The end of Intellectual Property

Posted on May 22, 2009

This is great.

Why Accountants are Dull and Guitarists are Glamorous – The End of Intellectual Property

by Adrian Bowyer

Go up to a stranger in the street and ask them to give you the keys to their car, and you will receive an abrupt and unhelpful reply. Go up to a stranger in the street and ask them to give you their most interesting idea, and fifteen minutes later you will be glancing at your watch and inventing fictitious dentist’s appointments.

This prompts a profound biological question: if information is such valuable property, what is the Darwinian selective advantage in the ubiquitous impulse to give it away?

The answer was worked out a few years ago by the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller. He realised that the human mind did not just evolve as a problem-solving device, it also evolved by sexual selection – like the peacock’s tail – to waste resources in a way that cannot be faked. Peahens admire peacocks with fancy tails, because those peacocks are strong enough to waste the resources needed to grow the tail and to drag it about. That peacock has good genes for strength, growth, and endurance, and so is worth mating with.

Parts of the human mind are for wasting glucose in a way that cannot be faked. Your brain dumps about 20% of your body’s energy budget out of your head every second of your life. You cannot pretend to paint a picture well, or pretend to write a quatrain of iambic pentameters well – you cannot pretend to be witty. You need to waste real glucose to do those things, all of which have no utilitarian value.

“But hang on,” you say. “If that were so, then you would expect only men to be talented, because sexual selection works through the power of female choice selecting the best males. But everyone except the most unreconstructed chauvinist can see that women are as clever as men.”

True, normally: it is the peacocks that have to drag around the tail and the stags that have to hold the antlers aloft. But, to choose between them, peahens and hinds just need good eyesight, whereas the only way for a woman to judge if a man is clever is for her to be equally clever herself – the transmitting device and the receiving device are the same: their minds. That is why the most important four letters in lonely-hearts columns are GSOH, why musicians, painters, authors, and actors (who all do nothing actually useful, and so who waste great mental energy) are so attractive to the opposite sex, why bank managers, engineers and computer programmers (who don’t waste their intellect, but use it for gainful things) are considered geeky and unattractive, and why we all want to tell people any inspired idea as soon as it comes into our head. Showing off cleverness by frittering it away is one of the main things our brains are for.

Read the full article at http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/EndOfIntellectualProperty?skin=print.pattern

Music and Spirituality

Posted on April 16, 2009

I got this email in my inbox today:

Your Name	Justin St. Vincent
Your email address	——-@xtrememusic.org
Subject:	Emcee Lynx: Music/Spirituality Interview
Message:	Dear Emcee Lynx, I hope all is well – my name is Justin St. Vincent, Editor of Xtreme Music, and a new and exciting series exploring “The Spiritual Significance of Music”. I’d love the opportunity for you to e-mail your response, around 200+ words, to the question: “What do you believe is the spiritual significance of music?” For more information and a preview of this online portfolio, please feel free to explore Xtreme Music: where music meets spirituality: www.xtrememusic.org Blessings and Best Regards, Justin St. Vincent Xtreme Music ———@xtrememusic.org

So I went and took a look at his website.  Apparently he’s going through and systematically contacting as wide a range of musicians as he can in one genre at a time, asking them all the same question, and then posting al their responses.  I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that there’s a sort of general Christian slant to his project, at least Christian Musicians were one of the first groups he did an interview set on, but I figured it doesn’t take long to write a short article like what he asked for and – worst case scenario – I get a post for this blog out of it, so I might as well put something together.

Here’s what i came up with:

Read more

Happy Darwin Day

Posted on February 14, 2009

The Egalitarian Revolution

Posted on October 3, 2008

An interesting article on the evolution of inteligence and it’s impacts on Hierarchy vs. Egalitarianism in early human societies.

… great apes’ societies are very hierarchical with each animal occupying a particular place in the existing dominance hierarchy. A major function of coalitions in apes is to maintain or change the dominance ranking. When an alpha male is well established, he usually can intimidate any hostile coalition or the entire community.

In sharp contrast, most known hunter-gatherer societies are egalitarian. Their weak leaders merely assist a consensus-seeking process when the group needs to make decisions, but otherwise all main political actors behave as equal. Some anthropologists argue that in egalitarian societies the pyramid of power is turned upside down with potential subordinates being able to express dominance over potential alpha-individuals by creating large, group-wide political alliance.

What were the reasons for such a drastic change in the group’s social organization during the origin of our own “uniquely unique” species? Some evolutionary biologists theorize that at some point in the Pleistocene, humans reached a level of ecological dominance that dramatically transformed the natural selection landscape. Instead of traditional “hostile forces of nature”, the competitive interactions among members of the same group became the most dominant evolutionary factor. According to this still controversial view, known as the “social brain” or “Machiavellian intelligence” hypothesis, more intelligent individuals were able to take advantage of other members of their group, achieve higher social status, and leave more offspring who inherited their parent’s genes for larger brain size and intelligence. As a result of this runaway process, the average brain size and intelligence were increasing [sic] across the whole human lineage.

Also increasing were the abilities to keep track of within-group social interactions, to remember friends and their allies and enemies, and to attract and use allies. At some point, physically weaker members of the group started forming successful and stable large coalitions against strong individuals who otherwise would achieve alpha-status and usurp the majority of the crucial resources. Eventually, an egalitarian society was established.

from Eureka Alert

And, for all my poli-sci nerds, here’s the link to the original studfy that the article is about: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0003293.

As Old as Song

Posted on July 9, 2008

Saw this article and thought it was pretty cool.  check it out.

Ancient hunters painted the sections of their cave dwellings where singing, humming and music sounded best, a new study suggests.

Analyzing the famous, ochre-splashed cave walls of France, the most densely painted areas were also those with the best acoustics, the scientists found. Humming into some bends in the wall even produced sounds mimicking the animals painted there.

…

Because Paleolithic humans had a deep connection with the melodic properties that helped them navigate in a cave, they likely celebrated the unique acoustics by singing in conjunction with their painting sessions.

“Why would the Paleolithic tribes choose preferably resonant locations for painting,” he said, “if it were not for making sounds and singing in some kind of ritual celebrations related with the pictures?”

The phenomenon isn’t limited to the interior of caves, etiher. Studies have been done at some outdoor Paleolithic sites in France and Finland, and the sound-painting connection is also strong, Reznikoff said.

Full article at LiveScience.

Now that’s cool.