Immortal Curiosity

Notes on Zoological Philosophy, by J.B. Lamarck-

Chapter 7-

• Concerning the influence exerted by the environment on the various living bodies exposed to it. It is in all times and places operative on living bodies.
• The state in which we find any animal is, on the one hand, the result of the increasing complexity of organisation tending to form a regular gradation; and, on the other hand, of the influence of a multitude of very various conditions ever tending to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing complexity of organisation.

11 /26/2005
Notes and thoughts from Stephen Hawking’s The Universe in a Nutshell, chapter 6, Star Trek or Not.

The world’s population plotted through time is a measure of our technological ability to preserve life. During recorded history, this measure has only increased. Of course, there are certain exceptions: the Black death etc. within the last 200 years, population growth has become exponential. Currently, the world population doubles every 40 years. Other measures of technological growth include power consumption and the number of scientific articles published. All three of these measures cannot continue to grow at the same rate that they are now. So what are the possibilities?

Notes on The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin
(first edition text)

Notes on “On Instinct in Man and Animals”, by Alfred Wallace.

• Pleasure and Change- If a pleasure is associated with a certain beneficial activity there will be an advantage conferred, namely that the activity would be likely to be emulated within a population within a shorter period of time than mere genetic inheritance. However, this association will be disadvantageous in that it will be that much harder to stop the activity from occurring. In fact, it seems that such a pleasure would counter all but the strongest survival benefits to its cessation.

Notes on Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis.

Chapter 9: Hypotheses in Physics

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Citation: Henri Poincaré. “Hypotheses in Physics”. Chapter 9 in Science and Hypothesis . London: Walter Scott Publishing (1905): 140-159.