Futurismic

I don’t know whether William Gillis wrote this little screed about the changing face of science fiction as a response or reaction to Jo Walton’s piece about the reading protocols of the genre, but it certainly serves as an interesting counterpoint to it. I like to read the viewpoints of smart readers coming from outside the loose tribe of fandom, because it enables us to see some of the stories we tell ourselves about the genre’s evolution in a different light:

… the modern age has given rise to a very distinguishable modern clique of SF authors interested in worlds with recognizable causal connections to our world. In a world deprived of anything more than an anemic NASA how we get there matters (or, alternatively, how it diverged). The other hallmark of the internet age is the density of the snarkiness, reference and speed of ideas — if Blade Runner signified the beginning of the shift away from abstraction with advertisements referencing real corporations, today’s authors plaster their prose with injokes. Rather than trying to abstract away, they embrace our inherent ties to the world as it is in order to milk a higher density out of our shared language. The internet has given everyone the sensation of having passing knowledge in every field, and modern SF authors are expected to be versed and deliver on many if not all fronts.

There simply isn’t the patience for limited-focus authors. And while I still heart Delany and Le Guin, I think this is a good thing. Nothing’s worse than sitting through a work full of intellectual spark on one front to find it dead on another. A great mathematics twist matched with a ridiculous carbon copy of the author’s culture transposed upon a ridiculously different environment. A finely constructed anthropological or psychological thesis with cliche and implausibly-portrayed tech.

Perhaps Gillis has hit upon the reason that the enthroned classics of the genre frequently fail to move new readers in the way they moved us when we discovered them… but having typed that out, it feels like a tautology. How about you – did the sf classics from before your time hold up to their reputations, or were they interesting in the way that archaeology is interesting?

Staying in the Russian capital for another post, here’s a fascinating article at the Financial Times about Moscow’s legendary population of stray dogs, and about the man who has been studying them [via MetaFilter; image by Adam Baker].

Muscovites have a close relationship with dogs, and the city is home to thousands of strays – more than eighty per square mile. And they’re not strays in the sense that we tend to think of them, namely abandoned pets; Moscow’s urban ecosystem has had a thriving population of dogs for long enough that a fully-domesticated animal released into the scrum of the streets would be unlikely to last more than a few days.

Furthermore, the population is big enough that it can be used to observe evolution in action; Andrei Poyarkov, a biologist specialising in wolves, has been studying Moscow’s canine tribes and learning about their gradual shift back toward a wilder nature, and about how the urban environment provides pressures that select for intelligence over aggression – to the extent that some of the dogs have actually learned to ride the subway system in search of reliable human benefactors to scrounge from:

“The second difference between stray dogs and wolves is that the dogs, on average, are much less aggressive and a good deal more tolerant of one another,” says Poyarkov. Wolves stay strictly within their own pack, even if they share a territory with another. A pack of dogs, however, can hold a dominant position over other packs and their leader will often “patrol” the other packs by moving in and out of them. His observations have led Poyarkov to conclude that this leader is not necessarily the strongest or most dominant dog, but the most intelligent – and is acknowledged as such. The pack depends on him for its survival.

Amazing how life finds ways of colonising and thriving in the interstitial spaces of the human world, isn’t it?

Here’s a handful of links from the weird and wonderful world of computer science…

First of all, Telepathic-critterdrug is described as “a controversial fork of the open source artificial-life sim Critterding, a physics sandbox where blocky creatures evolve neural nets in a survival contest. What we’ve done is to give these animals an extra retina which is shared with the whole population. It’s extended through time like a movie and they can write to it for communication or pleasure. Since this introduces the possibility of the creation of art, we decided to give them a selection of narcotics, stimulants and psychedelics. This is not in Critterding. The end result is a high-color cellular automaton running on a substrate that thinks and evolves, and may actually produce hallucinations in the user.”

You can download your own copy of this bizarre experiment to play with. Quite what it’s supposed to achieve (other than entertaining its creators) I’m not entirely sure… but then again, that’s what we tend to think about the reality we inhabit, so maybe there’s some sort of simulation-theory microcosm metaphor that could be applied here, eh?

Next up, wetware is about to make the transition from science fictional neologism to genuine branch of technological research; boffins at the University of Southampton are hosting an international collaboration aimed at making a chemical computer based on biological principles [via SlashDot].

The goal is not to make a better computer than conventional ones, said project collaborator Klaus-Peter Zauner [...] but rather to be able to compute in new environments.

“The type of wet information technology we are working towards will not find its near-term application in running business software,” Dr Zauner told BBC News.

“But it will open up application domains where current IT does not offer any solutions – controlling molecular robots, fine-grained control of chemical assembly, and intelligent drugs that process the chemical signals of the human body and act according to the local biochemical state of the cell.“

And last but not least, DarwinTunes is an experiment by two ICL professors to see whether they can use genetic algorithms to “evolve” enjoyable music from chaos, using the feedback of human listeners [via MetaFilter]. The DarwinTunes project website is sadly lacking a page that explains the project in a nutshell (or at least one that’s easily located by a first-time visitor), but a bit of poking around in the early blog entries should reveal the details. Or you can just listen to their 500th-generation riffs and loops from the project, which is still running.

Since I went for things made of metal skins and electrical guts last month when I wrote about weird robots, I decided to opt for warm-blooded carbon-based life forms this time around – so welcome to the December column on smart animals!

Now, we’re a dog family, and we have a golden retriever and two border collies.  My partner just bought a puzzle for the dogs. It’s a wooden base with cups for treats, and sliding doors that move and hide the treats.  The object is for the dog to slide the doors out of the way and get the treats inside.  One of the stated purposes of the toy is to increase animal intelligence.  Mind you, if the border collies get much smarter we’re in trouble.  The golden?  Well, that’s another story. Continue reading “What Are The Animals Becoming?”

Biologists used to think that new genes “could only evolve from duplicated or rearranged versions of preexisting genes.” Now, though:

Scientists have made a crucial discovery of genes that have evolved in humans after branching off from other primates, opening new possibilities for understanding what makes us uniquely human….

Researchers have found genes that arose from non-coding DNA in flies, yeast, and primates. No such genes had been found to be unique to humans until now, and the discovery raises fascinating questions about how these genes might make us different from other primates….

The authors [David Knowles and Aoife McLysaght of the Smurfit Institute of Genetics at Trinity College Dublin] also note that because of the strict set of filters employed, only about 20% of human genes were amenable to analysis. Therefore they estimate there may be approximately 18 human-specific genes that have arisen from non-coding DNA during human evolution.

This discovery of novel protein-coding genes in humans is a significant finding, but raises a bigger question: What are the proteins encoded by these genes doing? “They are unlike any other human genes and have the potential to have a profound impact,” McLysaght noted. While these genes have not been characterized yet and their functions remain unknown, McLysaght added that it is tempting to speculate that human-specific genes are important for human-specific traits.

[Image: Dollar Bin]