Posts Tagged ‘Copernicus’
“Everybody wants to save the Earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes”*…
Adam Smith once famously observed…
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.
– Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759
He is a member of a stream of observers of the human condition, stretching back to the ancient Greeks, who believe that an innate goodness is at work in us all. But is it so?
Behavioral economists have revolutionized the standard view of human nature. No longer are people presumed to be purely selfish, only acting in their own interest. Hundreds of experiments appear to show that most people are pro-social, preferring to sacrifice their own success in order to benefit others. That’s altruism.
If the interpretations of these experiments are true, then we have to rip up the textbooks for both economics and evolutionary biology! Economic and evolutionary models assume that individuals only act unselfishly when they stand to benefit some way. Yet humans appear to be unique in the animal kingdom as experiments suggest they willingly sacrifice their own success on behalf of strangers they will never meet. These results have led researchers to look for the evolutionary precursors of such exceptional altruism by also running these kinds of experiments with non-human primates.
But are these altruism experiments really evidence of humans being special? Our new study says probably not…
Read more– and draw your own conclusion– at “Does behavioral economics show people are altruistic or just confused?”
[TotH to Mark Stahlman]
* P.J. O’Rourke
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As we calculate the angles, we might spare a thought for Johannes Schöner; this is both his birthday (1477) and the anniversary of his death (1547). A priest, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, cosmographer, cartographer, mathematician, globe and scientific instrument maker, and editor and publisher of scientific texts, he is probably best remembered today (and was renowned in his own tine) as a pioneering maker of globes. In 1515 he created one of the earliest surviving globes produced following the discovery of new lands by Christopher Columbus. It was the first to show the name “America” that had been suggested by Waldseemüller– and tantalizingly, it depicts a passage around South America before it was recorded as having been discovered by Magellan. In his roles as professor and academic publisher, he played a significant part in the events that led up to the publishing of Copernicus’ epoch-making “De revolutionibus” in Nürnberg in 1543.
Move over, Magic Eight Ball…
As the salaries, bonuses , and options packages of America’s corporate elite continue to rise, so does their responsibility to arm themselves with the most advanced decision technology. Those sighs of relief one can hear from behind the doors of C suites and executive washrooms? They’re the bosses’ relieved reaction to Thinkgeek’s new Schrödinger’s Cat Executive Decision Maker:
When decisions need to be made, sometimes there isn’t a right choice. Hire Bob or Bob? Order pizza or Chinese? Give up your free will to the Schrödinger’s Cat Executive Decision Maker.
To use the Schrödinger’s Cat Executive Decision Maker:
– Ask your question. Any question that can be answered in a binary fashion will do. The cat is extremely bored in the box and will listen to whatever you say. It is open to questions of an executive, legislative, or personal nature. You’ll never know the answer if you don’t ask.
– Slide open the door. At this point, the magic will happen and you’ll see the cat flashing in flux between life and death. You’ll either find this disturbing or intensely magical. We won’t pass judgement on your character based on your reaction, we promise.
– See your decision solidify before you. The cat will be alive (which we interpret as a “Yes”) or dead (or “No”). The almighty Schrödinger’s Cat Executive Decision Maker has spoken. Go and do its bidding. Meow.
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As we get cozy with uncertainty, we might recall that it was on this date in 1616 that Cardinal Roberto Francesco Romolo Bellarmino decreed that Copernican theory is “false and erroneous.” It was this decree that Galileo violated, for which he was tried and put under house arrest for the last eight years of his life. Bellarmino was canonized in 1930.
San Roberto (source)
Meet a Beatle…
As a service to bewildered younger viewers of the recent Grammy Awards show, the History Channel and Twitter combined (under the auspices of Funny or Die) to produce the helpful documentary, Who is Paul McCartney?
As we say, “oh yeah (yeah yeah),” we might send heavenly birthday greetings to Renaissance astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus; he was born on this date in 1473. Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres; published just before his death in 1543), with its heliocentric account of the solar system, is often regarded as the beginning both of modern astronomy and of the scientific revolution.
Of all discoveries and opinions, none may have exerted a greater effect on the human spirit than the doctrine of Copernicus. The world had scarcely become known as round and complete in itself when it was asked to waive the tremendous privilege of being the center of the universe. Never, perhaps, was a greater demand made on mankind – for by this admission so many things vanished in mist and smoke! What became of our Eden, our world of innocence, piety and poetry; the testimony of the senses; the conviction of a poetic – religious faith? No wonder his contemporaries did not wish to let all this go and offered every possible resistance to a doctrine which in its converts authorized and demanded a freedom of view and greatness of thought so far unknown, indeed not even dreamed of.
– Goethe
Copernicus (source)
The pursuit of the hirsute…
From the doers…
…to the done…
… it’s all at The Hair Hall of Fame.
As we let it all go to our heads, we might wish a mystically happy birthday to mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, alchemist/occultist, navigator, and champion of English expansionism John Dee; he was born on this date in 1527. Widely regarded as the smartest man and/or most powerful magician in the Europe of his time, Dee was an intimate advisor to Queen Elizabeth I and her closest ministers. But Dee, a student of Copernicus and a friend of Tycho Brahe, was also a serious scholar (his library was the largest in England, perhaps in Europe) and one of the most learned men of his day– a central figure in the development of modern science… and underneath that cap, he had a killer head of hair.
Atavistic Tendencies: what’s old is new…
A team of astrobiologists, working with a a group of oncologists, has suggested that cancer resembles ancient forms of life that flourished between 600 million and 1 billion years ago. The genes that controlled the behavior of these early multicellular organisms still reside in our own cells, managed by more recent genes that keep them in check. It’s when these newer “control genes” fail that the older mechanisms take over, the cell reverts to its earlier behaviors– and cancer does its growing-out-of-control damage.
Reporting in the journal Physical Biology, Paul Davies and and Charles Lineweaver explain
“Advanced” metazoan life of the form we now know, i.e. organisms with cell specialization and organ differentiation, was preceded by colonies of eukaryotic cells in which cellular cooperation was fairly rudimentary, consisting of networks of adhering cells exchanging information chemically, and forming self-organized assemblages with only a moderate division of labor…
So, they suggest, cancer isn’t an attack of “rogue cells,” evolving quickly to overpower normal biological-metabolic routines; it’s a kind of atavism, a throwback… In conversation with Life Scientist, Lineweaver elaborates
Unlike bacteria and viruses, cancer has not developed the capacity to evolve into new forms. In fact, cancer is better understood as the reversion of cells to the way they behaved a little over one billion years ago, when[life was] nothing more than loose-knit colonies of only partially differentiated cells.
We think that the tumors that develop in cancer patients today take the same form as these simple cellular structures did more than a billion years ago…
The explanation makes a powerful kind of sense, at least at a systemic level: cancers occur in virtually all metazoans (with the exception of the altogether weird naked mole rat). As Davies and Lineweaver note, “This quasi-ubiquity suggests that the mechanisms of cancer are deep-rooted in evolutionary history, a conjecture that receives support from both paleontology and genetics.”
The good news, Life Scientist observes, is that this means combating cancer is not necessarily as complex as if the cancers were rogue cells evolving new and novel defence mechanisms within the body.
Instead, because cancers fall back on the same evolved mechanisms that were used by early life, we can expect them to remain predictable, thus if they’re susceptible to treatment, it’s unlikely they’ll evolve new ways to get around it.
“Given cancer’s formidable complexity and diversity, how might one make progress toward controlling it? If the atavism hypothesis is correct, there are new reasons for optimism,” [Davies and Lineweaver] write.
[TotH to slashdot]
As we resist the impulse, remembering that there are other good reasons not to smoke, we might recall spare a thought for Giordano Bruno, the Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer whose concept of the infinite universe expanded on Copernicus’s model; he was the first European to understand the universe as a continuum where the stars we see at night are identical in nature to the Sun. Bruno’s views were considered dangerously heretical by the (Roman) Inquisition, which imprisoned him in 1592; after eight years of refusals to recant, on this date in 1600, he was burned at the stake.
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