Posts Tagged ‘biology’

The Voyage of the Beagle is the book published by Charles Darwin following his five year trip around South America aboard the H.M.S. Beagle.

I read the abridged version because it sounded interesting, but not that interesting. Perhaps I was wrong though. The huge variety of places he visits makes for a fast moving narrative in which you are quickly going from one place and on to the next.

He is very much a product of his time. There is little careful observation in Darwin’s journey. He captures, pushes, pokes, prods, shoots and eats his way across most of South America. When there is a really tough nut to crack, he brings out the geological hammer. And by nut, I mean animal’s shell. Everything and everyone is a species of animal worth commenting on to him, including the native peoples.

It is interesting to compare this to On the Origin of Species. In Origin, he slowly builds up the idea of evolution. In Voyage, which predates Origin, he is in full science mode with no apologies. My guess is that there were designed for different audiences (or perhaps “adapted to their environment” would be a more appropriate term).

As the king of atheism in Leeds (because nobody else wanted the job), On the Origin of Species felt like the kind of book that I should have read. However, I never had, partly because it is basically a biology textbook, even if it is written for a more general audience.

In an exciting twist though I discovered an abridged version by Richard Dawkins which was a manageable length.

It is still pretty dull to be honest. I mean, I am sure if I thought about it, I would have known that there was indeed so much to know about pigeons. However, it is difficult to stay focused on that. Unlike Charles, I have never been a member of one pigeon fancier club in London, let alone two.

I think part of the problem was I just knew it all already. Having been in Humanist circles for so long I had been to enough talks, read enough books and debated the naturalistic side so often that I had a good grounding of evolutionary theory already.

The latest meeting of Leeds Skeptics saw Dr Bruce Turnbull from the School of Chemistry at the University of Leeds present a talk on “Synthetic Biology – A Brave New World?” It was an incredibly informative talk that offered a peak into one of the most exciting areas of science at the moment. Not one to be missed if you get another opportunity to see it!

Recently, I visited Headingley Cafe Scientifique for the first time for a talk entitled “Intelligence of Genetics.”

I had never attended the Headingley Cafe before but it seems very well attended. It was standing room only by the time the event kicked off and there were plenty of seating available – so they probably had 50+ people there.

The venue was the New Headingley Club which looked very fancy on the website but turned out to be significantly less fancy in the flesh. I got plenty of change from my round at the bar though, so will approve of that!

The event itself was somewhat disappointing. I came away from the talk not really feeling that I had learnt anything – other than that we have a one in three chance of getting Alzheimer’s disease and this massively varies depending on our genetics. There were lots of stats, but a lot of these weren’t really in much context – am I supposed to be impressed by that number? I don’t know what an average sample size for your area of science.

Still, it was good to finally make it down to the Headingley Cafe.

I’m currently in the process of re-reading Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near and having read the section about how the brain rewrites itself as you learn got me thinking. This is nothing new of course, it’s basic brain biology, but chancing on the subject again made me wonder.

If you can reinforce a pattern in your brain simply be repeating the activity over and over again, and this doesn’t even including physical actions but can also be done by thinking a certain idea, can you by mere repetition, implant a false idea in your head?

If you can, the consequences are obvious.

But this seems to be a hypothesis that is quite testable. What would happen for example, if we all collectively decided to believe a lie. If say, all the members of the A-Soc circle, picked a false statement to collectively believe, spent all their time thinking it was true and telling each other it was true for social reinforcement.

Of course, it could well fall flat on it’s face. Because you would know it wasn’t true, you could well spend all your time thinking “I’m pretending to believe this, even though I know it isn’t true” and therefore strongly reinforce the pattern that you know it secretly isn’t true.

Still, it might be an interesting project for someone to undertake.