Thursday, March 8, 2012

Evolutionary Science


Science is basically awesome.  If you dispute this you might be part of the problem plaguing the United States what with the rampant anti-intellectualism being exploited by very mean politicians (the scarier premise is that they aren’t exploiting this and actually are stupid enough to label science and intellectual curiosity as not so important).  I’m not talking about the silliness of religious doctrine fighting science; that’s a whole different subject.  The simple way I’ve come to think of it as science equals the study of that which pertains to nature.  It is measurable and quantifiable.  There can be fundamental changes, indeed, it is imperative that there are changes when evidence proves a theory, law, or idea incorrect.  Philosophy = the discourse of the immeasurable.  Philosophy deals with idea of attempting to quantify things like beauty, truth, reality and worth.  By worth in this context I don’t mean something as petty as monetary value but of which is greater an ant or a man, why and how much.  Religion equals the discourse and study of that which is supernatural.  Supernatural pertaining to that which is both outside nature and both outside of measure.  Religion is in no way silly.  People tend to swing too far when regarding religion as purely bad and foolish or the other way as the only way of life and everything else as unimportant or of lesser worth.  You can argue that metaphysics as well is the study of supernatural but metaphysics is stupid.   Kidding.

But science is becoming less popular in this country and that saddens me.  Science kicks ass.  Example: science can help blow shit up.  As an American male it is my patriotic duty to enjoy and partake in shit blowing up.

With science being all super awesome and all it somewhat surprises me that there is something much more powerful and inventive.  The animal kingdom.  You don’t believe me?  That’s fine Kyle, you douche.  Where the hell do you think flight came from?  Obviously if you say the Wright Brothers you wouldn’t be incorrect as, you know, you’re factually correct.  But yeah, the idea for flight and quite a few of the principles, like drag (which was later co-opted by Monty Python), were borrowed from nature.  Nature, you know, that thing that science is supposed to quantify and study.  The animal kingdom is shockingly efficient.  It has to be or there would be more dead shit.  Man, I am not proud of that last sentence.  That whole evolution thing comes in.  With success meaning you get to pass on genes and failure meaning you don’t it forces change and innovation.

Fish have an involuntary reflex that forces them to dart away, “built-in reaction to danger called a C-start".  This has been exploited by a particular water snake with, horrifyingly enough, tentacles.  The fish move so quickly when this reflex is turned on you can’t properly react to it.  The snake reacts before the instinctual reflex.  It strikes to the area it expects the fish to be at later.  Slightly off topic, martial arts teaches you how to read an opponent.  It looks like you are proceeding the reaction when in fact you are reacting to an earlier action.  Let me explain.  When someone punches it doesn’t often start with your fist.  You arm moves but usually before that your knees settle.  But before your hands moves your shoulder and chest moves.  You can become intrinsically aware of this as this happens from being placed in this situation repeatedly.  Martial artists are probably not the sanest people for volunteering to be placed in these situations repeatedly.  It is never a secret that most martial arts’ classes someone’s fist is hurtling at you with the intention of knowledge.  Now I can’t help but imagine fists hurtling through bad anime speed lines implying impressive velocity while a muscle-head shouts “Knowledge!”  So this water snake somehow figured out that fish had this reflex.  Then figured out how to makes sure the fish utilizes this reflex.  Then they have to anticipate this reaction and know where to strike so the fish comes directly to their mouth.  That’s some terrifying shit.  Imagine that kind of immense intuitive powers used by a human.  It would probably be used for picking up women at clubs.

There truly is no better laboratory than nature.  Just imagine if we could properly mimic the abilities of animals with science.  Animals by sheer accident have discovered ways to insulate and waterproof themselves better than anything we have created.  Ask someone in Alaska whether they want gortex or fur lining.  The answer is not gortex.  Heck, we are just making ground into how bumblebees fly.  If you say with their wings so help me Kyle I will punch you in your fat little face.  But we tend to think narrowly on certain subjects, like flight, and only talk to lift, drag and other elements when we don’t talk to other thing like you know the speed of the wings flapping.  Supposedly the honey bee flaps its wings faster than insects and eight of its size.  The size comes into play with aerodynamics as smaller insects tend to need to increase their flapping speed to fly.


Or a bit of simpler answer here:
“There is an old saying: 'The bumble bee is too heavy to fly, but no-one told the bee'. This was strengthened when early aeronautical engineers calculated the lift from a bumble bee's wings and said it was less than the bee's weight. They had made the mistake of treating the wing as a simple aerofoil. 
It was quite a few years before the real truth was found. As the bee flies, the downstrokes of the wing generate vortices above the wings. These create several times more lift than a simple aerofoil, more than enough for the bee to fly.”

This problem being solved significantly later than the posit was first… posed… poses… some questions of its own.  Like what the fuck were these scientists thinking?  But I guess that is what happens where a engineer that designs airfoils looks at bugs.  People get confused.  But why don’t we take more cues from the Animal kingdom.  Why not really set up experiments that force animals to adapt over time.  Get a species with a short lifespan that populates rapidly and force some tasks upon it to see if nature can create a better solution than traditional science.  Then reverse engineer the shit out of it.  We seem to be great at reverse engineering.  You should see the kind of stuff people can do when they hack into a Kinect.  They get it to fly helicopters and sense surrounding.  Like some sentient Skynet kind of nonsense.

Right now we seem to be merely happy playing around with spider silk and turning it into violin strings.

Not that isn’t cool but I’m more hoping for fucking ant armor.  Ants are god damn terrifying as a species.  Seriously we’re lucky ants haven’t decided they want us gone.  Because it is entirely possible they would either win that fight or cripple humanity.  Or picking up from the dubious science of Deep Blue Sea sharks have an amazing immune system.  I would say never to pay attention to any movie where Sam Jackson dies but that would eliminate Goodfellas so I’ll just say Deep Blue Sea was maybe better than G.I. Joe but not by that much (the lack of ninjas skews the quantifying).  You might mention that there are no sick sharks or sharks with cancer and it’s not due to their daily affirmations, which, I’m assuming, would go something like “I’m a fucking shark, today is going to kick ass.  Man, I feel bad for whatever I’m going to eat today.”

We have beloved superheroes whose only powers are being ‘like’ a spider.  Spiders are nature’s way of making sure we don’t get too uppity and that nature is supplied with a  constant stream of fear juice from our collective nightmares.  And Peter Parker only has some of the powers of spiders.  If he had some of those other abilities he would be way more badass.  But then they they’d just retcon that shit, again, because, hey, let’s have him be a whiny bitch forever and ignore character growth.

My proposition is to alter the game nature has created.  Normally the winning scenario in nature is living and passing on your DNA.  You have to compete against members of your species for mating and also the whole not getting eating thing and the not starving thing.  We simply change the things that get in the way of living and mating.  Instead of predators and mating display we separate the two sexes by a wall.  Only the animal that develop a method for getting through survive.  So they ones who can burrow the best of saw through the structure pass on DNA.  Keep this up and you have super moles.  We can then study these awesome new powers.  But hopefully scientist can think of something better than a wall separating mating pairs and super mol powers.

Most sciences could stand to pay more attention to animals and their evolutionary powers.  But don’t let logic get in the way of more important scientific breakthroughs like boner pills or something.

Ben

1 comment:

Thanks for posting. You are awesome!