The Sun and MySpace. What the fuck? Two shit websites with nothing in common merge thanks to Rupert Murdoch. "Add this Page 3 girl to your MySpace friends". Pathetic. The whole thing is a joke. Still, it provides a nice response to those people out there who thought that Rupert Murdoch's purchase of MySpace wouldn't change anything. It has. It's made them act like ten year olds at News International. I like Murdoch's statement though: "This is a generation... talking to itself in a world with frontiers". But actually look, and see how the opinions work. The "MySpace generation" aren't doing anything, it's their older brothers and sisters who don't shrug their shoulders at RSS or XML-RPC. The whole idea behind this merger is terrifying. 
Oh, for crying out loud. I get this enormous horde of loud foriegn students on the way in to London, and now I've got them on the way back. There are millions of them.
I do rather like this review of OS X from the POV of a Linux guy. I'm an OS X / Linux guy who has to use Windows on odd occasions.
Not even good enough for the National Enquirer.
Kent Newsome has a full list of ScobleFeeds that he's reviewed. Now, a Reading List or two?
The 2.0websites.com lists lots of Web 2.0 stuff. We still need this to be in OPML.
Thanks, Hil.
Mike Arrington has launched TalkCrunch podcast.
Live from the LSE 
18:01: I have arrived. I've got three and a half hours remaining, but I'm in the lecture theatre, second row. Not exactly blog-friendly - they have wireless, but it's behind a complex wall, so I'm GPRS-ing. Watch for time-coded updates. The good stuff starts at 18:45.
18:09: The star of the show is here.
18:32: It's getting more exciting now. I've seen a few people - Jonathan Miller, host of A Brief History of Disbelief, is a couple of rows behind me. Norman Bacrac, who gave a great performance in debate at SPES a few months back, and who runs SPES, is also here. Only a few minutes before we set off.
18:41: So, here we are in the LSE Old Theatre, in the West End of London. The stage is empty, but in a few minutes, the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg will chair a discussion on "Thirty years of The Selfish Gene". Included in the discussion will be Professor Richard Dawkins (Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, author of The Selfish Gene and a whole series of books on evolutionary science), Daniel Dennett (Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, author of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon and Darwin's Dangerous Idea), Sir John Krebs FRS (Oxford), Professor Matt Ridley and Ian McEwan (the author of Saturday and Enduring Love). If you wish to discuss this, please come and hang out at #freethoughtmedia on irc.infidelguy.com or send me an email at bbtommorris@gmail.com
18:48: Everyone's coming out.
"They are called genes. We are their survival machines."
18:52: Daniel Dennett: The View from Dawkins' Mountain
| | When Dennett read it this quote stuck out: "We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment." |
| | TSG changed his life on re-reading. Last June, took a trip to the Santiago island, Galápagos. |
| | Is Dawkins "Darwinian Fundametalism"? Steven Jay Gould was right. A DF - "either you shun Darwinian evolution altogether or you turn the traditional universe upside-down and accept that mind, meaning and purpose are not the cause but the fairly recent effects of the mechanistic mill of Darwinian algorithms". |
| | There is no compromise position. Evolution seems to be such a mindless and cruel thing! |
| | "Orgel's Second Rule (Francis Crick): Evolution is cleverer than you are." This almost looks like a slogan for ID. If it isn't, how can evolution be cleverer than you are? |
| | "mentalistic behaviorism": How can a gene be selfish? Treat it like it has a mind, and you can understand it - arms races, bargains, ploys, counterploys. |
| | "A virus is a string of nucleic acid with attitude." |
| | "A gene is a type not a token" - not a physical item, but "the potential near-immortality of a gene, in the form of copies, as its defining property". Genes are like words, or like novels or plays, or melodies. Genes are like memes, and memes are like genes. The information is what youre talking about. |
| | "The hox genes are like the Romeo and Juliet memes!" |
| | "On the tree of life, only one species has evolved that can understand that it is one of thefruits of the tree of life. It is human language, and culture, that has made this possible." |
19:08: Sir John Krebs FRS: From Intellectual Plumbing to Arms Races
| | An intellectual plumber: "if anyone has leaks in their scientific thinking, Richard's intelligence and razor sharp analysis will detect the leak and carefully fix it for you". |
| | River Out Of Eden: "Show me a cultural relatavist at 30,000 feet, and I'll show you a hypocrite." |
| | The Selfish Gene was born out of a certain zoological environment. Dawkins on Communication: ethologists agreed that communication is the transfer of information. |
| | Dawkins reframed communication from information transfer to manipulation. Examples: advertising, pornography, Keats' nightingale/hemlock. |
19:21: Matt Ridley: Selfish DNA and the Junk in the Genome
| | TSG: p. 47 (1 ed.): "Biologists are racking their brains trying to think what useful task this apparently surplus DNA is doing. But from the point of the view of the selfish genes themselves, there is no paradox. The true 'purpose' of DNA is to survive, n more no less. The ismplest way to explain the surplus DNA is to suppose that it is a parasite, or at best a harmless..." |
| | 1971: C-value paradox (C. A. Thomas): nuclear genomes vary 300,000 fold: transcriptome varies 17-fold. |
| | 1972: first mention of 'junk' in paper by Ohno, and lecture by Francis Crick at MIT: "What is all thsi DNA for: junk or an evolutionary reserve?" |
| | 1978: Skeletal DNA theory of Cavalier-Smith |
| | 1980: Doolittle and Sapienza, and Orgel and Crick coin 'Selfish DNA': "the natural selection preferred replicatiors within ths genome" |
| | "This idea is not new. It is first sketched [in the Selfish Gene]". |
| | Human beings have 3 gigabases, but marbled lungs have 133 gigabases. |
| | Linked to cell size: parasites often minimise the unk to shrink the cell, ciliate dual nuclei allow big cells with small genomes. High metabloism animals have reduced a lot of the junk in their genome - bats and birds. Aestivating species with big cells for storing glycogen in the lungfish. |
| | Big genomes go with small brain - in amphibia, the bigger your genome, the slower you are to replicate, so big brains take longer to grow and neurones are bigger, so we can't fit as many in. |
| | A small fraction of our genome are actual protein coding genes. A slightly bigger chunk for functional DNA. 5% of our genome gives us everything we need to build a human body. 8% consists of retroviruses. 3% DNA transposons. 25% Long Intersposed Nuclear Elements (LINE) autonomous retroposons - these are the selfish genes, they just copy themselves. 13% SINEs. More than a quarter are introns, some simple sequence repeats, segmental duplications and miscellaneous. |
| | LINE1 currently dominates about 17.4% of the human genome. Alu SINE is a 282bp sequence repeated 1m times - 10.74% of the genome. Actively peaked 40m years ago. |
| | LINEs found in AT-rich, gene-poor areas. Older SINEs in CG-rich, gene-rich. |
| | Junk DNA has spawned a bigger industry than coding DNA - junk DNA is used in fingerprinting (OJ Simpson and Monica Lewinsky). |
| | 45% of the human genome is made of selfish genes, but can spread at the expense of netural junk. |
| | Selfish elements include unwanted aprasites to co-opted symbionts or somewhere in betweeen. |
19:36: Ian McEwan: Science Writing Towards A Literary Tradition?
| | Voltaire on immunology - the only instance of a Frenchman who's come to England and been impressed. |
| | We have a scientific literary tradition - TSG hasn't gone out-of-date. |
| | The non-scientist has enjoyment in the spectacle of human ingenuity. We need to remember the people who get it wrong do us a great service. There is a magnificent literature in the history of science - "ingenuity propelled by curiosity". |
| | Style: "Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting". TSG clearly initiated a golden age of science writers: E. O. Wilson, Steven Weinberg, Matt Ridley, Dan Dennett (the memetics of faith). |
| | Religion: we didn't think, in the seventies, that religion would be an issue - Galileo and the church. |
19:49: Richard Dawkins: Afterword
| | Is there any unifying philosophy? "I'm a lover of explanation... I suppose that makes me a reductionist." |
| | "As for whether I'm a determinist - I'll let you know when I've decided." |
| | "Most scientists would shudder at being described as philosophical". |
| | "Genetics had to be digital for natural selection to work" |
| | "There must be some things which theory tells us to be so" |
| | What would have to be for life on another planet? |
| | "Could it be two-dimensional?" Yes. "Could it be three-dimensional?" Probably not. Proteins provide the 3D executors specified by the 1D code. |
| | Multi-cellularity, and many other things. |
| | Does information have to be molecular? Memes, for instance. Darwinism requires accurate replicators - memes aren't accurate. |
| | The title isn't great - can and has give rise to misunderstanding. Correctly locate the emphasis. It's not about "selfishness", it's about altruism. The correct word is gene. |
| | Genes aren't deterministic in the way that's politically interesting. The gene is the unit. |
| | Nice slight of Mary Midgley.  |
| | There are two types of selfish genes - differentaiotn between junk DNA. |
| | Robert Trivers new book "Genes in Conflict". Intellectual heros: Bob Trivers, John Maynard Smith, George Williams and others. |
| | Some people want to 'unread' it. |
| | "If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will undo it." |
20:11: Fantastic evening. Drinks await.
LSE liveblog prep
I'm going to be liveblogging the event tonight at the LSE. I will be posting all the way through the event. If you want to follow along, here's how to do it. A blog post will appear here at around 6.30pm GMT which I will update throughout the event.
Once the event concludes, I will build the RSS feed. The post will not appear in your RSS reader until that point. There will also be a permanent OPML version which you will be able to download or include in your outlines. This will be built ASAP after the event. It will use minimal HTML, but otherwise nothing too fancy.
Appearing tonight will be Professor Richard Dawkins, Professor Daniel Dennett, Professor John Krebs, Professor Matt Ridley, Ian McEwan and Melvyn Bragg.
