Time for the twice a year visit to Dr. E.
your local dentist. Later today, Carol goes to physical therapy. Other than
this nothing much is on the agenda. You are feeling better about yourself
protecting Merlyn, a fictional character in your books. – Amorella
0918
hours. Even in fiction a character has to have personal integrity and dignity. To
have such dreams is the only way I know to show his fuller character. He is a
lasting fictional character because people need to have a shaman as a hero just
as they need a James Bond hero. The culture of a shaman is whole earth, whole
universe, whole metaphysics. Dreams are where Merlyn belongs; you see the
dreams to the north, south, east and west as well as Up and Down. Merlyn is
invisible in the center. What would you expect of a ghost, a human spirit
driven to rise up and to be heard even from the Beyond.
Post. – Amorella
0927
hours. This seems trite and comic book-like.
You
had lunch at Smashburgers before Carol’s physical therapy. You had Jadah had a
nap, then when Carol arrived home you headed south to Graeter’s and after,
north to home. Carol is trimming bushes along the ‘woods’ but wanted the deck
umbrella up. You are sitting under the umbrella. She appears to be about a
third through K. Reichs’ Bones to Ashes. Let’s move on to ‘The Brothers
Ten’. - Amorella
1625
hours. This sounds good to me. – This original has 2603 words. This will take
some doing to whittle it down to 750. I have the next four lines of Beltane’s
Eve poem marked.
** **
Tonight
come the birds dressed wild and black
So
keep close your Soul, they'll be wanting to hack
And
fly it to Mounds where years seem a day
Across
the far green where Fairy lands lay. – Brothers
10
** **
1651
hours. Some of this I will not be able to construct until I have a draft of the
whole chapter – certainly the appropriate words in the lines have to relate to
something in each segment.
Of course, boy, this is understood. –
Amorella
1653
hours. This shows how shallow I am in deep water. I had not thought about it
until now. Talk about gallows humor.
You didn’t need to think about this until
now or even later. Gallows humor is stringing the line around a person’s neck
then forgetting to drop the door out from under herorhim. – Amorella
1657
hours. My thoughts entirely! I
continually would not be surprised to have the door drop.
See, now there is humor you could easily
wade into. I like it, orndorff. Post. – Amorella
1659
hours. You are so funny, Amorella.
You see how far you have come? Decades ago,
you would have been terrified to have seen these words “forgetting to drop the
door out”. It was as an Angel’s Voice and your heartanmind would have sweat
blood as you felt your very soul squeezed by the Hand of an angry G---D. –
Amorella
1703
hours. Such few words bring back the ‘dread’
of those times.
This feeling of dread sat just underneath
the surface of everyday reality for a period of about six months during the
school year; your second year at Mason when you did not yet have tenure. Not
having tenure was terror enough, but it was not a Holy Terror. I was there,
boy. I know how your soulanheartanmind were. – Amorella
1708
hours. I conquered my greatest fear, confronting an Angel of G---D face to
face, so to speak. Real or not, I believed and felt it so. – rho
No human being can know this spiritual ‘dread’
without the experience.
1711
hours. I know what naked is. No question about it. That’s enough on the
subject. The very thought makes me queasy and leans me towards a general malaise
or physical illness. The only thing that kept me balance was my doubt. This is
so unorthodox. Most, I think, would say it was their faith that carried them
through such a dark personal spiritual valley. The odds were very great that
this confrontation was not with an Angel of G---D or any less Angel for that matter.
It may have been my deepest most sacred fear. I was still angry with G---D if
G---D existed. Now, I am not angry with G---D either way, existing or not
existing. I am learning to accept myself.
Post. - Amorella
Earlier this evening I found this on Quora. This is really
interesting, plus it raises my curiosity on the subject.
**
**
What were the greatest
(both well and least understood) leaps in evolution?
Jason Coston,
I/O bound.
Jason has 30+ answers
in Evolutionary Biology.
I have like 10 favorites.
1) Panspermia (c. 8.5 to 4 billion years ago): This first
one, like the last one on the list, represents the very edge of our data and
speculation. That said...
If we calculate how fast organisms diversify at a genetic level,
and how fast their genomes lengthen, we can actually look at living creatures'
genomes and get multiple estimates for how long ago their genes started
evolving. And the numbers from one research team converge on the figure:
9 billion years ago. Researchers use Moore’s Law to calculate that life began
before Earth existed. Problem: Earth 4 billion years ago was a glob of lava too
hot for genes to exist on it. Solution: The earth was seeded by very
basic bacteria FROM SPACE! :) Sound crazy? Why? We find
bacteria living deep in the earth's crust. We find bacteria that can
survive space. We know from experiments that meteorite/asteroid impacts
can throw chunks of rock into space in such a way that they contain still-alive
colonies of bacteria, and that these rocks can then land in such a way that
some bacteria are still alive when the dust settles on the receiving planet.
And we know from astrophysics that the universe has had the right materials
(ample carbon, oxygen, etc.) and environments (rocky watery planets) to evolve
life for about 9 billion years, after the 2nd and 3rd generations of stars
started coming online.
And while technically it's not such an impressive achievement
for bacteria to "figure out" how to survive a ride inside a rock,
this development rates absolute TOPS in importance for life. It was life's
first crucial accomplishment.
Edit: Many readers are rightly skeptical about the evidence for
panspermia, preferring that the jury stay out on this particular hypothesis.
So in honor of them, I add this news item discovered 30 April 2015: Life on
Earth may have flourished a billion years earlier than thought. This item
explains that according to rather incontrovertible geological chemical
analysis, microbial life on earth was voraciously devouring atmospheric N2 the
instant that life on earth became possible. According to the study, older
scientific assumptions that life took a billion years to develop complexity
enough to break atmospheric N2 into usable nitrogen, are simply wrong, and
somehow, the moment the earth cooled enough that cells wouldn't boil to death,
those cells appeared fully formed and already complex enough to catalyze the
breaking of the triple bond between nitrogen molecules that only life can make
happen at scale and without which life cannot thrive.
2) RNA takes on DNA as a subcontractor (8.5 to 3 billion
years ago): We now, in the last 15 years, have converging indications that life
started as RNA. RNA is not as good at data storage as DNA, because it
branches and loops too easily to form a really long, self-organizing
"tape" of data, and it is not as good at being machinery as proteins,
because it can't form as many structures (sheets, tubes, tunnels, rotors) as
proteins. But it can do both: it can contain instructions for its own
replication PLUS instructions for how to make proteins PLUS can be the
machinery to do all that replication.
RNA: half data-tape, half machine:
DNA: mostly data tape:
Proteins: micro-machines:
So yes, at some point, RNA mutated one of its letters, and begat
a little mutant helper that wasn't as good at being machinelike, but was way
better at storing information. So they evolved a partnership, and DNA
grew and grew as the partnership spawned more and more innovations on RNA's
original basic game of copying itself into new lipid bubbles.
NOTE: Another evidence for panspermia is that, while research
indicates life started as RNA-based, no RNA-based cells exist on earth.
Their total extinction is profoundly unlikely. Then how to account for
their absence from earth? Simple: They never made it to earth. They
begat DNA-based life elsewhere, and when life reached earth, it was as a
species of DNA-based prokaryotes.
3) Chromosomes (2 billion years ago): After life got to
earth, some of it figured out how to get DNA to store more: instead of having
it work as a looped data tape, it would break into lots of non-looped tapes:
chromosomes. This in itself vastly increased the potential complexity of
single-celled organisms, by increasing the hard drive.
4) Sex! (1.2 billion years ago): Some
cells with chromosomes (eukaryotes) figured out that they could create a backup
copy of their data (something like autopolyploidy). Those
doubled-chromosome critters then started diverging, while holding on to their
habit of swapping data. Pretty soon, they hit upon the idea of swapping
whole "backup drives". Now, each critter had two slightly
differing "hard drives" or sets of chromosomes. As long as they
didn't differ too much, this worked out well, and gave life a way of safely
testing out a lot more variations at a time.
5) Multicellular life! (700 million years ago): Some of
these sexy critters hit upon the same idea that bees and ants would later
re-discover: SLAVERY GETS SHIT DONE. Some sex-capable cell split off and
made a daughter cell that couldn't itself do the sex thing (swapping whole DNA
copies). This was easy, because those cells never forgot their old trick
of just creating clones of themselves, as they did before sex. But for a
long time, this didn't make for anything interesting happening, because the
clones were identical to the parent cell--they were just colonies of cells.
But then a daughter cell was born that could not sexually reproduce, nor clone
herself, as her parent could. If she wanted her genes to outlive her,
she'd have to help her parent do that work. And so two castes were born,
the germ line that could do the sex thing, and the drone class. Today,
your eggs or sperm cells are the germ line, and the rest of you is a bunch of
drone classes. Remember when RNA took on a helper, DNA, to store data,
and DNA became so much bigger than RNA that it looks like the dominant part of
the partnership? Germ lines and drone lines are like that.
6) Nerves and muscles (700-500 million years ago): So now
life has created these giant, organized colonies, with a bunch of cells
defending germ cells at the center, helping them sniff out food, and then move
toward it. But move toward it HOW? Individual cells had ways to get
around, giant barges of cells not so much. Enter a new caste of drone
cell, the nerve, and its buddy, the muscle cell. They figure out how to
line up ion channels so that a message gets not just to one cell, but across a
giant cable or series of cables. Well done, gentlemen. Now we're
ready for...
7) Vision (and hearing) (500 million years ago):
The basic way cells know their environment is through touch. But at a
cell's scale, touch means knowing the shape of the molecules it's touching.
And that, is what we call taste/smell. Taste and smell are the first
senses, and we ostensibly share them with bacteria, if only in ways that lead
to philosophical debate about the nature of consciousness. But there are
other data in the world aside from molecule topologies, like sound waves, and
light waves. Luckily, there are chemicals that react to light and sound.
Some cells have more of them. Those cells started being helpful to nerve
cells. Nerve cells started preferring to connect to them, because they
twitched when light or sound hit, giving advanced intel about where the
creature should go to get food or avoid becoming food. Light and sound
travel farther, faster than smell. If you detect light, you're going to
outwit food that can only smell whether you're near.
Soon, these light-sensitive cells clumped, for the same reason
that telescope arrays clump--it improves signal clarity and sensitivity.
Then, they formed a pit, to help them determine the direction light came from.
Then the pit formed a transparent cover, to protect it. Then, these
protector cells formed a lens, to improve the incoming data. Then an
iris, to regulate brightness. And muscles that could aim the whole
apparatus with feedback from the brain.
8) Brains (500 million years ago): While eyes and
ears were developing, nerves were also clumping. For the same reason that
supercomputers are made of lots of computers. This allowed for so many
good things, it's really another list of 10 if I don't restrain myself.
9) Warm-bloodedness (200 million years ago):
Cold-blooded creatures are dumber than warm-blooded ones, as a rule. Why?
Because they don't have as much energy, and it takes extra energy to run a
less-dumb brain. Cold-blooded creatures can't afford to play as much,
communicate as complexly, even move as much. To get to my next
item on this list, you need to be warm-blooded.
10) Imagination/reason (200-50 million years ago):
Even a cell can "learn." But only in a very limited way--it can
learn to react a certain way the next time the same stimulus appears.
That's just basic conditioning. Useful, but not fantastic. But with
enough brain, you can combine things you've experienced, into categories, to
make useful predictions about what else might happen to you in the future,
other than exact repeats of what has happened before. For warm-blooded
creatures that hit upon a way of living that is calorie-rich enough (per unit
creature), imagination and reason are excellent aids to continuing to find lots
of calories.
11) Writing (15000-5000 years ago). For life to
happen, it needs a replicator. A replicator is a unit of information that
can mutate, but not too often, and can otherwise be counted on to stay itself
through thousands of copies (i.e. it's high-fidelity). For 9 billion
years, life had one class of replicators: nucleic acids (RNA and DNA, and now
some new ones we've created in the lab to show it's possible). But by 50
million years ago, life also had figured out ANOTHER way to use long data
strands to assemble machinery useful to perpetuate those long data strands.
That way? Language. Individuals in a language population have an
almost-universal way of agreeing on how a given signal codes to a given
imagined stimulus. If they string enough signals together, they can code
for a complex imagined stimulus. Get a complex-enough stimulus into the
imagination, and it will be able to run simulations of possible realities that
help the creature survive to speak again. Instead of DNA, the data string
is sound. Instead of proteins, the machinery is a nonlinear complex of
imagined percepts, that fold onto themselves dissolving the linearity of the
data string that spawned them. For example: The fox jumps over the
fence. Read that sentence, picture it. Now, in your mental picture,
does the fox appear and then disappear, then the jumping, then the fence?
Of course not. They all coexist. A linear data string has folded
into a nonlinear machine. And that is fricking powerful stuff.
But it's not a replicator. Those strings of sounds are too
low-fidelity. They shift so rapidly between generations of creatures,
they don't actually function as true replicators. And so they don't have
a very massive survival benefit. Very few creatures/species have adopted
long language strings--dolphins, parrots, primates, bees.
But if you turn those sounds into a physical solid, you freeze
their rate of mutation to something that outlasts the creatures carrying them.
Spoken language mutates so fast that we can barely understand Shakespeare, and
he was speaking English only 500 years ago, only 25 human generations ago.
That's low-fidelity.
But writing is
high-fidelity. It can therefore act as a replicator, and if it IS a
replicator, we should see that it confers an explosive evolutionary advantage.
And that's what we see. Writing has enabled human beings to become something
that now is capable of evolving at a rate thousands or millions of times faster
than any other genetic organisms, whether we're talking about genetic
evolution, or cultural, or phenotypical. We're even able to translate
DNA/RNA codes into this new format, so that they can be copied at the speed of
light, sent to the other side of the planet at the speed of light, and so on.
We're now feeding DNA/RNA via language into our imaginations/reason, so that we
can sort among genetic life's infinite possibilities millions of times faster,
and trillions of times more humanely, than does natural genetic selection. We
might not even be able to recognize the bodily form we take just 100 years from
now. And it is hard to imagine a more mind-boggling evolutionary leap
than that.
Selected and
edited from – quoraDOTcom, 27 August 2015
** **
2037
hours. The writer, Jason Coston, is full of passion about his response to the
question: What were the greatest (both well and least understood) leaps in
evolution? I like the writer for this, but what is more important to me
presently is that he summarizes the way life is and how we fit in it from a
natural perspective. I like his use of reason and imaginatively simple string of
concepts leading from A to B.
You also share your passions and reasoning in this blog.
Post. - Amorella
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