Barricelli presented a bold challenge to the standard Darwinian model of evolution by competition by demonstrating that organisms evolved by symbiosis and cooperation.
Somehow I thought symbiosis and cooperation was the accepted model, and competition was just a cultural projection. No?
While the mainstream view is evolving (ha..), the selectionist (competition-centric) view has been largely dominant in biological thinking (e.g. Richard Dawkins). It is giving way to a more balanced view of how natural evolution produces innovation.
For example, researchers like Gould stress non-competitive forces like the role of historical contingency, and exaptation [0]. Margulis, who was mentioned in the article, had a theory that much complexity in cells was accumulated through symbiosis -- a theory that was radical when first introduced but was later validated [1]. In effect, one cell would engulf another, but instead of eating the other cell, they would co-evolve together; for example, the mitochondria (cellular power plant) is thought to have arisen from such an event (it has its own DNA).
You are probably not seeing this but your point needs refutation.
Dawkins model(not his actually but he presented to general public) was not competition-centric. Main idea was gene centric view of life. Competition, cooperation, symbiosis etc all were explained from the genes point of view. The thing to note is, even when we see apparent 'cooperation' between species, at the genes level there is a competition with other gene pools. So the non-competitive forces look so on the surface, but the only thing genes care about is moving on to the next generations and spreading as much copies as possible even if that happens with symbiosis.
Gould on the other hand, was not happy with this selfish view of life(everyone says he had Marxist ideologies which made him a bit bias). He thought of selection as happening at multiple levels, not just limited at genes but also species and individual. This was the main controversy between him and dawkins.
So, to reply to GPs query, yes that quote is sort of incorrect since everyone agreed that cooperation and symbiosis(Darwin too) are very much part of evolution.
I will grant that the first form is clearly [0, 1, 2], while the second form could be construed as [0, [1, 2]].
HOWEVER, given that there is no "and" between 0 & 1, and that 1 & 2 are not like things, I believe most readers will naturally interpret the list as [0, 1, 2] and not [0, [1, 2]]. There are enough other cues that risk of misinterpretation is very low. Anyone who does interpret as [0, [1, 2]] is probably being willfully obtuse.
I'm glad I experienced the old internet back in its heyday, when high quality sites linked to other high quality sites, and Google exposed this natural topology for all to explore. Google's success eventually led to the end of the old internet: AdSense captured its value and then SEO perverted it with noise.
I expect within 5 years some crotchety old programmer will have build a search engine that penalizes sites for anything more than basic markup. No JS, no CSS, no hints of a CMS. Maybe it's already been done. "Old Skool Search"
And it will still be a poor imitation, because if there is one thing you can't recreate and experience for yourself, it is an internet gone by.
I sincerely believe we need two Internets, or we need two Googles.
We need what started with ARPANET, but this time never let it commercialise. PageRank works for that network.
We also need the commercial network that works like a better Yellow Pages but actually gives valuable local focused information on businesses and services that can't be gamed and has different rules.
Trying to apply the same ranking rules to both types of searches pollutes the academic and destroys every local small business who are unlucky enough to not make it to the magic first page - because nothing else counts and the winner takes all.
Google has taken on a lot of responsibility dictating what they think we are looking for and they are failing us (and especially small business) big time. Maybe they are thinking about this? Maybe Google Local will factor more than PageRank for commercial. Maybe they will change the layout so more than 10 lucky links get to page one and you never get to have multiple listings for the same company. But right now it is bad and only getting worse.
And with nobody having to worry about surviving without a job, it also frees up many people to explore ideas they otherwise would never have had time for.
Well, even universal healthcare would have this same effect in America. There would be a veritable Cambrian explosion as hundreds of thousands of people quit their jobs and started doing something interesting, something they cared about. A lot of these interests would turn into businesses and we would all be far the richer for it, never mind the 50% taxes.
It still provides some of the same ergonomics. You can put away the mental cheat-sheet ("1: gold, 2: silver...."). Your IDE can find all uses of BookTypeId.Gold(), rather than textual occurrences of "1". Etc.
The static quality of enums is only one of their features, and sometimes a hindrance, and it good to have other options.
sure, but I can't see how this is supposed to increase discoverability of the API...
I see "here is something that looks like an enum, and its possible values are gold, silver and bronze. But you can also give 10, 42 or any number as a value and it will still work".
I don't mean to be overly critical (clearly this approach has worked well for the author), but I am a bit unsure about the perceived benefits.
Not sure what the point of the implicit operator overloads was.
I assume he didn't want to change the signature of the constructor for whatever reason, but still provide a small measure of discoverability (and tractability). Such things do happen.
In that case, I might have used an enum plus a second constructor to wrap the explicit conversation. Maybe that didn't occur to him, or maybe he had other constraints.
Moreover, if a researcher shows up in a village offering cash, on the condition that player two doesn't refuse the split:
a) the villagers know each other.
b) the researcher is the stranger.
those are the teams, researcher vs players, not player one vs player two. when would it make sense to refuse the split, punish a neighbor, and let the stranger keep his money? never.
Inflammation is rooted in acidity and promotes infection.
Do you have any more on this? I have stumbled across the notion before. Someone typically counters with "but the body maintains a constant pH" and the conversation dissolves.
I dismantled my website due to ugly public attacks and moved it twice. I kept the info but it is currently not published.
The body does not maintain a constant ph. The body maintains the BLOOD at a very narrow range of ph because if your blood leaves that very narrow range of ph, you die. But if you watch crap about dinosaurs and stuff, you learn that not only are bones necessary to support your mass when you leave the ocean, they are necessary to mediate your blood ph. You can have sharks and invertebrates in the ocean because the mineralized sea water maintains their blood balance. When you leave the ocean, your body strips the bones of calcium to maintain blood ph when the body is in crisis. This is consistent with the fact that my condition is known to promote acidity of the tissues and also known to cause early onset osteoporosis, as early as the teens.
If you develop acute acidosis (example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetic_Ketoacidosis), they hospitalize you because you can die within 72 hours if it is not successfully treated. But then for my condition, they don't even treat the acidosis that they know it causes.
So whoever told you the body maintains a constant ph is full of shit. It isn't true. The body maintains a constant blood ph, a very different answer. I think blood tests are likely not a very good indicator of subtle or early problems because your body places a real high priority on keeping your blood in homeostasis in order to not die. I suspect we would really need to do tissue samples to genuinely track some things in a meaningful way. So I tracked things symptomatically since a lot of the tests the doctors ran said there was "nothing wrong with me" yet I was dying.
Feel free to email me if you want to discuss it further.
That's an interesting piece. You can see how some lines of thought have become verboten in respectable society. This era might be considered the Rise of Fear and the Return of Authority.
It also seems to me as if having to switch to the other side of the street or by having to circumvent a dangerous block as some form of coercion resulting from a very inconsiderate and self-serving illusion that everybody starts life with a similarly equivalent set of cards.
Can you elaborate on the first part? I'm not sure I understand what you mean.
The point I was trying to make was essentially that it seems logical to me that a higher crime rate can be connected to substantial inequalities in terms of opportunities / wealth.
Having to switch to the other side of the street or having to circumvent a dangerous block is a loss of freedom, a kind of coercion born of inequality, normalized by the very inconsiderate and self-serving illusion that everybody starts life with a similarly equivalent set of cards.
Somehow I thought symbiosis and cooperation was the accepted model, and competition was just a cultural projection. No?