Darwin's On the Origin of Species only contains one diagram, a branching tree diagram which shows divergence of species.

Commonplacing is a personal practice.

A note taking practice is almost always an evolving process with a variety of different pressures and variables in how it takes form.

List out these variables and pressures.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/yg2g8l/a_thought_experiment_what_if_luhmann_had_been_a/

reply (unsent)<br /> I appreciate where you're coming from, and it's an excellent thought experiment. However, knowing that there was a clear older prior zettelkasten tradition for several hundred years prior to Luhmann which also included a number of mathematician practitioners including not only Leibnitz but also Newton, who incidentally invented his version of calculus in his waste book (also a part of that tradition). (See also: https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/texts/notebooks?sort=date&order=desc).

This is particularly interesting in light of the research of Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell who within about 50 years dramatically changed the viewpoint of history.

Orality has something to say about this now too...

Gary Thomas posits that it's our cleverness which birthed education. Isn't it more likely our extreme ability to mimic others which is more likely from a cognitive and evolutionary perspective?

Were early peoples really "teaching" each other how to make primitive hand axes? Or did we first start out by closely mimicking our neighbors?

Religion co-evolves with the people, places, and times in which it exists. Much like human genes, it works at the level of the individual, the local group, the larger groups and communities (of both the religion itself as well as the polities around it), and when applicable at the scale of all people on the planet.

The Selfish Religion: How far might we take this religion/gene analogy with respect to Richard Dawkins' thesis (1976). Does religion act more like a gene that is part of the particular person or is it more like a virus which inserts itself? The latter may be closer as one can pick and choose a religion rather than it being a core part of their genetic identity.

(highlight: anchor only)

In his section on "Arrangement of File", C. Wright Mills describes some of the evolution of his "file". Knowing that the form and function of one's notes may change over time (Luhmann's certainly changed over time too, a fact which is underlined by his having created a separate ZK II) one should take some comfort and solace that theirs certainly will as well.

The system designer might also consider the variety of shapes and forms to potentially create a better long term design of their (or others') system(s) for their ultimate needs and use cases. How can one avoid constant change, constant rearrangement, which takes work? How can one minimize the amount of work that goes into creating their system?

The individual knowledge worker or researcher should have some idea about the various user interfaces and potential arrangements that are available to them before choosing a tool or system for maintaining their work. What are the affordances they might be looking for? What will minimize their overall work, particularly on a lifetime project?

!- title : The Evolution of Human Consciousness and Linguistic Behavior !- author : Karen A. Haworth, Terry J. Prewitt

https://thevoroscope.com/2022/06/20/sum-total-human-knowledge-3/

https://thevoroscope.com/2022/06/13/sum-total-human-knowledge-2/

!- for : language evolution - how many symbols do you need for a language? - no more than 2, like a computer with "0" and "1"

!- for : language evolution homo erectus vocal cords

Language is the greatest technology ever invented

In a society consumed with information overload, it is easier for our brains to allow our well evolved cognitive biases to decide not only what to pay attention to, but what to believe.

!- Question : Genetic Evolution

Does this mean that our predominantly cultural evolution threatens to freeze our genetic evolution? This is possible, since genetic evolution takes place on time scales that are orders of magnitudes larger than cultural evolution Unless theoretically proposed, it may have escaped detection for a long time

!- impact : human cultural evolution - is of global evolutionary significance

!- for : Cultural Evolution - the findings of this paper point to culture is displacing genetic adaptive potential as the main driver of evolution. This is a very profound finding!

!- for : Deep Humanity - intriguing result with important implications on cultural evolution

https://twitter.com/inkasrain/status/1566410516721016833

Does anyone know what exactly this is? A friend gave it to me years ago when they visited Jerusalem. I don't read Hebrew. Is it something harmless or should it be shamshed(jew magic)? (attached photo of a mezuzah)

The idea of "magic" here within a modern religious context is interesting in that it shows the divergence of religion and magic as concepts with respect to cultural practices.

The phrasing also has a sense of othering the unknown culture with a sense of fear in the idea that the object should be smashed. There's also a lack of basic science knowledge and tinge of superstition implied by the fact that they think that smashing will somehow dissipate the unknown magic.

So many different cultural indicators of various things going on here...

Ben Thompson by highlighting an argument made by Pat Kerr, that free speech (although lacking a widely accepted definition) is about the tolerance we show others in expressing their opinions, equates it to culture.

https://medium.com/flourish-inc/wait-what-the-did-i-just-read-4b00ff02d1b7

She's basically describing a form of the original zettelkasten (a slip or index card-based commonplace book), but where did she get this from? If it was the blogosphere, which is highly likely these days, then she's either misread or heavily simplified the practice (Luhmann's practice) back down to it's original form.

She seems to take for granted how to link physical cards.

Bloom, J., & Cobey, S. (2021, December 12). Opinion | A Scientist’s Guide to Understanding Omicron. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/12/opinion/covid-omicron-data.html

Atari, M., Reimer, N. K., Graham, J., Hoover, J., Kennedy, B., Davani, A. M., Karimi-Malekabadi, F., Birjandi, S., & Dehghani, M. (2021). Pathogens Are Linked to Human Moral Systems Across Time and Space. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/tnyh9

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy

Within our own notes, connections allow the ideas we developing to survive by

There are several levels of "evolutionary" development of one's notes. One can compare and contrast two different notes to help determine the truth or falsity of each, but groups of linked notes may also evolve and survive against other groups by competing both for attention as well as their potential truth or falsity.

This piece argues that seeing Natural Theology simply as an attempt to prove the existence of a creator by claiming the living world is irreducibly complex is to misunderstand the main thrust of Paley's argument. Paley was primarily concerned with what the living world can tell us us about the nature (no pun intended) of such a creator. Organisms' complex adaptations, claimed Paley, show that the universe has purpose.

The piece argues that both advocates of evolution and advocates of 'intelligent design' have misunderstood the main thrust of Paley's argument. He was primarily concerned with disproving other theological viewpoints, rather than atheistic ones.

One of Darwin's most compelling arguments in favour of evolution by means of natural selection was just how many different, apparently unrelated phenomena it explained. One of these was 'Classification' (what we now call taxonomy).

Darwin argued that, when the taxonomists of his day arranged species into hierarchical groups, those tree-like groupings were best explained by genealogical descent.

Now that biological evolution is accepted as a fact, genealogical descent has become the criterion taxonomists use to place species into hierarchical groups. Ironically, Darwin's explanation of taxonomy means it can no longer be used to justify his theory because modern taxonomy is, in effect, defined by his theory.

The strongest tool we have for identifying genealogical descent in species is modern DNA analysis. This has helped identify many mistakes in former, non-DNA-based taxonomic classifications. But DNA analysis can't be used in all cases… For example, we do not have access to DNA samples of the vast majority of extinct species.

!- in other words : bounded objects, boundary-forming processes * The leap from the unknown to the newly known is a birthing process from the known to a synthesis and new convergence of disparate phenomena into a unitary whole motivated by a compulsion that brings it into existence * Forming a boundary is synthesizing many qualities and bundling into one new one that has some compelling utility * Once formed, the new boundary, the new concept is much like how biological evolution works, from an aggregation of simpler forms that combine and unite to form a new higher level form

!- question : does evolution have a purpose? * Language is a constraint - it forces us to form questions that may not necessarily make sense, such as "how many angels exist on the head of a pin?" * To say that it has one, or even more than one purpose may itself be a meaningless assertion, as much as insinuating that it has no purpose. If one asks "Is the sound of a bell red or yellow? It is neither the case that it is red, yellow or any color. So arguing about the right and wrong of a quality that is nonsensical is itself nonsensical. * The self-annihilating questioning of Nagarjuna's tetralemma are relevant to shed insight into these deep questions.

These always read as hyperbole to me, but it's difficult to explain the surprise and serendipity of re-finding things in one's notes on a regular basis. It's akin to the sort of cognitive dissonance that religious people have when encountering the levels of complexity formed by living systems through evolution. Not having better words for describing the experience, they may resort to descriptions of magic or religion to frame their experiences.

A potential word to describe some of my theory for evolution, DNA, and complexity

Used often in business to describe increasing momentum

The maladaptive cultural evolution of our species has led us to the height of human technological and economic prowess as well as the height of ecological disaster. This can be interpreted as the result of linear vs nonlinear thinking, simplistic modeling vs complex modeling and reductionistic approach vs a systems approach. An attitude of separation engenders a controlling attitude of nature based on hubris, instead of humbling ourselves at the vast ignorance each of us and also collectively we have about nature. Design based on a consistent attitude of willful ignorance is sure to fail. Then Ascent of Humanity will lead to a trajectory of its own downfall as long as that ascent depends on the cannibalization of its own life support system based on ignorance of our deep entanglement with nature. http://ascentofhumanity.com/text/

Is this really what our brain does best?

What about on evolutionary timescales? Is this what brains were meant to do?

What drives the attendance at churches like this? Socializing, friends, family? Is it entertainment, politics, solely the religious part, or a conflagration of all of these? A charismatic minister?

Biological evolution works on relatively long time scales. Cultural evolution works on very short time scales. If we do not seriously listen to the lessons of history that teach valuable social norms, then we don't learn from history and history repeats.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-complicated-legacy-of-e-o-wilson/

I can see why there's so much backlash on this piece.

It could and should easily have been written without any reference at all to E. O. Wilson and been broadly interesting and true. However given the editorial headline "The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson", the recency of his death, and the photo at the top, it becomes clickbait for something wholly other.

There is only passing reference to Wilson and any of his work and no citations whatsoever about who he was or why his work was supposedly controversial. Instead the author leans in on the the idea of the biology being the problem instead of the application of biology to early anthropology which dramatically mis-read the biology and misapplied it for the past century and a half to bolster racist ideas and policies.

The author indicates that we should be better with "citational practices when using or reporting on problematic work", but wholly forgets to apply it to her own writing in this very piece.

I'm aware that the magazine editors are most likely the ones that chose the headline and the accompanying photo, but there's a failure here in both editorial and writing for this piece to have appeared in Scientific American in a way as to make it more of a hit piece on Wilson just days after his death. Worse, the backlash of the broadly unsupported criticism of Wilson totally washed out the attention that should have been placed on the meat of the actual argument in the final paragraphs.

Editorial failed massively on all fronts here.

This article seems to be a clear example of the following:

Any time one uses the word "problematic" to describe cultural issues, it can't stand alone without some significant context building and clear arguments about exactly what was problematic and precisely why. Otherwise the exercise is a lot of handwaving and puffery that does neither side of an argument or its intended audiences any good.

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/30/scientific-american-does-an-asinine-hit-job-on-e-o-wilson-calling-him-a-racist/

Richard Lewontin was Jerry Coyne's Ph.D. thesis advisor.

https://www.hjkeen.net/halqn/index.htm

I've thought this before, and sees like I've possibly read, though not captured it. Is there any solid proof of this fact?

Rat studies of mazes show this sort of spacial memory, but are there similar learned studies in lower animals? C. elegans, drosophila, slime molds, etc.?

Were fears about immigrants and Black people in the late 1800's milieu of evolutionary theory and beginning of eugenics thought influential in the growing debate about abortion?

People have evolved as social animals and this extends to thinking and interacting. We think better when we think socially (in groups) as opposed to thinking alone.

This in part may be why solo reading and annotating improves one's thinking because it is a form of social annotation between the lone annotator and the author. Actual social annotation amongst groups may add additonal power to this method.

I personally annotate alone, though I typically do so in a publicly discoverable fashion within Hypothes.is. While the audience of my annotations may be exceedingly low, there is at least a perceived public for my output. Thus my thinking, though done alone, is accelerated and improved by the potential social context in which it's done. (Hello, dear reader! 🥰) I can artificially take advantage of the social learning effects even if the social circle may mathematically approach the limit of an audience of one (me).

Research has shown that humans are "high-fidelity" imitators to the point of overimitation. It's possible that as an evolved and highly social species that imitation signals acceptance and participation by members of the society such that even "cognitively opaque" practices will be blindly followed.

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/lROFtsDkEey_yHtNNJ_NfQ

Is this responsible for some of the "group think" seen in the Republican party and the political right? Imitation of bad or counter-intuitive actions outweights scientifically proven better actions? Examples: anti-vaxxers and coronavirus no-masker behaviors? (Some of this may also be about or even entangled with George Lakoff's (?) tribal identity theories relating to "people like me".

Explore this area more deeply.

Another contributing factor for this effect may be the small-town effect as most Republican party members are in the countryside (as opposed to the larger cities which tend to be more Democratic). City dwellers are more likely to be more insular in their interpersonal relations whereas country dwellers may have more social ties to other people and groups and therefor make them more tribal in their social interrelationships. Can I find data to back up this claim?

How does link to the thesis put forward by Joseph Henrich in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous? Does Henrich have data about city dwellers to back up my claim above?

What does this tension have to do with the increasing (and potentially evolutionary) propensity of humans to live in ever-increasingly larger and more dense cities versus maintaining their smaller historic numbers prior to the pre-agricultural timeperiod?

What are the biological effects on human evolution as a result of these cultural pressures? Certainly our cultural evolution is effecting our biological evolution?

What about the effects of communication media on our cultural and biological evolution? Memes, orality versus literacy, film, radio, television, etc.? Can we tease out these effects within the socio-politico-cultural sphere on the greater span of humanity? Can we find breaks, signs, or symptoms at the border of mass agriculture?

total aside, though related to evolution: link hypercycles to evolution spirals?

Studies have shown that humans are highly selective about whom they choose to imitate. Children up to age seven show a propensity to imitate their parents over strangers and after that they primarily imitate people who have shown themselves to be knowledgeable and competent within an area of expertise.

This has applications to teaching with respect to math shaming. A teacher who says that math is personally hard for them is likely to be signaling to students that what they're teaching is not based on experience and expertise and thus demotivating the student from following and imitating their example.

ReconfigBehSci [@SciBeh]. ‘RT @DrEricDing: How It Started 3 Months Ago— How It’s Going. #COVID19 Https://T.Co/SMqGrzRgy7’. Tweet. Twitter, 10 December 2021. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1469596670690267140.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-history-gets-things-wrong

How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories by Alex Rosenberg

Elizabeth Filips has digital versions of medical school notes online. She's drawn them (in software) by hand with color and occasional doodles in them (there's an image of Einstein's head with an E=mc^2 under it on one page) which makes them more memorable for having made them in the first place, but with the color and the pictures, they act as a memory palace.

I've found no evidence (yet) that she's using direct mnemonics or that she's been specifically trained in the method of loci or other techniques. This doesn't, however, mean that she's not tangentially using them without knowing about them explicitly.

One would suspect that this sort of evolutionary movement towards such techniques would have been how they evolved in the first place.

ReconfigBehSci. (2021, December 28). RT @covid_explorer: Bonjour @19h30RTS, voici l’évolution des infections pour Denmark, Switzerland, France, Unitedkingdom: Https://t.co/dRY… [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1475868623105400841

Polytheism was the cultural norm during the First Temple period. It wasn't until the reforms of King Josiah described in 2 Kings in the second half of the 7th century BCE that other Semitic gods were actively removed from the Temple and parts of culture in favor of Yahweh.

In Deuteronomy 32 the gods El and Yahweh are separate deities which, over time, became conflated into one god as indicated in Exodus 6:3.

Biblical passages like Psalms 18:12-24 may be indicative of Yahweh subsuming the powers and attributes of other regional gods like Ba'al.

This makes one wonder if Yahweh evolved from other cultures into the one true god of the Hebrews?

Phoenicians use of steles and local environment in conjunction with their astronomy fits the pattern of other uses of Indigenous orality and memory.

Link this example to other examples delineated by Lynne Kelly and others I've found in the ancient Near East.

How does this example potentially fit into the broader framework provided by Lynne Kelly? Are there differences?

Her thesis fits into a few particular cultural time periods, but what sorts of evidence should we expect to see culturally, socially, and economically when the initial conditions she set forth evolve beyond their original context? What should we expect to see in these cases and how to they relate to examples I've been finding in the ancient Near East?

Evolutionarily speaking many animals communicate via gesture (body movements, tail wagging, etc.), so it isn't a far stretch to declare that linguists would consider gesture to be a precursor to language.

Living with COVID-19: How the virus could turn into the common cold, or something far worse. (2022, January 9). The Mercury News. https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/01/09/living-with-covid-19-how-the-virus-could-turn-into-the-common-cold-or-something-far-worse

This is a surprising effect for teaching and learning, and if true, how can it be best leveraged. Worth reading up on and testing this effect.

Indeed humans do seem built for categorizing and creating taxonomies and hierarchies, and perhaps allowing this talent to do some of the work may be the best way to learn not only in the short term, but over longer term evolutionary periods?

Academics: Viral Evolution Scenarios, 10 February 2022. (n.d.). GOV.UK. Retrieved February 14, 2022, from https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/academics-viral-evolution-scenarios-10-february-2022

Internet bis Web 3.0 (semantic web)

Salali, G. D., Uysal, M. S., Bozyel, G., Akpınar, E., & Aksu, A. (2022). Does social influence affect COVID-19 vaccination intention among the unvaccinated? PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/5qc3z

Trevor Bedford. (2022, January 28). Omicron viruses can be divided into two major groups, referred to as PANGO lineages BA.1 and BA.2 or @nextstrain clades 21K and 21L. The vast majority of globally sequenced Omicron have been 21K (~630k) compared a small minority of 21L (~18k), but 21L is gaining ground. 1/15 [Tweet]. @trvrb. https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1487105396879679488

Tom Wenseleers. (2022, January 30). Seems that the second Omicron subvariant BA.2 may soon be about to cause cases to start rising again in South Africa... Or at least to stop the decline in new infections. Shows how fast immunity wanes & evolution can catch up. Https://t.co/3y4xqPgZ0L [Tweet]. @TWenseleers. https://twitter.com/TWenseleers/status/1487919837670219781

81 Niklas Luhmann, ‘Reduktion von Komplexität’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philoso-phie, eds. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer, vol. 8 (Basel/Stuttgart, 1992), 377–78, at 377. On the claim that evolution leads to an increase in reducible complexity, there is an extensive literature. See J.W.S. Pringle, ‘On the Parallel Between Learning and Evolu-tion’, Behaviour 3 (1951), 174–215; Francis Heylighen et al., eds., The Evolution of Complexity (Boston/London, 1999), with large bibliography.

Delve into the statement that "evolution leads to an increase in reducible complexity".

Covid’s evolution: ‘With each passing wave, we’ve seen greater transmissibility.’ (n.d.). MSN. Retrieved January 15, 2022, from https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/covid-s-evolution-with-each-passing-wave-we-ve-seen-greater-transmissibility/vi-AARYwCn

Geddes, L., & correspondent, L. G. S. (2022, January 11). Will Covid-19 become less dangerous as it evolves? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/11/will-covid-19-become-less-dangerous-as-it-evolves

source?

Is there a link to religion and the connection and potential conversation provided by it that provides an evolutionary advantage? Is there a psychological change in attention or self-consciousness?

Which conditions? How broad are they?

This view of cooperation within evolutionary frameworks goes back to Richard Dawkins in the 1970s. Was their prior art/work on it prior to The Selfish Gene?

Leslie Orgel's second law is that "evolution is cleverer than you".

Indigenous peoples of the Americas critiqued European institutions for their structures and lack of freedom. In turn, while some Europeans listened, they created an evolutionary political spectrum of increasing human complexity to combat this indigenous critique.

It's interesting to note that the founders of the United States famously including Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr regularly participated in duel culture which often ended in death despite its use as a means of defending one's honor and relieving tensions between people.

The answer to my earlier question: They are taking Fukuyama and others to task here.

One should note that even among our primate cousins, there are a variety of social structures and social norms beyond only the chimpanzees. Folks forget about the differing structures of animals like bonobos which show much different structures.

Graeber and Wengrow argue that Rousseau invents leftist discourse by juxtaposing the evolutionist idea of societies and the indigenous critique in Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes) in 1754.

Humans in general have a seven second window of self-consciousness. (What is the reference for this? Double check it.) The exception is when one is in conversation with someone else, and then people have much longer spans of self-consciousness.

I'm left to wonder if this is a useful fact for writing in the margins in books or into one's notebook, commonplace book, or zettelkasten? By having a conversation with yourself, or more specifically with the imaginary author you're annotating or if you prefer to frame it as a conversation with your zettelkasten, one expands their self-consciousness for much longer periods of time? What benefit does this have for the individual? What benefit for humanity in aggregate?

Is it this fact or just coincidence that much early philosophy was done as dialectic?

From an orality perspective, this makes it much more useful to talk to one's surroundings or objects like rocks. Did mnemonic techniques help give rise to our ability to be more self-conscious as a species? Is it like a muscle that we've been slowly and evolutionarily exercising for 250,000 years?

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>David Wengrow</span> in Video: Graeber and Wengrow on the Myth of the Stupid Savage (<time class='dt-published'>12/19/2021 20:51:44</time>)</cite></small>

Is there a reason or cognitive bias we've got that would tend to make us think that there's a teleological outcome in these cases?

Why should it seem like there would be a foregone conclusion to all of human life or history? Why couldn't/shouldn't it just keep evolving from its current context to the next

In an ever-evolving manner, humans are constantly working at shaping and reshaping ourselves.

How does our drive to have and establish identity cause us to evolve as a species? Is identity the root gene that is driving change within society? Is there an identeme (a tacit portmanteau of identity + gene) that works at both the local level as well as at the group level? How might this fit into the selfish gene theory?

There is an interesting analogy here worth pursuing:

This idea and its structure have lots of similarities to those of growth and evolution in Werner R. Loewenstein's The Touchstone of Life: Molecular Information, Cell Communication, and the Foundations of Life. What if we reframe RNA or mitochondria in the role of the filing cabinet? What emergent properties occur in these processes? What do these processes have in common?

I need at least some shorthand idea or word for talking about the circular evolving processes of life in Loewenstein's book. Maybe evolution spirals?

Think inputs and outputs.

Atomizing projects and research ideas is very similar to the idea of the atomic note.

If useful things can be turned into re-usable building blocks, then it can be easier to build and design larger and more complex systems out of them.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/nov/25/mapping-redheads-which-country-has-the-most

Wheatley, A. K., & Juno, J. A. (2021). COVID-19 vaccines in the age of the delta variant. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(21)00688-5

The Palette of Being is a very useful idea that is related to Cumulative Cultural Evolution (CCE) and autopoiesis. From CCE, humans are able to pass on new ideas from one generation to the next, made possible by the tool of inscribed language.

Peter Nonacs group at UCLA as well as Stuart West at Oxford research Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET) West elucidates that modern hominids integrate the remnants of four major stages of MET that have occurred over deep time. Amanda Robins, a researcher in Nonacs group posits the idea that our species of modern hominids are undergoing a Major Systems Transition (MST), due specifically to our development of inscribed language.

CCE emerges new technologies that shape our human environments in time frames far faster than biological evolutionary timeframes. New human experiences are created which have never been exposed to human brains before, which feedback to affect our biological evolution as well in the process of gene-culture coevolution (GCC), also known as Dual Inheritance theory. In this way, CCE and GCC are entangled. "Gene–culture coevolution is the application of niche-construction reasoning to the human species, recognizing that both genes and culture are subject to similar dynamics, and human society is a cultural construction that provides the environment for fitness-enhancing genetic changes in individuals. The resulting social system is a complex dynamic nonlinear system. " (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3048999/)

This metaphor of experiences constituting different colors on a Palette of Being is a powerful one that can contextualize human experiences from a deep time framework. One could argue that language usage automatically forces us into an anthropomorphic lens, for sophisticated language usage at the level of humans appears to be unique amongst our species. Within that constraint, the Palette of Being still provides us with a less myopic, less immediate and arguably less anthropomorphic view of human experience. It is philosophically problematic, however, in the sense that we can speculate about nonhuman modalities of being but never truly experience them. Philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote his classic paper "What it's like to be a bat" to illustrate this problem of experiencing the other. (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf)

We can also leverage the Palette of Being in education. Deep Humanity (DH) BEing Journeys are a new kind of experiential, participatory contemplative practice and teaching tool designed to deepen our appreciation of what it is to be human. The polycrisis of the Anthropocene, especially the self-induced climate crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic have precipitated the erosion of stable social norms and reference frames, inducing another crisis, a meaning crisis. In this context, a re-education of embodied philosophy is seen as urgent to make sense of a radically shifting human reality.

Different human experiences presented as different colors of the Palette of Being situate our crisis in a larger context. One important Deep Humanity BEing journey that can help contextualize and make sense of our experiences is language. Once upon a time, language did not exist. As it gradually emerged, this color came to be added to our Palette of Being, and shaped the normative experiences of humanity in profound ways. It is the case that such profound shifts, lost over deep time come to be taken for granted by modern conspecifics. When such particular colors of the Palette of Being are not situated in deep time, and crisis ensues, that loss of contextualizing and situatedness can be quite disruptive, de-centering, confusing and alienating.

Being aware of the colors in the Palette can help us shed light on the amazing aspects that culture has invisibly transmitted to us, helping us not take them for granted, and re-establish a sense of awe about our lives as human beings.

After 30 Years of Breeding Condors, a Secret Comes Out ‘Virgin birth’ might be more common in animals than we thought. by Sarah Zhang https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/10/california-condors-are-capable-virgin-birth/620517/

Parthenogenesis can be selected for in breeding.

What might this look like in other animal models. What do the long term effects of such high percentages potentially look like?

Could this be a tool for guarding against rising temperatures in the looming climate crisis?

Different breeds of poultry display different rates of parthenogenesis.

Cross reference: https://rep.bioscientifica.com/view/journals/rep/155/6/REP-17-0728.xml

3 takeaways from the emergence of the ‘Delta Plus’ coronavirus variant. (2021, October 27). STAT. https://www.statnews.com/2021/10/27/3-takeaways-from-the-emergence-of-the-delta-plus-coronavirus-variant/

Beginning, Middle, End

Micah White wrote of the end: The End of Protest.

Micah White is the award-winning activist who co-created Occupy Wall Street, a global social movement, while an editor of Adbusters magazine.

Occupy Wall Street was a constructive failure but not a total failure. Occupy demonstrated the efficacy of using social memes to quickly spread a movement, shifted the political debate on the fair distribution of wealth, trained a new generation of activists who went on to be the base for movements ranging from campus fossil fuel divestment to Black Lives Matter protests. Occupy launched many local projects that will have lasting small-scale impact. Occupy buoyed many institutional activist organizations that were able to materially profit from the renewed interest in protest. All of these are signs that our movement was culturally influential. It may be comforting to believe that Occupy splintered into a thousand shards of light. However, an honest assessment reveals that Occupy Wall Street failed to live up to its revolutionary potential: we did not bring an end to the influence of money on democracy, overthrow the corporatocracy of the 1 percent or solve income inequality. If our movement did achieve successes, they were not the ones we’d intended. When victory eluded Occupy, a world of activist certainties fell apart.

I call Occupy Wall Street a constructive failure because the movement revealed underlying flaws in dominant, and still prevalent, theories of how to achieve social change through collective action. Occupy set out to “get money out of politics,” and we succeeded in catalyzing a global social movement that tested all of our hypotheses. The failure of our efforts reveals a truth that will hasten the next successful revolution: the assumptions underlying contemporary protest are false. Change won’t happen through the old models of activism. Western democracies will not be swayed by public spectacles and mast frenzy. Protests have become an accepted, and therefore ignored, by-product of politics-as-usual. Western governments are not susceptible to international pressure to heed the protests of their citizens. Occupy’s failure was constructive because it demonstrated the limitations of contemporary ideas of Protest. I capitalize p to emphasize that the limitation was not in a particular tactic but ratter in our concept of Protest, or our theory of social change, which determined the overall script. Occupy revealed that activists need to revolutionize their approach to revolution.

Failure can be liberating. Defeat detaches us from a theory of revolution that is no longer effective, reopening the possibility of true change. “For a revolutionary,” writes Régis Debray, professor of philosophy and associate of Che Guevara, “failure is a springboard. As a course of theory it is richer than victory: it accumulates experience and knowledge.”

(Pages 26-27)

A Theory of Change

How did we get here?

Yesterday (October 26, 2021), I picked up David Graeber’s book, The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity, written with David Wengrow, at Coles in Abbotsford.

It is interesting to note that David Graeber was interested in the origins, the beginnings.

Renowned for his biting and incisive writing about bureaucracy, politics and capitalism, Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement and professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE) at the time of his death.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/03/david-graeber-anthropologist-and-author-of-bullshit-jobs-dies-aged-59

From Plessner's perspective, even a cell has a constitution of a self.

Peeples, L. (2021). COVID reinfections likely within one or two years, models propose. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02825-8

Henderson, R. K., & Schnall, S. (2021). Social Threat Indirectly Increases Moral Condemnation via Thwarting Fundamental Social Needs [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/rjzys

Rono, E. K. (2021). Covid-19 genomic analysis reveals clusters of emerging sublineages within the delta variant [Preprint]. Genomics. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.10.08.463334

https://slate.com/culture/2011/08/cathy-n-davidson-s-now-you-see-it-do-the-young-really-rule-in-the-internet-era.html

A very prescient article by Annie Murphy Paul from 2011. It doesn't review Davidson's book, so much as to take to task some of the underlying optimistic views of the magic of technology. If only we were able to better adapt and evolve to create the sort of changes in humanity to take advantage of the potential benefits that were assumed. Instead, much of the tech sector adapted instead to hijack our slowly evolving attention to benefit themselves.

I wish we as a culture had had more of this sober sort of outlook about technology at the time.

I'm now even more intrigued by Paul's new book: The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain, which is already in my reading queue.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Annie Murphy Paul </span> in "@ChrisAldrich @amandalicastro @CathyNDavidson Chris, you may be interested in this review of "Now You See It" that I wrote . . . https://t.co/TnnbQ3NHWf" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>10/17/2021 10:25:52</time>)</cite></small>

I've had this same suspicion for a while. Might be interesting to try to collect some evidence to support it.

Originally published on Medium on August 29, 2019.

Sallie McFague, in The Meaning of Life in the World Religions, writes an article entitled, “The World as God’s Body.”

Evolution is not only or solely biological; it is also historical and cultural. Once evolutionary history reaches the human, self-conscious stage, natural selection is not the only operative principle, for natural selection can be countered with the principle of solidarity.

(Page 297)

Good move. Rather than having 2 different methods, and requiring people to "go out of their way" to "opt in" to using chunks by using the longer-named javascript_packs_with_chunks_tag, they changed it to just use chunks by default, out of the box.

Now they don't need 2 similar but separate methods that do nearly the same, which makes things simpler and easier to understand (no longer have to stop and ask oneself, which one should I use? what's the difference?).

You can't get it "wrong" now because there's only one option.

And by switching that method to use the shorter name, it makes it clearer that that is the usual/common/recommended way to go.