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Corante Blogs examine, through the eyes of leading observers, analysts, thinkers, and doers, critical themes and memes in technology, business, law, science, and culture.

The Press Will Be Outsourced Before Stopped

Vin Crosbie, on the challenges, financial and otherwise, that newspaper publishers are facing: "The real problem, Mr. Newspaperman, isn't that your content isn't online or isn't online with multimedia. It's your content. Specifically, it's what you report, which stories you publish, and how you publish them to people, who, by the way, have very different individual interests. The problem is the content you're giving them, stupid; not the platform its on."
by Vin Crosbie in Rebuilding Media

Travels In Numerica Deserta

There's a problem in the drug industry that people have recognized for some years, but we're not that much closer to dealing with it than we were then. We keep coming up with these technologies and techniques which seem as if they might be able to help us with some of our nastiest problems - I'm talking about genomics in all its guises, and metabolic profiling, and naturally the various high-throughput screening platforms, and others. But whether these are helping or not (and opinions sure do vary), one thing that they all have in common is that they generate enormous heaps of data.
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline

Disrobing the Emperor: The online “user experience” isn't much of one

Now that the Web labor market is saturated and Web design a static profession, it's not surprising that 'user experience' designers and researchers who've spent their careers online are looking for new worlds to conquer. Some are returning to the “old media” as directors and producers. More are now doing offline consulting (service experience design, social policy design, exhibition design, and so on) under the 'user experience' aegis. They argue that the lessons they've learned on the Web can be applied to phenomena in the physical and social worlds. But there are enormous differences...
by Bob Jacobson in Total Experience

Second Life: What are the real numbers?

Clay Shirky, in deconstructing Second Life hype: "Second Life is heading towards two million users. Except it isn’t, really... I suspect Second Life is largely a 'Try Me' virus, where reports of a strange and wonderful new thing draw the masses to log in and try it, but whose ability to retain anything but a fraction of those users is limited. The pattern of a Try Me virus is a rapid spread of first time users, most of whom drop out quickly, with most of the dropouts becoming immune to later use."
by Clay Shirky in Many-to-Many

The democratisation of everything

Over the last few years we've seen old barriers to creativity coming down, one after the other. New technologies and services makes it trivial to publish text, whether by blog or by print-on-demand. Digital photography has democratised a previously expensive hobby. And we're seeing the barriers to movie-making crumble, with affordable high-quality cameras and video hosting provided by YouTube or Google Video and their ilk... Music making has long been easy for anyone to engage in, but technology has made high-quality recording possible without specialised equipment, and the internet has revolutionised distribution, drastically disintermediating the music industry... What's left? Software maybe? Or maybe not."
by Suw Charman in Strange Attractor

RNA Interference: Film at Eleven

Derek Lowe on the news that the Nobel Prize for medicine has gone to Craig Mello and Andrew Fire for their breakthrough work: "RNA interference is probably going to have a long climb before it starts curing many diseases, because many of those problems are even tougher than usual in its case. That doesn't take away from the discovery, though, any more than the complications of off-target effects take away from it when you talk about RNAi's research uses in cell culture. The fact that RNA interference is trickier than it first looked, in vivo or in vitro, is only to be expected. What breakthrough isn't?"
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline

PVP and the Honorable Enemy

Andrew Phelps: "Recently my WoW guild has been having a bit of a debate on the merits of Player-vs.-Player (PvP) within Azeroth. My personal opinion on this is that PvP has its merits, and can be incredible fun, but the system within WoW is horridly, horribly broken. It takes into account the concept of the battle, but battle without consequence, without emotive context, and most importantly, without honor..."

From later in the piece: "When I talk about this with people (thus far anyway) I typically get one of two responses, either 'yeah, right on!' or 'hey, it’s war, and war isn’t honorable – grow the hell up'. There is a lot to be said for that argument – but the problem is that war in the real historical world has very different constraints that are utterly absent from fantasized worlds..."
by Andrew Phelps in Got Game

Rats Rule, Right?

Derek Lowe: "So, you're developing a drug candidate. You've settled on what looks like a good compound - it has the activity you want in your mouse model of the disease, it's not too hard to make, and it's not toxic. Everything looks fine. Except. . .one slight problem. Although the compound has good blood levels in the mouse and in the dog, in rats it's terrible. For some reason, it just doesn't get up there. Probably some foul metabolic pathway peculiar to rats (whose innards are adapted, after all, for dealing with every kind of garbage that comes along). So, is this a problem?.."
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline

Really BAD customer experience at Albertsons Market

Bob Jacobson, on shopping at his local Albertsons supermarket where he had "one of the worst customer experiences" of his life: "Say what you will about the Safeway chain or the Birkenstock billionaires who charge through the roof for Whole Foods' organic fare, they know how to create shopping environments that create a more pleasurable experience, at its best (as at Whole Foods) quite enjoyable. Even the warehouses like Costco and its smaller counterpart, Smart & Final, do just fine: they have no pretentions, but neither do they dump virtual garbage on the consumer merely to create another trivial revenue stream, all for the sake of promotions in the marketing department..."
by Strange Attractor in Total Experience

The Guardian's "Comment is Free"

Kevin Anderson: "First off, I want to say that I really admire the ambition of the Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free. It is one of the boldest statements made by any media company that participation needs to be central to a radical revamp of traditional content strategies... It is, therfore, not hugely surprising to find that Comment is Free is having a few teething troubles..."
by Kevin Anderson in strange
In the Pipeline: Don't miss Derek Lowe's excellent commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry in general at In the Pipeline

The Loom

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April 21, 2004

The Game is Over

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Posted by Carl Zimmer

John Maynard Smith has died.

While many people know who Stephen Jay Gould was or Richard Dawkins is, I’d bet few would be able to identify Maynard Smith. That’s a shame, because he played a key role in building the foundations of modern evolutionary biology. (Underlining this point, I only learned about his death from Science's online new service. As far as I can tell, no one else has run an obituary.)

Maynard Smith came to evolution from a previous career as an engineer. In World War II he measured the stress on airplane wings. When he moved to evolution, he brought with him a gift to see the mathematical underpinnings of things, whether they are bridges or botflies. (An awful lot of creationists are engineers, for some reason; they would do well to consider Maynard Smith’s example.)

Maynard Smith saw evolution as a very complex mathematical equation that played out over time. Genes spread or faded depending on their fitness, which depended in turn on changes in the environment. Maynard Smith came up with brilliant new formulas to describe that change, in some cases borrowing methods from other disciplines. For example, economists have delved deep into game theory over the years, working out the ways in which players with different strategies can wind up winning or losing. Maynard Smith had the brilliant idea of apply game theory to evolution. The players in his game might be a population of elephant seals, each with its own genetically determined strategies for finding a mate. Different strategies would have different levels of success. One strategy might be to confront the biggest male on the beach, drive him away, and take his harem. That might work if a male was also big, but if he was small it was a strategy doomed to failure. So perhaps instead he might skulk at the edges of the colony and mate secretly with females from time to time, trying to avoid getting killed by the harem leader. It’s not a solution guaranteed to produce a lot of kids. But Maynard Smith showed that it’s also not necessarily a one-way ticket to extinction. Instead, it’s possible that the two strategies, one dominant and one minor, can come to a stable coexistence.

Scientists have found lots of these so-called evolutionarily stable stategies. Some male salmons who take the sneaky route actually commit their whole bodies to the strategy. Instead of bulking up their bodies and developing big sexual displays such as long jaws, they become small and invest their energies into growing massive testes that give them a large enough supply of sperm to make the most of their few tristes. Some evolutionarily stable stragies cycle from prominence to rareness and back over time, in a sort of rock-scissors-paper game. Bacteria may reach evolutionarily stable strategies that leave some of them killers and others harmless. Evolutionary stable strategies may have a lot to tell us about human behavior as well. Genes have a role in personality, intelligence, and behavior, and there’s obviously a lot of variation in all these factors. It’s possible that these genes have, over millions of years, reached an evolutionarily stable state with one another. And these games may also be a model for how something as peculiar as cooperation evolved in our own species. (You can read a good recent review of evolutionary games written by Martin Nowak here.)

Maynard Smith realized that some of the equations that he developed for these sorts of social interactions might also carry over to more fundamental questions about the evolution of life. When life was just getting started on Earth, for example, genes might have settled into certain strategies for getting replicated—arranged on chromosomes, for example--in the same way animals settle into strategies for surviving. Maynard Smith came to see the history of life as a series of transitions to new ways of processing information--from the origin of life to the first sexually reproducing cells to the appearance of multicellular life to the emergence of animal societies, and finally, human language and culture. Each new transition created a new playing field for a new set of games.

All this may sound a bit daunting, but Maynard Smith was gifted with a disarmingly simple way of explaining his ideas. Check out his final book, The Origins of Life, to see what I mean.

Update 4/22: The obits are emerging now.

Update 4/23: The definitive JMS site. Via Panda's Thumb.

Comments (5) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: Evolution


COMMENTS

1. Tom Galczynski on April 21, 2004 05:44 PM writes...

Just wanted to point you to an obit for Maynard Smith:
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/press_office/media/media399.shtml
(via pharyngula.org)

Permalink to Comment

2. Dan Jones on April 22, 2004 05:42 AM writes...

I was saddeened to learn today of the death of John Maynard; I studied for my degree at the school of biological sciences at the University of Sussex, UK, of which Maynard Smith was the first dean (and emeritus professor when I was a student). I was there 1994-1998, and, when I wanted to write a short article on a recently published study of the rate of accumulation of deleterious mutations in the homonid lineage, Maynard Smith - whose office was next door to the office of the lead author of the paper - was approachable to talk to, and seemed talked to me as an undergraduate student without an ounce of arrogance or condescension (I only note this as I get the impression that many a great scientist develops a supercillious stance towards their juniors).

Although Maynard Smith is not as well known as Dawkins, his ideas, particularly that of the evolutionarily stable strategy (not 'evolutionary stable' Carl!), form an important part of the message of The Selfish Gene. You can watch a video of Maynard Smith talking at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/sciencearchive/

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3. José del Solar on April 22, 2004 11:19 AM writes...

Pretty sad. I admire Mr. Smith's use of game theory concepts to explain some of the most puzzling and challenging observations in evolutionary biology. He was indeed one of the most important biologists of the 20th century.

As for the fact that many creationists are engineers, I cannot but stress my embarrassment. Yours truly, at least, does not belong in that anti-scientific and deeply misguided mob.

Permalink to Comment

4. tyas on April 22, 2004 09:27 PM writes...

I'm very sad to hear the news. Maynard Smith is one of the greatest evolutionists there ever were and there ever will.

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5. Krishna Dronamraju on April 27, 2004 01:57 AM writes...

Very saddened to hear of John's demise. I first met him at UCL in 1961. Highly respected him always as a great scientist and as a great human being! We were both students of JBS Haldane.
Krishna Dronamraju,
Foundation for Genetic Research,
Houston, Texas, USA.

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