The Anthropocene is not simply an epoch. It comes with an attendant awareness of our environment, of the environment we are for other creatures, that pervades through our activities and thoughts. Humans of the Anthropocene have left an indelible mark on the natural world around them (mostly of carbon) even as they – as we – have embedded within ourselves the product of decades of technological innovation, even as we upload our memories into the cloud. Simultaneously, we’re also becoming more aware of the ‘things’ we’re made of: of gut bacteria that supposedly affect our moods and of what our genes tell us about ourselves. It’s an epoch whose centre of attention de facto is the human even as the attention makes us more conscious of the other multitudes with which we share this universe.
Tag: genetics
Universality of the Lotka-Volterra equations
If humankind were to discover a planet that harbours water, and if, by some provenance, the same unicellular organisms that were the precursors to Earth-bound evolution were to be introduced into this environment…
- Would the significant differences between our evolutionary pattern and their evolutionary pattern be equivalent in any measure to the significant differences between our environment and theirs? (akin to linguistic relativity; see Whorf-Sapir hypothesis) How might we measure these differences?
- How would the second-degree Kolmogorov model predator/prey population functions change? (Lotka-Volterra equations)
- Will the timeframe for “onset” of intelligence be determinable? Will intelligence manifest itself again at all? (Naturalism)
- Will the Earthborn megapode be able to recognize the “alien” megapode (or vice versa)? (Vitalism)
- Will evolutionary parameters in similar environments be similar, or will small changes in the evolution of genetic components manifest as large deviations in the final morphology?