Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Bouvard et Pécuchet

It is probably my fault.
I ask difficult questions that lead us
into everlasting discussions every time.

Is competition to survive necessary for organisms to evolve?
How friendly is causal entropy maximization?
Is world peace an achievable goal? I ask.

It was twenty years ago
I read Flaubert and wondered
when I would have my own Pécuchet.

It took time, but we've met.


(This is a poem for my best friend, Erick, who never gives up on me.)

3 comments:

  1. Glad that you've found the character that you've been looking for. I'm pretty sure organisms will evolve due to survival. Creatures adapt in order to not diminish.

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    Replies
    1. Kenn, I don't have many friends, but the ones I have are really precious to me. The great thing about them (and Erick especially, because we live in the same city, we sit in pubs or parks, or my yard and talk for hours,) is that discussion will emerge from either stupid or deep questions and continue until we have learned anything about the topic.

      As for the question on evolution, it wasn't 'if organism evolve' but 'if competition boosts evolution'.

      We learned from this paper http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0062186 that, based on computational calculations, that evolvable species accumulate over time even without selective pressure. The algorithms used for the simulations were abstractly based on how organisms evolve and the scientist is a Doctor in Computer Science with a thing for evolutionary computation, but that doesn't matter at all, see? We're just happy to have time for such a thing as learning together.

      Thanks for your comment. Kiss.

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  2. well, to misquote Gil Scott-Heron, the evolution will not be televised, either. ~

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