"People like to think of modern human biology, and especially mental biology, as being the result of selections that took place 100,000 years ago," said University of Chicago geneticist Bruce Lahn. "But our research shows that humans are still under selection, not just for things like disease resistance but for cognitive abilities."

Lahn recently published the results of a study demonstrating that two key genes connected to brain size are currently under rapid selection in populations throughout the globe.

Some radical thinkers suggest human evolution needs to move even faster, with a little help from science.

"Biological evolution is too slow for the human species," said Ray Kurzweil, futurist and author of The Singularity Is Near. "Over the next few decades, it's going to be left in the dust." READ ALL

 

via anomalist

                                                                             The Laws of Simplicity (via  bifurcated rivets)

 

 

 
photographs by Candida Höfer. Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek Wien X, 2003 (via thenonist)

 

by Nita L. Sturiale

Nature is a continuous transformation of energy, from galactic motion to starlight to tree to seasonal cycles to human to idea. Though genes and culture are intimately linked the rate at which they each evolve is different. Though culture changes very quickly it is limited by the inherent abilities of brains. The interaction between individual brains and cultural information is a dynamic system of transformation and change. This continuous system moves with wavelike patterns.

/\ Slice from large-scale map of known Universe by M. Geller and J. Huchra
- dots indicate galaxies.Every organism is a living map of time and interaction in nature.

Every artwork and sciencework is a physical record of memories, ideas and information. They are also maps of the human brain.

Anything that records an interaction, the movement of one thing through another, can be considered a map. The neuronal connections that represent the growth and learning one has experienced throughout life, a series of stroboscopic photographs of a milk drop falling through air, the path of ones footsteps through a park, each is a map of interaction. As the cut marks of a figure skater's path through ice store information about the speed, direction and weight of the body, a map stores information about its creator. Maps are the external storage of memories. These external databases enable an organism to compare past and distant events with present ones. In the case of land maps, users can locate where they are now, where they have been and where they might want to go. Brain maps can be images of the physical structures of the brain as well as show complicated interconnections of an individual brain's neuronal pathways.>>

call me childish, an escapist, but i would love to beleive in IT:

 

You are extremely bad both at judging how happy that thing with make you, and how long the happiness you do get will last.

 

How we forecast our feelings, and whether those predictions match our future emotional states, had never been the stuff of laboratory research.

 

 via itchyrobot

So many assumptions and theories and visionary that has to do with the our planet, with our future, here are some illustrative ones.

 

A historical timeline that steps into the future:

 

 

 via thingsmagazine

 

 

 

via rodcorp

 

 

"Computers have made it possible to explore the consequences of relatively simple interactions of relatively simple things in a way never before possible ... this new capability for observations makes possible significant insights into phenomena long felt to be complex for serious analysis." - Insights ...

 

So, why won't we check it on SEX?

 

 

A biologist of University of Houston, Ricardo Azevedo created a computer model of genetic interactions to study the evolution of a simple organism under several sets of conditions. He explains the evolutionary advantage of sex, and why we're not all asexual clones. read all

Where:

E, the multiplier, is the emotion/enthusiasm with which we live.
M means maintenance or attention to detail. See the tree and not the forest. Focus on the essential and not on the important.
B is for the quest for happiness. The quest and the anticipation bring more happiness than the attainment in itself.
P stands for Personal Relationships (a whole book could be devoted to this theme and I doubt the equation would be as simple ;-)

R stands for the reducing factors:
- Not being able to "unlearn" or not being able of getting rid of pre-concepts.
- Basing decision on the group's memory instead of one's experience.
- Interfering with automated psychological processes, trying to manipulate the feelings and reactions.
- Having fear.

C stands for genetic and other inherited factors.

"The human brain faces a challenging future. To cope with accelerating nanotech- and biotech-based developments in an increasingly complex world, compete with emerging superintelligence, and maintain its performance and sustainability as people live longer, the fragile human brain will need major enhancements: a backup system, eliminating degenerative processes, direct mind-linkup to ubiquitous computing networks, error-correction for memory, and a global Net connection with remote neural access."

"...the brain needs to accelerate with the rate of technological change, as our vision and audition have through innovative corrective technologies, and our arms and legs have with robotic prosthetics, and as other parts of our bodies have transformed and renewed in working together to keep us alive..."

(via)  Go (PDF files)

In his Doors of Perception Aldous Huxley proposes that our capacity to reason and even our senses are governed by mental patterns, perceptual sets, that determine the limits of what the mind can conceive. The mind uses a taxonomy--a set of categories--into which it squashes the somewhat messier occurences of life, that not only shapes what we think but what we can think. via Brain Clouds

 

John Armstrong's sais:

In one of his more memorable --- but typically obscure--- formulations, Hegel writes that: 'The owl of Minerva spreads her wings only at dusk.' What is the thought behind this poetic image, an image which is supposed to communicate something important about the nature of philosophy? Hegel was obsessed by one of the big problems of thinking and, by extension, of writing. The 'owl of Minerva' stands for the process of understanding. So, he says, we begin to understand what it is we are interested in only as we approach the end of our inquiry.

This is to contradict one of the most beguiling ideals of philosophy. Couldn't we start with absolutely clear and precise propositions ----as Descartes did when he tried to deduce every important truth from the simplest and clearest of starting points: 'I think, therefore I am'? To apply the point locally: couldn't we first of all say what beauty is and then move on to a discussion of its significance?.

Less idealistic, Hegel's point reflects a painful fact. We start in confusion, so we cannot immediately come up with the right definitions. Sadly, knowing where to start is something we only really see afterwards ---when, of course, it is too late. It is only at dusk that we become wise ----by which time we have already had to endure our own midday follies.

 The Secret Power of Beauty (About Aesthetic Concepts)

via junk for code

 

Beneath the level of culture there is lurking this erotic, time-and-space-bound, feeling-defined, pre-linguistic mode of being, which is real being. Terence McKenna via random walks

an interview with Edward O. Wilson at  meaning of life tv (which  has lots of great interviews).

I loved the interview with Joseph Goldstein, a Buddhist, co founder of the Insight Meditation Society

 

 

At the meaningoflife.tv, there are many more interesting broadcast over topics, such as:

Is mysticism an enemy of rationalism?, Is consciousness a mystery?

Does mind pervade the universe? what is god?

via The Daily Transcript

“Between the expressions of laughter and weeping there is no difference in the motion of the features,” Leonardo da Vinci  wrote in his posthumously published Treatise on Painting, “either in the eyes, mouth or cheeks.”

 

With the difference between the physical expression of emotions so subtle, artists had a challenge on their hands: How to differentially depict, in the words of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the “frantic joy of a Bacchante and the grief of a Mary Magdalen”?

 

 

 

In the history of art there are very few images of people laughing.

Nearly half a millennium after Leonardo, contemporary scientists have discovered a neurological explanation for the affinity between physical expressions and emotional sensations of joy and grief.

Charles Darwin notably fused the two approaches, using the art of photography to further his scientific inquiry. In order to formulate The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) with scientific veracity, Darwin broke with both schematic artistic representations of the passions and aristocratic conventions preventing extreme displays of emotion. He hoped to use photography to portray emotional subtleties – like the close similarity between the laughing and crying face – with a renewed realism.

Darwin described the spasms a laughing fit provoked, which would have rendered any photograph a blur: “During excessive laughter the whole body is often thrown backward and shakes, or is almost convulsed. The respiration is much disturbed; the head and face become gorged with blood, with the veins distended; and the orbicular muscles are spasmodically contracted in order to protect the eyes. Tears are freely shed,” he noted, appending a key observation, “Hence . . . it is scarcely possible to point out any difference between the tear-stained face of a person after a paroxysm of excessive laughter and after a bitter crying-fit”.

Darwin found a ready-made solution to the problem of how to capture raw expression in a set of extraordinary pictures taken by the French doctor Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne and reproduced in his book, Mécanismes de la physiognomie humaine (1862). ...

Why would the uncanny similarity between the expressions of laughter and crying have so intrigued Darwin? In short, it helped confirm his theory of evolution. Darwin thought that monkeys, like humans, laughed... Along the way, however, Darwin noted that apes didn’t shed any tears when they laughed. ...

Over last few years, surgeons and scientists, dealing with people who suffer for instence: epilepcy  and Parkinson, have most probably made new discoveries: or what they called the “laughter center,” a piece of the brain roughly one inch square, in which our sense of humor seems to be located. and the “crying center,” source of all our misery and grief. It turns out these points abut each other in the left-frontal lobe of the brain, and their close proximity provided neuroscientists with a clue as to why laughing and crying are so interconnected. Read all

 

 

Happiness,  is not a feeling or an experience, it is an ethical state of being. It means judging that you have made the right choices and done the right things, and enjoyed a measure of luck along the way. Where and when you are born, how the play of daily contingency affects you, do not determine your happiness, but they do constrain it. And so it often seems as though the choices of everyday life, cosmically small though they are, matter far more than events in distant capitals and war zones.   

But here is the key point. You must live your entire life with honour and commitment. You must try to build something larger than yourself: a community of citizens, a community of reason, a just and peaceful world. You may be defeated, because violence, arrogance and unreason are powerful forces in history. But that does not diminish your responsibility" Aristotle

via something beautiful