Food Talk

New at Reason: The first installment of Ron Bailey's tireless one-man coverage of the BIO 2003 conference. Ron will be covering the conference throughout this week.

Comments

[Anonymous]

http://www.seedquest.com/News/releases/2003/june/6072.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/06/030624085707.htm

[S.Urfergal]

Anon, your second link doesn't work.

Try again.

Just send us to http://www.sciencedaily.com/ and tell us WHICH STORY you want us to pick.

Thanks.

[Anonymous]

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ridley03/ridley_print.html

For the first time in four billion years a species on this planet has read its own recipe, or is in the process of reading its own recipe. That seems to me to be an epochal moment, because we're going to get depths of insight into the nature of human nature that we never could have imagined, and that will dwarf anything that philosophers and indeed scientists have managed to produce in the last two millennia. That's not to denigrate what's gone before, but the genome changes everything. We know that just because the first one or two glimpses inside this box, the first lifting of the lid of the human genome, reveals to us enormous insights into what's going on, and just from the first few genes we're looking at.

http://erasmatazz.com/library/History%20of%20Thinking/CoreArgument.html

There's one other form of thinking out there that represents the next step in sequential thinking: subjunctive thinking. This might be called "virtual thinking"; where sequential thinking imagines a line of nodes, subjunctive thinking sees each node as a branchpoint from which a thousand possibilities emerge. The workload of keeping track of all those possibilities is too much for the human brain to handle, but now we have a medium that is ideally suited for subjunctive thinking: the computer. Thus, the computer will permit the full exploitation of subjunctive thinking in the same way that writing permitted the full exploitation of sequential thinking. We are about to enter a new period in the human story every bit as brilliant as that of classical Greece.

[Librarian]

Anonymous, don't know who you are, but THANKS for posting the above.

(Love this sort of stuff!)

Of course, there goes my evening -- tied up with many hours of reading, albeit very interesting reading.

Munchies gracious!