Which form of goverment would evolution create? I was thinking that a monarchy would be most conducive to evolution. Heads of state are determined by birth. Whatever traits that gave the king the crown is more likely to be carried by their offspring then someone select by the whole community.

Could these scientists be more liberal?

Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb and other books on dilemmas facing contemporary human society, said he does not understand why more effort is not going into urgently needed solutions. “What we don’t know, and need to learn, is how cultures change and how we can ethically influence that process,” he said.

Deborah S. Rogers, a research fellow at Stanford, said their findings demonstrate that “some cultural choices work while others clearly do not.”

“Unfortunately, people have learned how to avoid natural selection in the short term through unsustainable approaches such as inequity and excess consumption. But this is not going to work in the long term,” she said. “We need to begin aligning our culture with the powerful forces of nature and natural selection instead of against them.”

Scary stuff to hear if you are a classic liberal.

Culture can changes thanks to ‘natural selection’. What we need is to ‘naturally select’ against capitalism democracy and freedom.

What the hell does natural selection mean in this case? Is anyone else sick and tired of evolution being applied to everything in the entire universe? Hell last time Dennet spoke at Duke he even applied natural selection to heaven and hell. Sigh, evolution has really turned into the holy scriptures of science. Grrrrrrrrrrr.

Via Instapundit.

Over at his blog he writes about Darwinism.

Now, a few scientists are questioning Darwinism on many fronts. I wonder how long Darwinism’s life span will be. Marxism, another theory which, in true Victorian style, sought to explain everything, is dead everywhere but on university campuses and in the minds of psychotic dictators. Maybe Darwinism will be different. Maybe it will last. But it’s difficult to believe it will. Theories that presume to explain everything without much evidence rarely do. Theories that outlive their era of conception and cannot be verified rarely last unless they are faith based. And Darwinism has been such a painful, bloody chapter in the history of ideologies, maybe we would be better off without it as a dominant force.

I have my Iron Umbrella open. Bring the hellstorm.

I dare you to watch this video and then deny god’s existence. I dare you.

Let me just go on the record as saying science rules but rules even more with the help of computer graphics.

How annoying. Looks like my fellow cognitive neuroscientists are following the path of some global warming scientists.

IN anticipation of the 2008 presidential election, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to watch the brains of a group of swing voters as they responded to the leading presidential candidates. Our results reveal some voter impressions on which this election may well turn.

A set of scientists have really decided that they want to make science vulnerable to being displaced as society’s grand arbiter of truth. I’m torn. It nice that science enjoys a reputation as being the arbiter of truth, but it’s also dangerous for studies like these can lead people to believe that there is an absolute truth. As science creeps towards religion hopefully society in general will figure out that science is best left as being amoral. Most likely its will only happen after moral decision with huge implications are made using poor science. Top candidate today would have to be global warming.

Its argued that without government paying for it basic research would no longer be done. Imagine my surprise when I read this:

Over the last 50 years, industry-funded basic research in universities generally had kept pace with all categories of R&D, even outstripping basic research performed in companies’ own labs. And in the mid-1990s, with the explosion of transdisciplinary fields such as biotechnology, corporations began funding basic research at universities at a blistering pace: such investment grew 45 percent from 1995 to 2000, much faster than the growth of total R&D funding. But in 2000, industry abruptly reversed course.

And here I thought basic science was unprofitable making necessary federal funds for survival.

That Marx challenged capitalism because of a condition called hidradenitis suppurativa. Apparently this condition prevents the sweat glands from expelling properly leading to inflammation. Communism has always been the nasty armpit of economics so I guess its unsurprising that a malfunction of this body party brought the communism into existence. It’s science, so it has to be true that hiradentis suppurativa caused communism. Intuition doesn’t tell me that. Rationality does.

IBM claims to have acquired a breakthrough in nano technology for memory storage. The poster states:

And it is often not the inventor who decides how and where to apply new technology. It’s the entrepreneur, the investor and ultimately the consumer who supply the imagination.

Couldn’t of said better myself. Its the capitalists that does all the work of converting some obscure discovery into something usable by consumers. To accomplish they must assume financial risk and develop a manufacturing process with no precedent. For this we offer them ownership of the fruits of their work even when it requires a labor force to generate the products.

Some wish to punish those willing to take risk and undergo sustained difficult problem solving. They wish to move ownership of the fruits of such efforts to the labor that produce the developed products. Such an inversion in incentive structure is doomed to fail. Denying wealth to financiers and entrepreneurs by shifting ownership to labors discourages economic development by forcing those that take risk and work hard to give their fruits over to those that took no risk nor worked hard. Moving ownership to labor simply reduces innovation required for economic growth. Wealth in the country is reduced over time and everyone becomes more poor.

Nope. In my country the entrepreneur and financier gets ownership of the nano memory products they develop for mass production. Sure labor gets a cut. It’s determined by the market value of the kind of labor need for production. However, labor does not get ownership of what is produced. If they want that kind of access they can take the financial risk and/or sustained problem solving required to convert discoveries like this one into something desirous by many consumers.

It has to be science. What are you going to do?