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 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/everything-list/xcBi6v8SAg4 ———————– 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…
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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 A homogeneous phase can be spontaneously decomposed into two immiscible phases. Concentration gradients can be spontaneously formed at the border between immiscible phases when the system reaches its equilibrium state. At constant temperature and pressure the entropy of system in question spontaneously decreases during the separation process. In the adiabatic system the increase…
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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…