the more sophisticated idea of the evolutionarily stable set of genes. Mutually suitable teeth, claws, guts, and sense organs evolved in carnivore gene pools, while a different stable set of characteristics emerged from herbivore gene pools. Has the god meme, say, become associated with any other particular memes, and does this association assist the survival of each of the participating memes? Perhaps we could regard an organized church, with its architecture, rituals, laws, music, art, and written tradition, as a co-adapted set of mutually-assisting memes.
To take a particular example, an aspect of doctrine that has been very effective in enforcing religious observance is the threat of hell fire. Many children and even some adults believe that they will suffer ghastly torments after death if they do not obey the priestly rules. This is a peculiarly nasty technique of persuasion, causing great psychological anguish throughout the middle ages and even today. But it is highly effective. It might almost have been planned deliberately by a macchiavellian priesthood trained in deep psychological indoctrination techniques. However, I doubt if the priests were that clever. Much more probably, unconscious memes have ensured their own survival by virtue of those same qualities of pseudo-ruthlessness that successful genes display. The idea of hell fire is, quite simply, self perpetuating, because of its own deep psychological impact. It has become linked with the god meme because the two reinforce each other, and assist each others survival in the meme pool.
Another member of the religious meme complex is called faith. It means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence. The story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so that we can admire the other apostles in comparison. Thomas demanded evidence. Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for evidence. The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence, are held up to us as worthy of imitation. The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
Blind faith can justify anything.(7) If a man believes in a different god, or even if he uses a different ritual for worshipping the same god, blind faith can decree that he should die on the cross, at the stake, skewered on a Crusaders sword, shot in a Beirut street, or blown up in a bar in Belfast. Memes for blind faith have their own ruthless ways of propagating themselves. This is true of patriotic and political as well as religious blind faith.
Memes and genes may often reinforce each other, but they sometimes come into opposition. For example, the habit of celibacy is presumably not inherited genetically. A gene for celibacy is doomed to failure in the gene pool, except under very special circumstances such as we find in the social insects. But still, a meme for celibacy can be successful in the meme pool. For example, suppose the success of a meme depends critically on how much time people spend in actively transmitting it to other people. Any time spent in doing other things than attempting to transmit the meme may be regarded as time wasted from the memes point of view. The meme for celibacy is transmitted by priests to young boys who have not yet decided what they want to do with their lives. The medium of transmission is human influence of various kinds, the spoken and written word, personal example and so on. Suppose, for the sake of argument, it happened to be the case that marriage weakened the power of a priest to influence his flock, say because it occupied a large proportion of his time and attention. This has, indeed, been advanced as an official reason for the enforcement of celibacy among priests. If this were the case, it could follow that the meme for celibacy could have greater survival value than the meme for marriage. Of course, exactly the opposite would be true for a gene for celibacy. If a priest is a survival machine for memes, celibacy is a useful attribute to build into him. Celibacy is just a minor partner in a large complex of mutually-assisting religious memes.
I conjecture that co-adapted meme-complexes evolve in the same kind of way as co-adapted gene-complexes. Selection favours memes that exploit their cultural environment to their own advantage. This cultural environment consists of other memes which are also being selected. The meme pool therefore comes to have the attributes of an evolutionarily stable set, which new memes find it hard to invade.
I have been a bit negative about memes, but they have their cheerful side as well. When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes. We were built as gene machines, created to pass on our genes. But that aspect of us will be forgotten in three generations. Your child, even your grandchild, may bear a resemblance to you, perhaps in facial features, in a talent for music, in the colour of her hair. But as each generation passes, the contribution of your genes is halved. It does not take long to reach negligible proportions. Our genes may be immortal but the collection of genes that is any one of us is bound to crumble away. Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror. Yet it is quite probable that she bears not a single one of the old kings genes. We should not seek immortality in reproduction.
But if you contribute to the worlds culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a sparking plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G.C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are stil going strong.
However speculative my development of the theory of memes may be, there is one serious point which I would like to emphasize once again. This is that when we look at the evolution of cultural traits and at their survival value, we must be clear whose survival we are talking about. Biologists, as we have seen, are accustomed to looking for advantages at the gene level (or the individual, the group, or the species level according to taste). What we have not previously considered is that a cultural trait may have evolved in the way that it has, simply because it is advantageous to itself.
We do not have to look for conventional biological survival values of traits like religion, music, and ritual dancing though these may also be present. Once the genes have provided their survival machines with brains that are capable of rapid imitation, the memes will automatically take over. We do not even have to posit a genetic advantage in imitation, though that would certainly help. All that is necessary is that the brain should be capable of imitation: memes will then evolve that exploit the capacity to the full.
I now close the topic of the new replicators, and end the chapter on a note of qualified hope. One unique feature of man, which may or may not have evolved memically, is his capacity for conscious foresight. Selfish genes (and, if you alllow the speculation of this chapter, memes too) have no foresight. They are unconscious, b lind, replicators. The fact that they replicate, together with certain further conditions means, willy nilly, that they will tend towards the evolution of qualities which, in the special sense of this book, can be called selfish. A simple replicator, whether gene or meme, cannot be expected to forgo short-term selfish advantage even if it would really pay it, in the long term, to do so. We saw this in the chapter on aggression. Even though a `conspiracy of doves would be better for every single individual than the evolutionarily stable strategy [=ESS], natural selection is bound to favour the ESS.
It is possible that yet another unique quality of man is a capacity for genuine, desinterested, true altruism. I hope so, but I am not going to argue the case one way or another, nor to speculate over its possible memic evolution. The point I am making now is that, even if we look on the dark side and assume that individual man is fundamentally selfish, our conscious foresight our capacity to simulate the future in imagination could save us from the worst selfish excesses of the blind replicators. We have at least the mental equipment to foster our long-term selfish interests rather than merely our short-term selfish interests. We can see the long-term benefits of participating in a `conspiracy of doves, and we can sit down together to discuss ways of making the conspiracy work. We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our own creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.(8)
NOTES
(1) I would put my money on one fundamental principle all life evolves by the differential survival of repicating entities.
My wager that all life, everywhere in the universe, would turn out to have evolved by Darwinian means has now been spelled out and justified more fully in my paper `Universal Darwinism and in the last chapter of The Blind Watchmaker. I show that all the alternatives to Darwinism that have ever been suggested are in principle incapable of doing the job of explaining the organized complexity of life. The argument is a general one, not based upon particular facts about life as we know it. As such it has been criticized by scientists pedestrian enough to think that slaving over a hot test tube (or cold muddy boot) is the only method of discovery in science. One critic complained that my argument was `philosophical, as though that was sufficient condemnation. Philosophical or not, the fact is that neither he nor anybody else has found any flaw in what I said. And `in principle arguments such as mine, far from being irrelevant to the real world, can be more powerful than arguments based on particular factual research. My reasoning, if it is correct, tells us something important about life everywhere in the universe. Laboratory and field research can tell us only about life as we have sampled it here.
(2) Meme
The word meme seems to be turning out to be a good meme. It is now quite widely used and in 1988 it joined the official list of words being considered for future editions of Oxford English Dictionaries. This makes me the more anxious to repeat that my designs on human culture were modest almost to vanishing point. My true ambitions and they are admittedly large lead in another direction entirely. I want to claim almost limitless power for slightly inaccurate self-replicating entities, once they arise anywhere in the universe. This is because they tend to become the basis for Darwinian selection which, given enough generations, cumulatively builds systems of great complexity. I believe that, given the right conditions, replicators automatically band together to create systems, or machines, that carry them around and work to favour their continued replication. The first ten chapters of The Selfish Gene had concentrated exclusively on one kind of replicator, the gene. In discussing memes in the final chapter I was trying to make the case for replicators in general, and to show that genes were not the only members of that important class. Whether the milieu of human culture really does have what it takes to get a form of Darwinism going, I am not sure. But in any case that question is subsidiary to my concern.Chapter 11 will have succeeded of the reader closes the book with the feeling that DNA molecules are not the only entities that might form the basis for Darwinian evolution. My purpose was to cut the gene down to size, rather than to sculpt a grand theory of human culture.
(3) memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically
DNA is a self-replicating piece of hardware. Each piece has a particular structure, which is different from rival pieces of DNA. If memes in brains are analogous to genes they must be self-replicating brain structures, actual patterns of neurological wiring-up that reconsititute themselves in one brain after another. I had always felt uneasy spelling this out aloud, because we know far less about brains than about genes, and are therefore necessarily vague about what such a brain structure might actually be. So I was relieved to receive very recently a very interesting paper by Juan Delius of the University of Konstanz in Germany. Unlike me, Delius doesnt have to feel apologetic, because he is a distinguished brain scientist whereas I am not a brain scientist at all. I am delighted, therefore, that he is bold enough to ram home the point by actually publishing a detailed picture of what the neuronal hardware of a meme might look like. Among the other interesting things he does is to explore, far more searchingly than I had done, the analogy of memes with parasites; to be more precise, with the spectrum of which malignant parasites are one extreme, benign `symbionts the other extreme. I am particularly keen on this approach because of my own interest in `extended phenotypic effects of parasitic genes on host behaviour (see Chapter 13 of this book and in particular chapter 12 of The Extended Phenotype). Delius, by the way, emphasizes the clear separation between memes and their (phenotypic) effects. And he reiterates the importance of coadapted meme-complexes, in which memes are selected for their mutual compatibility.
(4) `Auld Lang Syne
`Auld Lang Syne was, unwittingly, a revealingly fortunate example for me to have chosen. This is because, almost universally, it is rendered with an error, a mutation. The refrain is, essentially always nowadays, sung as `For the sake of auld lang syne, whereas Burns actually wrote `For auld lang syne. A memically minded Darwinian immediately wonders what has been the `survival value of the interpolated phrase, `the sake of. Remember that we are not looking for ways in which people might have survived better through singing the song in altered form. We are looking for ways in which the alteration itself might have been good at surviving in the meme pool. Everybody learns the song in childhood, not through reading Burns but through hearing it sung on New Years Eve. Once upon a time, presumably, everybody sang the correct words. `For the sake of must have arisen as a rare mutation. Our question is, why has the initially rare mutation spread so insidiously that it has become th e norm in the meme pool?
I dont think the answer is far to seek. The sibilant `s is notoriously obtrusive. Church choirs are drilled to pronounce `s sounds as lightly as possible, otherwise the whole church echoes with hissing. A murmuring priest at the altar of a great cathedral can sometimes be heard, from the back of the nave, only as a sporadic sussuration of `ss. The other consonant in `sake, `k, is almost as penetrating. Imagine that nineteen people are correctly singing `For auld lang syne, and one person, somewhere in the room, slips in the erroneous `For the sake of auld lang syne. A child, hearing the song for the first time, is eager to join in but uncertain of the words. Although almost everybody is singing `For auld lang syne, the hiss of an `s and the cut of a `k force their way into the childs ears, and when the refrain comes round again he too sings `For the sake of auld lang syne. The mutant meme has taken over another vehicle. If there are any other children there, or adults unconfident of the words, they will be more likely to switch to the mutant form next time the refrain comes round. It is not that they `prefer the mutant form. They genuinely dont know the words and are honestly eager to learn. Even if those who know better indignantly bellow `For auld lang syne at the top of their voice (as I do!), the correct words happen to have no conspicuous consonants, and the mutant form, even if quietly and diffidently sung, is far easier to hear.
A similar case is `Rule Brittannia. The correct second line of the chorus is `Brittannia, rule the waves. It is frequently, though not quite universally, sung as `Brittannia rules the waves. Here the insistently hissing `s of the meme is aided by an additional factor. The indended meaning of the poet (James Thompson) was persumably imperative (Brittannia, go out and rule the waves !) or possibly subjunctive (let Brittannia rule the waves). But it is superficially easier to misunderstand the sentence as indicative (Brittannia, as a matter of fact, does rule the waves). This mutant meme, then, has two separate survival values over the original form that it replaced: it sounds more conspicuous and it is easier to understand.
The final test of a hypothesis should be experimental. It should be possible to inject the hissing meme, deliberately, into the meme pool at a very low frequency, and then watch it spread because of its own survival value. What if just a few of us were to start singing `God saves our gracious Queen?
(5) If the meme is a scientific idea, its spread will depend on how acceptable it is to the population of individual scientists; a rough measure of its survival value could be obtained by counting the number of times it is referred to in successive years in scientific journals.
[ Sorry, I left this note out. Its rather long, and contains 3 figures (relatively hard to copy and put into an HTML page) that unfortunately are important to the notes text and anyway, the note is probably of interest only to settled bureaucratic scientists concerned mainly with the # of times their own publications are quoted in papers by others. :-):-) But !, since you have read so far, I think you are pretty interested in this stuff please consider buying the book ! I think it really would be a worthwhile investment in yourself. ]
(6) The computers in which memes live are human brains.
It was obviously predictable that manufactured electronic computers, too, would eventually play host to self-replicating patterns of information memes. Computers are increasingly tied together in intricate networks of shared information. Many of them are literally wired up together in electronic mail exchange. Others share information when their owners pass floppy disks around. It is a perfect milieu for self-replicating programs to flourish and spread. When I wrote the first edition of this book I was nave enough to suppose that an undesirable computer meme would have to arise by a spontaneous error in the copying of a legitimate program. Alas, that was a time of innocence. Epidemics of `viruses and `worms, deliberately released by malicious programmers, are now familiar hazards to computer-users all over the world. [Un-original paragraph break]
My own hard disc has to my knowledge been infected in two diffent virus epidemics during the past year, and that is a fairly typical experience among heavy computer users. I shall not mention the names of particualr viruses for fear of giving any nasty little satisfaction to their nasty little perpetrators. I say `nasty, because their behaviour seems to me morally indistinguishable from that of a technician in a microbiology laboratory, who deliberately infects the drinking water and seeds epidemics in order to snigger at people getting ill. I say `little, because these people are mentally little. There is nothing clever about designing a computer virus. Any half-way competent programmer could do it, and half-way competent programmers are two-a-penny in the modern world. Im one myself. I shant even bother to explain how computer viruses work. Its too obvious.
[ Hear, hear ! . So even Dawkins is not immune to burst off in `flames and in useless gratuitous morality and ethics. :-):-) Still, nevertheless, this note (bar the moralisms) does contain some interesting stuff. ]
What is less easy is how to combat them. Unfortunately some very expert programmers have had to waste their valuable time writing virus-detector programs, immunization programs and so on (the analogy with medical vaccination, by the way, is astonishingly close, even down to the injection of a `weakened strain of the virus). The danger is that an arms race will develop, with each advance in virus-prevention being matched by counter-advances in new virus programs. So far, most anti-virus programs are written by altruists and supplied free of charge as a service. But I foresee the growth of a whole new profession splitting into lucrative specialisms just like any other profession of `software doctors on call with black bags full of diagnostic and curative floppy disks. I use the name `doctors, but real doctors are solving natural problems that are not deliberately engineered by human malice. My software doctors, on the other hand, will be, like lawyers, solving man-made problems that should never have existed in the first place. In so far as virus-makers have any discernible motive, they presumably feel vaguily anarchistic. I appeal to them: do you really want to pave the way for a new cat-profession? If not, stop playing at silly memes, and put your modest programming talents to better use.
(7) Blind faith can justify anything.
I have had the predictable spate of letters from faiths victims, protesting about my criticisms of it. Faith is such a successful brainwasher in its own favour, especially a brainwasher of children, that it is hard to break its hold. But what, after all, is faith? It is a state of mind that leads people to believe something it doesnt matter what in the total absence of supporting evidence. If there were good supporting evidence then faith would be superfluous, for the evidence would compel us to believe it anyway. It is this that makes the often-parrotted claim that `evolution is a matter of faith so silly. People believe in evolution not because they arbitrarily want to believe it but because of overwhelming, publicly available evidence.
I said `it doesnt matter what the faithful believe, which suggests that people have faith in entirely daft, arbitrary things, l ike the electric monk in Douglas Adams delightful Dirk Gentlys Holistic Detective Agency. He was purpose-built to do your believing for you, and very successful at it. On the day that we meet him he unshakingly believes, against all the evidence, that everything in the world is pink. I dont want to argue that things in which a particular individual has faith are necessarily daft. They may of may not be. The point is that there is no way of deciding whether they are, and no way of preferring one article of faith over another, because evidence is explicitly eschewed. Indeed the fact that true faith doesnt need evidence is held up as its greatest virtue; this was the point of my quoting the story of Doubting Thomas, the only really admirable member of the apostles.
Faith cannot move mountains (though generations of children are solemnly told the contrary and believe it). But it is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness. It leads people to believe in whatever it is so strongly that in extreme cases thay are prepared to kill and die for it without the need for further justification. Keith Henson has coined the name `memeoids for `victims that have been taken over by a meme to the extent that their own survival becomes inconsequential You see lots of these people on the evening news from such places as Belfast or Beirut. Faith is powerful enough to immunize people agains all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyrs death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to iteself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb.
(8) We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.
The optimistic tone of my conclusion has provoked scepticism among critics who feel that it is inconsistent with the rest of the book. In some cases the criticism comes from doctrinaire sociobiologists jealously protective of the importance of genetic influence. In other cases the criticism comes from a paradoxically opposite quarter, high priests of the left jealously protective of a favourite demonological icon! Rose, Kamin, and Lewontin in Not in Our Games have a private bogey called `reductionism; and all the best reductionists are also supposed to be `determinists, preferably `genetic determinists.
The numbers in brackets refer to the numbered references in the bibliography. References for the body of Chapter 11 are preceded by a -, those for the notes by a >.
Arapesh tribe (133) blending inheritance (69) Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. (32, 33) Cloak, F.T. (37) cultural evolution (20, 32, 33, 37, 62, 128) Darwin, C.R. (41) > Delius, J.D. (58) > determinism (47,51,154) faith (94) > Henson, H.K. (94) Humphrey, N.K. (99) Ik tribe (175) Jenkins, P.F. (101) > Kamin, L.J. (154) > Lewontin, R.C. (110, 154) Mead, M. (133) -> meme (20, 58) > parasites (47, 89, 90, 160) particulate inheritance (69, 129, 153) Popper, K. (150, 151) primeval soup (144) > reductionism (154) religion (94) replicator (47, 48) > Rose, S. (154) saddleback (101) Trivers, R.L. (170, 171, 172, 173, 174) Turnbull, C. (175) > universal Darwinism (49, 50) Williams, G.C. (181, 183) > Wilson, E.O. (185)
20. Bonner, J.T. (1980) The Evolution of Culture in Animals. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 32. Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. (1971) Similarities and dissimilarities of sociocultural and biological evolition. In Mathematics in the Archaeological and Historical Sciences (eds. F.R. Hodson, D.G. Kendall, and P. Tautu). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. pp. 553-41. 33. Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. and Feldman, M.W. (1981) Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 37. Cloak, F.T. (1975) Is a cultural ethology possible? Human Ecology 3, 161-82. 41. Darwin, C.R. (1859) The Origin of Species. London: John Murray. 47. Dawkins, R. (1982) The Extended Phenotype. Oxford: W.H. Freeman. 48. Dawkins, R. (1982) Replicators and vehicles. in Current Problems in Sociobiology (eds. Kings College Sociobiology Group). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 45-64. 49. Dawkins, R. (1983) Universal Darwinism. In Evolution from Molecules to Men (ed. D.S. Bendall). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 403-25. 50. Dawkins, R. (1986) The Blind Watchmaker. Harlow: Longman. 51. Dawkins, R. (1986) Sociobiology: the new storm in a teacup. In Science and Beyond (eds. S. Rose and L. Appignanesi). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. pp. 61-78. 58. Delius, J.D. (in press [in 1989]) Of mind memes and brain bugs: a natural history of culture. In The Nature of Culture (ed. W.A. Koch). Bochum: Studienlag Brockmeyer. 62. Dobzhansky, T. (1962) Mankind Evolving. New Haven: Yale University Press. 69. Fisher, R.A. (1930) The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 89. Hamilton, W.D. (1998) Sex versus non-sex versus parasite. Oikos 35, 282-90. 90. Hamilton, W.D. and Zuk, M. (1982) Heritable true fitness and bright birds: a role for parasites? Science 218, 384-7. 94. Henson, H.K. (1985) Memes, L5 and the religion of the space colonies. L5 News, September 1985, pp. 5-8. 99. Humphrey, N. (1986) The Inner Eye. London: Faber and Faber. 101. Jenkins, P.F. (1978) Cultural transmission of song patterns and dialect development in a free-living bird population. Animal Behaviour 26, 50-78. 110. Lewontin, R.C. (1983) The organism as the subject and object of evolution. Scientia 118, 65-82. 128. Maynard Smith, J. (1988) Games, Sex and Evolution. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. 129. Maynard Smith, J. (1988) Evolutionary Genetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 133. Mead, M. (1950) Male and Female. London: Gollancz. 144. Orgel, L.E. (1973) The Origins of Life. London: Chapman and Hall. 150. Popper, K. (1974) The rationality of scientific revolutions. In Problems of Scientific Revolution (ed. R. Harr). Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 72-101. 151. Popper, K. (1974) Natural selection and the emergence of mind. Dialectica 32, 339-55. 153. Ridley, M. (1985) The Problems of Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 154. Rose, S., Kamin, L.J., and Lewontin, R.C. (1984) Not In Our Genes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 160. Seger, J. and Hamilton, W.D. (1988) Parasites and sex. In The Evolution of Sex (eds. R.E. Michod and B.R. Levin). Sunderland, Massachusetts: Sinauer. pp. 176-93. 170. Trivers, R.L. (1971) The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly Review of Biology 46, 35-57. 171. Trivers, R.L. (1972) Parental investment and sexual selection. In Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man (ed. B. Campbell). Chicago: Aldine. pp 136-79. 172. Trivers, R.L. (1974) Parent-offspring conflict. American Zoologist 14, 249-64. 173. Trivers, R.L. (1985) Social Evolution. Menlo Park: Benjamin/Cummings. 174. Trivers, R.L. and Hare, H. (1976) Haplodiploidy and the evolution of the social insects. Science 191, 249-63. 175. Turnbull, C. (1972) The Mountain People. London: Jonathan Cape. 181. Williams, G.C. (1975) Sex and Evolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 183. Williams, G.C. (1975) A defense of reductionism in evolutionary biology. In Oxford Surveys in Biology (eds. R. Dawkins and M. Ridley), 2, pp. 1-27. 185. Wilson, E.O. (1975) Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
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The greatest of Bachs 224 cantatas is BWV 109, Ich glaube, lieber Herr, hilf meinem Unglauben. Its subject the title translates as Mark 9:24, I believe, dear Lord, help my unbelief is that strange cognitive dissonance of believing something yet not believing it at the same time. Daniel Dennetts new book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, is aimed at those who suffer from this intermittent unbelief, though not about God Dennett is, after all, one of modern philosophys most prominent atheists but about his specialist subject: evolution by natural selection.
Of course, most educated people nowadays accept Darwins great insight. But, Dennett argues in his typical avuncular style, they only do so up to a point: the point at which anyone applies it to the human mind. Even the most rational among us feel the pull of Cartesian Gravity, the force that warps our scientific intuitions whenever we get close to thinking about our own minds, drawing us towards dualism and other philosophically naive notions. Surely, so the faulty reasoning goes, there must be something special about our intellects that doesnt admit of a purely Darwinian analysis?
Dennett treats this confusion with a dose of immersion therapy, applying Darwinism universally and far more liberally than most would dare. He goes so far as to encourage scientists to talk about design in evolution despite the lack of a designer, to think about reasons even though there is no reasoner (Dennett calls these free-floating rationales), and to consider competence without comprehension: like a computer, evolution can perform tasks competently, but without any need to understand what it has done.
This uncompromising adaptationism treating no feature of life as immune to evolutionary logic leads Dennett on to his Darwinian theory of human culture. Over thousands of years, culture has moved from bottom-up to top-down; from the mindless generating and testing of multiple ideas some of which happened to be successful and were thus replicated, often uncomprehendingly, by other people to the mindful, directed design we see in art, architecture, science and music. Similar to Dennetts notion of free will, expounded in his book Freedom Evolves, culture exists on a continuum of complexity; in a strangely satisfying inversion, as culture has evolved via Darwinian processes, it has effectively de-Darwinised itself (though not completely: even the greatest designers like Bach didnt create ex nihilo, often going through immense Dennett would say evolutionary drudgery, trial and error before their masterpieces emerged).
Can culture really be unconscious? This is where memes come in. By this I dont just mean those pictures of cats and frogs on the internet although those are memes in Dennetts conception. For Dennett, a meme is essentially any piece of information that spreads from person to person: indeed, even individual words are memes, and (by analogy with genes) we can study their fitnessby seeing whether they reproduce themselves into different peoples minds (again, often without those people making any conscious effort). This might seem like mission creep: Richard Dawkinss original conception of memes included fads, chain letters and other viral phenomena, not language itself. But Dennett extends memes along another continuum, from single words all the way to the complex cultural ideas that have shaped civilisation by infesting our minds. Memes are the handholds on the climbing wall of culture, allowing us to move towards ever more purposeful, ever more conscious design.
Dennett is well aware of the scepticism that the idea of memes engenders. Indeed, he spends a chapter fending off the various criticisms that have accumulated over the decades since Dawkins suggested it. Perhaps ironically given its focus on virality, memetics has never really caught on as a science, and I rather doubt whether Dennetts case here will convince the non-believers. I found myself wondering what a would-be memeticist would do with their day. Which scientific hypotheses would they be testing? Where would they gather their data? How would they analyse it? The memes-eye-view is an intriguing perspective on cultural evolution, but the concept seems too woolly to inspire hard science (history bears out this concern: the Journal of Memetics, which had its first issue in 1997, closed down in 2005 for want of research papers).
From Bacteria to Bach and Back is one long argument, employing Darwinian logic with often counterintuitive results. Decades of developing his theory has allowed Dennett to anticipate most of the objections readers might have, and he works methodically to defuse their concerns. Those who stick with him will find the books strange inversions of reasoning beguiling and its vast scope enthralling, even if theyre less than compelled by its payoff. Ultimately, philosophical thought experiments arent enough to buttress Dennetts memetic view of life and culture: perhaps Im still suffering the ill effects of Cartesian Gravity, but a little more empirical evidence would have helped my unbelief.
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Do Daniel C. Dennett's memes deserve to survive? - Spectator.co.uk
Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images Chad DundasMMA Lead WriterMarch 1, 2017
UFC President Dana White announced Wednesday that Georges St-Pierre's return to the Octagon will be a middleweight title fight against Michael Bispingand, boy, is that going to be an unpopular decision.
Of all the likely candidates for St-Pierre's returnincluding superfights against Anderson Silva or Conor McGregorBisping was unilaterally regarded as the least appealing.
In the wake of White's appearance on ESPN's SportsCenter to confirm this fight, early reviews have been mostly negative:
This unrest is nothing against the 185-pound champion himself but, rather, a compliment to the overall strength of the middleweight division. With top contenders like Yoel Romero and Ronaldo "Jacare" Souza already beating down Bisping's door, there was just no good reason to further stymie that division's already-slow-motion title picture.
That is, except for the two reasons that trump all else right now in the eyes of this fight company and these fighters: money and immortality.
Since winning the title with a surprise knockout of Luke Rockhold at UFC 199 in June 2016, Bisping has eschewed the UFC's official rankings in favor of trying to chase down lucrative matchups for himself. He's defended the title just once, against Dan Henderson at UFC 206 four months ago.
You can't blame Bisping for this approach. At 38 years old, he'd long been considered a nice cog in the middleweight machine but not championship material. Here he's got an unprecedented and unexpected chance to earn a nice bonus after 11 years and 27 fights' worth of service to the UFC.
And for GSP?
Well, what he gets in his return to the Octagon after a three-year absence is a potentially winnable championship fight, a nice payday and a chance at the history books.
If St-Pierre is able to return to action at nearly 36 years old and win another UFC title in a weight class above his natural division, there will simply be no argument against anointing him the greatest MMA fighter of all time.
He's already routinely mentioned on the short list of contenders for that honor alongside former middleweight champion Anderson Silva and former light heavyweight champ Jon Jones. Defeating Bisping would definitively put GSP over the top in that three-horse raceat least for the time being.
Silva's claim to the throne has taken a big hit in recent years.
Back-to-back losses to Chris Weidman at UFC 162 and 168 signaled the end of his career as a truly elite middleweight, but had Silva walked away then, he might still have been able to lay credible claim to greatest-of-all-time status.
Unfortunately, he soldiered on and has gone just 1-4-1 dating back to the middle of 2013 (that record includes the Weidman losses). His only official win in that span came three weeks ago, in a controversial unanimous decision against middling contender Derek Brunson.
Perhaps most damaging, Silva's win over Nick Diaz at UFC 183 was overturned after he tested positive for two banned substances. It's tough to take any case for GOAT seriously from a guy who has tested dirty for performance enhancers.
Jones, meanwhile, is the most gifted athlete and strategist the UFC has ever seen, but he has had a hard time keeping himself on the organization's active roster of late.
He's managed to fight just once a year the past three years and has missed significant time, first while sorting out legal issues stemming from a hit-and-runand then after testing positive for banned substances during the lead-up to a canceled fight against Daniel Cormier at UFC 200.
According to Jones' attorney, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency later substantiated the fighter's claim that the positive test resulted from a tainted dietary supplement, but as of this writing, Jones is still out serving a one-year suspension.
If Jones can return and win back his light heavyweight title at age 30, he'll still have plenty of time to move past both Silva and St-Pierre for consideration as best ever. That future has never appeared less secure than now, however, as Jones' out-of-cage transgressions have taken on considerable momentum and left him facing what might be his last chance with UFC ownership.
For the time being, St-Pierre leads his two closest competitors by a nose. Even before he makes this comeback, the case against him as greatest of all time must be made primarily on style points.
From 2006 to his announced break from the sport at the end of 2013with the exception of roughly one year spent without the title after a fluke loss to Matt Serra at UFC 69he ruled the UFC welterweight division with merciless zeal. He defeated 12 consecutive challengers, more often than not taking out the best 170-pound fighters the UFC could find without so much as losing a round.
Critics called it boring, but the truth is, it was amazing. Without any organized background in wrestling, St-Pierre transformed himself from a stand-up-oriented, Kyokushin karate stylist to one of the most dominant grapplers in Octagon history.
He beat wrestlers such as Matt Hughes, Jon Fitch and Johny Hendricks. He beat potent strikers such as Nick Diaz and Carlos Condit. He beat submission aces such as Serra (in their rematch at UFC 83), BJ Penn and Jake Shields.
It didn't matter what they did. St-Pierre beat them all.
Meanwhile, his built-in Canadian audience turned him into the UFC's single biggest pay-per-view draw to that point. It was a different time for the UFC, but GSP's PPV numbers are still staggering. He sold an estimated 625,000 PPVs for his fight against Fitch at UFC 87, 770,000 against Dan Hardy at UFC 111 and 800,000 against Shields at UFC 129.
In today's UFC, there is next to no one who can consistently provide those kinds of numbers, outside of McGregor.
That's one place St-Pierre's detractors fall flat. The notion that MMA fighters need to be "exciting" only exists because of the PPV model. Conventional wisdom preaches that fighters need to impress audiences to convince them to shell out $60 to watch them fight.
But GSP never had a problem with that. In fact, he did it better than anybody else from his era.
Can he still? That remains to be seen.
His accomplishments to this point are nearly peerless, however. Now, if St-Pierre can return from his lengthy hiatus, defeat Bisping and win another UFC title in a different weight class?
With all due respect to Silva and Jonesand to borrow a phrase from longtime MMA announcer Michael Schiavellothat's good night, Irene.
Estimated pay-per-view numbers courtesy of Dave Meltzer's Wrestling Observer Newsletter, as compiled at MMA Payout.
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Georges St-Pierre Takes Aim at Immortality in Title Shot Against Michael Bisping - Bleacher Report
Freezing and rewarming sections of heart tissue successfully raises hopes for doing the same for the entire organ. Photograph: Sebastian Kaulitzki/Alamy
Scientists have succeeded in cryogenically freezing and rewarming sections of heart tissue for the first time, in an advance that could pave the way for organs to be stored for months or years.
If the technique scales up to work for entire organs and scientists predict it will it could save the lives of thousands who die each year waiting for transplants.
The work is being hailed as a major development in the field of cryopreservation as it marks the first time that scientists have been able to rapidly rewarm large tissue samples without them shattering, cracking or turning to a pulp. The US team overcame this challenge by infusing the tissue with magnetic nanoparticles, which could be excited in a magnetic field, generating a rapid and uniform burst of heat.
Kelvin Brockbank, chief executive officer of Tissue Testing Technologies in Charleston, South Carolina and a co-author, said: It is a huge landmark for me. We can actually see the road ahead for clinical use and getting tissues and organs banked and into patients.
Currently, donor organs such as hearts, livers and kidneys must be transplanted within hours because the cells begin to die as soon as the organs are cut off from a blood supply. As a result, 60% of the hearts and lungs donated for transplantation are discarded each year, because these tissues cannot be kept on ice for longer than four hours.
Recent estimates suggest that if only half of unused organs were successfully transplanted, transplant waiting lists could be eliminated within two to three years. The latest paper has been hailed as a significant step towards this goal.
Mehmet Toner, a professor of bioengineering who is working on cryopreservation at Harvard Medical School, said: Its a major breakthrough. Its going to catalyse a lot of people to try this in their laboratories. Im impressed.
Cryopreservation has been around for decades, but while it works well for red blood cells, sperm and eggs, scientists have come up against a barrier for samples with a volume larger than around one millilitre.
Previously, larger samples have been cooled successfully using a technique known as vitrification, in which the tissue is infused with a mixture of antifreeze-like chemicals and an organ preservation solution. When cooled to below -90C (-130F), the fluid becomes a glass-like solid and prevents damaging ice crystals from forming.
The real problem has been the thawing process. Unless the rewarming occurs rapidly and uniformly, cracks will appear in the tissue and tiny ice crystals suddenly expand, destroying cellular structures.
We can freeze tissue and it looks good, but then we warm it and there are major issues, said Toner.
The latest work scales up cryopreservation from one millilitre to about 50ml, and the scientists said they believe the same strategy is likely to work for larger skin transplants, sections of ovarian tissue and entire organs.
John Bischof, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota and the senior author of the study, said: We have extremely promising results and we believe that were going to be able to do it but we have not yet done it.
Brockbank and colleagues previously attempted and failed to use microwave warming to generate an even thawing. It failed dreadfully due to the development of hotspots in the tissue, he said.
In the latest paper, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the team describe the new nano-warming technique. Pig heart valves and blood vessels were infused with a cryoprotectant solution mixed with iron oxide nanoparticles, coated in silicon to make them biologically inert, and the samples were cooled in liquid nitrogen to -160C (-256F).
For thawing, the sample was placed inside an electromagnetic coil, designed to generate an alternating magnetic field. As the magnetic field is flipped back and forth, the particles jiggle around inside the sample and rapidly and uniformly warm tissue at rates of 100 to 200C per minute, 10 to 100 times faster than previous methods.
In tests of their mechanical and biological properties, the tissues did not show any signs of harm, unlike control samples rewarmed slowly over ice. The researchers were also able to successfully wash away the iron oxide nanoparticles from the sample following the warming although said that further safety testing would be required before the technique could be used in patients.
The team are now testing the technique on rabbit kidneys and human allografts, which are combinations of skin, muscle and blood vessels from donors.
That will be our first trial with human tissues, said Brockbank. If that is successful, we would then progressively move to structures such as the human face for banking and for hands for banking as well as digits.
However, he added that it was difficult to put a timeline on when the developments might have a clinical impact, as this depended on regulatory approval as well as overcoming significant scientific challenges.
The scientists acknowledged that their work may attract interest from the cryonics industry, which promises to freeze the bodies or heads of clients after their death in the hope of bringing them back to life in the future, when medicine has advanced.
There is a certain intellectual connecting of the dots that takes you from the organ to the person... I could see somebody making this argument, said Bischof, but added these ambitions were not science-based as unlike with organs, the person would already be dead when frozen.
Clive Coen, professor of neuroscience at Kings College London, described the technique as ingenious. If the technique can be scaled-up to large organs such as kidneys, the contributions to the field of organ transplantation could be immense, he said. Such painstaking and careful research is to be applauded and must not be confused with wishful thinking about sub-zero storage and subsequent reanimation of a human body, as envisaged by the cryonics industry
Almost 49,000 people in Britain have had to wait for an organ transplant in the past decade and more than 6,000, including 270 children, have died before receiving the transplant they needed, NHS statistics reveal.
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Heart tissue cryogenics breakthrough gives hope for transplant patients - The Guardian
Its been a decade since Jake Plummer threw a pass in the NFL, but if you talk to him long enough youd think he has a few seasons left in the tank.
Jake is fired upwhether hes talking about his newborn daughter Laverne, his love for Saturday games of handball, or the crazy Colorado weatherhis enthusiasm for all things life is surging. But with a comic book like collection of old broken bones, sprains and surgeries, youve got to wonder how he keeps it up. The answer to Jakes apparent perpetual youth is cannabis, specifically cannabidiol or CBD. In fact, CBDs positive impact on Jakes health has helped him to understand that being healthy is a choice, but not a choice that everyone is free to make. To overcome this choice discrepancy, Jake has embarked on a crusade of cannabis activism designed to empower individuals to take back control of their wellbeing.
Growing up in a small Idaho town during the 70s and 80s, Jake was in a world of his own, free to indulge his boyish curiosities. With two older brothers to show him the ropes, Jake quickly took a liking to sports.
I wanted to be just like my brothers, when I was young. I always wanted to play football when I grew up, but I had dreams of playing running back for the Raiders.
Just as Jake was developing his talents as a student athlete, America was in the thick of its War on Drugs. Initiated by President Nixon in 1971, Americas War on Drugs inaccurately portrayed a societal epidemic of drug abuse and addiction as it pertains to cannabis. Propagated through public schools, churches and even athletic teams, the War attempted to classify all drugs as evil or dangerouseven cannabis. As a young athlete, Plummer steered clear of drugseven cannabis. It wasnt the political regimes fear mongering tactics that kept Plummer on the straight and narrowhe was simply too busy focusing on football to carve out time for a typical youths extracurricular activities. But Jakes indifference to drugsspecifically cannabiswas not wholly a result of his dedication to athletics. Jake was given an education about drugs, he was well aware of themit was his education that guided his choices, not the political scare tactics of the 70s and 80s.
I had people close to me that were using cannabis for a long time. For me, I grew up in an environment where it was, you know, not what Ronald and Nancy Reagan were telling us. To just say no, and that marijuana is a gateway drug, it will make you dumbI was like what? Ive talked to people that are extremely smart, brilliant, like Mensa smart, and they used cannabis on the regular. Theyre not dumb. So I knew right away what was true and false. So for me there was never any stigma.
Jake never attached the stigma to cannabis that was force fed to Americans during his formidable years. He stayed focused on the journey that would land him in the NFL and give him the platform from which he speaks today. With ten years between him and his tenure with the NFL, Jake has taken time to reflect on his career. His focus has shifted from playing the game to finding ways to make it safer. He believes cannabis could be the answer.
As I evolved and got out the game, football was still, and will always be, a part of my life. It doesnt define me, but it is a large part of what walks into the room with me. I am fine with it, I love it, but I want to use it for good. I hope that it allows some people that maybe wouldnt have listened to some of the things I am saying about cannabis, to listen. Now, they might respect me in a way, because I have always been very truthful and honest. I wouldnt be advocating if I didnt believe in its ability to mitigate pain, and just your overall wellbeing.
After his second hip surgery in 2014, Jake started using cannabis regularly to manage his pain and to help him develop a healthy mental state. He continued to use cannabis to manage pain, but it wasnt until he discovered CBD that he noticed an overwhelming increase in his mental and physical wellbeing. His experience with CBD inspired him to take action on behalf of his fellow NFL players.
Professional athletes like Jake put their bodies through hell to entertain us on game day. Objectified by the man, jeered and cheered by the fan, professional athletes are chewed up and spit out of their respective leagues like old wads of chewing tobacco. To make matters worse, players are doled out little envelopes of addictive painkillers to mask the pain from their battle wounds. They are given few options when they are in painyou either take the pill or shot and keep going, or you sit down and watch another guy take your place. What if this wasnt the case? What if players had a natural option to manage their pain? These are the questions that burn inside Jake.
Jake has recently become an outspoken advocate for the responsible use of cannabis in professional sports. Cannabis was the answer to the issues Jake was facing in retirement, and he suspected it would answer many of the issues that players face during their careers, like depression, traumatic brain injury and chronic pain. He has taken his experiences in the NFL and his experience with using cannabis and forged them as one into a powerful movement.
He is advocating for the responsible use of cannabis in the NFL, but also bringing attention to the myriad challenges that professional athletes face. Jake believes that the players should have a voice that transcends the limitations of the NFL Players Association and empowers them to speak from experience.
These guys are speaking from experience. We are not just advocates, but we are living walking experiments. A lot of us have used cannabis and found relief. Relief from not just pain or depression, but for some guys it saved their liveshelped them not pull the trigger, helped them get their families back. Thats powerful stuff. It has to resonate with somebody in their heart, that this is a valid option that should be looked into. Not just state-by-state, but by our Federal Government, by big organizations like the NFL. The control is not in the hands of the people that need it. If you look at the NFL, why wouldnt you want your guys to have everything possible in their systems to play better and longer. But I dont even know if they want us to play longer. They want the new guys with bleached mohawks.
Professional sports organizations are systems built around the almighty dollar. This leaves little room for players to voice opinions that stray from the company line. Jakes advocacy for cannabis use in the NFL has morphed into a campaign for choice. Players are setup by their employers to blindly destroy their bodies and Jake is slowly but surely putting a stop to this shameful exploitation of talent. Jakes message has earned him a new team of supporters that are assisting him in moving the chains on cannabis in the NFL and society as a whole. He and his fellow advocates are making progress. The NFL and its officials have become increasingly aware of the movement to research and allow cannabis in the league. Slow as the NFLs reaction may be, there is progressbut now Jake and his supporters are preparing a new initiative for change.
I am not fighting these guys, I dont want to fight anybody that big. I just want to keep sending emails to remind them that we are not going to allow them to make the statement (about cannabis) at the Super Bowl and then let the offseason go by, and then bang the season starts, then all of a sudden theyre back in the cycle again. They say they want to research itwell weve got it all setup. Roger Goodell, are you going to write a check? A million dollars would go a long way.
After successfully influencing the NFL to take a closer look at cannabis, Jake feels empowered to push for even greater changeand he wont be alone. In recent months, Jake and an impressive list of current and former professional athletes from all leagues, founded the not for profit organization Athletes For CARE (A4C). The soon-to-be launched organization will focus on confronting important health issues facing the sports community and the public at large. Whether its addiction, depression, chronic pain or improving overall health and safety in sports, Jake and his peers at Athletes For CARE are uniting as one voice to advocate for research, education and compassion when addressing these issues.
With the inception of A4C, and its imminent launch, it appears that Jake and his fellow cannabis advocates are ready to embark on the next phase of their journey to bring choice and wellbeing to not just athletes, but the general public. Though it isnt uncommon for professional athletes to take up philanthropic efforts in retirement, Jake has taken a path seldom traveled by NFL players. His passion for helping others is evident in everything he does. He remains faithful that his cannabis advocacy will help to unite professional athletes under an umbrella of wellness and purpose. As he continues to pollinate the minds of NFL officials, and the general public with anecdotal evidence of cannabis role as an alternative medicine, there is no doubting that change is on the horizon.
I hope they turn to A4C. Come find us, well help you, well help you find your path and get involved with something. Come back and be part of a team that is doing good. Thats where this all came from. To bring these guys into the fold and get them off their soap boxes and back to doing good. You guys made it to the top of the game, and you can do anything in the worldweve just got to put our minds to it.
Also published on Medium.
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OPENING THE PLAYBOOK ON ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE - Dope Magazine