Evolution has generated two opposed modes for organisms to find fitness:
r-selection is about speed: rapid reproduction, fast growth, many offspring
K-selection is about carrying capacity: slow development, robust fitness, few offspring
What can we learn to harness both approaches in work and life?
“Stages of Evolution of Plant Species” , from the Whole Earth Catalog , Spring 1970.
On Kevin Kelly’s “Technium” and why human innovation is different than the biological variety.
An interesting visualization technique for showing lineage.
Map of humanmetabolic pathways.
(via @burny_tech)
Gordon Brander:
There is something powerful about this notion of possibility spaces, both from a theory standpoint, and as a way of seeing. It causes you to approach challenges in a different way. You don’t need to be creative. The creative breakthrough already exists out there in the space of possibility. It’s just waiting to be discovered.
An basic explanation of the evolutionary process.
Illustrations by naturalistErnst Haeckel.
From his collection Kunstformen der Natur.
David Deutsch's two enlightenments: the British vs. the Continental model.
Evolution is a roiling mess of substance and interaction. Order emerges from the stew. Fitness allowing one collection of chemicals to outlast another.
A true complex system is confounding and inscrutable, bucking attempts to make it legible, controllable. “Greatness cannot be planned”.
A gene pool is carved and whittled through generations of ancestral natural selection to fit [a particular] environment. In theory a knowledgeable zoologist, presented with the complete transcript of a genome [the set of all the genes of an organism], should be able to reconstruct the environmental circumstances that did the carving. In this sense the DNA is a coded description of ancestral environments.
—In The Living Wild , Art Wolfe (2000)
(from David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity)
The organism is a key to decoding its environment.
Environmental challenge + gradual adaptation + eons of time = magic.
The baron caterpillar. Nature finds a way.
We should be teaching the mechanisms of evolution.
Embracing, reusing, and remixing existing technologies to build new ones.
Raising less money, the many uses for a screwdriver, and the importance of relentless incremental progress.
Steve Stewart-Williams on kin selection and altruism.
How 'tinkering' improves robustness.
Spicy foods and evolution, Humboldt's maps, and picking apart income taxes.
A conversation between Bret Weinstein and Sam Harris on biology, culture, and religion.
