Scientifica

2. Fat tails vs normal distribution- you will never meet a man 10x in height. But you will meet a man 1000x in wealth frequently. Wealth is a fat tail. Unlikely events are more likely.

3. Pleasure is in the anticipation of reward.

This is a small extract of the evolution of the Earth as learned from Robert Hazen's book :


1. Formation of the Earth - Sun formed and then the rest of the debris formed the planets. Even today 99%+ mass of the solar system is concentrated in the Sun. The first four planets are the rocky planets and the rest are made of Gas.


2. The swirling debris first coalesced into planetesimals and the planets started forming with massive impacts.

3. The interesting thing to note is that matter in the stars makes the first 6 elements. After that, the process is much more laborious and proceeds till it hits Iron. Anything  further requires extreme events like a Supernova to form.

4. How the moon- 'Thebia' came about. Competing theories but the most likely is that the moon was a planetesimal which crashed into earth. The resulting impact was immense and (the best possible hypothesis) the 2-celestial planetesimal debris coalesced to form the moon. The moon was much closer to the earth but is moving away at a slow space.

5. A very hot basaltic earth was the first phase of the earth. There was no granite then.

6. The oceans formed after this phase. One memorable statistic : All of the oceans only form 0.2 % of the mass of the earth. The steps above happened in the first 150-200 million years of the earth's birth.

7. First there was only Basalt but then due to melting of basalt came crystallization and granite. Granite is much more hardier than basalt (and lighter). This was the origin of continents. Happened between 200-500 millon years.

8. The origins of "Life" are to be found here.  An automatic 'chain-reaction' which was autocatalytic in nature lead to the advent of 'replicating' microbes. 500 million to 1 billion years.

8. There was the great Oxidation effect and the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere increased. This was because of the single celled microbes that started producing oxygen. From 1 billon to 2.7 billion years.

9. A Billion Years passed with nothing 'dramatic' happening. From 2.7 billlion to 3.7 billion years. Only the supercontinent of Columbia formed which broke up.

10. From 3.7 billion to 4 Billion  The Cold and Hot cycle. Suggest that there were at least 3 glaciations in this period. This was also the period of the second great Oxidation effect. At the very end of these three glaciations, small marine animals (i.e Tribolites etc.) were already present.

11. From 4-4.5 billion years  :
Act 1 : The supercontinent cycle was well underway with the break-up of the second supercontinent 'Rodinia'. Superocean was Mirovia.

Act 2 : Around 300 million years ago the supercontinent of Panagea formed. (Laurentia and Gondwana) collapsed to become one supercontinent. The superocean was Panthalassa.

Act 3 : The breakup of Panagea broke up the landmasses into 2 parts  - Laurasia and Gondwanaland. The sea in the middle of them was the Thethys sea.

12. Around 65 millon years ago a 6 mile asteroid stuck the Yucatan Peninsula wiping out the Dianosaurs.

12. There have been several mass-extinctions in the animal and plant history of the earth. The other most devastating was the Permian extinction.

I truely and completely believe in evoloution. I completely reject the view of creationism or intelligent design.

DNA is the building block of matter. The only interest that the DNA molecule has is to replicate itself. This has lead to the creation over 3 billion years some of the most complex organisms in the world from the virus to the Homo Sapien. It is important to note that at the base of every living organism is the DNA which is present in every living being. In that sense everyone of us is descended from the extraordinarily adaptable protein molecules who just wanted to make copies of itself.

There is nothing "moral" about evolution. There is also nothing "higher" or "lower". It just is. Nature cannot give us 'moral examples'.

Basically evolution works through a simple method :

1. A random mutation (or copying error) leaves an organism to cope better with the enviornment and hence is more reporductively successful.

2. This mutation then spreads throughout the population making subsequent generations carry this mutation. This is natural selection.

3. This process continues far enough that 'speciation' happens and species far removed from each other cannot mate / reproduce.

4. The gene hence is selfish i.e. it is only interested in preserving it's copying capability and will only choose those characteristics which will enchance chances to reproduce.

We should remember that the average lifespan of a species is only 4 million years. It is humbling to note that the dianosaurs ruled the world for much longer and were destryoed about 65 million years ago in a possible astronomical impact.

We have evolved in stages from our nearest cousins, the chimpanzee over 7 million years. All the variation that we see in physical features (flat noses, blackness, light blue eyes etc.) accross the world are only approximately 50000 years old this is a blink in geological time. The world was 'peopled' from a single group in Africa. We are closer than we think we are.

Stephen Pinker's "How the mind works" is one of those rare books which i have had a urge to finish - almost an obsession by the end of it. There were so may times that i thought "that is exactly what i agree with". It is an intellectual treat. One of the refeshing things that Pinker brings to the table is the marrying of so many disciplines - genetic evolution , psychology, anthropology, and mathematics. What i want to do here is to quickly articulate Pinker's core messages and my own observations.

• Pinker is an evolutionary psychologist) and basically presents us with a model of the mind where he says that our brains are both 'computational' and a product of 'natural selection'. (I am a darwinist and basically believe in the modern theory of evolution.). So this is no surprise.

• There is no moral direction of evolution (from simple to complex etc.). Evolution came about by mutations in the gene pool and only those mutations that were beneficial survived. The central message in the book is clarity on the meaning of the selfish Gene. The fascinating insight is that it not that the gene is selfish - not the organism that is inhabiting it. The gene is just interested in making copies of itslef and hence endowns the agents (the organism) with several things that aid it. The genes embed in us those traits that make it most conducive to make copies (reproduce). Quite a few things - lik Emotions (including love), comutational ability, the ability to catch freeloaders etc. are some of the things that the genes have embedded in us to aid our reproductive and survival goals.Our minds are fashioned by the problems that our ancestors had in surviving and have been shaped and sculpted in the environment of foraging that our human ancestors spent 99 % of their time.

• The evolutionary past shows that men and women are different based on the different genetic goals that they have. The goal of men's reproductive sucess is to have sex with several women. The reproductive success of women (read passing her genes) does not alter based on the number of sexual partners. Also women invest much more in child-rearing than men, they want men to provide them with safety, security and co-operation in child bearing. Essentially the genetic goals of men and women diverge and hence the different motivations. Marriage is an institution formed to guarantee that men will willingly give up the reproductic choice of having several partners and assist in child bearing. The women accepts this in return of exclusive sexual access to the man. Love is the emotion defense to blunt the reproductively-logical view of having several partners.
  

• The same theory is valid to explain why men are kindly towards their kin. The kin's genes are shared more by the incumbent and hence we are more concerned about their welfare. Consequently nepotism and altrusim towards our kin.

• Every entity (including children) act in their self-interest. The bond between parent and child is not the perfect-unselfish bond of popular imagination. The conflict starts from the womb and continues later.
  

• Stephen also dismisses the dichotomy between emotion and the intellect. According to him, emotions are what direct us to 'higher order goals'. Intellect is the process of figuring out a series of sub-goals (and the most optimal way of reaching the higher goal). There is no dichotomy between the two. Behaviour is a product of peoples's goals and beliefs.
  

The book rambles a little bit on neural networks, explaining sight and how we form language - and these parts can be skipped. The real force of the book is the focus on evolutionary psychology - and the demise of the schools of conditioning (pavlov), unconscious (freud), behaviourism (skinner). The force is most persuasive in arguing that our brains cannot be dissociated from the long baggae of evolution we carry...

Godel was 20th century mathematician who in my view propunded one of the most important scientific theories of all time. Why i am singling him out is because what he said about 'knowability'. His view showed us that there are limits which any theoritical system's provability. Though in this google-and-wiki world we can all know what he said by typing a few keystrokes, it is very important to understand the implication of what he said.

His essential point was : Any mathematical system cannot be fully provable, complete and consistent on their own at the same time. THe essential point to grasp is that Godel is not saying that this is because of any flaw of our logical sophistication. He is essentially making a point that some things are "unknowable" despite the best logic.

He demonstrated that within any given branch of mathematics, there would always be some propositions that couldn't be proven either true or false using the rules and axioms of THAT mathematical branch itself. One might be able to prove every conceivable statement about numbers within a system by going outside the system in order to come up with new rules and axioms, but by doing so you'll only create a larger system with its own unprovable statements. The implication is that all logical system of any complexity are, by definition, incomplete; each of them contains, at any given time, more true statements than it can possibly prove according to its own defining set of rules. This is an important point - the fact that somethings are 'fundamentally' unknowable. No amount of human effort or rationality is going to take this away.

It is often said that Godel made an important point to self-referencibility. Any universal system is falliable as it cannot explain itself. To explain itself it has to be 'outside' it and in that sense it is 'incomplete' (since it cannot explain itself).

Though it is perhaps a spurious comparison, i am reminded here of Quantum mechanics. The Hiesburg uncertainty principle which states that one cannot find the position and the momentum of an fundamental particle specifically. One of the two will remain unknowable.


One of the most important implications i believe is about self-awarness. And it has been taken to imply that you'll never entirely understand yourself, since your mind, like any other closed system, can only be sure of what it knows about itself by relying on what it knows about itself. Essentially you cannot step outside your skin to view yourself from 'outside'

PS : A great book to explain is the EGB (Ester, Godel, Bach - the eternal golden Braid by Douglas Hofstader)

In the process of how we came about, i would recommend the six following books to be read in sequence. I read these books at different times and altogether they connect the dots of how our world came about. They make me passionately a believer in the rational and scientific explanations of our evolution. It is amazing that 'creationists' even exist in today's so-called modern word. I mean isnt the scietific evidence for all of us to see ? Its like still believing that the earth is flat when man has reached the moon. There really is no end to superstition and credulity in our world.

I would recommend the following six books to be read in sequence however each of them is a complete entity in itself and you will be able to connect the dots of each segment even if you read it separately. Though written by people from different backgrounds each is a gem in it's own right.


1. A Brief History of everything - By Bill Bryson. Though Bryson is a brilliant travel writer, this is in my opinion his tour de force. Bryson writes engagingly from the time of the inception of the universe to the present date. His book is a fast-forward of the entire history and is a great overview.

2. The first three minutes - By Steven Wienburg. Starts from the very begining of the universe and explains how the universe behaved in the first three minutes. Of course deals heavily with theories of qunatum mechanics and may be a little heavy for the layman. I am told that recently Simon Singh has written a full fledged book on the Big Bang.

3. The Earth (an Autobiography) - By Richard Fortey is a an account of how the earth has been shaped since it's inception. Talks about how from earlier supercontinents the current continents have been shaped. How slow natural processes are able to form the highest mountains and how the tide of time can dry even the largest ocean. A little pedantic at times but good fast-reading.

4. The Ancestor's Tale :- By Richard Dawkins. My favourite among the six. Talks about how entire living world has come about from the smallest microbe onwards. The best part of the book is that it beautifully illustrates the linkages between the different animal families and when they diverged from each other along the path of evolution. Clearly explains the various concepts of evolution and natural selection. Gives a very good overview of the different geological eras till now. (did you know that we are living in the Holocene era ?) A classic.

5. Before the Dawn :- By Nicholas Wade. Takes off from where the aforementioned book leaves it. How humans evolved from Chimpanzees and Bonobos some five million years ago. I like it for the genetic analysis done recently after the human genome was decoded in 2003. It demonstrates the most possible hypothesis of human population migrations from our ancestral population of around estimated 150 individuals from Africa. It is humbling to note that EVERYBODY outside Africa has been descended from these 150 individuals. Has a couple of fascinating chapters on language families and races which have mirrored these human migrations.

6. Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond. The final book in the series traces the important question of why human societies have evolved so differently in different parts of the world. Since the ancestral humans who emigrated out of africa had the equal capabilities when they divereged, why then in the relatively short period of 50000 years have human destinies been so different (fromt the aborgines to the post-Industrial societies of the west). The answer as Jared persuasively argues is geography. Availibility of domesticable plants and animals have led say Europe and pre-colonised Americas to evolve very differently.

These six books will of course become outdated in time as new research may make some of the theories in these books redundant. Howver, together they are a fascinating exploration and after reading them, one may see the world with "new eyes"...Happy Reading !