Marginalia

[coalescent]

The new issue of the Internet Review of Science Fiction is up and has, amongst other things, confessions of a Buffy virgin and Jay Lake on the elitism brou-ha-ha from the other week.

More I, Robot links; this piece from USA Today has quotes from Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison, amongst others. Meanwhile, you can find Kevin Warwick's opinion here.

In defense of Enid Blyton.

You might very well think that House of Cards is out on DVD. I couldn't possibly comment.

Mmm. Experimental Lamarckism. Why hasn't anyone written a Ted Chiang-style hard-SF story about a world in which inheritance is Lamarckian?

Most recently read (despite what the previous entry may have you believe: Blood Child and Other Stories by Octavia Butler. Five shorts, at least two of which were near-perfect; there's a good review by Geneva here.

Comments

About Kev Warwick's interview/article there...

[applez.livejournal.com]

Actually, some of the latest generation UCAVs the USAF has rolled out have a stunning amount of autonomy...to fulfill a kind of routine mission of patrol, interdict, identify, and attack.

I thought it was just limited to the recon UAVs, but apparently not...

[scarlatti.livejournal.com]

I love House of Cards. :) And I can't believe it came out on DVD in America before it came out in the U.K.! *boggle*

House of Cards is fantastic!

[applez.livejournal.com]

I rather like the whole trilogy of FU ... including To Play the King and whats-the-other-one. :-)

Re: House of Cards is fantastic!

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

The Final Cut. I'm actually not sure I've seen all of all three, which is one reason why I want the boxed set. That, and Ian Richardson is fantastic.

Re: House of Cards is fantastic!

[applez.livejournal.com]

The themes to distinguish the 3 series are...

1. House of Cards - the reporter who gets into some odd relationship with FU, and ends up falling to her death from Parliament's roof...ahem.

2. To Play the King - political crisis between FU and the new King, with a youngish blonde political analyst who becomes enthralled by FU's might. She ends up dead in some car accident or IRA bombing...ahem. Worryingly, apparently the first girl's death involved a tape recording of her last moments, and a gloved hand is seen putting it in a safety deposit box by this episode's end.

3. With domestic troubles at home, and an increasingly unruly Party, FU find solace in a war in Cyprus. A foreign adventure to salve the troubles at home. Like a gambling addict, the stakes grow ever higher, and repercussions ever deeper ... and the close bodyguard of the Urquets, Corder (tall bloke with bushy eyebrows), plays an increasingly critical role. Ahem.

----

Of course, it's funny to remember that soon after finishing this series, Ian Richardson went to Hollywood to play the role of a butler in a hiphop comedy film. I remember hearing in interviews that Ian Richardson really really disliked the role of FU, a terrible evil man.

[sharp-blue.livejournal.com]

Presumably because almost all acquired characteristics are deleterious so Lamarckian evolution would tend away from adaptation. Which wouldn't make for much of a story.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

almost all acquired characteristics are deleterious

That's not obviously true, to me; could you expand? For example, I would think the age at which you reproduce would be an important factor. Those having children in their early twenties, say, would presumably pass on more advantages than disadvantages.

To an extent, it also depends how far you take the definition of 'acquired characteristics.' Injuries, for instance. If you have a broken arm when you conceive, how would that affect your offspring?

It probably isn't possible to come up with anything watertight, but that doesn't stop it being a good premise for a story - the biology in '72 Letters' is similarly implausible, for instance.

[sharp-blue.livejournal.com]

You've gone to the heart of this particular criticism with your broken arm example. Even much smaller problems would add up if acquired characteristics are inherited. For example, most people have a few scars on their bodies. Suppose everyone gets ten small scars in their life before reproduction. Then after a thousand generations (i.e. not very long on evolutionary timescales), people would've inherited ten thousand scars: they'd be so covered with scars that they might not even be able to move. And if not all acquired characteristics are inherited there would have to be some kind of "censor" that let some though if they're "good" ones, I suppose.

There are two other criticisms of Lamarckianism too: its incompatibility with any plausible morphogenesis scheme for biological organisms and the inability of "use and disuse" to fashion complex designoid organs. There's much more along these lines in chapter eleven of Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker (which is a generally excellent book in any case).

One way Larmarckian evolution might work well in a story is if the entities in question are AIs that fork and then diverge repeatedly. The acquired characteristics would then be ideas, memories, experiences and so on. How much could a group of AIs diverge from each other after a million forks spread across as many years? How much would they have to diverge before they're recognisably different individuals?

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

And if not all acquired characteristics are inherited there would have to be some kind of "censor" that let some though if they're "good" ones, I suppose.

Well...yes. I believe it would be called 'natural selection'. ;-)

One way Larmarckian evolution might work well in a story is if the entities in question are AIs that fork and then diverge repeatedly. The acquired characteristics would then be ideas, memories, experiences and so on.

Mmm. I was talking about this with others on friday, and we came to the conclusion that it works much better for knowledge - for memes, I guess - than it does for any kind of genetic trait. The AI suggestion is a good one, although I think personally I'd be tempted to try to wangle it into something that can affect biological humans. Along these lines, the epigenetic memory that Tom talks about elsethread sounds interesting.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Lamarckian worlds in SF - hmm. Brian Stapleford has one in his emortality series, while there's the world/universe in Greg Bear's Legacy...

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

I've read the first (in story terms, not first written) of the emortality sequence, but didn't notice anything Lamarckian - where does it come into the series? I plan to read the rest when I have time (and when I work out what the order is!)

I haven't read Legacy, and my experience with Bear in general has been mixed. Worth checking out, would you say?

[itchyfidget.livejournal.com]

You might very well think that House of Cards is out on DVD. I couldn't possibly comment.

:-D

Dull comment on Lamarck

[(Anonymous)]

It would (and/or has) make an interesting story. One of the stories in Fuzzy Dice is a bit like that, although it's more Sheldrake than Lamarck.

There are somewhat Lamarckian things in biology, though - for example, if you starve baby mice, then feed them well when they grow up, when they have kids of their own, they're smaller, and, moreover, their kids' kids are smaller (i think). There's some sort of epigenetic memory of the nutrient supply. Or something. Various other bits of epigenetic inheritance also look Lamarckian in the right light.

I suppose the reason full-blown Lamarckian inheritance hasn't evolved is that it would require a general mechanism for encoding adaptations in genes. I can't imagine how that would work, even in very abstract terms.

-- tom