Richard Dawkins – The Genius of Darwin: 2

August 18th, 2008 · 1 comment or link to (permalink)

In this second part of the series Dawkins progresses from the origin of species to the descent of man and what we know today about its implications.

He points out that as a program for living Darwinism is usually abhorrent, but that from Social Darwinists to Libertarians, kin selection and the resultant emergence of altruism as a natural outcome, has been ignored.

His point about Enron is especially pertinent: by periodically culling the people who they believed were the bottom 15% of performers, they encouraged individual ruthlessness rather than team players who would benefit the company as a whole, at the expense of their individual performance. Enron’s selection methods were unnatural rather than natural, and open to error of judgment. Unnatural selection was well known to animal breeders, centuries before Darwinism, but Natural Selection is different, there is no purpose and therefore no possible ideological attachment.

(This is the first of 5 parts of the second program in the series)

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Richard Dawkins – The Genius of Charles Darwin

August 5th, 2008 · 4 comments or link to (permalink)

There should be plenty of things to watch about Darwin this year, as we mark 200 years since his birth, and 50 since the law (in the traditional sense) of Evolution by Natural Selection was first presented.

This is the first in a 3 part series, presented by Dawkins, with the following parts being shown on Channel 4 in the UK, next, and the following Monday.

Running time: 48 mins.

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Oliver Sacks, Rage for Order

July 24th, 2008 · comment or link to (permalink)

Part of a series called “Mind Traveller”, the celebrated author and neurologist, Oliver Sacks looks at autism.

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Absolute Zero – The Conquest of Cold

April 30th, 2008 · 2 comments or link to (permalink)

The first in a 2 part series that takes the theme of conquering cold, as the premise for human progress.

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John Maynard Smith – Royal Institution Discourse on “The Origin of Life”.

April 28th, 2008 · 2 comments or link to (permalink)

Here, the late, great, Maynard Smith talks about what it means to say something is living. Like many virtuosos, he makes something difficult seem simple, with utterly clear explanations – the lecture is a small masterpiece.

He considers that what some biologists (such as Stuart Kauffman) define as life i.e. self reproducing things that metabolize, does not differentiate between life and something like a flame and that we must always add heredity (of infinite possible variety) to account for what we consider to be truly alive.

This leads to life as seen from an information perspective i.e how we transmit information between generations, and he outlines 9 milestones in the evolution of life from this vantage point, from replicating molecules to electronic information communication.

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