ScienceDaily (Dec. 13, 2009) — Scientists studying how bacteria under stress collectively weigh and initiate different survival strategies say they have gained new insights into how humans make strategic decisions that affect their health, wealth and the fate of others in society.
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Each bacterium in the colony communicates via chemical messages and performs a sophisticated decision making process using a specialized network of genes and proteins. Modeling this complex interplay of genes and proteins by the bacteria enabled the scientists to assess the pros and cons of different choices in game theory, a branch of mathematics that attempts to model decision making by humans, in which an individual's success in making choices depends on the choices of others.
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This has applications to human society because many people encounter similar dilemmas during their own lives. For example, should people ignore side effects and vaccinate against a new potentially lethal virus or should they not vaccinate and take the risk of being infected with the possible consequences?
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Abstract: The concepts of the "
Soul" and "
Free Will" are tightly coupled and are misunderstandings of
emergent properties of
complex biological systems due to fallacious
causal oversimplifications and are, in effect, a phenomena analogous to a rainbow. In the case of a soul that is separate from the self it would be judged by God for actions it did not condone. In the case of the soul as the self, the soul is locked into the body every night during
REM sleep and is catastrophically impaired by malfunctions of the body it resides in. While religions are divided on whether animals have souls and/or spirits, with or without them, animals have some of the same types of
cognitive abilities as humans and they get along well within their biological limitations. The
philosophical soulless zombie as the
null hypothesis for souls fits with established knowledge better than the "soul" described in unauthenticated bronze age "divinely revealed" texts.
I was watching Animal Cops (a "reality" TV show) the other night and a Veterinarian was working on a potentially lifeless dog (bear with me, this story does have a happy ending).
The best way to understand something is to build it.
In my recent articles I have been facilitating discussion on Adam and Eve and I have been collecting explanations about how Adam came to disobey god. This article identifies the parts of those arguments and diagrams one of them, and tries to tease out whether Adam could in any reasonable way be held accountable by his maker for his transgression and the resultant overall negative result that emerges from Gods Creation. However if we take Adam and God out of the equation, then the properties that emerge from nature are what we should expect once we understand them, and labeling them "good" or "bad" outside of any context becomes meaningless.
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