When Humans Caught Up With Evolution

I certainly didn't know this, but the spleen acts as a biological SCUBA tank during extended periods underwater.

There are some people from the southern Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia who evolved bigger spleens because they spend a lot of time diving deep underwater. They live on houseboats, rarely go on land, and spend 8 hours a day repeatedly diving underwater. They split from a very similar group of people nearby about 15,000 years ago - the one group stays on land and the other in the water. Their genes are very similar, except for this distinction, and so the spleen enlargement is correlated to this behavior/culture change.

This is a discovery worthy of reporting because most of the basic body plan that includes our organs is pretty similar across all humans, or so we thought.

We have this idea of a Human Genome being uniquely human, and as a thing we all share in common. (Or at least I do; maybe I just haven't been to 5th grade for a long time, kind of like people who don't realize that just about every star we can see in the night sky has planets revolving around it, a discovery of only the past few years.)

But there is this thing that happens about 10-15 thousand years ago, where human creativity (i.e. technological memes or cultural evolution) evolves faster than our genes. Diving in the ocean all day long doesn't by itself constitute a technological advance, but then again, this is at the 15,000 mark. 10,000 years ago, we see the genetic changes resulting from dairying practices. Because of this, some people continued to be able to digest milk into adulthood (not possible for other mammals).

The change in dairying practices must have relied on some techological change, but it's still hard to call this technology. Is agriculture a technological development? Animal husbandry? Because this is where 'drinking milk' comes from. Leaving the land to live on the water is not so much a technological advance as a group-behavior advance - cultural evolution we could call that. Memetic evolution some would call it.

The main idea here is that at some point around 10,000 years ago, humans began changing themselves faster than their environment changed them. When you hear Ray Kurzweil talk about the Singularity (a moment in our near future where humans learn to evolve ourselves at will), note that we have been evolving ourselves already for thousands of years.

Notes

Bajau people 'evolved bigger spleens' for free-diving
Apr 2018, BBC

Evolution of lactase persistence: an example of human niche construction
Philosophical Transactions B, 2011

Network Address:
Milk Does a Body
FurFuryl Mercapton, Abstract Foods, and Flavor Networks

Hype and Wonder

Alex Pardee made this picture, but not with graphene.

Scientists create patterned graphene onto food, paper, cloth, cardboard
Feb 2018, phys.org

If you're gonna tell me that we can make graphene at room temperature, and on bread of all things, I'm gonna wonder when we get to see graphene art.

I'm also looking for blowdryer painting on canvas seen through infrared lenses; can't tell if I made it up or saw it somewhere.

Droneboarding

idk it just looks cool...and sometimes I just get upset when I see something that I just didn't see coming.

Droneboarding takes off in Latvia
Jan 2017, phys.org

Are Clothes Modern

Are Clothes Modern? An Essay on Contemporary Apparel, Bernard Rudofsky, 1947

Neanderthals' failure to make parkas may have sealed their demise
Aug 2016, phys.org

The Poison Is In the Dose

"Every time we turn on a light, we are inadvertently taking a drug that affects how we sleep." (p.304)
-Chronobiologist Charles A. Czeisler

(I forgot to note this, but I think it's written circa 1800?)

At Day's Close: Night in Times Past. A. Roger Ekirch. Norton, New York: 2005.

image source

Information as Life

Helmeticus

What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly, 2010

Information doesn’t exist in spacetime. We do.

Data are just different patterns of life, layered on top of each other countless times. The more layers the data become, the more sophisticated the patterns, until you have life, then life that creates its own body-less information. Then we have something like data squared.

Technology is a form of information. DNA is a technology of life. It processes information from chemical to biological to electrical and back, to be replicated by progenetic entities.

Humans are the first form of life capable of storing information outside of itself, information that can then be processed and replicated by another form of its own (technological) species in an extra-biological way.

Is it crazy to think that life is using us to procreate itself? No.

Is it crazy to think that technology – a form of body-less information – is using us to procreate itself? Maybe.

The Ampersand, &

AKA The 27th Letter

(basically just reposting Wikipedia)

This is a false-reveal of the ampersand conflation. The E and T are visible, but the implied origin, sans-stylization, is misleading in regards to the actual evolution of the ampersand character.

The Thing, SEEN

Ampersand - '&'. It means ‘and’, a -conjunction- of things. It means ‘to combine’, or more like a command to the reader to combine.

Visually, this symbol ‘&’ is a conflation of the letters ‘e’ and ‘t’, for the Latin et, or ‘and’. Firstly, it was joined to form a simple ligature, or combination of letters typically-found-together. But it further underwent a strange evolution under the influence of, primarily, scribes, typographers and typesetting technology. These people/things would abbreviate, combining letters together (like the ‘ae’ in aesthetics) to save time, space, and money. And it was under these conditions that the hyper-stylization of the letter/s-form gave it a life of its own, the combination having reached a point where the constituent letters could no longer be distinguished from each other. This is what makes a conflation.

&, The 27th Letter

via: http://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/112/

source: My Own Primer, or First Lessons in Spelling and Reading. Carter, Rev. John  P. // Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1857

The Word, SPOKEN

As a word, ampersand is also a conflation. It was originally spoken/written as and per se and (which in itself is a combination of English-Latin-English, the Latin part of which, per se, means ‘in itself’…you can’t make this stuff up). The other word-letters of the alphabet were spoken I per se and A per se, and they were said that way to distinguish them as letters and not words (though their very distinguishing in this way made them words more than letters, in fact).

This time, it was through the copying mechanism of human speech that the ampersand was carried over multiple iterations, themselves being reinforced in children reciting the alphabet, and ending with ‘and’, the 27th letter, spoken ‘and per se and’, to distinguish it as a letter of the alphabet and not a word – andperseand became slurred and stuttered by its countless iterations until a stable ‘ampersand’ was reached. It doesn’t make any kind of sense how it got there; it is a conflation in this as well as its visual expression.

The Wrestling Ampersand

The Idea, UNDERSTOOD

Slightly sideways now; the ampersand, both the word, and its symbol, stand for a combination of things – they are a combination and they stand for a combination. It’s put together like an abstract life form. It’s just uncanny how the ampersand’s meaning is inherent in its form. It’s completely artificial, and completely beautiful, and who designed it?

And so finally, the most triumphant expression of this thing is in our understanding of it. A mental-pretzeling, we wrestle with its recursions and meta-logic diversions. It is the expression of a mind trying to understand itself.

Post Script, AMPERSAND OVERDOSE

notice the ampersand variations

image: Nobiltà di dame […] Fabritio Caroso. Venetia. 1600.

via History:

"...different kinds were used to keep the page from blurring under the reader's eyes"; too many &'s on the page is hypnotic.

Artemy Lebedev, Ampersand, § 112. March 22, 2005

via Russia:

"Finding any mention of the sign in the pre-computer era literature is nearly impossible, because the use of ampersand in Cyrillic typesetting was very scant."

"There’s no need to use ampersand in Russian.

Because the Russian conjunction u (and) sounds and looks short enough (with “y”, the Spanish [and 'e' in Spanish and Portuguese] are the luckiest of the bunch). The author can’t recall an example when one intelligible and condensed symbol is replaced with a few symbols or even just a ligature."

Artemy Lebedev, Ampersand, § 112. March 22, 2005

via France:

Esperluette means 'ampersand' in French,

but they really call it 'le sign et', like how English calls '@' 'the at symbol'.

(I am only reading the French-wiki via 'translate', and what a nightmare it is to translate this particular topic.)

try translating to english and reading the discussion page

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperluette

Esperluette underwent not identical but very similar development in France. Perhaps this can be a focus for studying the relative speed of idea-transmission at particular points in cultural evolution. Had printed writing been so prevalent in an older England/France as it is now, then the word for the thing-ampersand would not have been able to morph so easily.

Now it is fixed. If, for some reason, we were to incorporate 'theisthe' into our language today in the 21st century, it would not mutate the same (especially since the 'letter of the alphabet' for 'th' is no longer used)  However, it isn't used  in many other languages, examples given below. 

via Legend:

one appears in Pompeian graffiti, establishing the symbol at least as far back as A.D. 79 (we can just take this as legend).

via the Internet:

"Our Middle Name", 28 April, 2008

News, Notes, & Observations, Hoefler & Frere-Jones

http://www.typography.com/ask/showBlog.php?blogID=98

The Ampersand, an ampersand blog

http://ampersand.gosedesign.net

J. Tschichold and F. Plaat, The Ampersand: Its origin and development, London: Woudhuysen, 1957. <http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/721129570> Bibtex

The [Visual] Evolution of the Ampersand

http://blog.visheshk.net/2011/06/the-evolution-of-the-ampersand/

FINAL NOTE, not for the faint of heart:

try writing an article such as this, and switching back and forth between 'HTML' and 'Compose' and watch what happens to all the &'s.

___

^You've never seen the ABCs look this bizarre and wonderful
Vincze Miklós io9
Feb 14, 2014

Progress

Systems – all systems - generate their own momentum.

(p15)
What Technology Wants
Kevin Kelly
2010

Technological Complexity as a Function of Latitude

More complex technological units are needed (or have been invented) by historical hunter-gatherer tribes the higher the latitude of their homes.

(p25)
What Technology Wants
Kevin Kelly
2010