#darwin-devolves

[rejectory]

@rvolving *

Was that a smile.

Another button he didn’t know Q had.

“Are you old enough to drive?”

Not, judging by his soaked trainers. Q in his civilian skin is a fragment of the crowd.

Altogether past circumventing what might spook whom, James makes it a once-over while he’s at it—slim ankles, bad posture, and cat hair, surprisingly—all a sum of the parts of the intellectually most dangerous person he knows——-

the size of a paperweight.

[nozomijoestar]

you reblogging so much of shin megami tensei got me back on playing the game i had for a while (smt5) but i'm really curious what the one ur reblogging is about

I want to play four (the one with the samurai) if that's the one you mean but if you mean three then that's Nocturne and I'm playing it now. You play a guy who with his two friends is spared the apocalypse but are left to all fend for themselves in the world after, infested with demons because the people that ended the world wanted to bring about the process of creating a new one. Instead of dying immediately in what's effectively now a waiting room with everyone from Heaven, Hell, and myth, the player is saved because some kid (won't spoil his identity) who's part of these forces likes you and makes you swallow a parasite. You become half human half demon. Because you're now half demon you get excluded from being able to make a Reason ie. come up with an idea for a world to replace the old one, then get sponsored by a demon to fight in the struggle to make your Reason the new world. But being excluded from making your own allows you to choose what Reason you'll sponsor and champion into existence, or you can reject all of them, or you can leave the world to be solely for demons. Among other routes.

It's demonic pokemon just like other mainline SMT in a philosophical thought experiment, because the only way to gain party members is by fighting then talking to demons to collect them. I just really like the different Reason philosophies and how they interact and what happens when you reject them all; I like what the game is trying to say about what defines a human being, even if they get made demonic, really what's the difference between a human being and a demon at all and so on. It's not very character driven, characters are more a representation of the themes, commentary the game is making etc. and implications of where those intersect or what's implied but in this case I think that's fine. The music is bangin and the atmosphere is fantastic. I know it has a reputation for being hard but so far I don't care when it'll get hard for me, the combat is fun; getting absorbed in everything else is the real reward. And I love Demi-Fiend's tattoos that are more like his demonic veins. Really that was the first thing that always made me wanna play, his design.

How do you not find this cool

[dailyadventureprompts]

Hi! I really like your other takes on Underdark races, and wanted to ask if you had any thoughts on improving grimlocks? Beyond the permanent blindness they have and the whole being humans who adapted to the underdark, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot else done with them.

Monsters Reimagined: Grimlocks

Would it surprise anyone to learn that a d-list d&d monster has It's roots in 1800s ideas about eugenics and bad adaptations of genre fiction? No? Then you've been paying attention, top marks.

Asker is absolutely right in their assessment that there's not really much to grimlocks. They're one of many "hostile tribal primitives" that have filled out the monster roster ever since the original developers lifted them en mass from the pulp adventure stories they grew up reading.

A common theme among these pulp works and the early scifi that inspired it was devolution, the idea that a people could degrade from greatness back into an animistic nature. The most well known pop culture example would be HP lovecraft's deep ones, where the author's fears of race mixing manifest as monsters that literally push humanity back down the evolutionary ladder to the stage of fish.

There's plenty of different ways to explain the origin of this writing trend, but I like to chalk it up to an anxiety resulting from the widespread acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolution by a society that believed wholeheartedly in scientific racism. If intelligence (read: whiteness) wasn't just a god given right but was infact inheritable, then it could also be disinherited, bred out of a population whether by on purpose or by accident. This made it so important to practice good breeding (read: eugenics), to preserve the pure stock from falling to degeneracy (read: miscegenation) and introducing undesirable traits into the genepool.

We can see fear this with grimlocks, humanoids who were inherently lessened by their "adaptation" to life underground, losing their intelligence and eyesight and descending into a state of barbarism. Given that this is one of the few d&d monsters that mention evolution at all, we can trace this feature to their likely inspiration: The morlocks in H.G. Wells' Time machine, published a scant 36 years after Darwin published The Origin of Species.

I'm not well read enough to know whether Wells pioneered the idea of subhuman descendants, but I can say that most of his imitators missed the point of his writing: Wells saw in his day an increasingly indolent upper class inflicting brutal and dehumanizing labour conditions on the poor to support their own carefree lifestyle. He satirized this in his book by showing that while the descendants of the rich had devolved into beautiful, useless, idiots, the descendants of the workers devolved into subterranean ape-things who maintained the machinery that allowed the eden like existence of the rich while farming them for meat. Say what you will about Wells' race politics (Neither degenerate fop or inbred ape can withstand the smarts and strength of the enlightened colonial Englishman) but his writing was specifically class continuous, and the brutality of the morlocks was a direct result of the exploitation of working people in his own day and age.

When the morlocks were adapted into the grimlocks , the d&d writers kept their canibalistic streak but specifically removed their class based origins as well as their mechanical knowhow. This is a near identical process to what happened with a creature the worlocks helped inspire: Tolkien's orcs, which were likewise turned from a commentary on the brutality of the industrial age into warlike primitives. It's a bit of a trend.

If you wanted to "fix" the grimlocks I'd go one of two ways:

If you want to engage with themes of primality, make them legit underdark dwelling primates/australopithecus type of creatures, just figuring out tool use and language. Make the rumours of them being descended from cave-exploring humanoids a common myth made up by surface dwellers.

If you want to get spicy about it though, give them back their mechanical aptitude and maybe mix in a few more dashes of pulp "lost civilization" ancient aliens nonsense. Have them dwell in great mechanical complexes beneath the earth, worker drones who've long outlived the creatures that enslaved them and scribed mechanical knowledge into their very being. Originally denied understanding of the machines they toiled to build, work, and maintain, the grimlocks jealously guard the science they've spent generations reverse engineering, giving them the reputation of being violently territorial for those underdark travelers who venture too close to the megastructures they inhabit.

Artsource

[fnaflucasverse]

cake <3

"He-ere we go. For the birthday girl," Darwin announced, setting down the plate.

Leah eyed the huge slice of chocolate-walnut cake he'd cut her. "You dragged me out of training for this?" she scowled. Her first day of kindergarten, she'd pulled the same face when she'd realized they weren't actually at her aunt's house. "Caring about this shit's for babies and 100-year-olds."

"Well—you see…" Darwin tried to keep himself from deflating—had Sydney been right? Were all of his efforts pointless? Useless?—tried to muster up an argument—

"Whether you give a shit or not, your dad sure does!" Router snapped, scrubbing out a pile of pots and pans. "The least you could do is take a bite, say you hate it, and get out. But don't—" he jabbed a finger at Lee— "you dare. I spent the whole day making it, and you better appreciate my hard work! Goddamnit. Should've never taken his bribe…" As Router devolved into muttering, Darwin's jaw shut with a click.

When he finally turned back to Lee, her plate was clean.

"S'good," she mumbled. She cleared her throat, as if allergic to admitting it. "I mean, it's not great or anything… Just get me another one." His daughter shoved her plate forward, and Darwin felt the constant weight on his shoulders grow a little lighter.

Maybe, just this once, he'd done something right.

[ceratinus]

Anti-civ is so funny to me because it inevitably devolves into either straight up social darwinism OR some weird "noble savage" philosophy but these guys are still out here claiming to be the radical ones.

[astralcat]

GS&SM infodump time!

Little Ace, Sabo and Luffy loved making comics. When they were 10 years old, Ace and Sabo collaborated on a comic called "Super Drago" (Ace writing, Sabo illustrating), about a superhero dragon and his sidekick Little Jackalope (who was based on Luffy at the time). Meanwhile Luffy, inspired by their comics and the Captain Underpants books (it was 2009), made his own comics about Super Gassy Man, who had superpowered flatulence for seemingly no reason.

And then, when Sabo was 13, he started his own comic called "A Whole New World", which was a Digimon/Neopets/The Amazing World of Gumball crossover comic about a Shoyru and Gabumon transferring to Elmore Junior High and accidentally bringing threats from their universes over. It lasted until Sabo was 16, and has some pretty insane lore. *deep breath*

- Gumball gets (painfully) permanently fused with Gabumon to become "Gumbumon"

- Gumball is in a relationship with Gatomon and gets her pregnant. She gives birth in the epilogue

- Darwin was actually a girl and the Wattersons raised him as a boy, and he's actually cool with being referred to as a guy. He also falls in love with Gomamon

- Elmore gets nuked by Xandra halfway through the story, so all the TAWOG characters travel to the Digital World and live there for the rest of the story

- Penny dies after Gumbumon's first attempt at Digivolving into Garurumon goes horrifically wrong and he turns into a mindless beast

- Mirage (the Shoyru that originally transferred to Elmore Junior High with Gabumon, setting the plot into motion) ends up teaching magic to a whole bunch of characters

- Agumon kills Tina after Digivolving into SkullGreymon out of pure rage at something else and after he devolves is so distraught that he took an innocent life that he decides to lock himself in a crate and eat the key so that he dies a slow and painful death

- The grand finale of the series was a giant multiversal war against "Dark Universe" versions of the characters that led to Darwin dying and Gomamon deciding to be together in death with him, Anais being sold into slavery and multiple characters (including Ocho, Tobias, Piyomon, Terriermon, Lopmon and Teri) being offered as a sacrifice to God to cease the Dark Universe and its inhabitants' existence

- During the epilogue, Gumbumon has so much PTSD from the events of the final war that he can't even be happy about the birth of his own children

- Leomon survives this all

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“He Knocks the Spots from Darwin's Plan, Says Monkeys Have Devolved from Man,” Toronto Star. May 21, 1921. Page 3. ---- Canadian Press Despatch. ---- Ottawa. May 20. - New theories of the origin of man this morning at were presented a meeting of the Royal Society of Canada, by Prof. Charles Hill-Tout. F.R.A.I., F.RS.C., of Abbotsford, B.C. Prof. Hill-Tout took the opposite view to that presented in Darwin's theory of evolution, namely that anthropoids had devolved. from the human form rather than the human being had evolved from anthropoids.

The human race at the present time was much closer in its resemblance. to original type, he thought, than were anthropoids. There was much more possibility of monkeys evolving from human beings than vice versa.

[louiskdelphi]

Devolving to spite Darwin

Why must I

remember every fucking slight and embarrassment

Every mental face-plant

You gotta wonder

How does that help me evolve?

[processsandenquirysophie]

Brief research

Evolution & unpredictability

Since receiving the brief, I found myself questioning what does evolution & unpredictability actually mean? And so I started my brief research by looking further into these prompts so that I can successfully respond to this brief.

EVOLUTION

Definitions from Oxford Languages evolution 1. the process by which different kinds of living organisms are believed to have developed from earlier forms during the history of the earth. Similar: Darwinism natural selection 2. the gradual development of something."the forms of written languages undergo constant evolution" Similar: development, advancement, progress, expansion, extension unfolding, transformation, adaptation, modification, revision, reworking, devolvement

Evolution implies something transforming or changing into something better. An extension and expansion of what it already was - this can be biological or metaphorical. When I think of evolution, I think of the gradual change in living organisms - the human evolution but I also think of the more metaphorical evolution of an individual - the way that a person flourishes and reaches their fullest potential.

I began thinking about my own 'evolution' If we are to develop through time, how do we know when we have evolved? When does this evolution happen? Are we constantly changing and developing every day? With every decision-making and choice we make?

I also thought about the evolution of art, how we went from finger painting with pigment on cave walls to what we know as art today.

UNPREDICTABILITY

Definitions from Oxford Languages  unpredictability inability to be predicted; changeability. "the unpredictability of the British weather"

Unpredictability implies that something or someone cannot be predicted; the outcome of an event or action cannot be known until it happens. This means that any possible result can occur, and so it is completely unforeseeable. The word can also be used to describe something that changes suddenly without reason or warning - there is no time to predict that it will happen.

I started thinking of examples of unpredictability. I thought about how people can be unpredictable - sudden actions or abrupt mood changes. The unpredictability of natural disasters and weather. Thinking about how the world itself is unpredictable - like how the dinosaurs went extinct - started to think about how our lives are unpredictable and that anything can happen.

Thoughts so far

I am interested in exploring the unpredictability of life and its links to anxiety, the fear we have of what could go wrong and not knowing how things will happen and how this holds us back from reaching our potential. It could also be interesting to explore life and death, how we can't predict what happens after death, whether we ascend to our fullest potential and the idea that we evolve once we die.

Thinking about the brief and possible paths for my concept

I created a mind map as a way of writing my thoughts for each of my ideas for the brief - it became that I was more so looking at each words of the brief separately and finding possible ideas for each of them but in some ways the two words linked together e.g I am interesting in exploring the unpredictability of life and it’s links to anxiety, our fears of death but this also links to evolution and the idea of rebirth.

From completing this mind map I am most interested in exploring the unpredictability of life itself, including subjects of anxiety and death within this. I also want to look at evolution, more so focusing on human ascension and inner rebirth and so i plan to do research on this. I also plan to research artist that explore similar ideas as I am very interested in how other artists depict the anxiety of unpredictability and death.

I am interesting in working with video and sound for this and looking at text. I think it would be interesting to look at words I use myself when anxious about things I can’t predict, sentences like “what if…” “but this could happen..” and also looking at words associated with life after death “is there a heaven and hell” “is there an afterlife” “where do we go” “will I see them again?” “Is it just emptiness when we die?” I am thinking it could be interesting to create a work that depicts what this after life could look like, perhaps of the worst of our fears that there is nothing after death which could share this anxiety with the viewer. I plan to note these ideas so that I can explore and develop these in further workshops and in my own studio time.

[socialallegation]

Misuse

Sadly I’m a second rate saint

Talking to tools who reply with their taint

Mocking me for missing my mate

Fuck faking the usual family fate

And now I’m fatigued from free use fakes

Who intrigued by kind smiles and red velvet cakes

That break banks instead of bread

Symbol of hope just like Superman says

Turn that S to a D and now they impressed

Damn

Devolving Darwin downing drinks and they say I’m depressed

[dragonwyckcandleshop]

Good grief, it's a joke. Not everything requires a fact check.

Mankind is devolving. Checkmate, Darwin.

This is why we are journeying towards - or backwards - to Frontier Style Living. Mankind cannot sustain itself with this kind of stupidity. It will implode. People's lives will be destroyed. It's only a matter of time.

[faithfulnews]

Helpful Devolutionary Mutations Are Rapid and Unavoidable: Paper Reinforces Darwin Devolves

An interesting paper that strongly reinforces the lessons of Darwin Devolves was recently published in Nature Ecology and Evolution.1 University of Michigan biologists Piaopiao Chen and Jianzhi Zhang looked at the effect of changing environments on the evolution of laboratory yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

They grew 12 replicate cultures of a pure yeast strain separately for 1,120 generations in each of five disparate, challenging environments: 1) in the presence of the carcinogenic dye Congo Red; 2) in the presence of copper ion; 3) at pH 8; 4) in the presence of hydrogen peroxide; and 5) in the presence of the antibiotic neomycin. They also grew replicate cultures successively for 224 generations apiece in the five conditions  —  that is, the first 224 generations in condition 1, the next 224 in condition 2, and so on, for a total of 1,120 generations.

Chen and Zhang were interested in determining whether adaptive mutations might be lost when conditions were changed, because lab evolution experiments seem to show a lot more adaptive mutations than are seen in the wild. Sure enough, the authors saw that some helpful mutations that arose and were being selected in condition 1 were lost when the yeast was switched to condition 2, and different helpful mutations were gained. Then some of those were lost in condition 3 while others were gained, and so on. At the end of 1,120 generations, the yeast culture that had been rotated through the five environments had significantly fewer net mutations than the sum of all those that had come and gone during the course of the experiment. Chen and Zhang concluded that beneficial mutations can be undercounted in changing environments, both in the lab and in nature.

Fine and Interesting Work

The most interesting point of their fine work to me is that all of the beneficial mutations almost certainly are loss- or degradation-of-function. That is, the mutations in the various conditions benefit the yeast by destroying pre-existing genes or diminishing their activity. Chen and Zhang followed two different categories of mutations: 1) mutations that substitute single nucleotide residues; and 2) mutations that delete chunks of DNA or cause a stop codon to appear in a gene. The latter category is highly likely to outright destroy the activity of the protein that the mutated gene codes for. Nonetheless, this category is actually the more frequently found of the two. The former category — substitution mutations — does not necessarily destroy a protein’s activity, but that’s certainly the way to bet here. The reason is that most of the selected genes that have substitution mutations (where the normal amino acid residue in the protein the gene codes for is swapped out for a different one) actually have multiple positions that can be beneficially substituted. That’s the signature of a mutation that is helping by degrading or destroying a protein’s activity, simply because there are many more positions where substitution will degrade activity than ones that will improve activity.

Confirming Previous Experiments

Here are some important points that follow from this work and earlier results:

In case anyone needed further evidence, this experiment confirms many previous ones showing that loss- or degradation-of-function mutations dominate laboratory evolution. Notice that the yeast tested here are eukaryotes while the E. coli studied in Lenski’s lab2 are prokaryotes, yet in adapting to their environment both of them throw out genes left and right. Devolution is not confined to a particular branch of life — it is universal.

The growth conditions used by Chen and Zhang did not coddle the yeast. On the contrary, the investigators first pre-adapted the parent yeast strain to the initial growth conditions and then challenged the yeast with changes to its environment. Thus a common retort by Darwinians to degradation of E. coli genes in Lenski’s experiments — that benign growth conditions allowed the bugs to sacrifice genes easily — does not apply here. We can conclude that whenever breaking or degrading a gene will have a net benefit, it will be selected. (Note that it is not necessary for the previously functional gene to be unused or superfluous in a given environment — only that whatever is gained in fitness by its degradation is greater than what was lost.)

The adaptive degradative mutations show up very rapidly, within a few hundred generations (a month or so). An unalterable reason degradative mutations appear so quickly is that the speed with which a certain gene can be broken is much greater than the speed with which a specific, constructive mutation in a given gene can occur — perhaps a hundred to a thousand times faster.

Whenever the environment changes, helpful degradative mutations may eliminate genes.

The 224-generations per condition used by Chen and Zhang purposely does not allow enough time for the beneficial mutations to rise to 100 percent (become “fixed”) of cells in a flask because the investigators wanted to see if the mutations would be lost when conditions were changed. Yet if the switching time were lengthened, many broken genes would fix in the population and so essentially be irreversible.

Because mutation is random, the degradative mutations that show up first in the lab will also turn up first in natural settings.

Because the rate for loss-of-function mutations is much greater than for constructive ones, LOF mutations will much more frequently be part of the standing genetic variation of a species — that is, already be present in a population and ready to be selected when a change in the environment makes the mutation to be beneficial on balance.

Beneficial mutations that appear first in a population will be the ones that are rapidly selected and fixed, even if they are degradative. Mutations that are slower to appear thus must compete with the previously selected ones, even if the poky mutations would have been constructive. For all practical purposes, that means subsequent mutations must have selection coefficients that exceed the initial, quick-fix ones. In other words, degraded, quick-fix genes will actively inhibit the appearance of any possible constructive mutations.

Substantive constructive changes are expected to take a comparatively very, very long time to first appear. For example, a recent paper3 investigating what might be the appearance of new transmembrane (TM) segments of genes in yeast noted that they might “mature over millions of years.” Yet degradative changes occur on a time-scale of months, ten million times faster than the process described in the new paper. Thus, while such lumbering, snail-like processes plod along, any helpful degradative mutations will fix in a comparative eye-blink, at every stage of the process.

There is simply no way for any unguided, unintelligent account of the unfolding of life to avoid the bane of helpful degradative mutations. Any intellectually honest reasoning about evolution must henceforth deal soberly with universal devolutionary processes.

Many of the bullet points above are discussed at considerably more length in Darwin Devolves.

References:

Chen, P. and Zhang, J. 2020. Antagonistic pleiotropy conceals molecular adaptations in changing environments.  Nature Ecology & Evolution 4:461-469.

Lenski, R. E. 2017. Convergence and divergence in a long-term experiment with bacteria.  The American Naturalist 190 (S1):S57-S68.

Vakirlis, N. et al. 2020. De novo emergence of adaptive membrane proteins from thymine-rich genomic sequences.  Nature Communications 11:781. 

Photo: Saccharomyces cerevisiae, laboratory yeast, by Bob Blaylock / CC BY-SA.

The post Helpful Devolutionary Mutations Are Rapid and Unavoidable: Paper Reinforces <i>Darwin Devolves</i> appeared first on Evolution News.

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[charjbou]

Leni Robredo choosing pink as her campaign color is such a huge milestone for feminism

[why-is-it-always-raining]

My friends: what are you doing

Me, laying atop the water: devolving

[paraparathecow]

I fucking hate how people use the word "Nazi" without knowing what it means.

Nazism is a very specific ideology. It's not a word for "bad ideology", it's not a word for "evil". It is a word that describes a person who believes in Nazism.

Nazism is made out of the following ideas:

Fascism - the belief that the people must serve their country

The supreme leader/fuhrer - the belief that one person should be in control of all government institutions, and that all citizens must be loyal to that person

Social darwinism - a pseudoscience which applies natural selection to humans and human societies, which usually devolves into scientific racism - a pseudoscience which states humans can be separated into races, which can then be ranked. In simpler terms: insistence that racism is scientifically justified.

The new world order - an idea of a perfect world, based on whatever conclusion you drew from your own version of social darwinism/scientific racism. For Hitler, it was no Jews, Aryans reign supreme, and everyone else are varying degrees of slaves.

Antisemitism - coined in 1822 by Moritz Steinschneider, the term "Antisemitism" was created as a more scientific-sounding word for "Jew hate", to go together with social darwinism and scientific racism. A huge amount of the Nazi's actions specifically defined, targeted, hurt, and killed Jews.

If a person does not believe in all of these, they are not a Nazi. Believing in any of these is still terrible, don't get me wrong. But Nazis are only the people who believe in all of the above.

Words have meanings, and you should respect them - because if you don't, you'll end up harming your own goals, because your enemies will use them against you. For example, Putin accused zelenski (a Jewish man) of being a Nazi. This wouldn't have happened if the meaning of the word wasn't watered down by people using it to just mean "very evil".

genuinely fuck all of you for diluting the meaning of “nazi” down to “person i don’t think is radical enough” and the absolute devastation of the holocaust to “jews whining about a couple of them being killed.” fuck you. i hope you all spend the rest of your lives embarrassed and ashamed at the bold faced antisemitism you took part in.

[wisdomfish]

Michael Behe: Darwin Devolves

Biologist Kenneth Miller thought he had scored a point against biochemist Michael Behe’s concept of irreducible complexity. At a conference, says Miller, “I removed two parts from a mousetrap (leaving just the base, spring, and hammer), and used that 3-part device as a functional tie-clip.” Check out this bonus video from the Science Uprising series, where Behe amusedly tells what’s wrong with Miller’s demonstration.

He also explains the “edge of evolution,” which he has traced to the level of biological family, as in cats versus dogs. Down to that level in the taxonomic scheme, evolution must reflect intelligent design. Further down, Darwinian processes may reign, primarily by breaking, though, rather than building. The author most recently of Darwin Devolves, Behe is a pleasure to learn from, as always.