Green Years ...

Sunday, August 21, 2005

Darwin and Arkansas: Science vs. Religion

Galileo Galilei, the Italian scientist was victimized by the church about four centuries ago, when the new continent was discovered. After finishing the Middle Ages and beginning of the Renaissance, lots of church-going people decided to migrate to the new land and build the Jesus Land. The Puritans, who believed in purifying the religion, arrived in Massachusetts and later moved to the center of the new continent the area known as Bible Belt. Today, in Arkansas, in the fight between scientists and Evangelists, the religious group is the winner due to heavy support of the people of Center of America. Sometimes I think US needs a Renaissance such as one Europe went through to actually believe to the separation of church and state.

In my belief, science and religion both are relative and time-varying. Science is partly true, and is true at the scale of the time. Consider the Newton’s physics theory which was true at the time and now is just correct in the scale of our day-to-day life, not atomic scale nor stellar scale. The same thing is true about religions. But some closed-minded religious leaders always superficially believed and forced others to believe that religion is a solid and not-changeable concept. Whatever that people believed 2000 years ago, was with the progress of science and technology of that time, and brain development of that era.

PS: It’s not very far a day that religious fanatics will come into such
intelligent falling.

Saturday, August 06, 2005

Creativity for survival?

A few days ago, I tuened the channel desperately looking for a movie to watch. I stopped in a channel, and was trying to figure out if the charachters in the movie are real actors or animation!! Tough to figure it out!

My friend first said that they are real actors, but later both of use figured out that the whole movie was an animation. Everything was amazingly designed and animated, except the eyes of animated actors. It was the only place that could ensure us that we were watching an animation.

Anyway, we started our discussion about the future of movie industry and how everything is speedily being mechanized. This patho-social phenomenon is seen in the machinizing of "Answering machine." It has happened to all of us, when we call to an office, we have to painfully pass a lot of pre-recorded messages to be able to get into our goal.

I was thinking in a future time, about the possible jobs. Imagine a world that everything could be done with machine. What is left for humans?! What a human should do in that time? As an scrached idea, I think based on the survival-of-the-fittest Darwin's rule, among humans, the ones who make the ideas and thinkings will be survived and the rest will be sadly out of life. Because there is no need to pay for a human labor job while everything could be done with precise and fine-tuned results and a lot less expenses.

Just look at the least of the wealthiest people in the recent years, and see how fast people with creative ideas come to the firsts positions and passby the old-fashioned riches. People like Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, Pieyer Omidvar, founder of ebay, Lary Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google all belong to a group of rich people who became rich by only their creative ideas. In an extreme view, if "creative" people were the leaders of the old world, they will be the only survived people of the future world.

Thursday, August 04, 2005

Use of Technology as Wiki-ocrocy

I like this interesting idea of Wiki-ocrocy by Hossein Derakhshan, a pioneer in Persian blogosphere. The idea is explained in his paper in OpenDemocracy . He suggests a pilot socio-political project to test the ability of Wiki media for social changes. He proposes "producing a revised version of the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, on which thousands of people from different socio-political backgrounds have consensus."

I personally agree with him that such media like Wiki is a good and safe place to practice democratic training. This idea is similar to the Darwins evolution which has been mimicked during the last 20 years by different engineers and scientists. The idea is that you have a certain chromosome (in this case existing Constitution of IRI), then under certain rules such as mutation, recombination, and crossover these chromosomes evolve (changing of Constitution through mind of different socio-political groups). After some time, the evolved generation is "the fittest to survive." So I would see this project as a very interesting case study for social engineering.

PS: This subject can be studied under
evolutionary computation.