The rise in eczema, or asthma, or the general return of infectious disease, reminds one that though we live in a post-Malthusian Age generally, many of the truths of earlier times hold. While with physical technology we can rest assured that the feature-set and power will increase monotonically over time as if it is a natural law, biological or social processes are much more halting and subject to reverse. I recall several years ago that some steakhouses were heartened, so to speak, about the widespread usage of statins, since they assumed that this would result in greater comfort with eating red meat in the population.
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On the 31st of October we will officially reach 7 billion people on the earth. Over the next week or two we'll be talking a lot about population issues, and I wanted to start by doing a light revision of an article I wrote some years ago about a concept a lot of people don't grasp very well - the…
The moulding of senescence by natural selection is not one of William D. Hamilton's favorite papers. In the biographical introduction he notes that both Peter Medawar & George C. Williams covered the same ground in the 1950s; a fact that he was not aware of by the time he had already invested a…
Update on paper access: You can get it here already.
Note: I'm going to put a link roundup (updated) at this post. End Note
Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution:
Genomic surveys in humans identify a large amount of recent positive selection. Using the 3.9-million HapMap SNP dataset, we…
While "flesh-eating infections" caused by the group A streptococcus (Streptococcus pyogenes) may grab more headlines today, one hundred and fifty years ago, the best known and most dreaded form of streptococcal infection was scarlet fever. Simply hearing the name of this disease, and knowing that…
"Natural law". Joke, right?
yeah, more of a metaphor. i didn't actually mean 'natural law' in the philosophical sense, but in the scientific sense; e.g., laws of thermodynamics. phenomena of such regularity or predictability that you rely on them even without deep understanding.
No, we can't. We started hitting the buffers years ago, which is why you can't buy a computer with a 5GHz processor. We've already had to start finessing to try and maintain the appearance of monotonically increasing power.