A while ago, I wrote on the hypothesis that humans have essentially stopped evolving genetically, because of our cultural emphasis on keeping all humans alive, no matter how disadvantaged. The New York Times reports today on the opposite idea: that human culture may actually intensify the selective...

Heng, et al recently published a review paper that brings together and touches on many different aspects of cancer complexity.  I thought this an opportunity to selectively quote the paper and organize the quotes loosely around various complex systems concepts they relate to.  I’m curious whether...

I happened to come across two interesting posts with Singularity implications that I thought you might be interested in.  First, the Singularity Hub reports that Osiris has a promising phase II trial underway for a treatment that uses foreign stem cells to repair the muscle damage from heart attacks.  If...

Debbie Maier asks us on the Upcoming Topics page to address Crohn’s Disease. I don’t know too much about it except that it’s an autoimmune disease and has a complex, multi-causal etiology and pathology.  In my reading on autoimmune diseases in general there seems to be a direct link...

Thanks to Daniel Horowitz for alerting me to third-hand smoke.  I guess then if you pass on epigentic mutations to your children from third-hand smoke exposure it’s called fourth-hand...

Like does this mean you can cure heart disease? She’s hesitant.  Nobody wants to say they can defeat the industrialized world’s number one killer.  Nobody wants to make promises about life, or quantify salvation.  But she fervently believes she’s got a shot. This is what the 2008 Genius...

Will Wright’s demo of Spore illustrates some key concepts of complex systems, including the notion of simple rules generating complex behaviors, and also the power of recursively applied (i.e. fractal) computation at different levels.  Living systems leverage these same principles. ...

As I discussed in Environmental Ideology and the Ascetic Meme, the Ascetic Meme is a severe form of the Frugality Meme. In this post, I’ll explore how I think it arises and the social interactions that emerge when the Ascetic Meme takes hold. ...

I’ve always been ambivalent about environmentalism. On the one hand, my gut instinct is usually to conserve and preserve as a default policy. On the other hand, a lot of environmentalists seem to adopt an absolutist posture. Any harm to the environment is bad. No tradeoffs. No cost-benefit analysis....

Not having had any serious biological training I have to go to Wikipedia and Google to learn the basics. And I’m often surprised to find that concepts everyone uses don’t have good consensus amongst scientists. When reading the Wikipedia entry for “gene”, it occurs to me that if the...