Viraj's Weblog

Just finished reading Microcosmos. It's a great book about synergistic evolution. Some quotes:

Grasping as best we can the formidable powers of the biosphere in which we live out our lives, it is difficult to retain the delusion that without our help nature is helpless. As important as all our activities seem to us, our own role in evolution is transient and expendable in the context of the rich layer of interliving beings forming the planet's surface. We may pollute the air and waters for our grandchildren and hasten our own demise, but this will exert no effect on the continuation of the microcosm. Our own bodies are composed of ten quadrillion animal cells and another one hundred quadrillion bacterial cells. We have no natural "enemies" that eat us. But after we die we return to our forgotten stomping ground. The life forms that recycle the substances of our bodies are primarily bacteria. The microcosm is still evolving around us and within us. You could even say, as we shall see, that the microcosm is evolving as us.

Human religion and mythology have always been full of fantastic combinations of creatures - the mermaids, sphinxes, centaurs, devils, vampires, werewolves, and seraphs that combine animal parts to make imaginary beings. Truth being stranger than fiction, biology has refined the intuitively pleasing idea with its discovery of the overwhelming statistical probability of the reality of combined beings. We and all beings made of nucleated cells are probably composites, mergers of once different creatures. The human brain cells that conceived these creatures are themselves chimeras - no less fantastic mergers of several formerly independent kinds of prokaryotes that together coevolved.

Jeon's amoebae can be killed by penicillin, which binds to sites in the cell walls of the bacteria within them, destroying the interdependent population that is the cell. The pact between bacteria and amoebae has become so intimate and strong that death to one member of the alliance spells death for both.

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The amoebae experiments point out the fallacy of the idea that evolution works at all times for the "good of the individual." Just what is the "individual" after all? Is it the "single" amoeba with its internalized bacteria, or is it the "single" bacterium living in the cellular environment which is itself alive? Really the individual is something abstract, a category, a conception. And nature has a tendency to evolve that which is beyond any narrow category or conception.

The body is totalitarian in its regulation of genes. Once a cell becomes a muscle cell, for example, it is so forever. The only exception to this rule of permanent roles within the body is during cancer, when cells seem to revert back to the more primordial condition of reproducing continuously without regard to their place or function in the body. During cancer, chromosomes break apart and mitochondria reproduce even more rapidly than the cells of which they are a part. Usually once a cell commits itself to growing an undulipodium it is evolutionarily dead: it cannot grow again. But as if disobeying all authority, some cancer cells in tissue culture even grow undulipodia, which they withdraw just before mitosis. It is as if the uneasy alliances of the symbiotic partnerships that maintain the cells distintegrate. The symbionts fall out of line, once again asserting their independent tendencies, reliving their ancient past. The reasons, of course, are not all that clear, but cancer seems more an untimely regression than a disease. Genes are regulated and cells differentiated in the body by the complex interaction of biochemicals within the body. When these biochemicals are diluted by the introduction of cigarette smoke, sodium nitrate, and other carcinogens, they cannot perform their task. Consequently cells tend to behave like children in a classroom whose teacher has left: they go wild, they get out of their cellular "seats," they play and reproduce in an unregulated, wanton fashion.

The structure of plants seems to preclude evolution toward complex behavior. Yet as we gaze back on their impressive record, we may begin to suspect plants of being a bit less helpless than they seem. Our central nervous system and brain evolved as an adaptation to the eating of plants, and the eating of the eater of plants. Plants don't really need brains; they borrow ours. They have a strategic intelligence that resides more in the chemistry of photosynthesis and the ploys of the genes than in the tactics of the cerebral cortex; we behave for them. And what is behind this different wisdom of plants? It is no more nor less than the ancient microcosm. Microbes, in the form of chloroplasts, mitochondria, and the agitated residue of spirochete motility systems, provide the basis for botanical success.

The so-called modern races of man appeared so recently that they cannot be marked on a time line which includes the origin of life. The differences among Europeans, Africans, native Americans, Vietnamese, Eskimos, and indeed all peoples of the world are continually overdramatized. Since you have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on, and since there are about twenty-five years to a generation and thus four generations to a century, we are led to the conclusion that in forty thousand generations you would have accumulated 2^40000 ancestors. This number is far greater than the total number of people ever to have lived. It exceeds by far the most radical estimates which anthropologists have made for the worldwide human populations one million years ago. If we assume that your ancestors were alive ten thousand years ago, this calculation can only mean that many, indeed most, of the relatives on your father's side were the same people as those on your mother's side. Moreover, it means that, whether Chinese or African, English or Dravidian, your ancestors and your fellowman's ancestors were the same people.

A microcosmic example of devolution would be microbes growing on a Petri plate. (Petri plates are round dishes with clear, transparent food permitting the investigator to see microbial colonies as spots even with the naked eye.) Fed on nutrient agar - bacterial food hardened with a gelatinous substance extracted from seaweed - microbes are often most prolific in the generations immediately preceding their collapse. Depleting all the nutrients in the agar and reaching the edges of the small laboratory dish, the multibillions of bacteria suddenly stop growing and die for lack of food and living space. For us, the world may be such a Petri plate. Indeed, computer-enhanced satellite images of Spokane, Washington, show urban growth patterns similar to the growth of colonies of microbes. From the standpoint of Meredith's theory of devolution, it is easy to see that the implications of human population growth are not necessarily synonymous with progress.

A new song, mainly with saw waves and distortion. I used Izotope Ozone for mastering and love it! On Sutros and Soundcloud. Enjoy!

Rotten Tomatoes now has an API. Yay! Here is a quick way how to use it from Clojure.

Here is a great article on Unix process states and disowning processes. Also check out reptyr which is an interesting tool to move a process to another tty.

I seem to always remix the stuff I do once I hear how crappy it sounds in my car . This is just EQ'ed better. Here ya go. Also I put some of my stuff on Soundcloud.

A new song.