many other viruses have the exact same luck and have been getting away with this sequence of lucky moves for eons. It just makes me wonder whether viral accommodation by cells is a part of normal biology of a species for some greater goal that outweighs even the survival of the individual.
Given what we see in nature, we have good moral reasons to hope that evolution is unintelligent and that accidents can result in excellent designs. If a superior intelligence is responsible for these advanced designs, then we would have to ask what we should do if it turns out that this superior designer is actually a villain.
This is just a possible scenario of a synergy between humans and automation technology. We need technology for its mastery of the time-domain. Technology depends on us for survival due to our biologic advantages of solving problems in time-volume or in a frequency domain.
Learning is an instinctual behavior. If we had to be taught how to learn, we could never learn that lesson.
Success or fame in the current environment is a lottery prize given to great and weak with equal probability. In such an environment, it makes sense to put as little effort into success as one would put into buying a lottery ticket. A weekly effort, perhaps, but one that takes only a few minutes, leaving the rest of the week free.
The modern gig lifestyle results in a hive-like devaluation of the individual, but it also contributes to the emergence of more hive-like behaviors by encouraging individuals, especially men, to maximize their efforts in a gig when they are needed and minimize their obligations when they are not relevant.
The popular notion of a good life is to live the life of a historic king. The house becomes a castle. Every room must be filled with treasure. Every meal must be a feast. This is not a result of determination from evolution. This is a result of living a fantasy.
The dominant life form in the universe is more likely to be biological than machines. The bulk of that life remains undiscovered at the edges of planetary systems, content to stay there indefinitely expanding from one object to the next. Occasionally they will encounter a star system with a habitable planet. Eventually they will reach that planet and introduce life to that planet if the planet is previously sterile.
My last post discussed my disapproval of describing behavior as analogous to a computer program. In particular, that post focused on the idea that behavior is inherited, and thus somehow must be encoded in DNA, and thus DNA includes instructions for behavior in addition to blueprints for building proteins. I accept that there…
I have been delighted to watch the rapid progress of understanding of DNA over my lifetime. I am amazed by the number of different directions for progress: improved technologies for rapid reading DNA sequences, improved understanding how DNA is copied, transferred toward proteins, replicated across generations, etc. Each of these areas have seen…
Hypothesis Discovery 