Lying Robots

Swiss scientists at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have conducted an interesting experiment with light sensitive robots, where the robots are allowed to pass on genes and evolve throughout the generations. Some very interesting emergent behavior was the result, including robots lying to other robots for personal gain and robots “dying” to save other robots. Here’s a link to the full story: lying robots

Systems, Sustainability and Deep Time

Greetings Group,

Everynow and then I get some juicy essays from the online discussion group to which I belong regarding the study of evolution (formed out of the U. of Wisconsin). Below is a great piece that might offer another way to think about emergent systems and sustainability from the standpoint of Deep Time.

The article was written in response to anti-evolutionist campaigns put forth by those invested in a creationist model of cosmology and biology. The author’s name has been excluded for some reason, by is said to have been “penned” by a geologist who sent the text to a colleague in Evolutionary Studies at U of Wiscon, who then posted the text to the online group.

Do hope this stimulates imagination and problem solving.

Good to meet everyone. Look forward to returning to navigate body and brain systems with you.

zoom zoom!

M. A.

DEEP TIME AND EVOLUTION

Anti-evolutionists focus so strongly on the idea
that life is too complicated not to have been
created they seem to have little time for other
sorts of evidence. Until they get their thoughts
around “deep time” they will never understand
evolution. Deep time is formidable, 4.5 billion
years for our earth and solar system and about
14 billion years for the universe.

When one has been brought up on biblical time, a
bit more than 6000 years by Bishop Usher’s
tally, deep time can be nearly incomprehensible.
But, the people who study tree rings have
developed a continuous record much beyond 10,000
years and are still counting. That connects our
modern calendar to archaeologic time. Carbon-14
time goes back to 40,000 years, to include the
last stages of Neanderthal life. C-14 time has
two branches because its production rate in the
upper atmosphere has not been uniform over time.
The younger part is calibrated against tree
rings so accuracy there is a good as analytical
precision permits. The older part may be a bit
fuzzy in absolute ages but relative ages are as
accurate as the atomic analyses.

Ice cores have been taken from central Greenland
and Antarctica that are more than a mile long
(deep) and contain more than 100,000 countable
annual layers of ice accumulation. This is the
young end of geologic time, and near the
appearance of modern humans. Bubbles of air
trapped in those layers have been analyzed to
yield a chronology of the atmosphere’s contents
of CO2 and methane.

Fossils too old for C-14 usually cannot be dated
directly but the rocks they are found in can be
dated by more than thirty geochemical methods
that connect archeologic time with geologic
time. In principle, uranium-lead dating can work
back to ages greater than 20 billion years but
nothing has been found on earth older than about
3.9 billion. However, meteorites and moon rocks
date at 4.5 billion, connecting geologic time
with the astronomical.

Evidence of single-cell life has been found in
rocks as old as 3.4 billion years so we may
infer that some form of replicative activity was
going on before then. Photosynthesis developed
somewhat before 2 billion years ago. The earth’s
atmosphere then was mainly nitrogen and CO2 with
negligible oxygen. By converting CO2 and water
to insoluble minerals and oxygen the atmosphere
began to evolve. Life is the intricate
choreography of molecules at the level of the
cell and for the next 1.5 billion years the
dance of single-cell life was increasingly
refined. Forms that could use oxygen as an
energy source developed, complementing older
forms that produced oxygen, yielding an enduring
cycle. By 700 million years ago single-cell life
was so workable that multi-cellular forms
developed. First were algae that connected
individual cells as a string, a one-dimensional
life form. In the next 100 million years
three-dimensional life forms developed into most
of the structures of plants and animals we have
today. Plants colonized the land areas. During
the Carboniferous periods, 345 to 280 million
years ago, they extracted most of the remaining
CO2 from the atmosphere, locking it into coal
deposits around the world, completing the main
evolution of our modern atmosphere with 20
percent oxygen and 0.3 percent CO2.

The earth’s surface continues to evolve. The
Atlantic Ocean has been opening for about 60
million years, based on the ages of oldest rocks
at its margins. Oldest sediments on the ocean
floor are younger as one approaches the
mid-Atlantic ridge where fresh volcanic rocks
erupt. Crustal spreading in one area is
complemented by crustal shortening in others.
Some plate edges are subducted beneath adjacent
plates with concomitant extrusion to form
volcanic mountain ranges such as the Cascades
and the Andes. Others collide and result in
uplift, as the Rockies and the Himalayas.
Profoundly, the rocks on top of Mt. Everest
include marine limestone. The earth’s age of
4500 million years allows for a series of up to
70 counterparts of the Atlantic Ocean. Parts of
the crust have been recycled via erosion
followed by subduction, not a few times, but
many. There seems not to be any original,
unaltered crust left.

Most of our insight about evolution derives from
the fossil record. In the past 0.0001 million
years we have learned intricate details about
the molecular dances in cells and found that
structures of DNA in living species amplify the
fossil record. Deep time is a key part of
evolution.

“ANTS – NATURE’S SECRET POWER” DOCUMENTARY

Here is an excerpt from the documentary. The excavation is fantastic!

BIOMIMICRY AND FLOW IN CITIES

Dayna Baumeister is a biologist in the field of biomimicry, an educator and design consultant. She is the co-founder of the Biomimicry Guild.Of course you know my answer, biomimicry! Taking us out of nature and consolidating in urban centers furthers the artificial divide between humans and nature, as if they are two separate things. It does not occur to us that we’ve been on this planet for a mere few seconds if you look at the age of the earth, yet we think that these big brains are all that it takes to figure out how to live. Nature has been around for 3.85 billion years, and that is exactly what we need to do, to ask nature how it does it. We need to ask the whale how to do it. How do you transport such a large biomass thousands of miles on just fractions of energy? We need to ask the gecko how to climb walls without glue. How does an ecosystem filter water? Can we mimic them? With six or seven billion of us, the only way we can live on this planet is to have a substantial proportion in the cities, but cities cannot function like the way they do today. We need to have cities themselves mimic ecosystems. Flow is everything. Ecosystems work because flow is fostered by the form of the system. The forms of our cities today do not foster flow. That is where redesign comes in. I think emergent systems like slumsÑif you aren’t imposing hierarchical human hubris on top of that systemÑwill evolve to become working, functional systems, but we have to create the conditions to allow natural evolution to occur as opposed to creating artificial constructs that hinder flow and the form and pattern that we need.

Here is a link to Case Studies of Biomimicry.

State of Green Business 2008

posted Mari Nakano

Here is the PDF for Joel Makower’s State of Green Business 2008. Makower was one of the speakers at the Sustainability Conference Pre-Summit.

download the PDF here and check out the site while you’re at it.

You can also visit greenbiz.com for more information.

Deborah Gordon Video

A video of her talk about collective behavior in ant colonies that was filmed in 2003 at the TED conference. It was posted on the TED site in January 2008. View it here.