- I finished reading The Selfish Gene today.
- I also backed some of the crap on my hard disk up.
- Various thoughts from the conversation last night:
- Will asked me last night why I found his current woman uninteresting. I couldn't remember what things she had done in particular, so I gave a really vague unsatisfying answer. I remembered a few specifics today as to why she didn't make my "this person is worth any more of my time" triage: She was rather rude to the staff at the hotpot restaurant. She asked for a menu. I let her know that a menu wasn't needed. When the menu came and I asked her if she wanted to see it, she replied in a way that didn't acknowledge that she had asked for it in the first place -- a sort of reply that said "why would I possibly want to have seen a menu?"
- I realize that quickly triaging people makes me especially prone to the fundamental attribution error.
- Kevin seemed to be trying to get to a point that Intelligent Design made sense because all machines have creators. Chapter 13 of this 2nd edition of The Selfish Gene has an interesting point -- that in the case of life on earth, the creator is DNA. One cell is enough to, on its own, construct our entire body. A heart from one generation doesn't need to evolve into a better heart in the next generation. DNA that produced the heart from one generation might undergo a change. That change might 9999 times out of 10000 result in a heart that doesn't work and an offspring that dies immediately. But if the one other time, the change in DNA produces a different heart -- maybe even a radically different heart -- that works better than the old one, then this new gene will out-reproduce its ancestors and kill off the versions of the old heart, just via attrition.
- I guess that also is a good reason for us to die regularly. If we didn't die frequently enough, we'd be outcompeted, outnumbered, and then pushed extinct by attrition by more-frequently dying humans that had more frequent chances as a species to get one of those beneficial new genes.
- I've noticed my thinking becoming more mushy. Is this a result of not being in a demanding academic environment surrounded by intense, ambitious, sharp-thinking people, or my old age? Or maybe my thinking's always been this fuzzy, but I've never noticed the fact until now. I had vague impressions in the book where there could have been more robust justifications for arguments, but wouldn't have been able to pick them out.
- My reading of the Gita seems to have stopped for the moment.
