>>>> NEW YORK (AP) - Maybe they're outside in the garden. They could be
>>>> playing softball. Or perhaps they're just plain bored. In TV's worst
>>>> spring in recent memory, a startling number of Americans drifted away
>>>> from television the past two months: More than 2.5 million fewer
>>>> people were watching ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox than at the same time last
>>>> year, statistics show.
>>> Its not enough to be occupied, one needs also to be challenged.
>>> A notion of the unanswered question, ideas people are prepared to
>>> make room for. There are only so much hours in the day and so much
>>> else to see, hear and do.
Genomes are nearly plastic in that they can eventually change any way
through a series of muations and accidental gene doublings, new genes
that can be free to evolve new functions. If the dolphins and whales
were land mammals that evolved back into the sea, it is likely that
they could eventually evolve back into land animals. They may even
evolve into the humanoid form out primate ancestors did with us. For
that matter there is likely a torturous set of "conditions" that would
cause humans to evolve into roaches, but I doubt it now that we have
converged upon the humanoid morphology.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=hRguZr0xCOc
The cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) are descendants of land-
living mammals, and remnants of their terrestrial origins can be found
in the fact that they must breathe air from the surface; in the bones
of their fins, which look like huge, jointed hands; and in the
vertical movement of their spines, characteristic more of a running
mammal than of the horizontal movement of fish. The question of how
land animals evolved into ocean-going behemoths has been a mystery for
a long time, owing to gaps in the fossil record. However, recent
discoveries in Pakistan have managed to solve many of these mysteries,
and it is now possible to see several stages in the transition of the
cetaceans from land to sea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cetaceans
Market concentration mayrepresent a bottleneck which narrows the
possibilities temporarily, but once a new methods are discovered it
may become harder to resist pluralistic apportunities for competition.
...a bottleneck is a section of a route with a carrying capacity
substantially below that characterising other sections of the same
route. This is often a narrow part of a road, perhaps also with a
smaller number of lanes, or a reduction of the number of tracks of a
railway line. It may be due to a narrow bridge or tunnel, a deep
cutting or narrow embankment, or work in progress on part of the road
or railway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottleneck
QWERTY (run fingers across left top keyboard [see it?])
Panda Principle - "Stephen Jay Gould calls this one the Panda
Principle because his favorite example is the panda's thumb--not a
real thumb at all, and not as good as a real thumb, but the best that
the panda could manage, because the Panda's thumb is not a real thumb
at all, and not as good as a real thumb, but the best that the panda
could manage, because it had already committed its fifth digit to
other uses...
...an excellent technological example of the Panda Principle is the
QWERTY typewriter keyboard, so named because of its characteristic but
illogical arrangement of the letters of the alphabet. This sentence it
being typed on just such a keyboard, attached to a microcomputer far
more powerful than the best research tool the the seventies. We had no
choice: Nearly all of the world's keyboard are QWERTY." (Quoted in The
Collapse of Chaos, by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, Penguin Books,
1994.) This is a point that "the fittest" do not always gain a
foothold. The QWERTY keyboard survives not because it is the fittest,
but because it is more widespread than the more recently developed
Dvorak Simplified Keyboard. (If "fittest" means "produces the most
offspring," then the QUERTY keyboard is the fittest.)
http://tinyurl.com/czyb
http://www.webphilosopher.com/Index/index_10.htm
- QWERTY/Panda Principles, Networks that Resist New Standards from
Gaining Footholds
Another problem with "survival of the fittest" is that it suggests
that only the very best will do. In fact, creatures can survive
perfectly well even though other creatures could occupy their niche
more effectively. All they need to do is prevent the new creature from
gaining a foothold. The same problem arises in respect of particular
characters of a given creature. Superior characters that in principle
ought to displace them do not because they cannot get started while
the inferior character is present. Stephen Jay Gould calls this the
Panda Principle because his favorite example is the panda's thumb-not
a real thumb at all, and not as good as a real thumb, but the best
that the panda could manage, because it had already committed its
fifth digit to other uses.
As Gould explains in Bully for Brontosaurus, an excellent
technological example of the Panda Principle is the QWERTY typewriter
keyboard, so named because of its characteristic but illogical
arrangement of the letters of the alphabet. This sentence is being
typed on just such a keyboard, attached to a microcomputer far more
powerful than the best research tool of the seventies. We had no
choice: Nearly all of the world's keyboards are QWERTY. Yet it is a
hopelessly inefficient layout, requiring touch typists to use their
left hands to type the commonest letters in the English language. All
the speed records are held by the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, a
different arrangement. QWERTY couldn't slow typists down much more
effectively if it had been designed to do so-and thereby hangs a tale,
because it was. On the earliest typewriters, overrapid typing caused
keys to jam. But you couldn't tell because the keys were hidden from
view below the roller. Only several lines of typing later, when the
paper rose into view, would you spot that there had been trouble.
Early typists used one finger on each hand, not like today's touch-
typing, and QWERTY forced them to slow down by making them use the
left finger to type the commonest letters.
As typewriters became more popular, all kinds of alternative keyboards
were introduced. In a speed competition held in 1888 between two
different typing schools, QWERTY won decisively, and the bandwagon
began to roll. If most of the world's typists are trained on QWERTY
layouts, it is a foolhardy manufacturer who introduces anything
different. Today it's easy to reprogram the layout of any keyboard,
just by changing the word-processor software. QWERTY still survives.
The ironic thing is, QWERTY didn't win the competition because it was
the best layout. The winner used an eight-finger touch-typing system,
the loser a four-finger system. The outcome had nothing to do with
QWERTY at all. But the public thought it did.
Inadequate scientific paradigms often survive because of the Panda
Principle. Any existing paradigm possesses enormous inertia-or, more
accurately, the minds of the scientists adhering to it do. In order to
displace it, a new paradigm must not just be better: it must be so
much better that it can overcome all of the difficulties of being a
latecomer-such as difficulty in getting research funding when the
funds are controlled by senior scientists who of course adhere to the
old paradigm. You could invent a superior laundry detergent tomorrow,
but you'd never be able to displace the existing detergent
manufacturers. They have the distribution networks sewn up, they
control the advertising, and they've got the financial clout to put an
upstart like you out of business with a price war. And we all know how
incredibly difficult it is to oust an incumbent politician, however
poor his record may be.
Mathematically, the Panda Principle says that a local optimum-the best
thing among those not too different from it-will win; you don't need
the global optimum, the best thing that could possibly be. Evolution
leads to the occupation of niches by locally optimal creatures, not by
globally optimal ones. The proof is that sometimes a far fitter
creature is introduced from outside and wipes out all competition.
We've already mentioned how the catfish is wiping out its cichlid
competitors. They were surviving on the basis of the Panda Principle,
and they couldn't deal with the Catfish Principle. Another fish
introduced to the Rift Valley lakes by local fishermen is the Nile
perch, a generalized predator so successful that it looks as if
nothing at all will survive the Perch Principle-not even the perch.
Another example is the ground birds of New Zealand, happy in their
local optimum until land mammals such as rats, dogs, and Maoris came
along.
