Curious Wonder web notes

Definitions Conservative: Aversion to change or an inclination for stability. Progressive: Inclination for change in the way of improvement. Stability: tools, structures, concepts and systems being made with methods and materials that resist stress.  Improvement: Repairing something that's broken or making things more efficient.  Entropy: A measure of disorder in a system Onslaught of Entropy Everything in existence will always change with few exceptions, i.e. mathematical constants. There's no stopping the train of entropy. Trees will wither, mountains will erode, damaged DNA turns cells into cancer or dies, the sun will consume the earth in 4 billion years. Certain changes are so small that we don't perceive them, and if their change isn't big enough to affect the purpose of that which we value, we can consider things to have remained the same. Other things require constant work to keep from changing and there are more ways for things to change for the worse than for ...

Excerpt from "how the mind works" by Steven Pinker about Margie Profet's research  Profet predicted that pregnancy sickness should confer some benefit that offsets the cost of lowered nutrition and productivity. Ordinarily, nausea is a protection against eating toxins: the poisonous food is ejected from the stomach before it can do much harm, and our appetite for similar foods is reduced in the future. Perhaps pregnancy sickness protects women against eating or digesting foods with toxins that might harm the developing fetus. Your local Happy Carrot Health Food Store notwithstanding, there is nothing particularly healthy about natural foods. Your cabbage, a Darwinian creature, has no more desire to be eaten than you do, and since it can't very well defend itself through behavior, it resorts to chemical warfare. Most plants have evolved dozens of toxins in their tissues: insecticides, insect repellents, irritants, paralytics, poisons, and other sand to throw in herbivo...