277 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2022
    1. it also is summed together so everything we need is summed together per metal and that gives us this column here total metal required to produce one generation of technology units to phase 00:40:15 out fossil fuels and so that the that we've got these numbers here the next column is global metal production as it was from mining in 2019 00:40:28 so this is all from the usgs and the bgo the final column is how many years of production at the 2019 rate um would be needed to hit the actual 00:40:42 volumes needed so 2019's the last year before covert is the last year of stable data that's why i've used it so you might notice some of these numbers are rather large 00:40:55 like we will need seven thousand one hundred and one years of production to produce the needed number of volume of vanadium that's your uh your redox batteries

      !- for : metals for energy transition - unfeasible numbers

    2. the idea that we're going to do this in seven or eight years is very amusing so then the question is oh we'll just open more mines it's simple right

      !- for : metals for energy transition - not feasible

    3. if we want to deliver a thousand terawatt hours a year using these systems you could use 142 00:29:07 coal-fired power stations or 30 000 solar pv arrays or 12 309 wind turbine arrays of average size 00:29:18 where each array is like 10 win windows this is this is where we're getting the extra numbers from so each of these sites will have to be built and constructed and maintained and then when they wear out they need to 00:29:30 be decommissioned so renewables have a much lower energy return on energy invested ratio than fossil fuels and they and the the truth is they may not be strong enough to power the next industrial era 00:29:45 so gas and hydro power generation has to balance with demand supply and demand has to balance otherwise the grid will age

      !- for : EROI, energy density - lower energy density = more plants

    4. let's put the electrical power systems together these electrical power 00:22:29 systems that this is actually on the low side because most industrial action happens with the consumption of coal and gas on site and then it's converted to energy on site this is what's just been drawn off the power grid 00:22:42 so there's a vast amount of energy associated with manufacturing that is not included here and that is actually a huge piece of work to include that so these numbers i'm showing you are very much on the low side 00:22:55 so we're going to put it all together we need 36 000 terawatt hours all there abouts that's a that's a very low estimate

      !- key insight : minimum power of energy transition, excluding the large amount of energy for industrial processes ! - for : energy transition, degrowth, green growth

    5. current plans are not large enough in scope the task before us is much larger than the current paradigm allows for

      !- key insight : not enough mineral capacity to buildout replacement green growth, renewable energy system !- for : degrowth vs green growth

  2. Jul 2022
    1. FollowingSimondon’s social theory [37] and our previous work [10 ], social systems are themselves individualsthat harbour in them preindividual forces of transformation. Therefore we do not see in the currentorganization of personhood, inasmuch as it seems unassailable, a final unchangeable state of affairs.

      !- references : evolutionary biology * Evolutionary biologists have developed similar ideas to explain how throughout history, groups of individual organisms that clustered together and discovered better fitness as a result of symbiotic relationships began to reproduce as a whole new entity. Hence the collective became the new individual * Robin et al. paper: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.frontiersin.org%2Farticles%2F10.3389%2Ffevo.2021.711556%2Ffull&group=world * Robin et al. video presentation: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F6J-J72GoqhY%2F&group=world * Stuart West video: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FVUfNEHl44hc%2F&group=world

    1. What caused life's Major evolutionary transitions?
      • Title: What caused life's Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET)?
      • Author: Stuart West
      • Date:
    1. t what is an individual 01:13:07 okay so why why the why in the world would i why would we ask this question and why would i spend you know multiple pages in this paper even discussing like of course we know what 01:13:20 an individual is right or or maybe not like like that actually turns out to be a difficult question what is an individual and it's important to this and it's important to this discussion of societal 01:13:33 systems because who are we who what you know what is the purpose of a societal system what is it what is it who is it supposed to serve you know so you have to ask really like 01:13:45 it's it's good to ask if we're going to build a societal system who wh who is it that it's supposed to service you know like who are we what do we want you know it's part of 01:13:57 figuring out what do we want what do we value who are we start there you know i would say so so we've already kind of touched on these themes but 01:14:09 this idea of rugged individualism you know like from a certain perspective and a certain you know from a limited sort of time frame perspective sure there's there's a rugged individualism that exists right and it can be useful in 01:14:22 certain certain situations but by and large that's not what life is doing you know that's not what the the they're um we are we are 01:14:36 it's really even difficult to say like where if i'm a rugged individual where do i actually start and where do i end you know like where is where is me this you know even physically it's hard to say 01:14:48 because this physical me is really i think more bacterial cells than it is um human cells right so so uh like i'm a sieve i'm a i'm a process through which things are 01:15:02 flowing through i'm a i'm an ecosystem myself with bacteria and viruses and human cells and all of those components are necessary for me to survive today and for for 01:15:14 humans to survive you know over eons were like a mix we're a bag of of human-like things and bacterial-like things and viral-like things and 01:15:26 and we're porous and we're part of the carbon cycle and we're part of the nitrogen cycle and then you and then when you say like okay well how could you be a rugged individual individual when you're really 01:15:38 this this porous smorgasbord of things right

      What is an individual? This is a very fundamental question that John asks, especially from the evolutionary biological perspective as life has evolved over billions of years and what were once separate individuals, came together in Major Evolution Transitions (MET) to form a NEW grouping of what were former individuals to form a new cohesive, higher order individual. Life is therefore COMPOSITIONAL. When these groups of individuals increase fitness by clustering together and mutually benefit from each other, they then reproduce together as a cluster.

      Watch this informative video by Oxford researcher explaining MET: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FVUfNEHl44hc%2F&group=world and watch Amanda Robbin's video on research on the same question from an information systems perspective: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F6J-J72GoqhY%2F&group=world based on her paper: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.frontiersin.org%2Farticles%2F10.3389%2Ffevo.2021.711556%2Ffull&group=world

      Stop Reset Go and Deep Humanity praxis adopts the same view that the individual human being is a process, a nexus of many different flows of the natural world....and consciousness is part of the that - 4E - Embedded, Enacted, Embodied and Extended. We are more appropriately called a human INTERbeing, and even more appropriately a human INTERbeCOMing (since we are more process than static thing) both from material and information flow perspective.

      Our consciousness is at a specific level, associated with a body with sensory bubble that constrains it to this particular scale of experience - not microscopic and not planetary. It gives us a unique lens into the other scales of the individual that are purely cognitive, and only indirectly sensed via instrumentation that extends our naked senses. That siuatedness and perspectival knowing gives us a uniquely, distorted view of reality.

    1. Each of the transitions has been a progress trap, and every escape into a new way of life has relied on more energy and more information. The authors note that civilizations can collapse, but not into a previous way of life. Farmers don’t go back to hunting and gathering; they desert their kings, priests, and cities and go back to small-scale farming. When the first global society of the early 1900s collapsed after the First World War, countries reverted to tariffs and relatively small-scale capitalism — and large-scale wars. If the Trump regime has its way, we’ll see a similar reversion. But Lewis and Maslin note that each transition arrives faster than the previous one, and a fifth transition could be upon us very soon. The Great Acceleration is accelerating. In the past 40 years, we have digitized 500 times the information coded biologically in the human species. We consume more energy than ever before, and our demand for it will increase by 48 per cent between 2012 and 2040. More people are travelling and exchanging more information. Accelerating into a wall? The authors argue that “The simultaneous rapid increases in the number of people, level of energy provision and quantity of information being generated, driven by the positive feedback loops of reinvestment of profit, and ever-growing scientific knowledge, suggest that our current mode of living is the least probable of our three future options. Such rapid, radical changes suggest that a collapse or a switch to a new mode of living is more likely.” If We Can’t Stop Hothouse Earth, We’d Better Learn to Live on It read more Climate change, Lewis and Maslin say, makes collapse look likely. Violent weather events create food shortages, population displacements, rebuilding costs, and economic dislocation as global supply chains break down. The problem for the Anthropocene, they argue, is “how to equalize resource consumption across the world within sustainable environmental limits.” This involves moving much faster to renewable energy sources and leaving the damn fossil fuels in the ground. It also involves carbon capture and sequestration, on a far greater scale than was accomplished by the destruction of the American indigenous civilizations. So we might plant new forests and burn their wood for energy while trapping and burying the carbon dioxide emissions.

      Each transition is accompanied by a progress trap and each successive collapse has taken a shorter amount of time. This coming collapse may be much broader and deeper due to our impacts on the entire global climate system, not just one local part of it.

    2. Since 1945 this “Great Acceleration” has permitted the tripling of the human population and the crowding-out of the rest of the planet’s biosphere. Lewis and Maslin tell us: “Populations of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals have declined by an average of 58 percent over the last forty years… On land, if you weighed all the large mammals on the planet today, just 3 percent of that mass is living in the wild. The rest is made up of human flesh, some 30 percent of the total, with domesticated animals that feed us contributing the remaining 67 percent.”

      Fourth Transition: The Great Acceleration

      Will Steffen et al: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2053019614564785

    3. That led to the third transition: Europeans no longer needed on the farm became mill workers and coal miners. Scientific progress encouraged coal-fuelled industries and the telegraph spread information worldwide.

      Third Transition: Industrial Revolution

    4. the conquest of the Americas was also a second human transition: an escape from agriculture to profit-driven enterprise: “Western Europeans began colonizing large areas of the rest of the world, creating the first globalized economy.” Lewis and Maslin call this the “Columbian exchange,” when humans, animals, plants, and microbes established themselves in places they had never been before. Energy from new foods, and information from printing, helped drive this new transition. Farming resumed in the Americas to feed and clothe the Europeans, using the labour of African slaves.

      Second Transition: Columbian Exchange

      In evolutionary biology, there are also another type of transition, Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET). Robin et. al propose that the introduction of writing (inscribed language) was a major information improvement that played an important role leading to a major system transition (MST).

      Major Evolutionary Transitions and the Roles of Facilitation and Information in Ecosystem Transformations https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.frontiersin.org%2Farticles%2F10.3389%2Ffevo.2021.711556%2Ffull&group=world https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F6J-J72GoqhY%2F&group=world

  3. Jun 2022
    1. Although “renewable energy promoters claim that we can replace our current energy needs without fossil fuels,” adds Berman, the truth is this: “The triumph of technology may allow that but it will do little to end the ongoing ecosystem disaster.”

      There are researchers looking at the amount of fossil fuel energy required for the transition. One research group is MIT: https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/does-concrete-needed-build-renewable-energy-negate-good

      Other researchers have estimated fossil fuel budgets that need to be reserved for building the initial renewable energy production infrastructure for the transition.

      Research is nonlinear. A recent breakthrough might circularize cement industry:

      ‘If Cambridge Electric Cement lives up to the promise it has shown in early laboratory trials, it could be a turning point in the journey to a safe future climate. Combining steel and cement recycling in a single process powered by renewable electricity, this could secure the supply of the basic materials of construction to support the infrastructure of a zero emissions world and to enable economic development where it is most needed.’ http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/news/cambridge-engineers-invent-world-s-first-zero-emissions-cement

  4. May 2022
    1. This is the vision of OP Sapiens Star—that human’s evolution is not finished, and that the hyperthreat provides the impetus for a quantum leap into a new way of being. Through achieving a galactically significant mission—saving Earth’s ecological integrity—the Homo sapiens species “stars” within the universe. Humans go from being a menace and fighting one another to being heroic, creative, and tolerant.    

      This can be interpreted as an instantiation of the hero's journey, in the context of research that combines evolution with ecology as in the research paper: Major Evolutionary Transitions and the Roles of Facilitation and Information in Ecosystem Transformations (Robin et al., 2021).From this lens, cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) was first made possible through spoken language, then accelerated through written language. The authors claim that another Major System Transition (MST).is emerging, which they posit to be abiotic in nature involving Artificial Intelligence.

      Faced with a self-induced civilization-scale threat, we may ask whether a major cultural evolution may be necessary to avoid catastrophe and whether it may constitute another MST. Could a rapid higher level global understanding of the epistemological dualism of self and other which undergirds normative alienation, othering and conflict, both with others of our own species, of other species and with the planetary system itself play a major role in the transition?

  5. Mar 2022
    1. So, given the enormity of this change, I was trying to find the right phrase. The notion of being between worlds has the power to name this transition we are in.

      Funny enough, I am trying to describe the same thing, and going with the name Ledgerback Frontier.

  6. Jan 2022
    1. Figure 1. Autocratic leadership transitions, 1946 to 2014.

      peaceful vs. unpeaceful power transitions:

      From 1946 to 2014, only 44 percent of autocratic leadership transitions were peaceful and resulted in the continuation of the regime after the departure of the incumbent.

  7. Dec 2021
    1. If our two loves be one, or, thou and I Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.

      The final threes lines imply the existence of a possible threat to their relationship. This transition to a slightly concerning tone contrasts with the preceding stanzas and lines full of affirmation and conviction. However, the cause of the slackening still does not belong to the world that the lovers have just awakened from, but it is within them. Unless the uniformity of the love of their relationship is disproportioned, their love is eternal.

    1. A related risk is that the coverage will have gaps. California is a choice spot for installing chargers, but is anyone keen on investing in Nebraska?

      Again, the question of energy equity. What about infrastructure in the global south?

    2. By 2040 around 60% of all charging will need to take place away from home,
    3. Today’s mostly wealthy owners can often plug in their EV at home or at work. But many less-well-off EV drivers will not have a drive in front of their house or a space in the executive car park.

      One of the main questions we need to address in the energy transition is equity of access to the infrastructure that enables the transition.

    4. Yet the charging business suffers from big problems. One is how to co-ordinate between the owners of charging points, the owners of the sites where they will be installed, planning authorities and grid firms.

      The challenge of building an ecosystem of partners who historically have not worked together. There’s also the question of compatibility with the past and future EV fleet.

  8. Nov 2021
    1. many of you were brought up with the 00:03:57 idea of Enlightenment reason critical thinking an Enlightenment reason had a number of properties and it turns out that most of them are not true 00:04:10 Enlightenment reason is useful in many situations we'll talk about why it's useful and why it's been popular and so on but it's inadequate grossly inadequate for understanding what hew 00:04:22 means for human beings to understand the world and to think so what we're going to do is talk about real reason which is coming out of the neural and sciences and what the properties are so 00:04:36 there's a certain myth that comes out of enlightenment reason it says you know I think therefore I am says Descartes reason is conscious you know what you think it's just not true for most of 00:04:50 your thought it's unconscious mainly about 98% consciousness is a tip of the iceberg you know how do you get 98% there are two ways one if you look at 00:05:03 what you're conscious of versus what your brain is doing the roll is about fifty to one your brain is doing 50 times as much as you're conscious of and there's another way to look at it if you 00:05:15 take a sentence and you say what can the next sentence be in a paragraph and what do you have to fill in to understand all the possible next sentences the answer is that you need to fill in 50 times as 00:05:29 much as it's in that sentence roughly so it's about 98% unconscious you're not even aware that you're filling this in but you're not moreover consciousness could not in 00:05:42 principle in principle be you know you you couldn't have reason being conscious because most of your reason is done in parallel circuitry but consciousness is 00:05:55 linear so you have massively parallel circuitry but you're tracing out a linear path through it and that is means you can only be aware of a tiny portion of what you're thinking now

      Refuting Descartes and Enlightenment myths. Lakoff justifies how neuroscience findings of the processing of the unconscious mind leads him to the statement that 98% of our thoughts are unconscious.

      What emerges into conscious knowing then is a small percentage of what the rest of the processing brain "knows".

      The conscious mind therefore has no direct access to that 98% of what is going on to surface the 2% it is aware of. If we extend knowledge into processes that are beyond simply neural processes, however, this knowledge gap becomes even more pronounced.

      Since human physiology of modern hominins is the evolutionary terminus point of billions of years of evolution, with at least 3 different prior Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET) embedded within our various body structures, our "conscious mind" is the governor over a thriving, cohesive planetary population of billions of cells and trillions of microbes of whose ongoing metabolic processes we are completely ignorant of.

      Witness the development of disease within our bodies. The con-specific is unaware of it often until late stage symptoms appear and warrants a doctor's visit..

    1. So to sum things up what caused life's major evolutionary transitions the answer is cooperation major transitions begin when a group of organisms join forces to better survive and reproduce if cooperation continues long enough a new super organism may Emerge one that can then go [on] to reproduce and evolve as a whole and 00:07:42 The pathway that led [to] animals along with humankind [at] least three major transitions have been identified resulting in four layers of Life within your own body

      Within this human body, we embed 4 different stages of Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET).

      Our human body is the product of billions of years of evolution, embodying various outputs from each major stage of a Major Evolutionary Transition (MET). We are a multi-cellular being, a colony. Yet,at the same time, we have living elements that at one time in history, were independent living beings which were NOT part of a multi-cellular colony!

      In the deep history of the evolution of the human body, genes, mitochondria, eukaryotes were all once autonomous living entities, each a biological self with its own boundary separating inner from outer. Virus's helped to catalyze their mutualism over deep time.

      Now, over billions of years of evolution, they are all integrated together by the extra-cellular matrix and laminin protein into our multi-cellular human body, replicating as one super, super, super organism.

      Finally, inscribed language has allowed us to undergo another kind of transition, a major system transition (MST) where human beings now dominate the entire biosphere, for better and for worse.

    2. in 00:05:44 1998 researchers set up a mini Ecosystem with small mouths protists and single-celled algae the protists could easily swallow individual algal cells But had trouble eating cells that happen to stick together after reproducing in less than just 20 generations the algae evolved multicellular cooperation they form groups of eight tightly connected cells that could not [be] eaten by the protists [a] 00:06:10 similar experiment on single-celled yeast in 2011 Showed that [just] 32 days after multi-celled colonies evolved clear division of labor also evolved giving rise to unique cell types specializing in different tasks these two experiments show us how multi-celled organisms may have first evolved, but what about mitochondria and their permanent merger with eukaryotes In a long-term study ending in 2008 a protist that normally eats Bacteria was seen swallowing a species of algae 00:06:41 Apparently on accident that it was not able to digest Inside the protists the algae was able to grow and reproduce when the protists reproduced as well both daughter cells contained algae after several years and many many generations researchers found that when Bacteria was scarce Protists containing algae were much more likely to survive than those without They avoided starvation by feeding off the waste products the algae produced This was the start of a [Brand-new] relationship 00:07:14 Strikingly similar to what we find between [our] [cells] and the mitochondria [that] live inside

      Fascinating experiments that support MET.

    3. Each new layer of Life is the result of what scientists call a major evolutionary transition? What was the cause of these transitions the answer is? Cooperation a Major Transition starts when free living creatures team up to form a cooperative group in the early stages of cooperation Participants are free to come and go as they [please] [if] a group sticks together long enough however 00:04:51 Division of labor will often evolve different participants begin specializing in different tasks as time goes on Individuals may become so specialized that they can no longer survive on their own [if] the entire group becomes locked into cooperation Depending fully on one another to survive and reproduce a new super organism has been forged and they made your evolutionary transition is complete 00:05:16 From this point on the entire group will evolve together as one Models describing natural situations that might promote the evolution of major transitions have been put forth by scientists such as John Maynard Smith [fior] Sonck Mary stuart West and w d hamilton using these models Researchers have been able to Mimic natural scenarios in the lab Allowing us to directly witness the beginnings of major transitions [evolved]

      This is the key to Major Evolutionary Transition - a population of free living individual creatures discover that in teaming up, there is a greater resultant evolutionary fitness, mutualism symbiotic relationship emerges. It becomes so strong over time that the many become a self-replicating one.

      The biological self is always defined by a boundary between inner and outer, but in this act of mutualism, the many biological selves join to form a new higher order biological self.

      In this way, a multi-cellular species like ours is somewhat like one of those nested Russian dolls.

      Indeed, Amanda Robins hypothesizes

      https://hyp.is/NyrixELGEeyYWN_d76UNMg/docdrop.org/video/6J-J72GoqhY/

      that our species has undergone what she and Peter Nonacs calls Major System Transition (MST). The cultural artifact of inscribed language has made possible a superorganism / supraorganism that has spread across the globe.

    4. Today we tend to shrug this off as common knowledge, but think how amazing this is you are a Colony

      This is a great vid for showing how we are a multi-level being. Within this human body, we embed 4 different stages of Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET).

      Our human body is the product of billions of years of evolution, embodying various outputs from each major stage of a Major Evolutionary Transition (MET). We are a multi-cellular being, a colony. Yet,at the same time, we have living elements that at one time in history, were independent living beings which were NOT part of a multi-cellular colony!

      We have genes, that were once autonomous living entities, mitochondria within cells, which at one time were autonomous entities, and cells, which were also once autonomously existent eukaryotes. All three exist in transmuted form that is now integrated into our body.

    1. we want to focus on how humans fit into our category goal framework here and we'll use this figure as a roadmap 00:42:18 starting with the center section looking that looks at how events that affect the species and clay level and so what stands out here for humans is our 00:42:28 complex spoken language which greatly enhances our communication and has long been thought of as a met due to leaps in the way that we transmit information between individuals 00:42:40 but this met really wouldn't have been possible without a major competitive transition so the specific regions in the brain that are associated with greater cognition and language ability 00:42:52 and also our larger brain size which is correlated with functionality and our spoken language allows human societies to gather greater amounts of level 3 or learned 00:43:07 information than would ever be possible within any one individual's lifetime and this really turns up the dial on the magnitude at which cultural evolution affects us as a 00:43:19 species and allows us to adapt and construct our environments in different ways cultural innovations are also not dependent on random beneficial mutations but can 00:43:32 arise intentionally and this has major impacts for how quickly and at what level we can affect our ecosystems 00:43:43 so when we come back to the figure and we've layered on complex spoken language now we can look at the level of ecosystem change that's occurred because of this and see if it's enough to bring 00:43:55 us to a major systems transition and here we argue that the answer is no if we would have just stopped at spoken language our global impact would never have reached the level 00:44:07 that it takes to drive an mst but we do argue that this spoken language was actually a facilitating evolutionary transition for events that directly paved the way 00:44:19 for an mst so human spoken language is a facilitating transition for symbolic representation of instructional information so the met and the mechd that make up 00:44:33 complex spoken language are actually a fit for being able to write things down and being able to write things down onto abiotic mediums allows us to increase the amount of information that 00:44:47 we can store the accuracy of the stored information and the efficiency of transmission and this has an especially high impact for oblique transmission because 00:44:59 being able to inscribe information can potentially immortalize it and then individuals far in the future can build upon it and so being able to build upon 00:45:12 uh generations of information through symbolic representation of language is really a key for the expansion of technological innovations that have expanded the realized niche of humans so 00:45:25 we have spread across every continent made major impacts on most ecosystems and a part of what has allowed us to do this is the technology that we've designed uh based upon large amounts of 00:45:39 inscribed language and some of these technologies actually allow us to manipulate or avoid the processes of natural selection and some of the those examples are listed here 00:45:53 and so when we go back to our figure and layer on the potential to inscribe language and then re-look at ecosystem level changes we think that here due to due to the 00:46:06 technological innovations and global expansion that's come with being the only species to store this much level three information that the answer is now yes 00:46:19 and when an mst occurs the context in which this entire cycle takes place completely shifts because now the global ecosystem is playing by a modified set of rules that are 00:46:33 set forth by the mst so this brings us to the question are humans the last mst or are there other mets and mechs forthcoming that will drive a new 00:46:45 major systems transition

      Robin argues that spoken language alone, while a MET does not constitute a MST because spoken language could not have resulted in the global spread of ideas that made our current globalized modernity possible. However, it is a Facilitating Evolutionary Transition (FET) which paved the way for inscribed language which did enable the global spread of technology.

    2. our fourth point is that for something like eukaryotes and others where there is no immediate major system 00:25:30 transition we're really sort of saying is that they perhaps are critical to such a transition but not at the time necessarily that they have evolved so in essence we want to amp we want to bring in a new 00:25:43 term which we call facilitating evolutionary transition so it makes it is part of a major system transition but it clearly needs other 00:25:55 evolutionary events to go along with it and the final sort of point is that there are perhaps catalysts that are involved in this process and one of the major catalysts that may 00:26:12 have had effects throughout evolutionary history are viruses so viruses may have been key actors to help the transition from 00:26:23 rna to dna they may have uh produced or helped produce the nucleus in eukaryotes and we'll talk about a little bit later about the key role that viral genes play 00:26:36 in making sexual reproduction possible and even in placental mammals the evolution of a placenta so without viral genes being moved across 00:26:47 horizontally species some of these major transitions could never have happened so now we have sort of the complete integrated process of of our diagram and again the question 00:27:02 that we're really focusing on oftentimes is that last one yes when how and why do we get to a major system transition and how do nets mechs uh 00:27:15 fets and catalysts all play a role in these various transitions

      Viruses have played a key role in a number of different METs. This is an important insight that can contextualize the covid-19 pandemic.

    3. you are looking at major 00:12:17 evolutionary transitions so one can start with the idea that initially what has to happen is individuals kind of have to tolerate each other so in other words competitors 00:12:31 have to be willing to form into those simple groups and those groups have to have some kind of benefit for their existence and continuance then berkshire said well the next step 00:12:44 in this transition is what can go from formation to maintenance so if you go from a simple group to society again there are there are rules there are maybe individuals that belong to certain 00:12:56 societies and rather than sort of a fission fusion kind of uh coming together going apart these societies maintain themselves these groups maintain themselves over 00:13:08 longer periods of time and there are more benefits and there may in fact be more conflicts that have to be worked out to keep the societies to maintain the societies 00:13:19 finally there would be the step into this group transformation again what what what kuala and strassmann might have called organismality so now that the groups subsume their kind of 00:13:32 individual goals into a collective goal for all of them and again the idea here is that that that one has to happen is conflict has to be somehow managed and reduced 00:13:44 such that the groups can actually transform into this coherent whole single individual and some of the key points in in in burke's sort of 00:13:55 pathway to to to transformation is that the first two steps are can truly be bidirectional in other words uh societies can go back to being simple groups and simple groups can go 00:14:10 back to being competitive just competitors so in other words those aren't sort of absorbing states but the argument is that once once you sort of get to that group transformation that last blue arrow you 00:14:23 have transformed in a way that it is hard or impossible to really go backwards and what burke argued is that that process those those various steps and 00:14:34 particularly that last transformative step is strongly driven often by inclusive fitness kin selection so in other words going back to that continuum 00:14:46 of the types of groups that they can form fraternal groups are much more likely to to transform into these higher level organisms than 00:14:58 uh egalitarian groups

      The transition from competing individuals to a coherent unity is a fascinating journey.

      Applied to human society at a time of the Anthropocene, these principles of evolutionary biology may be salient to apply to the superorganism/supra-organism of humanity undergoing a process of rapid whole system change.

    4. so what kuller and strasman then basically were trying to kind of in a way define or look at was how you transition from being a group 00:11:28 to an actual individual organism so at what point at what point do the individuals sort of meld into something that you would call just one individual what they call 00:11:41 organismality

      The shift from individual to unified group due to evolutionary fitness bestowed by fitness emerges a new stable replicable unit and marks a Major Evolutionary Transition (MET).

    5. and in that uh i would sort of say that that dave queller and jones strassmann again sort of approached this these problems as to how you transition across social groups and 00:08:18 their emphasis or at least they put an emphasis on the idea of that one way you can look at groups is you can look at their relative similarity or genetic similarity 00:08:32 so groups can range from being you know entirely fraternal in which place we're looking at genetic clones all the way out to what might be called egalitarian 00:08:44 with unrelated individuals or even individuals from from from different species so in essence groups can be placed somewhere along this continuum of 00:08:56 similarity of identity from again completely identical to very very different fraternal to egalitarian

      The radical collaboration that is required during the climate crisis is on the egalitarian end of the spectrum.

    1. Professional musicians, concert pianists get to know this instrument deeply, intimately. And through it, they're able to create with sound in a way that just dazzles us, and challenges us, and deepens us. But if you were to look into the mind of a concert pianist, and you used all the modern ways of imaging it, an interesting thing that you would see 00:11:27 is how much of their brain is actually dedicated to this instrument. The ability to coordinate ten fingers. The ability to work the pedal. The feeling of the sound. The understanding of music theory. All these things are represented as different patterns and structures in the brain. And now that you have that thought in your mind, recognize that this beautiful pattern and structure of thought in the brain 00:11:52 was not possible even just a couple hundred years ago. Because the piano was not invented until the year 1700. This beautiful pattern of thought in the brain didn't exist 5,000 years ago. And in this way, the skill of the piano, the relationship to the piano, the beauty that comes from it was not a thinkable thought until very, very recently in human history. 00:12:17 And the invention of the piano itself was not an independent thought. It required a depth of mechanical engineering. It required the history of stringed instruments. It required so many patterns and structures of thought that led to the possibility of its invention and then the possibility of the mastery of its play. And it leads me to a concept I'd like to share with you guys, which I call "The Palette of Being." 00:12:44 Because all of us are born into this life having available to us the experiences of humanity that has come so far. We typically are only able to paint with the patterns of thoughts and the ways of being that existed before. So if the piano and the way of playing it is a way of being, this is a way of being that didn't exist for people 5,000 years ago. 00:13:10 It was a color in the Palette of Being that you couldn't paint with. Nowadays if you are born, you can actually learn the skill; you can learn to be a computer scientist, another color that was not available just a couple hundred years ago. And our lives are really beautiful for the following reason. We're born into this life. We have the ability to go make this unique painting with the colors of being that are around us at the point of our birth. 00:13:36 But in the process of life, we also have the unique opportunity to create a new color. And that might come from the invention of a new thing. A self-driving car. A piano. A computer. It might come from the way that you express yourself as a human being. It might come from a piece of artwork that you create. Each one of these ways of being, these things that we put out into the world 00:14:01 through the creative process of mixing together all the other things that existed at the point that we were born, allow us to expand the Palette of Being for all of society after us. And this leads me to a very simple way to go frame everything that we've talked about today. Because I think a lot of us understand that we exist in this kind of the marvelous universe, 00:14:30 but we think about this universe as we're this tiny, unimportant thing, there's this massive physical universe, and inside of it, there's the biosphere, and inside of that, that's society, and inside of us, we're just one person out of seven billion people, and how can we matter? And we think about this as like a container relationship, where all the goodness comes from the outside to the inside, and there's nothing really special about us. 00:14:56 But the Palette of Being says the opposite. It says that the way that we are in our lives, the way that we affect our friends and our family, begin to change the way that they are able to paint in the future, begins to change the way that communities then affect society, the way that society could then affect its relationship to the biosphere, and the way that the biosphere could then affect the physical planet 00:15:21 and the universe itself. And if it's a possible thing for cyanobacteria to completely transform the physical environment of our planet, it is absolutely a possible thing for us to do the same thing. And it leads to a really important question for the way that we're going to do that, the manner in which we're going to do that. Because we've been given this amazing gift of consciousness.

      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.

  9. Oct 2021
  10. Sep 2021
    1. great transition, shifting the time focus to the more recent 25 years.

    2. Headings help to seperate subtopics and provide transtions.

    3. Headings help to seperate subtopics and provide transtions.

    4. Headings help to seperate subtopics and provide transtions.

    5. Headings help to seperate subtopics and provide transtions.

    6. Headings help to seperate subtopics and provide transtions.

  11. Aug 2021
  12. Jul 2021
    1. PatientID: None

      KindredID: 1

      Case: Sex Unknown, Age Unknown, Ethnicity Unknown

      DiseaseAssertion: Adrenal pheochromocytoma

      FamilyInfo: The proband was part of a cohort of apparently sporadic cases of pheochromocytoma/ paraganglioma, implying this individual had no family history of VHL disease or pheochromocytoma.

      CasePresentingHPOs: HP:0006748 (Adrenal Pheochromocytoma)

      CaseHPOFreeText: N/A

      CaseNotHPOs: HP:0002668 (Paraganglioma)

      CaseNotHPOFreeText: N/A

      CasePreviousTesting: RET, SDHB, SDHC, and SDHD

      PreviouslyPublished: N/A

      SupplementalData: N/A

      Variant: ex. p.R161Q (c.482G>A)

      LegacyVariant: N/A

      CaseProblemVariantFreeText: N/A

      ClinVarID: ex. 182983, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/clinvar/variation/182983/

      CAID: N/A

      gnomAD: N/A

      VariantEvidence: N/A

      MutationType: missense_variant;transition

      CivicName: R161Q(c.482G>A)

      MultipleGeneVariants: N/A

  13. Apr 2021
  14. Mar 2021
  15. Feb 2021
  16. Jan 2021
  17. Nov 2020
    1. I encounter this problem in all of my Svelte projects- feels like I'm missing something. Fighting it with absolute positioning usually forces me to re-write a lot of CSS multiple times. Is there is a better way to solve this that I've overlooked?
  18. Sep 2020
  19. Aug 2020
  20. Jul 2020
  21. Jun 2020
  22. Apr 2020
  23. Oct 2019
  24. Feb 2019
    1. Escobar casts wide the net of his critique, his objective is not merely to tackle neoliberal capitalism, rampant individualism, patriarchy or colonialism — although each of those topics are explored in detail. He is writing against nothing less than all of modernity, a “particular modelo civilizatorio, or civilizational model… an entire way of life and a whole style of world making.” Our toxic, modern lifestyle in the Global North and the way it understands (or fails to understand) the relationality between humanity and other forms of life plays the dominant role in creating the contemporary crises. To preserve the future we need a different way of life and way to relate to all of life, “no less than a new notion of the human.” The crises are inseparable from our social lives. We need to step outside of our established worldviews to bring about significant transformations. Is this possible? How can we achieve such a transition?

      Designs for the Pluriverse book review

  25. Oct 2018
  26. Sep 2017
    1. This “Jane Austen,” the author of a body of texts that circulated across four continents within decades of their publication in England, has a less obvious relationship to the western ideal of the liberal autonomous individual

      A weak aspect to this article is that Moe often makes unclear transitions in her argumentation. This is one of these cases.

      Further, does this then mean that Austen has her own individual understanding of "modernity"? Then, perhaps, both Elizabeth and Charlotte are modern in their own respective ways.

  27. Dec 2016
    1. The wars that are erupting now, like cancerous sores upon the world, are based upon tribes fighting to regain their identity, attempting to re-establish their former role, their territory, their spirituality, their government and their heritage. You will see many attempts to reassert the past in the times to come, but the past is gone. Many of these attempts will be quite violent and disruptive. That is why we must teach peace. That is why there is a great deal of instruction going on currently, so that people may have a greater spiritual capacity to undergo this tremendous transition.
    2. new world order
  28. Sep 2016
  29. Aug 2016
    1. Perhaps they need not even be infrastructure in the traditional, utilitarian sense, but efforts to create lasting human works that can provide keystones of cultural continuity for centuries to come — works I believe capitalism has proven nearly incapable of building, or in some cases even maintaining.

      This is the tie-in with Transition design!

  30. May 2016
  31. Apr 2016
  32. Mar 2016