Saturday, March 10, 2007

A reminder: Lynn Margulis, Monday, March 12, at Pharyngula

The Lynn Margulis blog tour begins this Monday morning. If you're interested, click this PZ Myers link on Monday and join me over at Pharyngula. According to PZ. Margulis will send a short article that PZ will post that morning. Comments and questions will be addressed that afternoon or evening if she finds them interesting. I'll probably only show up in the afternoon myself.

The blog tour is being done to promote her new imprint of science books called Sciencewriters Books.

If you don't know who Lynn Margulis is, here are some interesting bits of information:

1) She worked on the endosymbiont theory. More.

2) She was married to Carl Sagan.

3) She is a critic of neo-Darwinian theory, but not a Creationist or an Intelligent Design advocate. Her criticism, as far as I can tell, has to do with a neglect of the endosymbiont theory in mathematical neo-Darwinism. I guess those genetic algorithms might be improved if the writers incorporated a little endosymbiosis into their code.

4) According to her wikipedia entry she thinks HIV is not the sole cause of AIDS.

3 comments:

DaveX said...

"Are you talking about the lyrics I posted when you say "disturbing"? You haven't seen anything yet.

Here's a snatch from Marilyn Manson..."

I thought I'd reply over here, since Pharyngula has moved on. Anyhow, no, I wasn't referring to your NIN lyrics at all. I'm a fairly big fan of NIN, though I'd have to say my favorite NIN albums is Broken, rather than Downward Spiral.

What I was referring to is this notion that listening to a certain type of music somehow confers specific personality traits on you, or that certain personality traits can be assumed based on your listening material. I think that people are too ready to allow their purchases and their identity to become entangled, which is the "disturbance" I referred to. Sorry I confused you, I hadn't noticed how my comment would look directly after yours.

Oh, and as far as Marilyn Manson... my opinion so far is that Antichrist Superstar was his only good album-- probably due to Reznor producing so many tracks!

DaveX said...

I forgot.. here's my link Blogger has the WORST comment entry area!

normdoering said...

Yes, I was confused.

I'm not so sure you can't make some inferences into people based on the music they listen to most. You can't rely on them, but more often than not if someone listens to Christian Rock they're probably Christian (there's no other reason to listen to it, it's so lame) and if they listen to Marilyn Manson, they're probably not Christian.

But Reznor is good enough to appeal to a wider audience. After all, Johnny Cash did a great version of "Hurt."