Rhoops

Would it unfair to ask how well the difference between 'rational' and 'irrational' decision making is known in humans first? Collectively for instance our societies make decisions , often for the greater good, more usually for that and a mixture of elite self interest, and less commonly entirely for the latter. This is not a political statement, simply pointing out that if social individuals, like primates are have at least 3 forms of collective organisation: group, group/individual, and individual based, I fail to see how its possible to extrapolate a simple dichotomy (and ignoring structural conflicting interests) in rational/irrational 'group as a unit' behaviour from a Eurykarote species so distant from us that isn't even a Deuterstome. This sounds like a purely subjective analysis, where the answers are already pre-determined by the superficial anthropomorphism given to 'communal' 'social' ants. Doesn't it strike you as a big 'coincidence' that some researchers from a species of rational/communal social monkies finds 'rationality/communality' issues in a species with no common ancestor with us for about half a billion years? Parallel evolution... fine, but don't cuddle up to it too much. The basic intellectual premise of these studies seems to me to be too Disney-esque A little self awareness of how the question asking process is generated goes a long way in extending the length of one's linear logic chains...

I like this kind of speculation, because it leads to an intelligent questioning on evolution. I don't mean questioning whether Darwin was right, that's a given as far as I'm concerned, but the processes which he did not know about (DNA/genetics), and presumably those we still do not know about, associated with it. Evolution is not just a simple mix of Natural Selection, mutation and response to environmental change. The coelocanth/shark enigma shows that. They both stopped evolving. Similarly, after the land/sea transition c.430mya there are no new sea associated locomotive forms, only land based. This may be taken to imply, (and has) that the sea is a stable environment, which it clearly is not. I always used to think that Flight, and the sea/land transition were very peculiar in terms of Natural Selection. The implied 'inbetween' animals, neither specialist in one thing nor the other would have been extremely inefficient creatures, and with normal genetic mutation rates, would have had to be for tens of thousands of years at least. An unconvincing scenario. However, that view point is somewhat black/white, and fails to appreciate numerous minor factors in favour, which in aggregate may well have been sufficient. Dealing with minutiae over millions of years is problematic, because few people actually think like that. It takes familiarity, and some training to get one's mind accustomed to working with the known evolutionary parameters involved, and even more so if you appreciate that Darwinian Evolution is not complete. Darwin himself was very clear on the matter. He described the mechanism as "Unknown". Then we come to the Neo Darwinists... You know that mob... they have the predominant evolutionary view point at present. They're the ones with the presumption to substitute Darwin's "unknown" with the mediocre mathematical concept: 'random'. Which is to say "ineffable". Not much of a substitute you might say! Doesn't it strike you as being somewhat ironic that the Neo-Darwinists with their strong anti-religious connotations, actually rely upon 'ineffability' too for their evolutionary explanation! No wonder the poor little Creationists gets so grumpy, their fundamental belief has been both stolen, and insulted! To me Neo Darwinism is a product of the 1930's, futurism, fascism, communism, etc etc, not pejoratively, but simply because these philosophies were designed to be radical and NEW. Rejecting the old was the primary message. Neo Darwinism was born in that environment, and appears to be strongly constructed as a simple binary opposite to religious explanations of biological matters. That's just not good enough for Science 3 generations later. Anti-religion is out of date, religion has had nothing to do with accurate explanations of reality for at least a millennium, and even unconsciously including them in opposition is unacceptable in the process of expanding empirical knowledge. Personally I'd be inclined to add Philosophy too to the list of out dated thought processes, because so many of the concepts involved are either sloppy or redundant. I'm not particularly bothered by it though, given another decade, Science will have finished... nothing more to find out, so there'll be no need for any more Philosophical speculation!! Won't it be dull though...

Can anybody help? I read a research article last year by a female professor (I think) based in Paris, published in the last 2/3 years which identified a repetitive ten stage sequence in the DNA codon process. I can't remember where I read it, exactly what it was about or who she was. HELP!! It might be a really good correlation for some really neat bio-mathematics that's just 'appeared'....