Category: biology
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On the difference between man and all other animals
J. B. S Haldane, Julian Huxley, Animal biology, 1927 “The one great difference between man and all other animals is that for them evolution must always be a blind force, of which they are quite unconscious; whereas man has, in some measure at least, the possibility of consciously controlling evolution according to his wishes.” I…
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Hinshelwood, bacteria and biologists
Hinshelwood is a famous chemist (Nobel price for kinetics of chain reactions). He also spent the considerable time on research of the growth of bacterial cells. From his biography: “Shortly before the 1939-45 war, Hinshelwood began work on the growth of bacterial cells. For some time he had been thinking about applying kinetic measurements and…
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Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings
My comments to the everything-list while discussing Fodor’s paper ‘Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings‘ ———————– To understand Fodor’s answer it is necessary to understand his argument. Shortly: 1) Natural selection is assumed to be unintentional. It just happens but it does not has a goal. 2) The existence of coextensive traits in the organism is…
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Depressive views of Jacques Monod
Lately I have met the name of Jacques Monod several times with respect to his depressive views on nature of mankind. Below is information about him from books and papers that I have read. I. Prigogine and I. Stengers, The new alliance, Scientia 112 (1977) Epigraph to the paper. J. Monod. “The ancient alliance has…
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Entropy and Miscibility Gap: Tutorial for Biologists
Main Points Introduction Recently I have written a small text Schrödinger’s Order, Disorder and Entropy and discussed it on the biosemiotic list. During discussion, there was a suggestion to consider a solution with a miscibility gap. In this case, a homogeneous mixture spontaneously decomposes to two different solutions with different concentrations of components. In this text,…
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Muddle Puddle with Entropy in Biology
One paragraph from J. Scott Turner, Biology’s Second Law: Homeostasis, Purpose, and Desire. In Beyond Mechanism: Putting Life Back Into Biology I should say that the book is good and the chapter actually is also not bad. Yet, this paragraph speaks for itself: p. 192 “At its most general, the disequilibrium that characterizes a living system…
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Addiction: The View from Rat Park
In an interview of Alexis Pietak, I have heard about Rat Park and now I have found information in Internet. Bruce K. Alexander Addiction: The View from Rat Park http://globalizationofaddiction.ca/articles-speeches/rat-park/148-addiction-the-view-from-rat-park.html “In the 1960s, some experimental psychologists began to think that the Skinner Box was a good place to study drug addiction. They perfected techniques that…
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The Uses of a Screwdriver Cannot be Listed Algorithmically
A quote from Stuart A. Kauffman, Foreword: Evolution beyond Newton, Darwin, and Entailing Law. In Beyond Mechanism: Putting Life Back Into Biology p. 9 “Here is the first ‘strange’ step. Can you name all the uses of a screwdriver, alone, or with other objects or process? Well, screw in a a screw, open a paint can, wedge…