Privatize-se tudo, privatize-se o mar e o céu,
privatize-se a água e o ar, privatize-se a justiça e a lei,
privatize-se a nuvem que passa,
privatize-se o sonho, sobretudo se for diurno
e de olhos abertos.
E, finalmente, para florão e remate de tanto privatizar,
privatizem-se os Estados, entregue-se por uma vez
a exploração deles a empresas privadas,
mediante concurso internacional.
Aí se encontra a salvação do mundo...
E, já agora, privatize-se também
a puta que os pariu a todos....
José Saramago, in Cadernos de Lanzarote – Diário III
7/30/2015
Privatiza-se a puta que os pariu...
7/18/2015
7/10/2015
Grécia 2015, por Clara Ferreira Alves
A crónica da grande Clara Ferreira Alves da edição da revista do Expresso de 6 de Julho de 2015 é sublime. Exprime com humor e sublime ironia a esquizofrenia vigente à volta da Grécia. Merece ser lida e relida. Como quase todas as crónicas dela.
O problema dos gregos foi e será um bom tema para os profissionais do conselho, que têm várias soluções para a crise e orientações de voto
Toda a gente tem, tinha, teria, teve, terá, um conselho a dar aos gregos sobre como votar num referendo, incluindo os profissionais do conselho. Proponho uma grelha fixa de opção múltipla.
1) Sou um douto Prémio Nobel de Economia a atirar para o keynesiano e vivo em Manhattan que fica longe de Atenas. Sou pago a peso de ouro para desafiar em prosa o capitalismo internacional. Tenho sempre razão e tive sempre razão. Aconteça o que acontecer, a minha vida segue igual. Votem NÃO.
2) Sou um financeiro desses que ganham dinheiro à custa dos desgraçados e estados falhados, vivo de apostas, sei os truques todos e tenho servidores super-rápidos e traders com vazios occipitais de aço. Estou a apostar contra a dívida portuguesa e espanhola e vou ganhar um milhão. Votem NÃO, make me rich.
3) Sou um jornalista com garras e pertenci em tempos à extrema-esquerda, queria salvar o mundo e ganhava uma miséria. Com a idade, descobri que o capitalismo existe e encontrei-o. Passei a ser de extrema-direita e tenho rendimentos, um bom carro alemão e ataques epiléticos de cada vez que vejo um dos antigos correligionários. Passei de Mao a mau e adoro os republicanos americanos embora ache o Tea Party um bocado comunista. Pelo-me por viagens a Washington. Gregos, arrasem o Syriza, votem SIM e corram com esses palhaços.
4) Sou um potentado do “Financial Times”, desses que ajudam os que têm menos cabedal para estas crises a pensar. Sou pago a preço de ouro para fazer previsões mas não acertei uma. Já disse tudo e o seu contrário, nuns dias aconselhei os gregos a não pagarem ao FMI e no dia seguinte aconselhei os gregos a pagarem ao FMI. Ninguém reparou porque ninguém estava à espera de que eles não pagassem ao FMI. Percebo o Syriza e acho que os tipos tem “balls” mas se o dissesse publicamente perdia o emprego e a Lagarde não me largava. Votem SIM.
5) Sou um manda-chuva europeu e só apareço em público com ar de compunção para disfarçar a minha falta de princípios, a minha cobardia e o meu amor à burocracia de que sou um membro bem pago. O dinheiro emprestado à Grécia serviu para pagar aos credores e nunca serviu os gregos. Ahahah! Só agora perceberam? Não querem mais dinheiro emprestado? Vão para o inferno. Odeio os gregos e em particular estes tipos do Syriza que são jovens. Odeio países como a Grécia que me fazem lembrar como o Luxemburgo é um país mais estúpido do que a Suíça e menos rico do que o Liechtenstein. Vou tomar um copo e mandar um whatsapp ao bacano do Orbán. Mon cher Viktor. Votem SIM, mantenham-me empregado.
6) Sou um analista dos que passam a vida na CNN e na BBC a comentar a crise com aproximações analíticas. Tenho uma tese de doutoramento de merda mas sou um perito. A Grécia e o terrorismo são um maná. Já disse tanta coisa que agora só me ocorre dizer isto, aconteça o que acontecer, está bom para comprar propriedades na Grécia. Casas, ilhas, praias, vivendas. Preço da chuva, se me entendem. Votem NÃO.
7) Falando de vivendas, sou um pobre Presidente de um país pobre que se distingue por nada ter de distinto. Não falo, mando bocas, e aqui vai mais uma: se a Grécia sair ficam 18 países. La Palice ao meu lado é um tolo. Se eu soubesse quem é o La Palice, que não sei, só me disseram que éramos parecidos. É com c ou dois ss? Votem BEM.
8) Sou um poderoso chefão alemão e sofri um atentado que me derrubou. Abomino a esquerda. E abomino aquele tipo careca da moto, aquele bonitão arrogante que me olha de alto sabendo que estou cá em baixo. Vou matá-lo, e ao contrário do imbecil que me atentou, não falharei. Sou rijo como um corno de veado da Floresta Negra. Sou bad como o lumbricus badensis, a minhoca gigante da dita. Votem SIM e deixem o careca para mim. Heil!
9) Sou um esquerdista imaculado que acha que os amanhãs cantam e o socialismo vencerá e todos seremos felizes se eliminarmos o capitalismo e o substituirmos por... depois logo se vê. Votem NÃO, camaradas.
10) Sou a mulher mais poderosa do mundo. Tenho responsabilidades e o nazismo em cima. A rainha de Inglaterra que é alemã lá foi a Bergen-Belsen, eu a aguentar isto e os gregos e o meu ministro que é um touro enraivecido. E o chantagista do Cameron. Estou com uma enxaqueca. Gregos, não sei o que dizer-vos, estou como o choninhas do francês, não faço a mínima. Eu cá fico a apanhar os cacos e apanhar cacos é o que a Alemanha sabe fazer. Nós por cá todos bem: Über alles e assim. Para nós, a Grécia vem de carrinho, ou de Uber, ahahah. Fiz uma piada? Fiz.
11) Não sou a mulher mais poderosa do mundo. Isto aborrece-me. Mas sou autoritária. Tenho de bronzear-me na máquina para estar bem na conferência. Adoro o sol e não faço liftings como o Putin. Por causa dos malditos gregos tenho de adiar o voo para as Caraíbas. Votem SIM. Vou prevenir-me e pedir ao Karl um Chanel noir para o funeral da Europa.
Clara Ferreira Alves - Revista Expresso, 6 de Julho de 2015.
6/23/2015
Mad Max, Fury Road
Uma distopia com laivos de loucura e demência. Um filme de acção fantástico. Uma heroína forte e não sexualizada. Brilhante.
6/03/2015
4/28/2015
A noite
Post do Valter Hugo Mãe no facebook. O melhor escritor português do sec XXI.
há uma solidão específica para as noites. uma espécie de agrura que o escuro inventa. esconde o mundo como se escondesse a possibilidade de encontrar alguém. gostava de um lustre magnífico, tremendo e sempre aceso no lugar do sol. gostava que pendesse cristais e fosse encantatório. noite e dia. com ou sem gente. a solidão é muito um problema de luz.
4/14/2015
4/12/2015
4/09/2015
Sebastião Salgado
Sebastião Salgado - Um grande ser humano, um grande fotógrafo.
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebasti%C3%A3o_Salgado
3/24/2015
Herberto Hélder - RIP
....Se o conhecimento é uma forma de escrita, mesmo sem palavras, uma respiração calada, a narrativa que o silêncio faz de si mesmo, então não se deve escrever, nem mesmo admitindo que fazê-lo seria o reconhecimento do conhecimento. Pode escrever-se acerca do silêncio, porque é um modo de alcançá-lo, embora impertinente. Pode também escrever-se por asfixia, porque essa não é maneira de morrer. Pode escrever-se ainda por ilusão criminal: às vezes imagina-se que uma palavra conseguirá atingir mortalmente o mundo. A alegria de um assassinato enorme é legítima, se embebeda o espírito, libertando-o da melancolia da fraternidade universal. Mas se apesar de tudo se escrever, escreva-se sempre para estar só. A escrita afasta concretamente o mundo. Não é o melhor método, mas é um. Os outros requerem uma energia espiritual que suspeita do próprio uso da escrita, como a religiosidade suspeita da religião e o demonismo da demonologia. A escrita - inferior na ordem dos actos simbólicos - concilia-se mal com a metamorfose interior - finalidade e símbolo, ela mesma, da energia espiritual. O espírito tende a transformar o espírito, e transforma-o. O resultado é misterioso. O resultado da escrita, não....
3/17/2015
Choose your own enlightenment
Long ago, before Westerners associated "enlightenment" with meditation or yoga, there was the Enlightenment: the philosophical revolution of the 1600s and 1700s that made the modern West. Before the Enlightenment discovered natural rights, most people had no rights, speech was restricted, and few governments were accountable to their subjects. Enlightenment ideals are still common ideals: tolerance and equality, reason and science, an educated, engaged public. But today, we are witnessing the decoupling of Enlightenment principles from Enlightenment practices.
The Enlightenment was what historians call a "grand narrative." For full effect, say it with a smirk. How foolish those costumed dreamers were to believe in the advance of human knowledge, the dignity of all individuals, and the right to think, speak, and pray as we choose. How much cleverer we are, to not bother at all with such questions as we stroke our screens. As G.K. Chesterton said, "Everything matters—except everything."
The ideal of infinite progress is, ironically, an Enlightenment inheritance: Before the modern age, progress was in the hands of the Almighty, and moral authority rested with kings and churchmen. We might see this more clearly, if only we could settle on what the Enlightenment was. Everyone knows that it happened, but no one agrees on when, why, or where. The Enlightenment aspired to scientific reason, and the discovery of universal principles. But we, locavores in taste, are local in perspective too. Since 1989, and the demise of Marxism, one of the Enlightenment's grander narratives, historians have subdivided the Enlightenment like developers with condos. Now, we look back and see many Enlightenments. French dandies discourse wittily about Reason, and why it is reasonable to destroy the church. Red-faced Brits exchange their claret for coffee, and ponder the uses of Adam Smith's invisible hand. Practical Americans discover their natural rights in the wilderness. The Germans take off their clothes and commune with Nature. The Jews keep theirs on, and commune with the Germans. Everyone enlightens, but in their own way.
There is much to be said for this picture, give or take the naked Germans. The Enlightenment was a broad phenomenon—often, we use it as a synonym for "modern life"—but its outcomes depended on local variations. This is the relationship of climate and weather: the varieties of the latter confirm the stability of the former, but the relationship between the two is always unstable. Vincenzo Ferrone, the Italian author of the forthcoming Enlightenment: History of an Idea, calls the Enlightenment a "centaur": an impossible combination. It was a set of abstract philosophical ideals, but it was also a lived historical experience, full of ordinary disappointments and irregularities. We know what a centaur should look like, but we never see one in real life.
The Trouble With Sweeping Questions About the Internet
"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp," Browning wrote, "Or what's a heaven for?" The Enlightenment was the first modern "theory of everything." Out with empires, slaves, and priests; in with nations, free minds, and free publics. If the world could be known entirely, society could be reconstructed along improved lines. That, at least, was the theory. In practice, some of the Enlightenment's local variations were terrifying, not least because the theorists of the Enlightenment thought they knew better than everyone else. The Enlightenment was made by intellectuals, and frequently for them, too. The modern intellectual prides himself on his selfless rectitude but, like the medieval churchman whose power he supplanted, he can spy a distant horizon because he looks down from a lofty height. Voltaire reviled the church, but thought religion was a good way to keep the plebs in line: better that the little folks clung to their religion than to their guns. Rousseau loathed authority, but he awarded his Enlightened state the dictator's privilege of "forcing people to be free."
"These days," Goethe said, "there remains no doubt that world history has from time to time to be rewritten." Historically, managerial elitism has been a reliable paver of the road to hell. Today, the technocrats chase a mirage of perfection, allegedly on our behalf. Lawrence Lessig tells us that we should abandon the eighteenth-century ideals of intellectual copyright, and the Constitution; perhaps Google can sponsor a Second Constitutional Convention? Cass Sunstein tells us that we cannot be trusted to make informed decisions, so the government must "nudge" us toward "healthy" choices. Why let us eat cake, when we can be forced to make free at the salad bar? These are odious ideas, the kind of suggestions that Rousseau might have made if he had worked in advertising. They reflect a widening distance between the governors and the governed, the tenured and the temporary, the rich and the poor.
In the free market of American spirituality, "enlightenment" means the sweaty contortions of the yoga studio.
The greatness of the Enlightenment lies less in its ideals, than in our efforts to realize them. The tragedy of the Enlightenment lies there too. History is made in the middle ground between theory and practice. But the middle ground, economic, social, and political, is a bad place to be in the modern West. The Enlightenment was never automatically democratic in the modern sense. The path from the Enlightenment ideal of Nature to the Enlightenment politics of natural rights often ran into the mud of the middle ground. Intellectually, the Enlightenment was always an elite business. And in business, ethics are always challenged by commercial realities.
Today, the ideals of scientific enquiry and free exchange survive, but at the expense of the Enlightenment inheritances that shaped the democratic nation state: civic tolerance, genuinely free speech, and an engaged, educated public. In the free market of American spirituality, "enlightenment" means the sweaty contortions of the yoga studio, where bodhi is only personal, never political. An educated middle class appears to be a luxury we can no longer afford. If nothing fails like success, then the Enlightenment is failing wonderfully.
"I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's," said William Blake, full of Romantic doubts about Reason and a planned society. When the visionaries presume to plan on our behalf, we are no less obliged to refuse their presumption. Like Kant said, we are autonomous subjects, providing we try to act like it. If we outsource the intellectual labor of decision-making to the upper crust, or surrender to the bread and circuses of digital entertainment, we cannot complain about the results. Long ago, before the Enlightenment, people cowered before governments and speech laws. The Enlightenment offered an alternative, but it is one that must continually be affirmed: by public actions, by intellectual engagement, and by voting. We must make our own Enlightenment, or be chosen by someone else's.
Fonte: The Atlantic
Artigo Original: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/choose-your-own-enlightenment/387355/
2/19/2015
O início da vida.
Artigo original - Quanta magazine - https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/
Wy does life exist?
Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”
From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.
Kristian Peters
Cells from the moss Plagiomnium affine with visible chloroplasts, organelles that conduct photosynthesis by capturing sunlight.
“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.
England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. “I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.”
His idea, detailed in a recent paper and further elaborated in a talk he is delivering at universities around the world, has sparked controversy among his colleagues, who see it as either tenuous or a potential breakthrough, or both.
England has taken “a very brave and very important step,” said Alexander Grosberg, a professor of physics at New York University who has followed England’s work since its early stages. The “big hope” is that he has identified the underlying physical principle driving the origin and evolution of life, Grosberg said.
“Jeremy is just about the brightest young scientist I ever came across,” said Attila Szabo, a biophysicist in the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at the National Institutes of Health who corresponded with England about his theory after meeting him at a conference. “I was struck by the originality of the ideas.”
Others, such as Eugene Shakhnovich, a professor of chemistry, chemical biology and biophysics at Harvard University, are not convinced. “Jeremy’s ideas are interesting and potentially promising, but at this point are extremely speculative, especially as applied to life phenomena,” Shakhnovich said.
England’s theoretical results are generally considered valid. It is his interpretation — that his formula represents the driving force behind a class of phenomena in nature that includes life — that remains unproven. But already, there are ideas about how to test that interpretation in the lab.
“He’s trying something radically different,” said Mara Prentiss, a professor of physics at Harvard who is contemplating such an experiment after learning about England’s work. “As an organizing lens, I think he has a fabulous idea. Right or wrong, it’s going to be very much worth the investigation.”
Courtesy of Jeremy England
A computer simulation by Jeremy England and colleagues shows a system of particles confined inside a viscous fluid in which the turquoise particles are driven by an oscillating force. Over time (from top to bottom), the force triggers the formation of more bonds among the particles.
At the heart of England’s idea is the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of increasing entropy or the “arrow of time.” Hot things cool down, gas diffuses through air, eggs scramble but never spontaneously unscramble; in short, energy tends to disperse or spread out as time progresses. Entropy is a measure of this tendency, quantifying how dispersed the energy is among the particles in a system, and how diffuse those particles are throughout space. It increases as a simple matter of probability: There are more ways for energy to be spread out than for it to be concentrated. Thus, as particles in a system move around and interact, they will, through sheer chance, tend to adopt configurations in which the energy is spread out. Eventually, the system arrives at a state of maximum entropy called “thermodynamic equilibrium,” in which energy is uniformly distributed. A cup of coffee and the room it sits in become the same temperature, for example. As long as the cup and the room are left alone, this process is irreversible. The coffee never spontaneously heats up again because the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against so much of the room’s energy randomly concentrating in its atoms.
Although entropy must increase over time in an isolated or “closed” system, an “open” system can keep its entropy low — that is, divide energy unevenly among its atoms — by greatly increasing the entropy of its surroundings. In his influential 1944 monograph “What Is Life?” the eminent quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that this is what living things must do. A plant, for example, absorbs extremely energetic sunlight, uses it to build sugars, and ejects infrared light, a much less concentrated form of energy. The overall entropy of the universe increases during photosynthesis as the sunlight dissipates, even as the plant prevents itself from decaying by maintaining an orderly internal structure.
Life does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, but until recently, physicists were unable to use thermodynamics to explain why it should arise in the first place. In Schrödinger’s day, they could solve the equations of thermodynamics only for closed systems in equilibrium. In the 1960s, the Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine made progress on predicting the behavior of open systems weakly driven by external energy sources (for which he won the 1977 Nobel Prize in chemistry). But the behavior of systems that are far from equilibrium, which are connected to the outside environment and strongly driven by external sources of energy, could not be predicted.
This situation changed in the late 1990s, due primarily to the work of Chris Jarzynski, now at the University of Maryland, and Gavin Crooks, now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Jarzynski and Crooks showed that the entropy produced by a thermodynamic process, such as the cooling of a cup of coffee, corresponds to a simple ratio: the probability that the atoms will undergo that process divided by their probability of undergoing the reverse process (that is, spontaneously interacting in such a way that the coffee warms up). As entropy production increases, so does this ratio: A system’s behavior becomes more and more “irreversible.” The simple yet rigorous formula could in principle be applied to any thermodynamic process, no matter how fast or far from equilibrium. “Our understanding of far-from-equilibrium statistical mechanics greatly improved,” Grosberg said. England, who is trained in both biochemistry and physics, started his own lab at MIT two years ago and decided to apply the new knowledge of statistical physics to biology.
Using Jarzynski and Crooks’ formulation, he derived a generalization of the second law of thermodynamics that holds for systems of particles with certain characteristics: The systems are strongly driven by an external energy source such as an electromagnetic wave, and they can dump heat into a surrounding bath. This class of systems includes all living things. England then determined how such systems tend to evolve over time as they increase their irreversibility. “We can show very simply from the formula that the more likely evolutionary outcomes are going to be the ones that absorbed and dissipated more energy from the environment’s external drives on the way to getting there,” he said. The finding makes intuitive sense: Particles tend to dissipate more energy when they resonate with a driving force, or move in the direction it is pushing them, and they are more likely to move in that direction than any other at any given moment.
“This means clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and better with the sources of mechanical, electromagnetic or chemical work in their environments,” England explained.
Courtesy of Michael Brenner/Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Self-Replicating Sphere Clusters: According to new research at Harvard, coating the surfaces of microspheres can cause them to spontaneously assemble into a chosen structure, such as a polytetrahedron (red), which then triggers nearby spheres into forming an identical structure.
Self-replication (or reproduction, in biological terms), the process that drives the evolution of life on Earth, is one such mechanism by which a system might dissipate an increasing amount of energy over time. As England put it, “A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself.” In a September paperin the Journal of Chemical Physics, he reported the theoretical minimum amount of dissipation that can occur during the self-replication of RNA molecules and bacterial cells, and showed that it is very close to the actual amounts these systems dissipate when replicating. He also showed that RNA, the nucleic acid that many scientists believe served as the precursor to DNA-based life, is a particularly cheap building material. Once RNA arose, he argues, its “Darwinian takeover” was perhaps not surprising.
The chemistry of the primordial soup, random mutations, geography, catastrophic events and countless other factors have contributed to the fine details of Earth’s diverse flora and fauna. But according to England’s theory, the underlying principle driving the whole process is dissipation-driven adaptation of matter.
This principle would apply to inanimate matter as well. “It is very tempting to speculate about what phenomena in nature we can now fit under this big tent of dissipation-driven adaptive organization,” England said. “Many examples could just be right under our nose, but because we haven’t been looking for them we haven’t noticed them.”
Scientists have already observed self-replication in nonliving systems. According to new research led by Philip Marcus of the University of California, Berkeley, andreported in Physical Review Letters in August, vortices in turbulent fluids spontaneously replicate themselves by drawing energy from shear in the surrounding fluid. And in a paper appearing online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Michael Brenner, a professor of applied mathematics and physics at Harvard, and his collaborators present theoretical models and simulations of microstructures that self-replicate. These clusters of specially coated microspheres dissipate energy by roping nearby spheres into forming identical clusters. “This connects very much to what Jeremy is saying,” Brenner said.
Besides self-replication, greater structural organization is another means by which strongly driven systems ramp up their ability to dissipate energy. A plant, for example, is much better at capturing and routing solar energy through itself than an unstructured heap of carbon atoms. Thus, England argues that under certain conditions, matter will spontaneously self-organize. This tendency could account for the internal order of living things and of many inanimate structures as well. “Snowflakes, sand dunes and turbulent vortices all have in common that they are strikingly patterned structures that emerge in many-particle systems driven by some dissipative process,” he said. Condensation, wind and viscous drag are the relevant processes in these particular cases.
“He is making me think that the distinction between living and nonliving matter is not sharp,” said Carl Franck, a biological physicist at Cornell University, in an email. “I’m particularly impressed by this notion when one considers systems as small as chemical circuits involving a few biomolecules.”
Wilson Bentley
If a new theory is correct, the same physics it identifies as responsible for the origin of living things could explain the formation of many other patterned structures in nature. Snowflakes, sand dunes and self-replicating vortices in the protoplanetary disk may all be examples of dissipation-driven adaptation.
England’s bold idea will likely face close scrutiny in the coming years. He is currently running computer simulations to test his theory that systems of particles adapt their structures to become better at dissipating energy. The next step will be to run experiments on living systems.
Prentiss, who runs an experimental biophysics lab at Harvard, says England’s theory could be tested by comparing cells with different mutations and looking for a correlation between the amount of energy the cells dissipate and their replication rates. “One has to be careful because any mutation might do many things,” she said. “But if one kept doing many of these experiments on different systems and if [dissipation and replication success] are indeed correlated, that would suggest this is the correct organizing principle.”
Brenner said he hopes to connect England’s theory to his own microsphere constructions and determine whether the theory correctly predicts which self-replication and self-assembly processes can occur — “a fundamental question in science,” he said.
Having an overarching principle of life and evolution would give researchers a broader perspective on the emergence of structure and function in living things, many of the researchers said. “Natural selection doesn’t explain certain characteristics,” said Ard Louis, a biophysicist at Oxford University, in an email. These characteristics include a heritable change to gene expression called methylation, increases in complexity in the absence of natural selection, and certain molecular changes Louis has recently studied.
If England’s approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that “the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve,” Louis said.
“People often get stuck in thinking about individual problems,” Prentiss said. Whether or not England’s ideas turn out to be exactly right, she said, “thinking more broadly is where many scientific breakthroughs are made.”
2/05/2015
Mar
"Meio-dia. Um canto da praia sem ninguém.
O sol no alto, fundo, enorme, aberto,
Tornou o céu de todo o deus deserto.
A luz cai implacável como um castigo.
Não há fantasmas nem almas,
E o mar imenso solitário e antigo,
Parece bater palmas."
Sophia Mello Brayner