#selectionist

[tmbgareok]

Hi Flans! There's been a few songs mentioned by TMBG that seem to have never been released or were repurposed into other songs. If you recognize any of these names, I would love to know a little information about them! "Delusion", "Swinging From Vine To Vine", c. 2015 | "Dawn Divine", "Lucky You", "Stalker In Reverse", c. 2013 | "I'm Sorry Rosalyn", c. 2006 | "Earwig", c. 1997 | "Captain Crunch", "Revolution While I'm Hot", c. 1980s Thank you!

JF: songs that just never came out--Revolution While I'm Hot, Stalker in Reverse, Vine to Vine, Lucky You. Dawn Divine became Selectionist, and I'm Sorry Rosalyn became something else, but I can't remember what it was!...

[flubson]

collection of random animations I made while testing ibispaint

song is Selectionist by They Might Be Giants

[splorp]

Via last.fm

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Pro-variation vs. pro-selection culture

Evolution requires three things: some form of information that’s inheritable, some way to create variation from that information, and some way to select what information will be passed on to future generations. In biological evolution, of, course, we all know what these three things are: genes (information) can mutate (variation) -- well, it’s more complicated than just mutation, but this isn’t a biology lesson -- and those that are worse at surviving and reproducing themselves are of course naturally weeded out through cause and effect (selection). But other things -- art, culture, language, science, technology -- evolve as well, and they all need the same three things.

When it comes to variation and selection in things like culture and politics, there’s a sliding scale of which one people think is most important -- whether they’re more pro-variation, or pro-selection.

People on the pro-variation end of the spectrum tend to view diversity as a positive thing and selection as something that will take care of itself, or even something to be actively suspicious of because of its tendency to cause harm -- a rainbow queer community, an education system available to people of all cultures and economic backgrounds, country borders that are as open as practical, and embracing a diverse array of art make a community stronger, and things like gatekeeping, means testing and heirarchies on ‘what counts as art’ should be abandoned unless there’s a really good reason for the selective process to exist, in which case it’s grudgingly tolerated. To pro-variation people, exclusion and oppression within a community are threatening. Pro-variation people recognise that yes, you’re going to get some freeloading drains on resources and obvious money laundering schemes masquerading as terrible art and a few people pretending to be gay for a few years to look more interesting to their straight friends, and this is largely a non-issue, a perfectly acceptable price to pay for a diverse and fair world.

People on the pro-selection end of the scale tend to view selection as the main means of advancing or healing a society, and see diversity as something that will take care of itself and as something to be deeply suspicious of. Gatekeeping, unequal opportunities and financial heirarchies are needed to sort the what from the chaff and make sure everyone does their best (”capitalism breeds innovation”); initiatives to redress inequality and give minorities or poor people an ‘unfair’ advantage or make it easier for outsiders to enter the country should be abandoned unless there’s a really good reason for their existence, as they’re dragging down the ‘deserving’ and polluting the culture. To pro-selection people, contamination or invasion from outsiders is threatening. Pro-selection people recognise that yes, you’re going to lose some talented geniuses in sweatshops and stop some deserving people from achieving success and bully some LGBT people out of the community to face abuse and oppression alone, but this is largely a non-issue, a perfectly acceptable price to pay for an advanced and fair world.

“Oh, Derin, you’re just talking about left-wing vs. right-wing philosophies.” Sort of, but not really. It fits the stereotypes and common arguments to a T, but one can’t assume that all righties are pro-selection or all lefties are pro-variation. I have met pro-variation righties, although I’m not really sure how. And there are leftie TERFs out there, despite TERFism being an undeniably pro-selection philosophy. I find determining where people sit on the variation-to-selection scale to be a lot more useful for communication than left-to-right.

I say this because often I’ll see pro-selection and pro-variation people talking to each other, and notice that they’re having fundamentally different conversations. For example, let’s look at the issue of meritocracy. Most modern people would say that meritocracy is a good thing, but ’meritocracy’ means a fundamentally different thing to pro-selectionists than pro-variationists.

A pro-selectionist, when conceiving of meritocracy, tends to think in terms of, well, selection; devising a system where the strongest (those that excel in whatever the thinker thinks is important; innovation or determination or whatever) rise to the top and gain special privileges and power over others, that they can use to determine the rules and make life better for themselves and their children, elevating society as a side effect. To the pro-variationist, this is absolutely not a meritocracy. “You’ve built a system whereby those who don’t start out with more, those who are born poor or disabled or underprivileged in some way, have to work way harder and be lucky in order to get anywhere than those born lucky. People don’t get ahead on merit in this system because the playing field becomes drastically uneven after a couple of generations. This is not a meritocracy.”

A pro-variationist, on the other hand, would concentrate on making sure that everyone has a fair chance at exercising their skills and getting ahead. They’d focus on making sure that people had the space and security to exercise their skills and that, when it came to supporting the society to make that happen, those with more contributed more. To a pro-selectionist, this is absurd. “So those who have pulled ahead and succeeded are being penalised by having to give more? That’s the opposite of a meritocracy! That’s a system designed to drag the best down!”

I find this framework useful in explaining a lot of weird political quirks of certain subcultures. TERFs and tradwives, for example, are theoretically political opposites, but in practice their logic sounds almost identical to outsiders, sounding rather a lot like standard right-wing talking points and Fascism Lite. This is because they’re all using pro-selection arguments. To a pro-selectionist, the arguments of these groups look very different -- “we’re saying that X kind of people are good/virtuous/victims, and Y kind of people are bad/oppressors/sinners, which is the exact opposite of what the other group is saying!” To a pro-variationist, the fact that they are making literally the same argument makes them identical -- “you’re still putting people in your little ‘keep or cull’ boxes for exactly the same reasons, you just wrote different names on the boxes to keep or cull according to your personal taste.”

I think a lot of the things associated with right-wingers could be more accurately associated with people on the pro-selection end of the spectrum in general. It’s known, for example, that right-wingers tend to have a more sensitive disgust reflex and, as a consequence, be generally more xenophobic. You can see this in the way xenophobes talk of making room for outsiders; they talk of invasion, contamination, infection, hygeine, purity. LGBT exclusionists, lefties and righties, talk in the same sort of language. So do antis.

It’s also notable in the sorts of innocuous-seeming things that such people get really angry about. Right-wingers and authoritarians are known for their trend of an almost comical hatred of modern art. The idea that anything can be art, or that art can be measured on any level that isn’t strict complexity and realism of paint and sculpture, causes a surprising level of dislike in such groups. (See also arguments like ‘what is a video game’, ‘does this even count as a game’, althoughpeople thankfully seem to be bored of that now). Exclusionists are equally renowned for campaigns against inclusive terms like ‘queer’, and TERFs get obsessively nitpicky about people’s genitals to a really creepy degree and get very uncomfortable when you mention the ‘grey area’ in biological sex. This is normally assumed to be just dislike at people challenging their arguments, but I think it’s deeper. I think it’s like the modern art thing. Any kind of radical inclusivity is threatening to pro-selection thinkers, not because it’s a challenge to their rules and definitions -- they can have those arguments perfectly comfortably -- but because it is an attack on the very concept of meaning. “Words mean things! Groups exist! You can’t just... just get rid of groups and open up categories to include more people without putting them through a serious, rigorous proving ground first! You can’t just call anything you want to ‘art’, you can’t just call anyone outside cisheteronormative expectations part of the LGBT community, you can’t just call people men or women based on how they feel! That’s chaos! How can any progress be made if we just decide words don’t mean anything??”

(I also think this is a much-overlooked aspect of the same-sex marriage debate. Yes, most of that was garden-variety homophobia, but I’ve known a lot of people who were perfectly fine with ‘the gays having equal rights’, they just didn’t want it called marriage. To a pro-variationist, having the same legal language for partnerships regardless of the sex or gender of the participants is really important -- it’s a shield against future discrimination as the laws relating to either marriages or civil partnerships change over time. To a pro-selectionist, changing the definition of words related to fundamental cultural activities is a huge deal. “They’re eroding the very meaning of marriage! Chaos! How much more will the word change? Can people marry animals or cars next?!”)

As I said, this is a spectrum. I’ve met very few people who are on either extreme end -- even the most pro-equality liberal anarchist acknowledges that some standards of behaviour, community responses to inappropriate action and definitions of different communities do have to exist, to protect people, and the most hardocre fascist admits that there needs to be some measure of generating diversity to avoid stagnation and extinction. And people’s default reaction isn’t necessarily their position on all issues -- somebody who’s generally pro-variation might feel specifically threatened by immigration and think a strict proving ground for immigrants is necessary, or someone who is generally pro-selectionist might think that a robust social system is necessary because one’s economic status at birth has no bearing on one’s merit or value. But I’ve always found it to be a very useful general model.

[fundgruber]

" Since you refer to my nails several times, let me tell you what they are all about. People can always say that my mother used to cut them and this is linked to the Oedipal complex and castration (a grotesque interpretation but psychoanalytical). They can also notice, if they have a look at my fingertips, that, being deprived of normal protective fingerprints, I cannot touch an object, especially a piece of cloth, with the pads of my fingers without a nervous twinge, which requires me to resort to the protection offered by long nails (a teratological and selectionist interpretation). They can also say, and it is true, that I dream not of being invisible, but imperceptible and that I compensate for this dream by having nails that I can tuck into my pocket, so much so that nothing seems more shocking to me than someone who looks at them (a psycho·sociological interpretation). Finally they can say: "You shouldn't bite your nails because they are yours; if you love nails, eat someone else's, provided that is what you want, and if you can (a political interpretation, Darien)2 . But you had to choose the most degrading interpre· tation: he wants to distinguish , himself, to act his Greta Garbo part. Anyway, isn't it strange that none of my friends ever noticed my nails, finding them completely natural, planted there by chance as if they had been sowed by a gust of wind, which no one would bother to talk about? “

Gilles Deleuze - I have nothing to admit. Semiotexte  Vol II Nr 3,1977

Text is a translation of "Lettre à Michel Cressole", published as an appendice to Cressole's, Deleuze, "Psychothèque". Editions Universitaires, 1973.

How did Deleuze write?

[magixwitch]

I could believe that the Trix are sisters, but not triplets. Just look at them: they have different phenotypes, different nose shapes, after all. Or are you saying that their parents were selectionists? And wiki is a fan source. I'd be glad if its authors provided links to official sources, because I searched that interview, but without success. I had a headcanon that Trix are from the orphanage, and such children often don't know their real date of birth, so they came up with one for everyone.

Straffi once said they were a triplet but many sources also said Icy was the eldest and Stormy the youngest so idk honestly but what you said makes sense!

[scissorsisters]

local tmbg guy back to suggest a few more of their songs that i think more people should know but selectionist, ive been seeing things, and ampersand are also great tracks to check out!

Thank you ceo of tmbg 😌 I wont do the rating thing for all of them but I will check these out

[dfroza]

A look at the age of ice and the repopulation of earth after the Flood

A portion of this article from the november 2021 issue of Acts & Facts by the ICR:

While secular scientists have great difficulty explaining evidence of an Ice Age and have literally put forth dozens of speculative theories, a biblical solution based on the global Flood fits the data closely. In this model, it is proposed that an Ice Age began shortly after the Flood about 4,300 years ago and likely only lasted for several hundred years.

The mechanism for its action has been aptly applied as a four-point model using the acronym HEAT. 1) Hot oceans during the Genesis Flood were produced by hot, molten material from the earth’s interior, along with hot waters from “the fountains of the great deep” (Genesis 7:11), ongoing underwater volcanic activity, and heat generated from the friction of plate tectonics. 2) Evaporation into the atmosphere from the warm oceans would have increased levels of atmospheric moisture, allowing for high levels of snowfall over the cooler mid-to-high-latitude regions. 3) Aerosols (airborne particulates) would have resulted from the enormous amounts of volcanic activity occurring at the end of the Flood and afterward, filling the atmosphere and blocking the sun—creating a cool climate for snow and ice to accumulate. 4) Time (several hundred years) would have been involved in this overall process of extended post-Flood volcanic activity that continued as the earth was equilibrating from the massive amount of plate tectonics that had occurred during the Flood.

[Ice Age Land Bridges]

In previous articles, I described how the pre-Flood earth had been composed of one large mega-continent called Pangaea thatsplit apart into the global continental configuration of seven continents we see today. Not only is this massive level of tectonic activity important in explaining the HEAT model of the Ice Age, but it also directly relates to the ability of humans and animals to repopulate the earth after the Flood.

When the present separation of continents by oceans is observed, it is difficult to explain how the various kinds of animals on the Ark could have dispersed around the earth. However, when we take into account the post-Flood Ice Age, the problem readily disappears. The Ice Age would have created land bridges all around the world by exposing dry land as large proportions of the oceans would have been frozen. In fact, the massive amount of water stored in ice sheets would have fortuitously lowered sea levels by 200 to 280 feet below today’s level. The resulting land bridges would have made excellent pathways and migration routes for animals and humans to simply walk to the major continents.

•

and another about the genesis of True nature:

There is no room in Darwin’s selectionist worldview for giving Christ the credit for engineering the intricate systems that we see in creatures. Selectionists project volitional and intelligent agency onto nature when they ascribe to it the ability to “select for” or “act on” creatures. Nature derives its imaginary law-like creative powers over organisms from the belief that it somehow selects for traits just like real human breeders do. God’s true agency is exchanged for an idolatrous view of nature that treats this unconscious entity as though it had volition and exercises an omnipresent agency. Evolutionists do not explain away the Creator, they simply venerate nature as God.

•

and this article that peers into caves in New Mexico:

[tmbgareok]

Random question: what was the division of labor on Selectionist? Any instrumental tracks in the works now?

That was a product of my workstation--including some bona fide highly filtered and distressed vinyl sampling that I can guarantee you could never even CONCIEVE came from their original source material , and is largely electronic. I think Danny plays on it, and there are some tom overdubs from Mr. Marty Beller.

[splorp]

Via last.fm

[evoldir]

Fwd: Other: JMolEvol.ClassicPapers

Begin forwarded message: > From: evoldir@evol.biology.mcmaster.ca > Subject: Other: JMolEvol.ClassicPapers > Date: 30 April 2021 at 06:14:22 BST > To: rdmpage@gmail.com > > > > EVOLDIR reported (March 4th) that for an issue celebrating > the half century of the Journal of Molecular Evolution, > ten members of its editorial board each gave their personal > historical perspective on a classic paper from the journal and > the research it subsequently spawned. These were made available at > https://ift.tt/2NJavuD together with links > to the original paper referenced. One of these classics (JME 44:632-636) > described the epic clash on the pages of the journal (1995) between the > neutralist ideas of Naboru Sueoka and the selectionist ideas of Donald > Forsdyke. The latter has now issued an update (see Genetica 149(2):81-88; > https://rdcu.be/cjAE0). > > > forsdyke@queensu.ca > via IFTTT

[cloudtales]

Pregnant Females as Historical Individuals: An Insight From the Philosophy of Evo-Devo

Pregnant Females as Historical Individuals: An Insight From the Philosophy of Evo-Devo

Criticisms of the “container” model of pregnancy picturing female and embryo as separate entities multiply in various philosophical and scientific contexts during the last decades. In this paper, we examine how this model underlies received views of pregnancy in evolutionary biology, in the characterization of the transition from oviparity to viviparity in mammals and in the selectionist…

[symbolicsystems]

The fact that surplus connections and neurons are pruned during development is well established. We complement this selectionist picture by a proof-of-principle model of evolutionary search in the brain, that accounts for new variations in theory space. We present a model for Darwinian evolutionary search for candidate solutions in the brain.

Breeding novel solutions in the brain: a model of Darwinian neurodynamics

[spectaculardistractions]

When Parliament is open to all the Churches, including the Atheist Churches (for the Positivist Sciences, the Ethical Societies, the Agnostics, the Materialists, the Darwinian Natural Selectionists, the Creative Evolutionists, and even the Pantheists are all infidels and Atheists from the strict Evangelical or Fundamentalist point of view), it becomes impossible to attach religious rites to our institutions, because none of the Churches will consent to make any rites but their own legally obligatory. Parliament is therefore compelled to provide purely civil formalities as substitutes for religious services in the naming of children, in marriage, and in the disposal of the dead. Today the civil registrar will marry you and name your children as legally as an archbishop or a cardinal; and when there is a death in the family you can have the body cremated either with any sort of ceremony you please or no ceremony at all except the registration of the death after certification of its cause by a registered doctor.

George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism

[tmbgareok]

This week’s brand new Dial-A-Song is here! Enjoy the driving instrumental tones of Selectionist

[ntrending]

Natural selection can’t explain this bug’s bizarre horn

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/natural-selection-cant-explain-this-bugs-bizarre-horn/

Natural selection can’t explain this bug’s bizarre horn

A Buffalo treehopper with resplendent headgear. (USGS/)

Treehoppers (Membracidae) are, in most respects, nothing special. Abundant everywhere but Antarctica, there are about 3,200 species of this cicada (Cicadoidea) and leafhopper (Cicadellidae) relative. Each individual measures between two and twenty millimeters. They live for a few months, during which they feed on sap. They have some social characteristics but no extraordinary capacities distinguishing them from other social insects.

What separates treehoppers is their headgear. Each species has its own model of enlarged and ornate helmet, known to entomologists as a pronotum. Some look like spines, others like leaves or ants. Still others have forms too bizarre for the Oxford English Dictionary to name. Even the hats at a royal wedding would fall short of these helmets’ extravagance. And, unlike all those princesses and duchesses, treehoppers have to wear their millinery 24/7, from birth until death.

The treehoppers’ helmet is hard to justify from a selectionist standpoint. Schlepping it around adds a considerable energy burden, so it ought to do something important. What might be its useful function? Courtship, the usual suspect when it comes to exaggerated features, is eliminated by the absence of sexual dimorphism. Helmets are equally distributed in both genders; one can distinguish males and females only by their genitalia. Aerodynamics, another possible function, defies common sense. While some helmets are streamlined, others are decidedly not. And, in any case, the extra weight is detrimental to flying. Camouflage is a stronger bet but also problematic. Even in cases where the helmet’s form or colors fit the environment, a helmetless insect with the same colors and an otherwise identical form would be better equipped for hiding, being half the size or smaller. In the absence of smaller mimics, it is reasonable to infer that the helmet is not an antipredator tool.

Daniel Milo’s new book “<a href=”https://amzn.to/2IMALig”>Good Enough</a>” is on sale now. (Courtesy of Harvard University Press/)

So, what is the helmet for? Benjamin Prud’homme and Nicolas Gompel offer an answer based on their careful study of the treehoppers: nothing. Based on the discovery that the helmet is a third pair of wings that lost their original function, they turn to Darwin’s thesis on vestigial organs. The helmets “illustrate how a structure or an organ, relieved from its original function, is ‘left to the free play of the various laws of growth’ . . . and provides a new substrate for morphological diversification.” But contrary to typical vestigial organs such as the human appendix, the python’s pelvis, and the whale’s leg bone, which degenerate over time, the treehoppers’ helmets continue to evolve to an ex- travagant scale. Some measure twice or thrice the size of the rest of the body to which they are attached. The treehoppers illustrate Romanes’s observation that specific traits that differentiate species from one another may be useful to scientists but are useless to the species themselves.

The miserly accountant appears to have fallen asleep on duty some 3,200 times. We cannot credit this outcome to nature’s bias toward excess. That bias applies only to traits that are important to species, not to vestigial organs; where preservation has no effect on survival, there is no need for factors of safety and therefore no increased probability of runaway growth. Vestigial organs should shrivel, not expand. Yet in the long term, and for reasons unfathomable, the bigger and freakier prevailed. The results are artistic masterpieces, but from a selectionist point of view, they are pure heresy. More than three thousand white elephants? That is a lot of exceptions.

The big question surrounding the helmets is one we have encountered before. How can such excess be viable? How is it that this useless, overweight blob meets the eighteenth-century French anatomist Marie François Xavier Bichat’s definition of life: “the set of functions which resist death”? We need not doubt the treehoppers’ will to live. As Baruch Spinoza put it, “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.” Another way to think about this is to recognize that organisms resist change, death being the ultimate case. Change is met with negative feedback, which brings a system back to equilibrium, as opposed to positive feedback, which distances the system from the original equilibrium.

There are three mechanisms that, in concert, can explain how this perseverance works in living organisms: facilitated variation, homeostasis, and norm of reaction. Facilitated variation affirms 3 billion years of natural selection followed by 400 million years of risks, follies, and otherwise idiosyncratic development; homeostasis preserves the interior milieu of the organism against external and internal perturbations; and the norm of reaction means that every genotype can produce a range of phenotypes without new genetic variation. Collectively, these mechanisms form a natural safety net that allows the mediocre to survive and thrive.4 This theory takes for granted the distinction between the two evolutions. During the first, occurring over the course of those 3 billion years of life on earth, adaptation amid competition produced fundamental changes in the nature of life. During the second, the safety net is so robust that all species are good enough to survive and experiment with selectively neutral variations in size, shape, and other aspects of appearance.

I should stress that this safety-net theory is just that—a theory. I cannot prove that it explains our observations of nature, but I believe it provides a useful complement to prevailing wisdom, filling in its gaps.

As should be clear, natural selection has a critical role in this theory: it is the engineer behind the safety net. But this role lasted “just” three billion years. Since the Middle Cambrian period, positive selection has been reduced to the role of architect and designer, whereas natural elimination (natural tolerance) pre- dominates. CCCP and homeostasis were fixed and optimized through a selective process, after which species were free to play with appearance and scale. The extraordinary diversity of body forms found in the Burgess Shale—fossils dating back 508 million years—demonstrates the power of the fixed infrastructure. The safety net was so strong that the genetic lottery could produce all sorts of sustainable deviation. The treehoppers’ helmets prove that deviations must be extreme before, as our epigraph puts it, “the sentence of unfitness is pronounced and the penalty of extermination paid.” The safety net is nature’s assurance to the fittest and the mediocre alike. Excellence does not hurt, nor is it necessary.

Even the mediocre may be good enough. Nature’s safety net benefits humans, of course. But there is something special about us, for we have won the final arbitrament of life. We must have an edge over everybody else. If my argument holds, this edge was not selected. Our victory was won by an organ that imposes huge selective burdens, and in any case, no one wins where competition is endless.

Excerpt adapted from GOOD ENOUGH: THE TOLERANCE FOR MEDIOCRITY IN NATURE AND SOCIETY by Daniel S. Milo, published by Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Written By Daniel Milo