Monday 5 March 2007

Does evolution select for faster evolvers?

here is an interesting article about evolution

Does evolution select for faster evolvers?

3 comments:

Jim said...

I seem to remember many years ago reading an aricle in which the author suggested that some people actually got smarter (more intelligent)after suffering a severe viral infection. He claimed that the virus affected the brain in some way to "switch it on" to function in a better way (i.e. to be more clever). I have not heard of this since, but is there a suggestion in this article that a virus can affect an individual's DNA to "switch on" (and presumably off)a better state of function? This better state is then becomes part of the evolutionary process.

Jim said...

Can the evolution of life create the conditions for life to be created, i.e. change the past?

Mind boggling link I stumbled on about retrocausality..

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/21/ING5LNJSBF1.DTL

hdj said...

my brain hurts... but to quote a little bit (below) this idea of entanglement as a form of instant communication over light years has been a stable of SF literature for years...

The experiment builds on work done in the late 1990s in Anton Zeilinger's lab, when he was at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Researcher Birgit Dopfer found that photons that were "entangled", or linked by their properties such as momentum, showed the same wave-or-particle behavior as one another. Using a crystal, Dopfer converted one laser beam into two so that photons in one beam were entangled with those in the other, and each pair was matched up by a circuit known as a coincidence detector. One beam passed through a double slit to a photon detector, while the other passed through a lens to a movable detector, which could sense a photon in two different positions.