02 November 2008

A New Meaning

Year 2009 is Charles Darwin's 200th birthday (12 February) and 150th anniversary (24 November) of the publication of his famous book, On the Origin of Species. I write this as my celebration and simple tribute to his life!

A New Meaning
(http://sites.google.com/site/artificialcortext/special/a-new-meaning)

5 comments:

Sunil Prajapati said...

Good one. So in which category does following fall - common sense, or common non-sense? - that "There is a huge misconception and misunderstanding about it. Most of the things cannot be proved or disproved with 100% certainty, even our own existence. Say, existence of a unicorn (an imaginary creature represented as a white horse with a long horn growing from its forehead) cannot be proved or disproved with 100% certainty. In a scientific approach, a theory is offered as a logical conclusion based on the current observations. Each proof and the validation of its predictions increase the confidence level of the theory; else it loses its ground. As Richard Dawkins puts it, today evolution theory is about as much as open to doubt as the theory that the Earth goes round the Sun. Not only it has been proved again and again, now we know its actual mechanism how it functions."

RajK said...

Thanks. May be little bit of both.

Anonymous said...

Good!

Guna Arokiadass said...

The story on 'Life Technology' was good. It's all positive view of things. There are a lot of negatives too, which is why there are road blocks and hurdles imposed by congress. If this technologies is let on itself to flourish it might turn out to be a threat to existing life forms. My take, its just a trade-off between what is beneficial for humankind vs. what is a threat.

CorTexT (Old) said...

Thanks Guna for your comments. I could think of possible accidental threats and intentional (terrorist) threats. My goal is to describe the science and technology aspect of it. I'm sure that during the course of these developments there will be some wrong steps/mistakes/even accidents. That is inherent part of any new endeavor. There are also many discussions about moral and ethical aspects of it; this where public and hence congress mostly struggles to get a grip. I agree that we need new laws (like, against discrimination based on individual genome); but I disagree with many old or ideology or fear based views, though I understand their uneasiness about new disruptive changes.

As in my other post (If Knowledge Speaks), my general view is: knowledge is power and enlightening. If we miss to enlighten all, some destine to misuse that power. In many Arabic countries are fast adapting to scientific technological advancements, but not science.

If you know/think about any major specific threats, please feel free to share them; knowing is in part preparing!