https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=10007 No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons In love with the moment. Scared shitless of the future. [ ] [Search] << Fucking Pirates: A Teeny, Tiny Call to Arms Pimpage: Me and Neill on The Bridge. >> 19 Sep 2021 John Carpenter's "Planaria": or, The New Individualism Sometimes you run into a concept that completely rewires your outlook. It happened for me back in the eighties, when I encountered the definition of "Life" in Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker: "Information, shaped by natural selection". That concise distillation--an actual description of what life is, as opposed to all those tired and exception-prone checklists that only talk about what life does-- told me that you didn't have to be squishy to be alive, you didn't even have to have physical substance. It told me that carbon and silicon were just platforms, that a piece of software could be not just metaphorically but literally alive under the right circumstances. That single insight informed half a trilogy. It happened again back in 2008 when I encountered Pepper et al's paper on Somatic Evolution, a paper that posed a question mindbogglingly obvious in hindsight, but which had never occurred to me: how can multicellular life evolve in the presence of Darwinian processes that should, by rights, turn every individual cell against its neighbors in a competition for resources? Why isn't every somatic cell in it for themselves, why doesn't all multicellular life devolve into cancer? That particular question ultimately gave you "The Things ". You're welcome. And now, once again: a bolt from the blue that (for me at least) redefines the word "individual" in a way that could almost be a deliberate response to Pepper et al. An individual-- an organism-- is "a living system maintaining both a higher level of internal cooperation and a lower level of internal conflict than either its components or any larger systems of which it is a component." What we have here is a definition that not only acknowledges the issue of cellular competition within the individual, but which is actually based upon it. Here's a corollary, which elevates us from the perspective of the individual to the shaping of entire populations: "The major evolutionary transitions, including those from prokaryotes to eukaryotes and from free-living cells to multicellularity, all increase the scale over which cooperative interactions dominate competitive interactions." Personally I think that's a bit clunky: I'd have just said symbiosis increases with complexity; antagonism diminishes^^[1]. However you put it, it provides an evolutionary rationale for the emergence of hive minds: competition waning between individuals the same way it did between cells, cooperation waxing, as individuals fuse to become a single superorganism. Put it that way and hive minds seem almost an inevitable next step, on the off chance that extinction doesn't happen first. I found those little gems of insight quoted in a 2018 paper from Fields and Levin. They weren't talking about hive minds, of course. They were talking about something far more down to earth: those humble, endearingly cross-eyed little flatworms everybody learns about in first-year biology. You know: Planarians. Dugesia et al. [Lobo-et-al]Come on. You know they're cute. (Adapted from Lobo et al 2012.) Except, if this paper is right, they're not exactly worms. They're not even individuals. What they are is habitats: cellular substrates containing individuals. Individuals who may not even like each other very much. There are these things called neoblasts--stem cells, basically. They only comprise about 20% of any given planaria, but they're the ones that keep the whole worm running. A single neoblast can build an entire worm from scratch; they not only produce new neoblasts but they also give rise to the other cells that comprise the remaining eighty percent of the body. Those guys don't even divide; they're perennially post-mitotic, they just kind of sit there being muscle fibers or digestive cells or neuroconductors for a week or so before dying off. (Fields and Levin compare them to the sterile workers in insect hives; the queens in that scenario being, of course, the neoblasts themselves.) Also--and this is especially wild--genetically-different neoblast lineages can be found in the same planarian body. Turns out the genes tend to mix it up at wound sites: neoblasts and non-neoblasts exchange genes during wound repair, which changes the gene frequencies (not to mention sharing any mutations which have turned up along the way), effectively forging new lineages. Further, asexual reproduction in planaria is a form of self-inflicted wounding: the worm literally rips itself in two, each piece subsequently regenerating into a whole worm. So neoblast lineages diverge, both during reproduction and repair. You end up with gangs of neoblasts--tribes, if you will--whose members are bound to each other by genetic similarity and put at competitive odds with less-similar neoblast populations living in the same body. [fissitribalization-1024x658]Family Feud, Planaria-style. From Fields & Levin 2018 I've been focusing on asexual reproduction, but there are also planarian species that reproduce sexually. And here's an interesting factoid: you can sexualize an asexual planarian by feeding it a sexual one. Or cut out the cannibalistic middleman and just inject neoblasts from a sexual worm directly into an asexual one. They'll move right in, take over, sexualize the territory. So. Neoblasts are Immortal. Autonomous. Mobile. Genetically distinct. Neoblasts are, in other words, a system which maintains a higher level of internal cooperation and a lower level of internal conflict than either its components or the larger system of which it is a component (i.e., the worm entire). There are quantifiers, of course. It wouldn't be science if you couldn't hang numbers off it. The paper cites Hamilton's Rule, invokes "zygotic bottlenecks", describes a model which simulates a day in the life of Joe Neoblast. But the conclusion, the point, is that planarians are not the organism here. Neoblasts--in their competing tribes-- are the organisms, the individuals. The worm is merely the niche they happen to be fighting over. The worm is not an individual but an environment, highly complex, constructed by neoblasts out of their own "reproductively incompetent progeny". Maybe it's just me (I am also, after all, reproductively incompetent), but I find this a profoundly exciting thought. [Thingaria-1-683x1024] And I haven't even mentioned somatic mutations, bioelectrical fields that supersede genetic codes, two-headed and headless variants that persist from one generation to the next even though the genes themselves have not been edited. Fields and Levins invoke all that stuff. But for me, their radical conclusions regarding individuality are especially resonant in the context of John Carpenter's classic "The Thing". So much of planarian biology seems, paradoxically, both alien and familiar. The ability to grow new morphological features independent of genetic code. A single particle able to regenerate an entire organism ("We should each prepare our own food. And I suggest we only eat out of cans."). Even the alien's Achilles' heel, the competing agendas of different groups of neoblasts ("Blood from one of you Things won't obey when it's attacked. It'll try and survive--crawl away from a hot needle, say.") It all fits. Canonically, The Thing came from outer space. But maybe that's not where we should have been looking all this time. Maybe we should have been looking at the puddles under our own feet. --------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Admittedly the last two words are redundant, but I don't want to lose sight of the idea that antagonist process do persist to some extent. | This entry was posted on Sunday, September 19th, 2021 at 8:16 am and is filed under biology, evolution, just putting it out there.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. 24 Responses to "John Carpenter's "Planaria": or, The New Individualism" 1. [b1479c96] Paula Johanson September 19th, 2021 at 10:31 am More reasons to be charmed by those cross-eyed little planaria! Ever so glad I put a flatworm pattern into my Science Critters book that'll be released this fall. Paula Johanson(Quote) (Reply) 2. [49b6d1c1] Greggles September 19th, 2021 at 11:23 am For years I've been throwing symbiosis and mitochondria at weirdo libertarians and randians whenever they bring up any of their 'animal spirits of competition' or the 'creative destruction' & tc. But I usually get pushed back to some squishy bs myself. Thanks for pointing out these papers, I'll have some ammunition. tl:dr, arguing back against "It's nature" is haaaard when you don't have a good counterdefinition. Greggles(Quote) (Reply) 3. [8787940a] osmarks September 19th, 2021 at 12:38 pm Greggles, Why treat "it's nature" as if it's a valid argument to do anything anyway? Nature does lots of horrible, horrible things. osmarks(Quote) (Reply) 4. [dc57b79e] Paul Harrison September 19th, 2021 at 3:05 pm I am reminded of Tasmanian Devil facial tumour disease. Paul Harrison(Quote) (Reply) 5. [94c4c679] J Andrew Hoerner September 19th, 2021 at 4:55 pm The actual engineering of cooperation is sufficiently important that organisms have evolved to accept a remarkably high cost in order to assure it: universal organismic death. Limited, determinate maximum lifespans combined with arranging that the next generation arises from a single cell, assures that self-aggrandizing cells gain no purchase on future generations unless they are, or can alter, germ cells. However, I remain fascinated and deeply puzzled by instances where highly complex and apparently fragile coordination is maintained without "zygotic bottlenecks," i.e without accepting the cost of universal mortality. Why don't competing planarian cell lines tear them to pieces? Two more examples of this puzzle: sponges are one of the oldest multicellular life patterns, and thy constitute a "voluntary" association of separately reproducing cells. you can pass a sponge through a net fine enough to separate it into individual cells, and those cells will rejoin into a new sponge. And yet, there seem to be obvious ways that sponge cells can free-ride on the colony. Each cell expends energy to help pump water through the sponge. Why don't non-pumping sponge cells destabilize and take over sponge colonies? Also for a long time biologists have told that eusocial species like ants and bees maintained their cooperation in a similar way to eukaryotes, again, at a big and obvious cost in reproductive fitness, through narrowing genetic inheritance through a single queen and keeping the vast majority of hive/nest members sterile. It's a clever and persuasive story, except it happens to be false. There are many species of eusocial insect that maintain multiple queens in every group. Nowak, Tarnita & Wilson, "The evolution of eusociality" https://www.nature.com/ articles/nature09205 What stabilizes cooperative behavior in these species? As best I can tell, by behaving in accordance with the much-maligned theory of group selection. Dawkins responded to these assertions with such virulence that the usually imperturbable Wilson referred to him publicly as a "science journalist." Cold! J Andrew Hoerner(Quote) (Reply) 6. [94c4c679] J Andrew Hoerner September 19th, 2021 at 5:13 pm Wait a minute. What? If a sexually reproducing neoblast joins an asexually reproducing planerian, which gene lines end up in the germ cells? I'd bet art long odds that it is the genes from the invading sexual neoblasts exclusively, or at least, highly disproportionately. It's like those "slaver" ant species that make their living by invading the colonies of different species of ants, killing the queen, and then sending out the same chemical signals so the colony raises the invaders' offspring as their own. However, I think it would be much more interesting if I was wrong. J Andrew Hoerner(Quote) (Reply) 7. [fa6e7566] v174 September 19th, 2021 at 6:13 pm Hello Mr. Watts, No shortage of interesting stuff in Mr. Fields' website, it seems: https://www.chrisfieldsresearch.com/ What is your opinion on his (hot?) take on consciousness: https://iai.tv/articles/ dont-worry-about-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-auid-1373 (first comment, but long-time lurker and admirer!) v174(Quote) (Reply) 8. [0808dccf] Brett Davidson September 19th, 2021 at 9:05 pm Fascinating. I wonder what the implications are of lichens? In relation to that, I recommend Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life (it's about fungi). Brett Davidson(Quote) (Reply) 9. [54608234] Ashley R Pollard September 20th, 2021 at 1:52 am Fucking Awesome, which I want to spell out in capitals, but I won't, because... the internet doesn't need people shouting. Still, fucking A! Yep. Just what I need to blow my mind wide open. And yes, I'm stealing the insight and going to running off into the darkness, laughing crazily with my new piece of a puzzle to add to my to my insane prognostication on life in the universe and as an answer to the Fermi question. Thank you. Ashley R Pollard(Quote) (Reply) 10. [4d36fe51] Greg Guy September 20th, 2021 at 10:34 am So does any of this lend support to the ideas of Rupert Sheldrake? Lots of talk about bioelectric and morphogenetic fields. Sounds familiar. Greg Guy(Quote) (Reply) 11. [f0487910] Tran Script September 20th, 2021 at 11:05 am "These results suggest that planaria have not fully completed the transition to multicellularity, but instead represent an intermediate form in which a small number of genetically-heterogeneous, reproductively-competent cells effectively "farm" their reproductively-incompetent offspring." <-- it sounds cool but I'm not completely sold. I'd like to see a bit more evidence, for example regarding the genetic heterogeneity. They only refer to one paper talks about that, but they check the heterogeneity of a clonal population of planarians. What I'd really like to see is the intra-organism genetic heterogeneity in the neoblasts, although that's probably not easy, but can probably be done nowadays with single cell genome sequencing. But yeah nature is full of weird organisms. We often take it for granted because so much research has been focused on a few model organisms (that each have their own idiosyncracies as well, to be fair, e.g. drosophila use transposons to extend their telomeres iirc) that we forget there's a whole bunch of other things out there. Speaking of weird organisms, I'm sure we're all familiar with parasitic wasps here. You know, laying an egg inside another organisms and devouring it from within, the inspiration for Alien which is the best movie ever etc. But did you know that some species of parasitic wasps have something called "polyembrony" where the embryo at an early state splits into multiple embryos and some of them become something called "precocious larvae". These precocious larvae develop quickly but never reach maturity and die inside the host, and it turns out their purpose is to kill the larvae of competing parasitic wasps. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jez.1402370303 Tran Script(Quote) (Reply) 12. [3721e7b7] Kane September 20th, 2021 at 12:48 pm I think you would enjoy learning more immunology PW. The utter collapse of immunoregulatory law and order in chronically inflamed settings like cancer, it's like a movie. The system starts breaking down. Individual cells, unable to turn themselves off, simply potentate their own activity through helplessly antagonising neighbouring tissue, drawing in fresh recruits from the blood before hitting them with the same milieu that corrupted them. A successful immune response isn't a symphony of cooperation, it's simply a sum of the parts of the parts of the immune system cooperating outweighing those which have, in parallel, gone terribly wrong. Kane(Quote) (Reply) 13. [c93968b1] has September 21st, 2021 at 4:00 am "Information, shaped by natural selection" Sentient cat memes will eat the universe. has(Quote) (Reply) 14. [49b6d1c1] Greggles September 21st, 2021 at 7:04 am osmarks, Who said I accepted the argument? Problem is you can't change a worldview in one conversation, you usually need to keep them sleep deprived, somewhat malnourished and isolated from their support network for at least a couple of weeks. So sometimes you might need to accept someone's framework of beliefs if you want to change their mind on one point. Greggles(Quote) (Reply) 15. [dbbad022] Guy September 21st, 2021 at 8:51 am Certainly the most "unique" post-election analysis I've come across so far. Guy(Quote) (Reply) 16. [993bc0a5] Nestor September 21st, 2021 at 9:15 am I'm pretty sure I already posted links to Michael Levin's work on bioelectricity and regeneration, but perhaps they got lost in the churn, the man seems to have discovered the actual programming code of large scale biological structures and has come up with some fairly impressive demos (All sorts of Frankenstein stuff with planarians, but also those freaky xenobots made out of frog cells) Nestor(Quote) (Reply) 17. [e5951184] Peter Watts September 21st, 2021 at 11:25 am osmarks: Greggles, Why treat "it's nature" as if it's a valid argument to do anything anyway? Nature does lots of horrible, horrible things. Not that I'm accusing any present company of this, but there's not only a tendency for some people to defend a given behaviour by saying it's "natural"; there's also a tendency of some people to assume that whenever some defines something as "natural" they're defending it as a good thing. As I am (probably too) fond of saying, behaving "naturally" is what got us into this mess in the first place. If we want to get out of it we'd better start behaving unnaturally ASAP. J Andrew Hoerner: Limited, determinate maximum lifespans combined with arranging that the next generation arises from a single cell, assures that self-aggrandizing cells gain no purchase on future generations Thanks for this. I admit I was a bit unclear on the value of the whole bottleneck thing. J Andrew Hoerner: What stabilizes cooperative behavior in these species? As best I can tell, by behaving in accordance with the much-maligned theory of group selection. Is it still much-maligned? I know it was back when I was in grad school, but I had the sense that things had changed since then. For one thing, they rebranded it as "multilevel selection". For another, apparently they established that the models which ruled it out had some pretty unrealistic and arbitrary constraints. And even back in the eighties, nobody denied that sacrificing your life for the tribe (for example) could enhance inclusive fitness by benefiting your relatives, even though that manifested at a group level. We just called it "kin selection" instead. J Andrew Hoerner: Wait a minute. What? If a sexually reproducing neoblast joins an asexually reproducing planerian, which gene lines end up in the germ cells? I'd bet art long odds that it is the genes from the invading sexual neoblasts exclusively, or at least, highly disproportionately. Yeah, I think that's what the paper's saying. Except apparently you'd get genes from sexual and asexual neoblasts mixing it up at wound sites, so the genotype of any given neoblast line would change over time, even within a single corpus. v174: No shortage of interesting stuff in Mr. Fields' website, it seems: And I thought my first website looked premillennial. Some of those slides do look fascinating, if only you could slow down the playback speed to something on the safe side of epilepsy-inducing... v174: What is your opinion on his (hot?) take on consciousness: I think he's more or less right, with the caveat that-- while, yes, the panpsychic claim that "consciousness is a fundamental property of all matter" doesn't really explain anything--it's no less explanatory than "mass is a fundamental property" or "charge is a fundamental property". In all these cases we just accept the label and play with what those properties do and how they interact, so I don't see why we should hold consciousness to a different standard if you grant the Fundamental Property premise. But, yeah. None of the models he cites even hints at solving the hard problem. I'm currently finishing off a book that claims to solve it, but as enlightening as it is along other axes, the bottom line seems to be "these structures exist as a delivery platform for feelings, and you can't have a feeling without feeling it, therefor consciousness". Which is true in a trivial sense at least, but seems a bit too circular for my liking. All that said, I disagree with the conclusion that we should just ignore the problem and focus on correlates. I think it's a profound problem. I would really like to see someone make headway on it. I don't have the first fucking clue how you'd go about doing that, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. Maybe Searle's right and we have to completely reinvent physics. Greg Guy: So does any of this lend support to the ideas of Rupert Sheldrake? Lots of talk about bioelectric and morphogenetic fields. Sounds familiar. Jesus, you may be right. I don't remember much about Sheldrake's fields--I read a few pop-science pieces about it, back around the turn of the century-- but now that you mention it, it does seem kind of similar. Tran Script: it sounds cool but I'm not completely sold. I'd like to see a bit more evidence, for example regarding the genetic heterogeneity. I'll defer to your expertise on how compelling the presented evidence is. Fortunately, as a skiffy writer I get to just take a cool idea and run with it. The fact that it appears in a peer-reviewed journal just gives me cover if it turns out to be wrong. Tran Script: These precocious larvae develop quickly but never reach maturity and die inside the host, and it turns out their purpose is to kill the larvae of competing parasitic wasps. Whoa. That is so cool. I wonder if I can use that somewhere... Kane: a sum of the parts of the parts of the immune system cooperating outweighing those which have, in parallel, gone terribly wrong. That sounds almost like a metaphor for us... Guy: Certainly the most "unique" post-election analysis I've come across so far. You've lost me. Especially since I wrote this pre-election. Peter Watts(Quote) (Reply) 18. [4f0c328b] Jeff Bonkers September 21st, 2021 at 6:24 pm "Information, shaped by natural selection." I'm not as familiar with planaria as most posters here, it seems, but I do remember studying them in school many years ago. I just thought they were worms 'cuz that's what our teacher said. What a crazy organism if neoblasts are the actual organisms within its worm-like "landscape." Maybe they'll rise and populate Earth after we're all stuck in virtual la-la land. Maybe they already did. Jeff Bonkers(Quote) (Reply) 19. [aa103c69] Ross Presser September 22nd, 2021 at 9:58 am Tangentially relevant: Scientists are now making unicellular yeast evolve multicellularity. Will They Never Learn? https://www.quantamagazine.org/ single-cells-evolve-large-multicellular-forms-in-just-two-years-20210922 / Ross Presser(Quote) (Reply) 20. [d53f9092] listedproxyname September 27th, 2021 at 5:22 am Not directly related to biology: there is a very interesting video I watched some time ago describing the concept of Combine from Half-Life series. In game itself there's never, really, like, direct and extensive description of who they are and where they come from, only a lot of hints and references. And I am quite sure the creators don't bother to develop this understanding further to keep their hands free for the future changes. In any case, the major conflict of the series is the opposition of Human Resistance to the whole of invading Combine. For one, the city's Overwatch refers to protagonist as "individual" (directly addressing or announcing), as opposed to the whole of the Combine itself. On the other hand, the same Overwatch refers towards other Combine assets within itself in medical terms - "lock, cauterize, stabilize". It gives the very distinctive impression of them being a collective alien intelligence interacting with humans on its own terms. Along with completely Orwellian effect it gives to the entire concept, of course. And yet they are not presented as hive-mind, but rather like a giant corporation. So, very much like Planarians, they are creatures of different lineages, who cooperate within the whole "body", to achieve goals that do not belong too any of them individually (or to their origin species), but rather out of collective self-interest. listedproxyname(Quote) (Reply) 21. [] Anonymous September 27th, 2021 at 6:09 pm Hey Peter, on the subject of pithy definitions, you ever read this one from Cormac McCarthy? "The unconscious is a machine for operating an animal." It's from this essay he wrote in 2017: https://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/the-kekul-problem Seemed up your alley, but I could be wrong. Would be interested to get your take on the quote, the essay, and even McCarthy's fiction if you're up for it! Thanks for considering. Anonymous(Quote) (Reply) 22. [49b6d1c1] Greggles September 29th, 2021 at 8:32 am Peter Watts: Not that I'm accusing any present company of this, but there's not only a tendency for some people to defend a given behaviour by saying it's "natural"; there's also a tendency of some people to assume that whenever some defines something as "natural" they're defending it as a good thing. I personally loathe arguments based on 'nature' but I've found when arguing against a position based on a (highly arbitrary and narrow interpretation) of 'nature' it's better to come up with counter examples rather than attack the overall structure of beliefs. Greggles(Quote) (Reply) 23. [9fb12411] Hansen October 1st, 2021 at 7:52 am So, while Dawkins talks about the "selfish gene", we should really talk about the "selfish neoblasts" when the topic is organisms like flatworms. Seeing life as information sounds like biosemiotics, as proposed by the late Jesper Hoffmeyer. "The major evolutionary transitions, including those from prokaryotes to eukaryotes and from free-living cells to multicellularity, all increase the scale over which cooperative interactions dominate competitive interactions." According to Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, there is a universal upper limit for complexity in any system. If true, there should be a limit for how complex a prokaryotic cell can be (some can grow very big, but not more complex, and is usually less efficient). An eukaryotic cell is a system made up of units that are themselves systems, such as organells like mitochondria and chloroplasts, and new structures. When these cells has reached the upper limit of their complexity, a new system can be created by going multicellular. And social behavior in for instance ants becomes more complex the more members the colony have and the more specialized the casts are, till a certain point. They reach a stage where the colony may continue to grow, but without achieving more complexity. The same with human cities. I don't remember the number, but the more humans that live in a city, the more ideas, inventions and progress we will see, till we reach a certain number (one or two million or so), and nothing more can be gained for a bigger population. "It told me that carbon and silicon were just platforms, that a piece of software could be not just metaphorically but literally alive under the right circumstances." Yes, the "hardware" alone will always be non-sentient. Most have heard about the conscious, the subconscious and the unconscious in psychology (and according to Jung also the collective unconscious). But we could just as well call it the non-sentient, the sentient and the consciousness. You have pointed out before that the brain can only contain a single consciousness at the time. And yet that single consciousness can hear voices and see hallucinations of a kind that one associates with a conscious mind. An inner voice having a long monologue with you is not just random signals, it is just as complex as a monologue from a real human. So, just as leaf-cutter ants and a fungus have co-evolved, these mental phenomena indicates that our mind is made up of both conscious, sentient and non-sentient processes, all of which have co-evolved to fulfill each other. If you hear voices, this balanced cooperation between the processes no longer function properly. Like when you try to remember a name or the title of a song. You can't remember it, and you continue to talk about something else, and suddenly the name just pops up into your mind all by itself. Which is probably the result of the non-sentient processes in your brain. Or when you hear the narrator on the radio say something, but don't understand what it was he said. A minute or so may pass, and suddenly you realize what he said. These processes should be hard working when a child is developing for instance a language. This is getting a bit off topic, but regarding consciousness; it is said that the human body sends 11 million bits per second to the brain for processing, yet the conscious mind seems to be able to process only 120 bits per second or so. Another upper limit of the complexity Stephen Wolfram is talking about? But are emotions included in these 120 bits per second? If for instance a teenage girl have recently developed an obsession with The Beatles, and she is watching a TV-recording of one of their songs which she so far has only heard on CD, her heart may be filled with emotions and she is practically in nirvana. It's the music she loves, maybe she is also deeply in love with the younger version of Paul or John, it's the nostalgia and atmosphere and all. Her father is sitting in the couch and is watching the same thing. He is a pod person; he hears the music but it doesn't trigger any strong emotions in him. He cares zero about the members of the band or anything. Emotionally, he is completely flat. A telepath that is also an empath, feeding on emotions, would gorge on the daughter's emotions but only get a small bite out of the father. The question is; does both the father and the daughter experience the world in 120 conscious bits per second? If they are, and it is all information processing, then emotions must be something more than that. Hansen(Quote) (Reply) 24. [f1851cd2] nathias October 4th, 2021 at 2:24 am This competition/cooperation ratio seems to be the key concept, I wonder if anyone measured it across different systems. It seems almost as a subtype of the noise/signal ratio. nathias(Quote) (Reply) Leave a Reply [ ] Name [ ] E-Mail (will not be published) [ ] Website (optional) Your comment [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [Submit Comment] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] * +--------------+ | Front Door | | online short | | stories | | artwork | |artwork blurbs| |& reviews site| | updates | | credits | | contact | +--------------+ * Calendar October 2021 S M T W T F S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 << Sep * Subjects Subjects[Select Category ] * Archives Archives [Select Month ] * Recent Comments + listedproxyname on Pimpage: Me and Neill on The Bridge. + nathias on John Carpenter's "Planaria": or, The New Individualism + Hansen on John Carpenter's "Planaria": or, The New Individualism + Phil on Pimpage: Me and Neill on The Bridge. + Cagey on Pimpage: Me and Neill on The Bridge. + Greggles on John Carpenter's "Planaria": or, The New Individualism * Signposts En Route to Oblivion September '21 * Coral reef coverage declined by 50% worldwide between the fifties and 2007. 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Popsci coverage here. * Revenge Travel. It's a thing. * Oh goodie. Looks like the Gulf Stream might be shutting down. Too many downstream effects to list here. * Last July worst for wildfires, globally, since records began. * The Greenland Ice Sheet lost enough meltwater to cover Florida to a depth of two inches last, um, Tuesday. 8.5 billion tonnes in one day. It's not even a record. July '21 * "Everything is on fire." Siberia hit by unprecedented burning. * Remember "Limits to Growth"? Turns out they were right all along. Recent analysis suggests that business-as-usual will lead to global societal collapse around 2040, right on schedule. J. Industrial Ecol. report downloadable here. * Even now--even now-- the G20 won't agree on commitments to combat climate change. Four of the miserable fuckers have put forth plans that would lead to a 5C rise in global temperatures if everyone adopted them. * Not to be outdone by the Europeans catastrophic flooding also in China! All that coal-powered economic growth, finally paying off. * Tired of the same old stories about heat waves, droughts, and wildfires? You're in luck! Climate change causes catastrophic flooding in Europe, too! Climate Change. A Catastrophe for Every Mood. * The Amazon rainforest is now a net carbon producer. Goodbye, "Lungs of the Planet". It was nice knowing you. * June '21 was the hottest ever recorded in the US. Wanna bet July breaks that record? * Last June's inferno over on N'Am's western reaches was rendered 150 times more likely due to climate change. * Hate to sound like a broken record but once again, worse than the worst-case scenario: Nobody saw the Lytton conflagration coming. Scientists never factored "heat domes" into their models. June '21 * ExxonMobil lobbyists filmed saying oil giant's support for carbon tax a PR ploy. ExxonMobil shocked and appalled by these allegations. May '21 * Electric cars 'will be cheaper to produce than fossil fuel vehicles by 2027'. One source even says this will happen by 2024. * Europe to clamp down on air and water pollution under green deal. "The overarching goal is to eliminate all harmful contamination by 2050." Good words. Let's hope the actions live up to them. * Heartened by so many governments suddenly hopping on the green bandwagon? Even if they all keep all their commitments, we're still looking at a 2.4C global increase. Ah, well. 1.5C was always "aspirational" anyway... April '21 * Australian Academy of Science: holding warming to 1.5C now " virtually impossible". (As usual, the Hope Police object to the dire wording, but even they admit it's "super-challenging" and "hanging in the balance".) * Coal is powering the post-covid economic recovery. This year's coal usage expected to rival peak burn of 2014. * European droughts over the past five years are "unprecedented in the past 2,110 years". Popsci coverage in The Guardian. * Carbon emissions to soar in 2021 by second highest rate in history. Massive surges in coal power in the US and China. The Covid Dip. It was nice while it lasted. * Only 3% of the world's ecosystems remain intact. We might be able to recover up to 20% through species reintroduction if we really get off our asses, but what are the odds? March '21 * Disease outbreaks more likely in deforestation areas. Well, duh. * Bottom trawling releases as much carbon as air travel. Not to mention the sheer physical damage of clearcutting entire benthic ecosystems. Popsi coverage here. * Bladeless, even windless wind power. From giant wobbling dildos to streetlamp-mounted little turbines that harness air displaced by passing traffic. * Former CIO for sustainable investing at BlackRock states that "Green Investing" is Bullshit. Turns out capitalism is incompatible with decarbonization pretty much by definition. Who knew. * Geoengineering goes mainstream. At least, the National Academies of Sciences thinks we should be taking a serious look. * Falling sperm counts 'threaten human survival'. It's old news --and I remain skeptical that linear regression is the appropriate analysis in any case--but wouldn't it be nice if our sperm counts really did hit zero by midcentury? And we've got no one to blame but ourselves. * Hey, new Ebola outbreak in Guinea. Actually it's been going on since January, but who can keep track? (Also it now appears that Ebola can lie dormant in a host for up to 5 years, and then jump out and out break all over again...) * Northern California's Kelp forest ecosystem reduced by 95% since 2013. Crash instigated by a "multiyear marine heat wave". * UN agrees on standards to put a monetary value on ecosystems. Works great until Jeff Bezos pulls out his checkbook and says Okay, I've bought the Amazon. Let's burn the fucker down." * Global carbon emissions on track to surpass pre-Covid levels. December emissions 2% higher in 2020 than in 2019. Goodbye, Covid dip. You were nice while you lasted. February '21 * Chance of keeping global warming below 2C currently 2%. Goodbye, coral reefs. * Nineteen out of twenty Australian ecosystems are seriously fucked (i.e., "experiencing potentially irreversible environmental changes.") Guardian coverage here. * China doubles the number of "Protected" animal species. Now there's, like, six of them. (Just kidding. Really, it's nice to see they've given up on the whole wolf-extermination thing.) * Global "Peace Levels" have declined 2.5% since 2008. (Actually this dates from last August but I just discovered it now.) In your face, Stephen Pinker. * 20% of all Human mortality due to particulate air pollution. 30% in east Asia. Guardian coverage here. * US Cities are vastly underestimating their carbon emissions. The uncounted difference adds more annual emissions than the entire state of California. PopSci coverage here. January '21 * Past estimates of sea-level rise are too conservative. The worst-case scenario gets even worse, yet again. PopSci coverage here. * Global ice loss now following IPCC's worst-case trajectory. Which might be relatively good news, given how many indicators are trending to worse than worst-case. PopSci coverage here. * Electric cars will be cheaper than the fossil-powered variety by 2023-2025. Of course, fossil-powered SUV sales are still going through the roof. * Increased rewilding of landscape in rich countries, thanks to declining birth rates. See what happens if we just ignore that whole Judeo-Christian "fill up the world with thy numbers" edict? * Three quarters of the world's sharks and rays are in danger of extinction. As usual, a conservative estimate. Popsci perspective here. * Electric car batteries with five-minute charging times produced . 1000 - 2500 recharge cycles without significant battery degradation. * Future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than currently believed. "The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms--including humanity--is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts." Popsci summary here. * World's insects suffering 'death by a thousand cuts'. A series of papers in PNAS. Popsci summary here. * Solar now cheapest electricity in history. Oil use still hasn't peaked-- and won't without "stronger climate action"-- but it's something. * 2020 hottest year in recorded history. Technically tied with 2016, but 2016 cheated by getting an El Nino boost. December '20 * Monarch butterflies are endangered under the ESA, but won't get protection because 'it costs too much'. Not the only such species, by a long shot. * Mass die-off of birds in south-western US 'caused by starvation'. One guess what the drought that caused the starvation was caused by. * Fighting the Covid recession by amping up fossil-fuel production. Imagine my surprise. * Global human-made mass now exceeds all living biomass. This doesn't even include landfills. * Water now trading on the Stock Market. Hey, at least they haven't monetized the air we breathe. Yet. * EU's biggest oil producer closes deal to shut down its entire oil industry. Legally binding on future governments and everything. * November 202 hottest November on Record, beating out runners-up 2016 and 2019. During an El Nina no less, which acts to cool the planet. * By 2030, world's governments plan to produce more than double the fossil fuels than would be consistent with curbing global warming. Meeting even the half-assed Paris accords requires cutting fossil fuel production by 6% annually. Current plans: an annual increase of 2%. * Media Reframes Projected Failure to Meet Carbon-Reduction Targets as Being 'Within Striking Distance' . If every country honors their pledges (which virtually none have done up to this point) we're still looking at 2.1C increase by centuries' end. But hey, let's move the goalposts and call it a win. * Cloned Meat Goes Commercial. Only in Singapore, so far. And highly carbon-intensive until it scales up. But in a world in which 96% of mammalian biomass is people and livestock, it's a start. November '20 * Once covid passes, we plan on driving even more. We're a bit more restrained when it comes to flying, at least. Be still my heart. October '20 * A fifth of the world's countries are in danger of ecosystem collapse. Odd. I didn't realize that "ecosystems" respected international boundaries... * Arctic methane deposits starting to release, scientists find. Preliminary findings. Still awaiting confirmation. But if true, another cascade has begun. * China pledges Carbon-neutrality by 2060. The bad news is, talk is cheap from the world's biggest coal-burner. Good news is, totalitarian regimes can turn on a dime if they really want to. None of that messy pandering-to-the-voter bullshit. * Over half the Great Barrier Reef has disappeared since the nineties. As usual, this estimate is conservative; it doesn't include major bleaching events over the past year. * California wildfires spawn first 'gigafire' in modern history. One fire, one-million-plus acres. * Climate change could tip 1.45 million km^2 of Amazonian rainforest to savannah by century's end. Admittedly a conservative estimate. Popsci coverage here. September '20 * World fails to meet a single one of the UN's 2010 Aichi biodiversity targets to put the brakes on global ecocide. Not a single fucking one. Report here. * Northern Hemisphere's 2020 summer hottest in recorded history. * Global wildlife populations down by 68% since 1970. Two thirds down, one to go. August '20 * Greenland Ice Sheet has passed Point of No Return. Already the largest single contributor to rising sea levels. Now there's no Off switch. * Rising temperatures on track to kill as many people as all current infectious diseases combined. Original paywalled study here. July '20 and earlier * Forget future development; emissions resulting from projects already committed/underway mean we can kiss 1.5degC goodbye as an attainable target. * Covid Means Fewer Children!. Even better, the fertility decline preferentially affects those with the biggest carbon bootprints (i.e., urbanites in rich countries). * 2020: the worst year ever for the fossil fuel industry. "We're still in for a long and ugly fight", they admit. Still. * Virtual extinction of Polar bears within eighty years due to climate change. But it's not all bad. A few straggly survivors may be all Coca Cola needs to keep its advertising campaign within the bounds of good taste. * Green power beats fossil fuels for first time in Europe. Still less than half, and pandemic-temporary. But something. Also when there's a renewables surplus they pay you to consume electricity. * Unsuitable for 'human life to flourish': Up to 3B will live in extreme heat by 2070. * Record-breaking Siberian winter keeps 2020 on track to be hottest year in recorded history. Covid Pause? What Covid pause? * It hit 80F in the Arctic this week. Not to mention the zombie fires. * 2019: the Hottest Year in Europe's Recorded History. * Ecuador To Sell A Third Of Its Amazon Rainforest To Chinese Oil Companies. * Amazon could switch from carbon sink to carbon source within twenty years.. "Decades ahead of even the most pessimistic climate models." * The Great Barrier Reef is experiencing its third mass-bleaching event in five years.. Hey, just because nobody's talking about it doesn't mean it's stopped happening. * E.P.A., Citing Coronavirus, Drastically Relaxes Rules for Polluters. But it's okay, because they're also asking companies to "act responsibly". * Australian Bushfires destroyed over a fifth of the continent's temperate broadleaf forests. This year alone. Who knows what next year might bring? * Global carbon emissions fall 2%. It's pathetic progress and utterly insufficient, but I'll take what I can get. * Australia's Bushfires Completely Blasted Through the Models. They weren't supposed to get this bad for another eighty years. * A quarter of climate-change tweets are from bots. The vast majority of them denialist. * January 2019 warmest in recorded history. * Good news for a change: Global emissions didn't increase in 2019. * Climate change displaced 17.2 million from their homes in 2019. * Atmospheric triflouromethane--a greenhouse gas 12,000x worse than CO[2]-- reaches record levels. * We're currently adding 5 Hiroshima bombs worth of heat per second to the world's oceans. And climbing. * Climate threats now dominate long-term risks. Global leaders finally admit risks outweigh those from cyberattacks, pandemics, geopolitical conflict and weapons of mass destruction. Well, duh. * Earth just had its hottest decade on record. NASA's Gavin Schmidt admits 1.5C goal unattainable. * 2019 UN Emissions Gap Report (global emissions have to drop by 7.6% annually starting now or we're even more fucked). * 3.2C unless emission-control efforts tripled. * Greenhouse gases accelerated to new peak in 2018. * Nature: Predicted extent of global flooding is triple previous estimates. No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons is powered by WordPress and Uchilla theme Subscribe: Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS)