Uke 10 - Gener og memer
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Gener er bærere av oppskrift for liv, mens memer er bærere av oppskrift for tanker
GENer former liv
MEMer former ideer og gir mening
Helt nye gener kan oppstå ved mutasjon, dvs. kopieringsfeil
Helt nye memer kan oppstå ved assosiasjon mellom gamle memer, dvs. kombinasjonsfeil
Begge er basert på tilfeldigheter
GENer muterer, men MEMer assosieres
Gener som ikke fungerer, forsvinner
Memer som ikke fungerer, forplantes og forsterkes i de digitale ekkokamre
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Noen sitater:
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"Nothing is constant but change! All existence is a perpetual flux of 'being and becoming!' That is the broad lesson of the evolution of the world."
― Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919)
"Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability."
"For the future, so far as we can see it, it appears to be unquestionable that the activity of the human race will provide the major factor in the environment of almost every evolving organism. Whether they act consciously or unconsciously human initiative and human choice have become the major channels of creative activity on this planet. Inadequately prepared we unquestionably are for the new responsibilities, which with the rapid extension of human control over the productive resources of the world have been, as it were, suddenly thrust upon us."
—Ronald Fisher (1890-1962)
"The social dynamics of human history, even more than that of biological evolution, illustrate the fundamental principle of ecological evolution - that everything depends on everything else. The nine elements that we have described in societal evolution of the three families of phenotypes - the phyla of things, organizations and people, the genetic bases in knowledge operating through energy and materials to produce phenotypes, and the three bonding relations of threat, integration and exchange - all interact on each other."
—Kenneth E. Boulding (1910-1993)
“Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species.”
― Lewis Thomas (1913-1993)
"Cultural evolution was centered for a hundred thousand years on tales told by elders to children sitting around the cave fire. That cave-fire evolution gave us brains that are wonderfully sensitive to fable and fantasy, but insensitive to facts and figures. To enable a tribe to prevail in the harsh world of predators and prey, it was helpful to have brains with strong emotional bonding to shared songs and stories. It was not helpful to have brains questioning whether the stories were true. Our scientists and politicians of the modern age evolved recently from the cave-children. They still, as Charles Darwin remarked about human beings in general, bear the indelible stamp of their lowly origin."
― Freeman Dyson (1923-2020)
"Purpose … was the first phenomenon of life: the first step from a universe in which entropy and chaos held sway toward one in which purposes residing in organisms direct external physical processes and create new physical relationships”.
― William T. Powers (1926-2013)
"The nature of mind: much of its power seems to stem from just the messy ways its agents cross-connect. ...it's only what we must expect from evolution's countless tricks."
― Marvin Minsky (1927-2016)
"The incredible diversity of life on this planet, most of which is microbial, can only be understood in an evolutionary framework"
— Carl Woese (1928-2012)
“By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.”
"Nor are we the culmination of evolution, except in the sense that there has never been another species so bizarrely ingenious that it could create both iambic pentameter and plutonium."
― David Quammen
"The cumulative nature of the evolutionary process, the fact that memory is preserved, means that life grows not just through a random proliferation of new forms, but there's a kind of cumulative quality."
― Rupert Sheldrake
"Imitation and conformity can create high degrees of intra-group homogeneity and inter-group heterogeneity, and on a faster time scale than that of biological evolution."
— Michael Tomasello
“in the evolution of a society, continued investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy yields a declining marginal return.”
—Joseph A. Tainter
“As far as we can tell, from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about business as usual.”
― Yuval Noah Harari
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