Money and Finance
- How Do You Get To Carnegie Hall? Talent
Link to article: How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall? Talent The 8-year-old juggling a soccer ball and the 48-year-old jogging by, with Japanese lessons ringing from her earbuds, have something fundamental in common: At some level, both are wondering whether...
- Did Early Humans Ride The Waves To Australia? - By Matt Ridley
Everybody is African in origin. Barring a smattering of genes from Neanderthals and other archaic Asian forms, all our ancestors lived in the continent of Africa until 150,000 years ago. Some time after that, say the genes, one group of Africans somehow...
- Why We Lie
In 1995 I traveled to the University of California, Santa Barbara, for the annual meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, which turned out to be a pep rally for psychologists, anthropologists and others who view humanity through the lens...
- Nature Versus Nurture
A Robert Sapolsky quote from the article I linked to in the previous post that I think relates to the topic of 'expert performance' that has been a frequent one on this blog:"To some extent, the age-old “nature versus nurture” debate is silly....
- Which Traits Predict Success? (the Importance Of Grit) - By Jonah Lehrer
Found via Simoleon Sense.What are the causes of success? At first glance, the answer is easy: success is about talent. It’s about being able to do something – hit a baseball, play chess, trade stocks, write a blog – better than most anyone else....
Money and Finance
Richard Dawkins on long-lasting memes...
From Chapter 11 of The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition (it also looks like an MP3 CD of the book will be released in a few weeks which can be pre-ordered for just $8.99, HERE):
I have been a bit negative about memes, but they have their cheerful side as well. When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes. We were built as gene machines, created to pass on our genes. But that aspect of us will be forgotten in three generations. Your child, even your grandchild, may bear a resemblance to you, perhaps in facial features, in a talent for music, in the colour of her hair. But as each generation passes, the contribution of your genes is halved. It does not take long to reach negligible proportions. Our genes may be immortal but the collection of genes that is any one of us is bound to crumble away. Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror. Yet it is quite probable that she bears not a single one of the old king’s genes. We should not seek immortality in reproduction.
But if you contribute to the world’s culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a sparking plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G. C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong.
- How Do You Get To Carnegie Hall? Talent
Link to article: How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall? Talent The 8-year-old juggling a soccer ball and the 48-year-old jogging by, with Japanese lessons ringing from her earbuds, have something fundamental in common: At some level, both are wondering whether...
- Did Early Humans Ride The Waves To Australia? - By Matt Ridley
Everybody is African in origin. Barring a smattering of genes from Neanderthals and other archaic Asian forms, all our ancestors lived in the continent of Africa until 150,000 years ago. Some time after that, say the genes, one group of Africans somehow...
- Why We Lie
In 1995 I traveled to the University of California, Santa Barbara, for the annual meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, which turned out to be a pep rally for psychologists, anthropologists and others who view humanity through the lens...
- Nature Versus Nurture
A Robert Sapolsky quote from the article I linked to in the previous post that I think relates to the topic of 'expert performance' that has been a frequent one on this blog:"To some extent, the age-old “nature versus nurture” debate is silly....
- Which Traits Predict Success? (the Importance Of Grit) - By Jonah Lehrer
Found via Simoleon Sense.What are the causes of success? At first glance, the answer is easy: success is about talent. It’s about being able to do something – hit a baseball, play chess, trade stocks, write a blog – better than most anyone else....