In automatic control theory “homeostasis” is defined as the property of a system in which variables are regulated so that internal conditions remain stable and relatively constant. Homeostasis is a fundamental concept in biology because is what allows the life of organisms. In fact, it maintains the stability of the organisms in response to changes in external conditions. The concept of homeostasis is tied to the strictly correlation and interdependence of all systems in a body, i.e. its functional unity. Organisms can live and survive only because are giant cybernetic hierarchical hologramatic macro-systems. Donald Johnson defines cybernetics as: … the interdisciplinary study of control systems with feedback. (Programming of Life, Big Mac Publishers 2010) While Norbert Wiener, about homeostasis, writes: Read More ›

Truth may be, as Paul Dirac suggested, beautiful, but beauty is not always true. From the celestial spheres of the Greeks to Kepler’s heavenly harmonic tones, our dreams of beauty are often just that—dreams and not reality. But we dream on and today the most beautiful dream is evolution.  Read more

Over at TSZ Lizzie disagrees with me regarding my conclusions from the zombie thought experiment (see this post).  Very briefly, in the zombie post I summarized David Gelernter’s argument from the zombie thought experiment: If a conscious person and a zombie behave exactly alike, consciousness does not confer a survival advantage on the conscious person. It follows that consciousness is invisible to natural selection, which selects for only those traits that provide a survival advantage. And from this it follows that consciousness cannot be accounted for as the product of natural selection. Lizzie disagrees.  In her post she writes: What is being startled if not being “conscious” of an alarming signal? What is trying to gain further information, if not Read More ›

Professor Jerry Coyne cares deeply about people and sentient animals. But when he attempts to explain why we should care about others, his whole theory of ethics comes apart at the seams. Curiously, Professor Coyne does not seem to notice. In today’s post (which will be short), I’d like to explain what’s wrong with Coyne’s ethical theory. In a nutshell, it fails to address the following three very simple questions: 1. What matters, ethically speaking? 2. What ultimately matters: the individual or society? 3. How can we know whether an animal has feelings or not? What matters, ethically speaking? The first question is fatal to Professor Coyne’s ethical theory because he doesn’t believe in a self, but at the same Read More ›

A new study out of Europe has demonstrated for the first time magnetoreception abilities in dogs. We recently discussedthese amazing abilities in a range of species including fish, turtles, butterflies and homing pigeons. Even though researchers have not yet figured how these species sense and process the Earth’s magnetic field data, it is clear that these species use much more than merely the compass direction given by the field. In some cases it appears the organism is using the field intensity and inclination (the angle which the magnetic field lines make with the Earth surface) data. This new study on dogs has found yet another measurement. The dogs appear to be sensitive to real-time changes in the field’s declination angle (the difference between Read More ›

In my last post I highlighted an exchange between commenters “Joe” and “AVS” concerning whether Darwinian evolution is a blind, unguided process.  My purpose was not to open the issue Joe and AVS were discussing for debate, because there really is no debate on that issue.  AVS, who took the position that evolution is, in some sense, “guided” should begin to worry when even frequent Darwinist commenter Mark Frank says, “Surely ‘guided’ is the wrong term for natural selection.”  Dawkins sums the matter up nicely: Natural selection, the blind, unconscious automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind.  It has Read More ›