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Contents |
Welcome
I'm Tom Barbalet and this is a continuation of the Biota Podcasts. For more information check out;
Call-In Number
(646) 200-0640
Next Episode
Friday, November 14th, 8pm Pacific, Surviving an Artificial Life Winter
GreyThumb News
Boston
Mon, Nov 3, 6p – 9pm Where: The Asgard Irish Pub & Restaurant (350 Mass. Ave, Central Square, Cambridge)
Grey Thumb Meeting Announcement Grey Thumb is pleased to announce a presentation by Dr. Shivakumar Viswanathan When: 7:00pm Monday, November 3, 2008 Where: The Asgard Irish Pub & Restaurant (350 Mass. Ave, Central Square, Cambridge) Who: All are welcome Speaker: Dr. Shivakumar Viswanathan Title: The Ideal Delivery problem in Evolutionary-Developmental algorithms
Abstract:
Using computational models of development instantiated by generative representations, I will discuss how development can exert a strong bias on fitness evaluation and selection by framing it as an optimal stopping problem. These findings bring to light some of the strong informational constraints operative during development that need to be taken into consideration in interpreting the role of the Genotype-Phenotype map on evolutionary adaptation.
EvoGrid Update
In Florida - meeting Obama. In New York/New Jersey next week.
Justin Lyon
Still in Iraq
Divine Action and Natural Selection OUT!
Seen it on a text book site already. Amazon is slow. World Scientific
Promotion, two copies for a Biota Live participation contest.
Feedback from last show
Stunning
Spiders have complicated "brain" chemistry
Can learn a lot
Gerald remains unconvinced
Dawkins Dawkins Uber Alles
The Great Move
Try not to have interruptions in the podcast - the recording date will remain, the release date may change. Easiest way is to subscribe to the XML feed. Numbers on the feed continue to grow.
Remember Call-In Number
(646) 200-0640
Question for this week
Frankenstein and artificial life
How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?
During the rainy summer of 1816, the "Year Without a Summer," the world was locked in a long cold volcanic winter caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815.[5] Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, aged 19, and her lover (and later husband) Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The weather was consistently too cold and dreary that summer to enjoy the outdoor holiday activities they had planned, so the group retired indoors until dawn. Amongst other subjects, the conversation turned to the experiments of the 18th-century natural philosopher and poet Erasmus Darwin, who was said to have animated dead matter, and to galvanism and the feasibility of returning a corpse or assembled body parts to life. Sitting around a log fire at Byron's villa, the company also amused themselves by reading German ghost stories, prompting Byron to suggest they each write their own supernatural tale. Shortly afterwards, in a waking dream, Mary Godwin conceived the idea for Frankenstein:
I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.[7]
She began writing what she assumed would be a short story. With Percy Shelley's encouragement, she expanded this tale into a full-fledged novel.[8] She later described that summer in Switzerland as the moment "when I first stepped out from childhood into life".[9] Byron managed to write just a fragment based on the vampire legends he heard while travelling the Balkans, and from this Polidori created The Vampyre (1819), the progenitor of the romantic vampire literary genre. Thus, two legendary horror tales originated from this one circumstance.[citation needed] Mary's and Percy Bysshe Shelley's manuscripts for the first three-volume edition in 1818 (written 1816-1817), as well as Mary Shelley's fair copy for her publisher, are now housed in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Noble Ape and Frankenstein
Noble Ape, the Teddy Bear and the Terminator
Super Toys Last All Summer Long by Brian Aldiss, 1969
Matthew Anderson and Old Tech
Thanks to Robert Wright
Robert Wright presented Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) wrote at the beginning of his Leviathan:
Nature is the art through which God made the world and still governs it. The art of man imitates in it many ways, one of which is its ability to make an artificial animal. Life is just a motion of limbs caused by some principal part inside the body; so why can’t we say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as a watch does) have an artificial life? For what is the heart but a spring? What are the nerves but so many strings? What are the joints but so many wheels enabling the whole body to move in the way its designer intended? Art goes still further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of nature, man!
Thanks
Next fortnight
Surviving an Artificial Life Winter, November 14th, 8pm Pacific
