Genotype, Phenotype, Schmenotype... The distinction between “genotype” and “phenotype” is an artificial one that obfuscates understanding past a certain point. As Dawkins points out in his selfish gene argument, from the standpoint of the gene, the gene is the phenotype and the organism is the genotype. This is not to say that we...

The Logical Necessity of Group Selection... There has been a long-standing debate about the notion of group selection, the idea that populations of organisms can be selected for en masse over competing populations.  The Darwinian "purists" claim that natural selection (NS) only acts at the level of individuals.  But if that's true, then how can...

Types of Emergence... Stability can be thought of as a measure of agency. That is, the more stable a system is, the better we are able to recognize it as a distinct agent, a system that actively, structurally or by happenstance persists through time, space and/or other dimensions. Burton Voorhees defines a concept of virtual...

On the Brink of True Distributed Computi... [ The following is a repost from my MySpace blog, which is not accessible unless you have an account there. Also, the audience there isn't really interested in this stuff :-) ] The notion that the "network is the computer" - or at least that it could be - has been around for a while. But all actual...

Is Obesity Contagious?... Science News reports that a 2005 study of obese and normal-weighted people found that "30% of the obese group showed signs of previous adenovirus-36 infection, while only 11 percent of the lean group did". Recent research showed that the virus induces long-term changes in how stem cells develop, causing...