Clipmarks | grimmy's 'darwin' clips

Why The Loudest are Often the Most Wrong

Sun, 06 May 2007 03:37:49 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: This classic paper by Kruger and Dunning, Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments, examines the psychological reasons for the unfortunately common correlation between ignorance and confidence.

We argue that when people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the mistaken impression that they are doing just fine. As Miller (1993) perceptively observed in the quote that opens this article, and as Charles Darwin (1871) sagely noted over a century ago, "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."

(PDF here.)

Clip Source: gagne.homedns.org

Abstract
People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

Tags: ignorance, crank, cranks, troll, trolls, skill, psychology, learning, confidence, expert, study, science

Evolution for Creationists, Busting the Evolution Myths

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 21:07:58 GMT

clipped by: sohil

Clip Source: www.abarnett.demon.co.uk

Evolution - what YOU need to know

Evolution is a fact. Shocking and controversial this might sound, but bear with me. I'm not talking about Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. I'm talking about the changes in the gene pools of all species that occur every single day due to births and deaths. If you accept that most members of a species do not all have the exact same DNA (which is easily demonstrated), and you accept that sexual reproduction combines the DNA of two parents to form a slightly different combination of genes, and you accept that not all creatures survive long enough to be able to reproduce, then....

Tags: evolution, facts, science, creationism, god, biology, education

Atheists Need to Chill

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 04:05:26 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: Michael Shermer makes a point that needs to be made. Atheists need to remember what they stand for, not merely what they are against. Ridicule and contempt have no place in science, and haters should not tarnish its reputation by association.

In the words of the greatest consciousness raiser of the 20th century, Martin Luther King, Jr., in his epic "I Have a Dream" speech: "In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline."

If atheists do not want theists to prejudge them in a negative light, then they must not do unto theists the same.

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

Anti-something movements by themselves will fail.

Atheists cannot simply define themselves by what they do not believe.

Positive assertions are necessary.

Champion science and reason, as Charles Darwin suggested: “It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity & theism produce hardly any effect on the public

Rational is as rational does.

It is irrational to take a hostile or condescending attitude toward religion because by doing so we virtually guarantee that religious people will respond in kind.

The golden rule is symmetrical.

If atheists do not want theists to prejudge them in a negative light, then they must not do unto theists the same.

Promote freedom of belief and disbelief.

As long as religion does not threaten science and freedom, we should be respectful and tolerant because our freedom to disbelieve is inextricably bound to the freedom of others to believe.

Tags: atheists, atheism, secular, humanism, science, religion, civility, extremism, freedom, belief

25 Greatest Science Books of All Time

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 02:26:37 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks:

The Origin of Species (1859)

Darwin's masterwork is, undeniably, The Origin of Species, in which he introduced his theory of evolution by natural selection. Prior to its publication, the prevailing view was that each species had existed in its current form since the moment of divine creation and that humans were a privileged form of life, above and apart from nature. Darwin's theory knocked us from that pedestal. Wary of a religious backlash, he kept his ideas secret for almost two decades while bolstering them with additional observations and experiments. The result is an avalanche of detail—there seems to be no species he did not contemplate—thankfully delivered in accessible, conversational prose. A century and a half later, Darwin's paean to evolution still begs to be heard: "There is grandeur in this view of life," he wrote, that "from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
Clip Source: discover.com

1. and 2. The Voyage of the Beagle (1845) and The Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin [tie]

3. Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) by Isaac Newton (1687)

4. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo Galilei (1632)

5. De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres) by Nicolaus Copernicus (1543)

6. Physica (Physics) by Aristotle (circa 330 B.C.)

7. De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) by Andreas Vesalius (1543)

8. Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein (1916)

Clip Source: discover.com
9. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976)
10. One Two Three . . . Infinity by George Gamow (1947)

11. The Double Helix by James D. Watson (1968)
12. What Is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger (1944)
13. The Cosmic Connection by Carl Sagan (1973)

14. The Insect Societies by Edward O. Wilson (1971)
15. The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg (1977)
16. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)
17. The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould (1981)

18. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks (1985)
Clip Source: discover.com
19. The Journals of Lewis and Clark by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (1814)
20. The Feynman Lectures on Physics by* Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, and Matthew Sands (1963)

21. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred C. Kinsey et al. (1948)
22. Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fossey (1983)

23. Under a Lucky Star by Roy Chapman Andrews (1943)
24. Micrographia by Robert Hooke (1665)

25. Gaia by James Lovelock (1979)
Honorable Mentions

Tags: science, book, books, reading, best of, list, history, literature, discover, darwin, newton, galileo

Smell Ya Later?

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 13:06:08 GMT

clipped by: debbyski
clipper's remarks: "Knowing this makes me want to run outside, capture a butterfly, and inhale its scent. •

Clip Source: www.thesmartset.com

Who out there knows that butterflies are scented? Their aroma can be that of flowers like honeysuckle or jasmine, herbs and spices like lemon verbena or cinnamon, or confections like vanilla or chocolate, depending on the species.

Gilbert’s new book examines why the sense of smell is so underappreciated, and why it should be valued at least as much as seeing or hearing.

Darwin thought smell was important to our early ancestors, but of only minimal service to modern man. Freud believed that the smell became obsolete when humans started walking upright and no longer had their noses close to the ground. He asserted that repression of smell led to the repression of wild sexual impulses, which was a vital condition of civilization.

Scientific research has found that while humans can detect thousands upon thousands of distinct scents, our brains quickly reduce that sensitivity. “

But words cannot recapture a scent once it is gone and forgotten

Neat Sites 4

Mon, 28 May 2007 15:20:43 GMT

clipped by: Robatron
clipper's remarks: A list of neat sites. #4

Clip Source: neatsites.magictree.com

Amusing Sites
Lycos Top 50
Anagrams
Addicting Games
Miniclip Games
Annals of Improbable Research
Darwin Awards
Dialectizer
The Straight Dope
The Onion
Top Secret Recipes
CopyKat Recipes

Computers
Tom's Hardware
CNET Hardware Reviews
W3Schools
Major Geeks
CERT Computer Security
Tech Support Forum
Web Developer's Virtual Library
WebMonkey
About.com Clip Art index
Silent PC Review
Quiet PC
Silicon Acoustics
End PC Noise
Videoguys (DVD)
A1Javascripts
Dynamic Drive Javascripts
Linux.org

Internet
CNet/Hotspots
DSLReports Speedtest
Shields Up/Leak Test
TheList - ISPs
DSL Reports
JiWire Wi-Fi
Free Wi-Fi Hotspots
Whois.net
Find My Hosting
SelfPromotion.com
Search Engine Watch
MySpace
GeoCities
AngelFire
1dollarhosting
Tripod

Tags: list, site, websites, free, cool

Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road?

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 02:45:04 GMT

clipped by: missangelyss
clipper's remarks: I had a gigglefest over this page. So many more at the source.

Clip Source: blog.myspace.com

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

Douglas Adams: Forty-two.

Mohammed Aldouri (Iraqi ambassador): The chicken did not cross the road. This is a complete fabrication. We don't even have a chicken.

Aristotle: To actualize its potential.

George W. Bush: We don't really care why the chicken crossed the road. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road or not. The chicken is either with us or it is against us. There is no middle ground here.

Bill Clinton: I did not cross the road with THAT chicken. What do you mean by chicken? Could you define chicken, please?

Darwin: Chickens, over great periods of time, have been naturally selected in such a way that they are now genetically dispositioned to cross roads.

Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road moved beneath the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.

Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.

Freud: The fact that you are at all concerned that the chicken crossed the road reveals your underlying sexual insecurity.

Bill Gates: I have just released the new Chicken Office 2000, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents, and balance your checkbook.

Grandpa: In my day, we didn't ask why the chicken crossed the road. Someone told us that the chicken had crossed the road, and that was good enough for us.

Hemingway: To die. In the rain.

Carl Jung: The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at this historical juncture, and therefore synchronicitously brought such occurrences into being.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: I envision a world where all chickens will be free to cross roads without having their motives called into question.

Timothy Leary: Because that's the only kind of trip the Establishment would let it take.

Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.

Agent Mulder: You saw it cross the road with your own eyes. How many more chickens have to cross the road before you believe it?

Tags: humor, philosophy

1st time Darwin's Papers Online 4 Free

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 10:48:48 GMT

clipped by: syncopath

Clip Source: darwin-online.org.uk

Charles Darwin's Papers Online

For decades available only to scholars at Cambridge University Library, the private papers of Charles Darwin, one of the most influential scientists in history, can now be seen by anyone online and free of charge. This is the largest ever publication of Darwin papers and manuscripts, totalling about 20,000 items in nearly 90,000 electronic images.

This vast and varied collection of papers includes the first draft of his theory of evolution, notes from the voyage of the Beagle and Emma Darwin's recipe book.

These online images are scans from copies of early black and white microfilms produced by the Cambridge University Library Imaging Service, mostly in the 1990s. For online publication now a slight colour tint has been added to many and the brightness and contrast have been digitally enhanced.

First sketch of the theory of evolution, 1842

Theoretical notebooks

Drafts of Descent of Man

Review of Origin of Species, 1859

100 Most Influential Books Ever Written

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 14:46:44 GMT

clipped by: Bookyards
clipper's remarks: To get the rest of the list you must go to the blog post at http://bookyards.blogspot.com/2007/10/100-most-influential-books-ever-written.html

Clip Source: bookyards.blogspot.com

Earlier this year Digg published "Digg's 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written".

It was good to see the list, but unfortunately there were no links to the books themselves. We at Bookyards have corrected this as best as we can.

So ..... here is the list ..... and links to read these books.

1) The Old Testament
2) The Origin Of Species by Natural Selection by Charles Darwin
3) The I Ching
4) The Koran
5) The First Folio – William Shakespeare
6) Works By Aristotle
7) The New Testament
8) The Prince by Niccol Machiavelli
9) Don Quixote, Parts I and II, by Miguel de Cervantes
10) The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels
11) Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
12) Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Tags: 100 most influential books ever written, free ebooks, the greatest books

Fact: Most inept people THINK they are smart

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 14:17:14 GMT

clipped by: BigBadWolf
clipper's remarks: Oh boy... don't EVEN get me started.

Clip Source: en.wikipedia.org

Dunning-Kruger effect

The Dunning-Kruger effect is the phenomenon whereby people who have little knowledge systematically think that they know more than others who have much more knowledge.

The phenomenon was rigorously demonstrated in a series of experiments performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, then both of Cornell University.

incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill,

incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others,

incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy,

if they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.

Kruger and Dunning noted a number of previous studies which tend to suggest that in skills as diverse as reading comprehension, playing chess or tennis or operating a motor vehicle, "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" (as Charles Darwin put it).

Tags: intelligence, logic

Sex, lies and some existential questions.. :-)

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 22:51:28 GMT

clipped by: Bluewhale
clipper's remarks: So many orchids treat their pollinators so nastily, with false promises of food and sex or the occasional dunking of insect visitors into bucket-shaped petals full of liquid, that naturalists have puzzled over the relationship for more than a century.

Darwin was so consumed by the odd interactions that after “The Origin of Species,” his next book was an entire volume on the subject, “The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects.”

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Sexually deceptive orchids, as biologists have long known, look and can even smell so much like a female insect that males will try to mate with the flower in a sometimes vigorous process that can result in pollination

. But scientists now report that the tongue orchids of Australia are such thoroughly convincing mimics of female wasps that males not only try to mate with them, but they actually do mate with them — to the point of ejaculation.

The discovery that orchids can induce such an extreme response is more than just bizarre natural history, because biologists have always assumed that the sexual misrepresentations of orchids were harmless to the duped males, no more than a comical exercise in frustration.

“If males waste all their sperm on orchids,” Ms. Gaskett asked, “what have they got to offer a real female?”

why, scientists asked, would orchids do such an evolutionarily foolish thing? Why would a flower evolve to compromise the ability of its pollinator to reproduce?

Tags: evolution, orchids, sex

Unintelligent Design

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:14:29 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: At this point, 30 years after the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and his late collaborator Amos Tversky started documenting a rash of fallacies in human reasoning, the idea that the human mind would be "perfect in His image" is as outdated (and narcissistic) as the idea that the solar system would revolve around the planet earth.
The only theory that can really make sense of these needless imperfections is Darwin's theory of natural selection, which holds that humans (and all other life forms) evolve through a blind process known as descent-with-modification, in which new life forms represent random modifications of earlier life forms -- with no central overseer to guide the process. Such a random process can, over time, lead populations of creatures to become more adapted to their environment, but it is also vulnerable to getting stuck, in the sort of good-enough-but-not-perfect solutions that mathematicians call local maxima.

Clip Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Lost amid all the recent discussions of intelligent design -- including Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's decision this past Friday to sign a bill that allows teachers in his state to "supplement" classes on evolution with talk of creationism -- is one simple basic fact. The human species isn't intelligently designed.

When you get right down to it, from an engineering perspective, the design of the human mind (and for the matter the human body) is a bit of mess.

Take, for instance, human memory, and the trouble we often have in remembering even the most basic facts -- where did we put our keys? Where did we park our car? Because our brains so often blur our memories together. Human eyewitness testimony is often no match for even a low-rent survelllance camera, and memory can fail even in life-or-death circumstances. (6% of all skydiving fatalities, for instance, are from divers that forgot to pull their ripcords),

Tags: evolution, creationism, intelligent design

Evolution Beyond Darwin — Way Beyond

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:06:53 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.wired.com

Highly complex honeybee communities are one example of phenomena that some scientists think can't be explained by the mainstream theory of evolution alone, but instead by a theory of self-organization.
Courtesy AlainB/Flickr

Nearly 150 years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, evolution has been widely accepted by scientists -- and, except for a few religious dogmatic types, the public -- as the blueprint for the engine of life.

But not every scientist thinks that evolution as it's now understood and applied is complete. They want to scale it up to the level of populations, even whole ecosystems. Moreover, they say evolution is intertwined with other dynamics that science is just starting to understand.

"The process of evolution is fundamental to the universe. Biology is the most obvious manifestation of it," said Carl Woese, a legendary microbiologist and one of the first proponents of this newly revised evolutionary framework.

Tags: complexity, evolution, darwin

GREAT BOOKS INDEX

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 02:24:14 GMT

clipped by: Socratoad

Clip Source: books.mirror.org

GREAT BOOKS INDEX

HOME PAGE AND AUTHOR LIST

An Index to Online Great Books in English Translation

AUTHORS/HOME . TITLES . ABOUT GB INDEX . BOOK LINKS

INDEX BY AUTHOR

Aeschylus . Apollonius . Aquinas . Archimedes . Aristophanes . Aristotle . Augustine . Marcus Aurelius . Austen . Francis Bacon . Balzac . Bergson . Berkeley . The Bible . Bohr . Boswell . Calvin . Cather . Cervantes . Chaucer . Chekhov . Conrad . Copernicus . Dante . Darwin . Descartes . Dewey . Dickens . Diderot . Dostoevsky . Eddington . Einstein . George Eliot . T.S. Eliot . Emerson . Engels . Epictetus . Erasmus . Euclid . Euripides . Faraday . Faulkner . Fielding . Fitzgerald . Fourier . Freud . Galen . Galileo . Gibbon . Gilbert . Goethe . Hamilton . Hardy . Harvey . Hegel . Heidegger . Heisenberg . Herodotus . Hippocrates . Hobbes . Homer . Hume . Huygens . Ibsen . Henry James . William James . Jay . Joyce . Kafka . Kant . Kepler . Keynes . Kierkegaard . Lawrence . Leibnitz . Locke . Lucretius . Machiavelli . Madison . Mann . Marx . Melville . Mill . Milton . Moliere . Montaigne . Montesquieu . Nietzsche . Newton . Nicomachus . O'Neill . Orwell . Paine . Pascal . Planck . Plato . Plotinus . Plutarch . Poincare . Proust . Ptolemy . The Quran (Koran) . Rabelais . Racine . Rousseau . Russell . Schroedinger . Shaw . Shakespeare . Adam Smith . Sophocles . Spinoza . Sterne . Swift . Tacitus . Thoreau . Thucydides . Tolstoy . Tocqueville . Twain . Veblen . Virgil . Voltaire . Whitehead . Wittgenstein . Woolf

Tags: authors, great books, literature, books

Susan Blackmore on Memes and Temes

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:13:00 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: Video at source.

Clip Source: www.spring.org.uk

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is probably the best idea that anybody has ever had. Darwin's idea is not just applicable to biology, though, it also applies to culture.

The application of natural selection to culture has been called 'memetics'. This is the theory that, like living things, ideas - or 'memes' - naturally vary and that (generally) the 'fittest' ideas survive and are replicated across generations.

Neuroscientist Susan Blackmore, who has studied memetics, introduces a new type of meme which she calls the 'teme': the technological meme. Technology, through temes, she argues, is now driving us forward, whether we like it or not.

In this talk Blackmore uses the idea of the 'teme' to pose some interesting questions. She asks whether there are other lifeforms out there in the universe and also whether humanity will survive the arrival of the 'temes'.

Tags: ted, meme, evoultion, susan blackmore, teme