HW 12
per http://informationcomputingandthefuture.blogspot.com/p/hw.html
1. Prepare your presentation. You may be asked to present it in class, or a recording of it may be presented in class if you are in an online section. The presentation will be 20 minutes. Also please mail it to the instructor's futurism address: thehumanracetothefuture@gmail.com (or to a regular address -- they all go to the same place anyway). For any questions about details of this, just ask.
A1: Done.
2: Grad students only: continue with the book you obtained. Read the next 20 pages. State what page numbers you have read and provide a reminder of the title of the book. Then, discuss those 20 pages. Explain what you agree with, disagree with, and how your views compare with those of other reviewers on Amazon or elsewhere.
A2:
Predictions pages 180-199; essays about and predictions by Paul Nurse and Steven Pinker.
Nurse is a geneticist and a cancer researcher. His thinking about cellular biology is that just describing the genes that control a trait is a small part of the problem of how cells go about their business; his interest is in the information flow and processing within the cell which involves genes, proteins, and other chemical molecules that form the networks within a cell. He met with success studying heat-sensitive yeast cells to unravel the mechanics of cell division which has had profound implications on cancer research. His prediction again a hope, a breakthrough that he would like to see in the next century: "a complete understanding of the workings of a cell, which in turn will provide real insights into the nature of life." By combining the mechanics of the sensors and switches within a cell, with the complex networks that link these components, he hopes that we will answer "the very question of what is life."
Pinker likes to explain psychological and social phenomena in terms of natural selection, sort of a reverse-engineering the brain. He states that the mind is not the brain but "what the brain does", and that is to process information. He postulates mental organs that have been shaped by natural selection. He views language is as an adaptation that served the function of better communication and thus better survival of our ancient ancestors. This is a controversial view, debated by both Chomsky who holds that language is a universal grammar tool in humans, and Gould who holds that the minute you say "it was adaptive on the African Savanna", you've left the realm of Science and entered into speculation that cannot be tested. Still Pinker thinks the circumstantial evidence is compelling, saying "Anthropologists have noted that tribal chiefs are both gifted orators and highly polygynous". He has thoughts on the misinterpretation of the "selfish gene" leading to a selfish person, and notes that sometimes the most selfish thing a gene could do is to produce a selfless person. His prediction is that in the next century the major development in the study of the mind will be increasing "consilience" among the branches of human knowledge. He predicts we will "eliminate the distinction between biology and culture, nature vs. society, matter vs. mind, and natural sciences vs. arts, humanities and social sciences." He predicts the complete mapping of the human genome will lead to an understanding for the genetic basis of emotions and learning abilities [ narrator: it didn't ]. He expects that in the long term the connection between genes and the mechanisms of thought and the study of the mind and society will be widely accepted.
Agree: I really like Nurse's notion of an information network within a cell; I see the genes, switches and physical portions of the cell like neurons in a neural net, and the chemicals that mediate the flow of information as the weights between the nodes of the network. In this way a cell can be understood as a learning organism just as an artificial neural network can assimilate a stream of inputs into a classification of higher-order concepts.
Disagree: Pinker's notion of Darwinism does seem to stray into storytelling in a way that isn't provable and isn't consistent with compelling theories of adaptation being stalled for long periods instead of continuous, but maybe there is a fine line between the two.
Opinion of the book / reviewers: I'm finding it hard to make it through the book given the completely disconnected nature of each episode, but there are some common themes such as "what is life", "what is the mind" that the notable minds are repeatedly concerned with. I also find these thoughts fascinating and I'm glad to have chosen this book.