Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Josh Mitteldorf

American Researcher and Educator, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Professor of Physics, Math, Astronomy, and Evolution at Harvard, University of California at Berkeley, Temple University, University of Pennsylvania, LaSalle University and Bryn Mawr, scientist specializing in the biology of aging and the evolution of cooperation

"The best loving partnerships demand of us not great sacrifice but great expansion."

"It is then that our attitude will sustain or sink us. If we can revel in the mystery, keeping faith in our sights, then we will thrive and grow stronger."

"How can we imagine a Darwinian process directed toward the loss of fitness? Certainly this must be a sort of evolutionary altruism, but the individual costs are too high, the group benefits too weak and too widely dispersed among non-relatives to be explained by inclusive fitness models or even multi-level selection theory. My hypothesis is that entire ecosystems are co-adapted for demographic homeostasis. Without aging, the principal causes of animal mortality would be starvation and epidemics. These phenomena are very ?lumpy?, in the sense that either everyone is fine, or everyone is in trouble. But when deaths are so tightly clustered, populations can be dangerously unstable, leading to population crashes and extinctions. Aging has evolved as a way to level the death rate in good times and bad, to stabilize population dynamics and avoid extinctions. The implications for evolutionary theory are profound, and so are the implications for medical research. If aging is a pro-active genetic program, then targeting that program pharmaceutically may be the most productive medical intervention of all time."

"Darwin?s prescription for evolution involved just blind variation + natural selection as if evolution were inevitable and all that was required was a collection of objects that are able to reproduce themselves imperfectly. We know now that it is not at all inevitable. The mode of variation is crucially important to making evolution possible. Some systems can support evolution while others cannot. In real biological systems, evolution works unaccountably well. Is this just a lucky accident?"

"I live my life with a great deal of discipline. There are rules for food and exercise and disciplines for writing and meditating and sex, guidelines for interacting with others, daily and weekly and a few yearly rituals, all formulated by and for myself and self-imposed. I have no tolerance for restrictions imposed on me by others. I wrote in November about a free school where students are given absolutely free rein over their time, with no tests or standards or curriculum, and where almost all students figure out what they want to learn and learn it in their own way, at their own pace. But it is only today that I have considered the corollary: perhaps I don?t need rules or disciplines. Perhaps I would be as healthy and as happy (or more), I would accomplish as much (or more), I would be as responsible a citizen and as good a friend (or better) if I let go of discipline altogether, substituting self-awareness. Most intriguing and most occluded for me is a faint glimpse into the obvious: that my disciplines are maintained by a part of me that seeks unconsciously to set myself apart from others, to sustain a myth that I am better than the people around me. The lesson of free schools is the power of community. It is certainly not true that any child left to his own whims will thrive and blossom and fulfill himself. When free schools are effective it is because individuals are inspired and swept up by a supportive community of people who are joyfully engaged, collectively and individually, in projects that are fulfilling and challenging. This is the environment I will seek for myself."

"Most evolutionary biologists strain at the gnat of ?group selection? but they swallow whole the camel of evolvability. What I mean by this is that multi-level selection theory (MLS) is well-grounded in traditional evolutionary theory, and requires only a modest theoretical step beyond kin selection. For historic and cultural reasons going back to the 1960s, many evolutionary biologists categorically dismiss the body of MLS research, insisting that the ?selfish gene? is a one-size-fits-all explanation for all evolutionary processes. Evolvability, in contrast, is an irriducibly radical concept. It requires group selection on a vast scale that dwarfs MLS accounts. Evolution of evolvability is a story of how evolution came to be smart, or at least give the illusion of being smart. A simple yet controversial idea from MLS is that local geography ties together fate of a local animal community, which can be described as having a collective fitness, and which experiences Darwinian selection as a unit. But evolution of evolvability (E2) goes far beyond this, requiring that selection work on entire lineages that last over many generations required for significant evolution to take place. Somehow, during all that time, the fittest individuals don?t manage to crowd out those that are collectively good evolvers, though much less fit (by the traditional definition)"

"Standard models of Darwinian evolution focus on individual reproductive output as a measure of fitness. From this perspective, aging is the opposite of fitness. It is inconceivable that aging could be regarded as an adaptation. And yet there is abundant evidence for a genetic program that fixes a maximum life span. There are genes that enforce aging, genes that seem to have no other purpose than to kill the individual who carries them. What is more, some of these genes have been conserved across the biosphere. Aging genes have been preserved over a billion years of evolutionary history, since the first eukaryotes. It sure looks as though evolution wants us to die."

"Thou art enjoined to enjoyment, exhorted to exultation. Thy responsibility is to be responsive, and impishness be thy imperative. So cherish thy good cheer, and be not judicious in jubilation - Rather exude exuberance, for to revel is a revelation, and it is on pain of death that Thou art obliged to Live!"

"There can be no doubt that without evolvability adaptations, evolvability could never have evolved. In other words, evolvability promotes itself in a positive feedback loop, or bootstrapping process. The further evolution of evolvability progresses, the more rapid is further progress in evolvability [sic]. This idea gives us greater respect for evolution, the foundation and basis for life. Evolution is not a simple process that is bound to happen, beginning whenever some chemical happens to catalyze its own synthesis and proceeding inexorably onward and upward from there. Evolution as we know it has required this further action of exponentially increasing its own effectiveness, a process that modern evolutionary science can barely describe, let alone understand."

"Three prominent and readily observable features of the collapse of the Twin Towers on the morning of 9/11 are inconsistent with the official explanation involving fires and "pancaking"... First, the towers collapsed quickly... Second, the collapse was symmetrical. Natural events (including fires) will always be governed by a certain amount of randomness. Some situations are stable and inherently restore symmetry; but the collapse of a tall building is not one of them... Third, each collapse began with an explosion in the upper storIes that carried impressive energy. Jet fuel will burn, but not explode. ... The explosions that are readily observable in videos of the towers? collapse could only have been produced by commercial explosives... Finally, I mention only for extra emphasis that a third tower (WTC 7 [570 feet tall, 47 stories] ) collapsed 6 hours after the first two. It was never struck by a plane, and fires in WTC 7 were far smaller than the other two towers, and confined to one side of the building. Yet WTC 7 also collapsed suddenly and symmetrically, almost as fast as a free fall ? hallmarks of controlled demolition. The 9/11 Report of the Kean Commission omits any mention of Building 7, and no government agency has even proposed an explanation of how it fell. Conclusion: We may differ over the political plausibility of conspiracies that have been proposed in connection with the destruction of 9/11. But the physical implausibility of the official scenario concerning the towers? collapse should be beyond dispute. This is an area where physicists? calculations and our commonsense notions of how tall objects fall down both point to the conclusion that sophisticated engineering and carefully-timed explosive charges would be required for the towers to fall in the manner that they did.""

"We live comfortably in the patches of reality where theory is tolerably successful, where reason is functional and predictability predominates. But any day an unexpected event may expel us from this Eden into the larger world of the incomprehensible. It is then that our attitude will sustain or sink us. If we can revel in the mystery, keeping faith in our sights, then we will thrive and grow stronger."

"We might not be satisfied attributing the evolvability of life to ?luck?. Perhaps at the dawn of life, a lot of proto-living systems began in many different forms, but it was only a few that happened to be evolvable, and those are the ones that survived. In other words, evolvability evolved. But the truth is larger than this and far stranger. The evolution of evolvability has been an ongoing process, interwoven with the ?normal? evolution of fitness, and continuing all through the history of life. We know this because there are traits that are obviously highly-evolved, but they offer no selective advantage whatsoever, in the traditional sense of survival and reproduction ? their only advantages are in the long-range prospects for adaptive change. How did evolvability traits manage to evolve, without ever offering a selective advantage to the individual carrying that trait, but only to its great, great grandchildren?"

"We seek guidance from an inspired place within, but as we listen for that still, small voice we also become hostage to our phobias and neuroses, which have learned to impersonate inspiration. To be able to distinguish our highest callings from base distortions of our personality is an elevated form of self-knowledge. Don?t imagine you can perform this feat of wisdom through thinking. When the gift of discrimination arrives, it is likely to operate beneath the level of conscious analysis. The best you can do is to observe your own process, to refrain from taking sides in the debate, to watch yourself deciding."