thegoodfellas/blogset-br huggingface dataset:
organisms development and metabolism. For example, it is almost always the case that a mutation in fruitflies affecting any morphological character also reduces the rate of survival of the larvae, i.e., the worm-like early stages of development. So, any mutations that alter the normal dark red eye color of adult flies, making it bright red or orange or colorless, will also result in lower survival rates of larvae, even though they have no eyes.The causes of a reduction in survival in larvae that results from mutations with obvious visible effects in adults must be as varied as the morphological character in question, and it would require a detailed examination of the process of fruitfly development to elucidate. It is precisely this phenomenon that compromises the elegant natural historical story about the industrial dark color of the peppered moth or the story about predation in the dark-colored mice. Is it the dark coat and not some other metabolic product that is changed in dark-coated mice and that is responsible for their greater success in reproduction? Perhaps the mice with dark coats are also more fertile or better able to digest their food.It is, of course, not true that every process in a living organism interacts strongly with every other process. If interaction were both universal and effective, the organism would be so inflexible as to make life impossible and no evolutionary change could ever occur. The intensity of interaction between parts is also strongly dependent on the circumstances of life. Were I to lose the little finger of my left hand it would have little effect on my life, but if I were a cellist it would be a catastrophe. Thus it matters to the result of natural selection which of the possible multiple pathways of protein metabolism and interaction exist in each kind of organism.Second, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini point out that there are molecular interdependencies that arise from the fact that genes are organized onto long thread-like chromosomes. The translation of a gene that is the first step in the process of producing a protein is sensitive to changes in DNA that is nearby on the chromosome strand, so that several genes of quite different specificity can be affected by the same change in the chromosome.Third, the organization of genes onto the chromosomes in the cell means that when an offspring has inherited a particular form of one gene from a parent, it will also, with high probability, inherit the forms of a number of other genes that lie nearby on the same chromosome strand in that parent. It takes many generations for such historical linkages between genes on the same chromosome to be dissolved. Therefore selection on one function may result in inherited changes in other functions.While Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini put considerable weight on these actual functional interactions in organisms, the main issue for them has to do with how we describe the actual objects of selection. If we are to describe what is going on in nature as natural selection, then we must remember that it is not traits that
are selected but organisms; the traits they possess as properties will determine what their contribution will be to the next generation. This is not an idle distinction because organisms will be selected as a consequence of their total biology. In our example we say that dark-colored mice are selected over light-colored mice. But not all dark-colored mice are candidates for natural selection because some of them might be sterile, or have a poor sense of smell, or any other of a vast list of properties that organisms may possess, and those properties may work against the survival of their offspring and thus their natural selection. Moreover, an alternative way that selection might have acted is by selecting mice that were active only after dark when the predators could not see them, in which case color would be irrelevant. The fact that no such mice happened to exist at the time certainly does not rule out that they might have come into existence. Thus, to give a correct description of the objects of selection we would have to say that what was selected were mice that were dark-colored and not nocturnal. But suppose the mice could make a loud screaming noise that would frighten away predators. Then too, their color would be irrelevant so the correct statement is that what was selected were mice that were dark-colored and not nocturnal and made squeaky noises. We cannot stop there. According to Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini our specification of what kind of mice were selected properly includes an infinite number of descriptors that take into account all the actual properties of our selected mice. This logic would then include that the mice are smaller than Manhattan.2The authors are driven to this by a logical necessity because we must, in fact, implicitly take into consideration why it was mice of a certain coat color and not, say, of a particular diurnal activity that were selected. If we are to understand the actual path of evolutionary change, the lack of variation in certain traits is of as much importance as the presence of variation in others. In fact, it often happens that artificial selection in the laboratory for a particular trait when replicated in different genetic strains results, in addition to the trait being directly selected, in different changes in other characteristics in the different lines. This is because in different strains genetic variation for different hitchhiking traits is present on the same chromosome as the genes influencing the directly selected trait.One way to escape from the logical necessity of an impossibly complete specification of the actual living objects that are selected is to stop talking about selection for certain kinds of organisms and refer only to selection of the trait or traits that actually change as a result of the process of differential reproduction.3 It is certainly true in artificial selection experiments that you dont always get what you asked for and there is no reason why the differential reproductive success in nature of different types that we call natural selection should not produce the same result.
This alternative, however, will make most evolutionary biologists very uncomfortable, because they want to provide narratives of what is really happening to the different sorts of creatures in nature.A major issue to which Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini give insufficient attention is the concept of adaptation. They point out, correctly, that every living creature must be in some sort of adaptive correspondence to its conditions of life or else it would be dead, so the fact of apparent adaptation of living organisms to the world they inhabit is hardly a surprise. But the adaptation of organisms to their environment is a characterization of the relation between organism and environment that misses half the story. It is based on the metaphor of the ecological niche, a preexistent way of making a living into which organisms must fit or die. But there is an infinity of ways that organisms might make a living, an infinity of ways of putting together the bits and pieces of the external world. Which of these is an ecological niche? The only way to tell is if some organism makes a living in that way. Just as there is no organism without a niche, there is no niche without an organism. A famous example of how niches are defined by the organisms that inhabit them comes from the attempt to find life on Mars. How does one detect life on Mars? One suggestion was to send up a sort of microscope, collect some dust from the Martian surface, and see if anything wiggled. If it wiggles it is alive. This seemed too unsophisticated for the space scientists.Instead they sent up a sort of vacuum cleaner filled with a nutrient solution containing a radioactively labeled simple sugar. If the dust sucked up from the surface contained living cells, they would start to grow and divide, metabolize the sugar, and release radioactive carbon dioxide, which would be detected by a counter. The Mars lander never detected any life activity although it was determined to be in perfect working order. But that does not mean that there is no life on Mars. It means that there is no life in Martian dust that grows on the sort of sugar provided. This device certainly would not have detected a science-fiction Martian. What the space scientists had done was to provide an ecological niche for a specific kind of life that they knew from earth, a niche that does not match a vast variety of earthly organisms. If you do not specify the kind of organism you are looking for you cannot specify its ecological niche. Perhaps the space program should look again for wiggly things.Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini do not discuss the fact that every kind of organism, as a consequence of its life activities, reforms the world around itself and creates its own ecological niche that is in constant flux as the organism behaves and metabolizes. Organisms do not fit into niches, they construct them, and biologists realization of this fact has led to the creation of theories of niche construction.4 It is not simply
that birds and ants build nests or humans build houses. The metaphor of construction covers a number of activities of metabolizing creatures that create the world around themselves. Plants, putting down roots, change the physical structure of the soil in which they are growing and they extrude into the soil chemicals that encourage the growth of certain fungi. These molds, far from infecting the plants, form intimate connections with the roots that are a pathway for substances that promote plant growth.In a great variety of organisms the chance of survival and the growth rate of individuals are not the highest at the lowest population density, but at intermediate numbers. Fruitflies, in their immature worm stage, for example, are farmers. They eat yeast that grows on the surface of the decaying fruit on which they live. The worms burrow into the fruit and the yeast grows on the linings of these tunnels. So, up to a point, the more worms, the more tunnels; and the more tunnels, the more food. Animals and plants create storehouses of energy on which they call in nonproductive times. Bees store honey and squirrels store acorns. Humans store grain and, in modern times, have a commodity futures market, so that affordable bread is available in the winter.The most remarkable feature of terrestrial organisms is that each one of them manufactures the immediate atmosphere in which it lives. By use of a special kind of optical arrangement (Schlieren optics) on a motion picture camera it is possible to see that individual organisms are surrounded by a moving layer of warm moist air. Even trees are surrounded by such a layer. It is produced by the metabolism of the individual tree, creating heat and water, and this production is a feature of all living creatures. In humans the layer is constantly moving upward over the body and off the top of the head. Thus, organisms do not live directly in the general atmosphere but in a shell produced by their own life activity. It is, for example, the explanation of wind-chill factor. The wind is not colder than the still air, but it blows away the metabolically produced layer around our bodies, exposing us to the real world out there.The appearance of Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarinis book at this time and the rhetoric and structure of its argument are guaranteed to provoke as strong a negative reaction in the community of evolutionary biologists as they have among philosophers of biology. To a degree never before experienced by the current generation of students of evolution, evolutionary theory is under attack by powerful forces of religious fundamentalism using the ambiguity of the word theory to suggest that evolution as a natural process is only a theory. While What Darwin Got Wrong may have been designed pour epater les bourgeois and to forcibly get the attention of evolutionists, when two accomplished intellectuals make the statement Darwins theory of selection is empty, they generate an anger that makes it almost impossible for biologists to give serious consideration to their argument.Conscious that Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini may
Rolland; Antonio Carlos Lessa (coord.): Relations Internationales du Bresil: Les Chemins de la Puissance; vol. I: Representations Globales (Paris: Harmattan, 2010, 322 p.; ISBN: 978-2-296-13543-7; 2 volumes); Michel Arslanian Neto: A Liberalizacao do Comercio de Servicos no Mercosul (Brasilia: Funag, 2010, 408 p.; ISBN: 978-85-7631-255-0); (...) revisando notas ja preparadas sob n. 2255. Boletim ADB (ano 17, n. 73, abr-mai-jun 2011, p. 31-32; link: www.adb.org.br). Atualizada em 28 maio 2011.
In Praise of EmpiresDeepak Lal(New York: Palgrave, 2004, 234 pages) In Praise of Empires is based on the Henry Wendt Lecture Deepak Lal delivered at the American Enterprise Institute in 2002, In Defense of Empires. He was preaching to the converted there, but the book presumably is meant to reach a broader audience. Whether he can convince anyone else remains to be seen. Lal takes a no-nonsense approach in his writing. The evidence is clear to him, the necessary steps obvious. Unfortunately, things are not quite that simple -- and simply stating them like this doesn't make them more so. Still, one has to admire his gumption. Lal's thesis is simple: America is an empire. Accept it -- and get on with it. Lal believes empires are special -- and good. Specifically, they maintain peace and promote prosperity -- better, Lal argues, than any other system -- and much of the book is an historic overview of empires and their successes (contrasted to the failures of, especially, the Age of Nations and all those annoying multinational organisations). Especially impressive: the British Empire, creating "the first truly global economic space (.....) the first truly liberal international economic order" (whereby Lal emphasises he mean 'liberal' in the original sense of the word, not the perverted current American usage). The historic overview is of some interest, though the small number of true empires and their very different circumstances should suggest that the conclusions one can draw are limited -- not that Lal lets that stop him. Historical evidence is hard to deny -- it happened, after all -- but history is also easily twisted, and Lal certainly presents it in light of the conclusions he's after; the book is certainly vulnerable to criticism that has a different take on history. What Lal leads the reader to is, first, the fairly obvious: the United States is an empire, by far the most dominant -- and thus literally the leading -- nation in the world. And that's where the fun really then begins -- because: The nub of my case is that the United States, even more than any other economically and militarily dominant powers in the recent past, has acquired an empire but is reluctant to face up to the resulting imperial responsibilities because in its domestic discourse it refuses to face up to the reality. Lal has little use for multinational organisations (or, indeed, multilateralism in any shape or form). The United Nations ? "It is of little use and in a rational world would be wound up." The World Bank and IMF ? They've outlived their usefulness: wind 'em up. The largest NGOs ? They're "bureaucratic organizations whose interests lie in creating scares to maximize their income and thereby the salaries, perks, and size of their bureaucracies." The specialized UN agencies (from the World Health Organization and Food and Agriculture Organization to UNESCO) ? "It is time to shut them down." Lal is correct that many of these organisations have become bloated, wasteful, and self-serving -- as most bureaucracies are wont to become --
but refuses to see almost any value in them. The better way he sees is to have the US play the part of the imperial power -- play it as he thinks it should be played, that is. That his idealism is no more realistic than that of those who think the UN and friends can save the world is not something he seems to be aware of. (In theory, after all, the multilateral approach can be made to sound quite convincing, but real-life conditions (as Lal gleefully recounts) prove otherwise; similarly, the unilateral approach can be blamed for all sorts of historic disasters (not that he dwells on these) -- and there's one aspect of the empire-solution that even he can't quite get around: all previous empires have collapsed. Lal offers excuses and explanations, but the fact that all empires have eventually failed is a devastating blow to his argument he never adequately deals with.) Lal isn't entirely deluded, and much of the book does focus on the fact that the United States has historically been reluctant to assume the imperial role its strength would allow it to take, with occasionally catastrophic results. Particularly after World War I US policy led to global economic catastrophe -- and Lal believes also "led to the two greatest threats to the classical liberal order created by Britain: Fascism and Communism." Woodrow Wilson, in particular, has a lot to answer for -- so Lal. Lal does recognise that American policies (and attitudes) have been confused -- an empire that isn't sure how to play the part -- , and he is certainly correct in warning that the resulting uncertain approach is dangerous. But In Praise of Empires is more a plea for the leopard to change its spots: a call for America to embrace the empire within, as it were, than realistic blueprint. The transformative leap Lal expects is simply not realistic. Even the most sensible proposal -- that the US finally do away with its insistence on reciprocity in trade matters, and embrace the "economically correct principle of a unilateral move to free trade" -- does not seem feasible in the current political climate (nor in any future imaginable one, as long as special interest groups continue to play the role they do in American politics). There are some other appealing proposals -- specifically the idea of an "International Natural Resources Fund" (which could conveniently replace the World Bank and IMF ...) as a way of depoliticizing natural resource rents (that benefit only bad rulers and elites of resource-rich nations) -- but almost all are impractical and likely unimposable. Lal thinks the US should do what needs to be done. Undeniably, it has the military power to squash, on some level, almost any opposition. As the recent misadventures in Iraq suggest, however, that only gets you so far. Lal acknowledges a failure in post-invasion preparation in that case -- but thinks the fault was in the setting of the original goal: the imposition of liberal democracy in a united Iraq. He understands that in
this case: "there is no reason to hold this artificial state together" and that American interests would be better served with the imposition of a different model (three autonomous self-governing regions, for example). But the costs of following this very different agenda from the get-go -- especially in selling it to the American public (and voters), not to mention the international community are not something Lal bothers with much. Lal thinks the US should flex its imperial muscle: forget the pressure groups, forget the international community. The current approach of kowtowing -- or at least going through some of the motions -- before taking action merely muddies the waters -- and prevents the US from doing what is in its best interest; time, he thinks, to go at it completely differently. In Praise of Empires is an interesting political fantasy book. Lal offers interesting history and some sensible theory -- a significant chunk of the book is also a defence of globalization as being the way to go, with the emphasis here on the US taking a leadership role (as it has not) in its spread. The examination of current and future threats and competition (including the likely rise of China and India as imperial powers) is certainly of some interest and value. But too much is just too far removed from contemporary reality to be of much use. Even if an American government were willing to go down Lal's path it seems unlikely that it could overcome even merely congressional and public opposition to it; the efforts of the jr. Bush administration -- far from Lal's ideal -- show how much America's leaders' hands are tied. Lal's wholesale dismissal of almost all multi- and supra-national organisations is also problematic. Despite their many faults, these organisations do serve a variety of purposes, though Lal is unwilling to acknowledge essentially any of these. Similarly, he does not dwell on America's frequent failures in its foreign adventures, most notably in Viet Nam, Iran, and now Iraq, but also in countless other small and large interventions over the past decades. Current (2004) support of Pakistan and numerous post-Soviet Central Asian states (in the course of the poorly defined so-called 'war on terror'), as well as continuing deference to Saudi Arabia suggest American political leaders may be congenitally incapable of (or institutionally prevented from) acting in the nation's best interest. Lal may know what's best for America (and he may even be right); American leaders certainly have never shown that they do. So: In Praise of Empires is interesting -- worth a look -- , but it shouldn't be taken too seriously.
No comeco foi apenas passatempoe o tempo foi passando devagarSem querer eu fui chegando me envolvendoe de repente ja gostava de voceComecei a tomar conta do seu tempoe a sentir que nao podia te perderMesmo assim fui te perdendo pouco a poucoe a saudade e o que me resta de vocePassa o tempo, so nao passa, essa saudadevoce quis brincar de amor e eu te ameiPassa tudo so nao passa essa certezaQue nao fui na sua vida o que penseiE agora o tempo passa, tao sem gracaFaz pirraca, tem preguica de passarSem voce o que me resta e muito tempomuito espaco e muito nada pra esperar Everything you are tudo que voce eEverything you'll betudo que voce seraTouches the current of love toca a corrente do amorSo deep in metao profunda em mimEvery sigh in the nightcada suspiro na noiteEvery tear that you crytoda lagrima que voce choraSeduces me seduz-meAll that I amtudo aquilo que eu souAll that I'll betudo aquilo que eu sereiMeans nothing at allnao significa absolutamente nadaIf you can't be with mese voce nao pode estar comigoYour most innocent kissseu beijo mais inocenteOr your sweetest caress ou sua mais doce cariciaSeduces meI don't care about tomorroweu nao me preocupo com o amanhaI've given up on yesterdayeu desisti do ontemHere and now is all that mattersaqui e agora e o que importaRight here with you is where I'll stayaqui mesmo com voce e onde eu estareiEverything in this worldtudo neste mundoEvery voice in the nighttodas as vozes na noiteEvery little thing of beautytoda pequena belezaComes shining thru in your eyesvem brilhando nos seus olhosAnd all that is you becomes part of me tooe tudo aquilo que voce e se torna parte de mim tambemCause all you do seduces meporque tudo que voce faz seduz-meAnd if I should die tomorrow e se eu morresse amanhaI'd go down with a smile on my faceeu iria pra baixo com um sorriso no meu rostoI thank God I've ever known youeu agradeco a Deus por ter conhecido voceI fall down on my knees eu caio de joelhosFor all the love we've madepor todo o amor que nos fizemosEvery sigh in the nightEvery tear that you crySeduces me All that you do...Seduces me In sleep he sang to meno sono ele canta pra mimIn dreams he cameNos sonhos ele vem pra mimThat voice which calls to meA voz que chama por mimAnd speaks my namee fala meu nomeAnd do I dream againE eu sonho novamenteFor now I find The Phantam of the Opera Pois agora eu encontro o fantasma da opera is here Inside my mind esta aqui dentro da minha cabecaSing once again with meCante novamente comigoOur strange duetnosso estranho duetoMy power over youMeu poder sobre voceGrows stronger yet cresce mais forte aindaand thought you turn from mee pensei que voce se desviaria de mimTo glance behind The Phanton of the Operapara olhar para tras O fantasma da OperaIs there inside you mindesta aqui dentro da sua cabecaThose who have seen your faceaqueles que viram o seu rostoDraw back in fearafastam-se com medoI am