Category: evolution
Plants don’t get enough respect as sci-fi monsters. Sure, Triffids will always rule, but sci-fi baddies tend to be mutants, zombies, vampires and other altered mammals. This is in ignorance of plants’ amazingly creepy special abilities. To prove it, we’ve dug up six plant skills that freak us out more than Godzilla.
This is a TEDx presentation given by my favorite scholar of the rhetoric of biochemistry and post-vital living, Richard Doyle, about the importance of developing our conceptions of the noösphere.
Currently I’m reading his newest scholarly book concerning his ecodelic hypotheses about archaic and contemporary psychedelic media technologies, Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere.
Here is another informative, insightful and entertaining talk filled with fascinating data from Dr. Sapolsky, Stanford neurologist and primatologist.
[original FORA.tv upload.]
Other recommended Sapolsky lectures include:
‘Stress, Neurodegeneration and Individual Differences’
‘The Neurobiology of Primate Sexuality’: Part 1 [Part 2]
and more excellent lectures can be found here.
Recent experiements have demonstrated that neighboring plants use the underground mycelial networks of symbiotic fungii to send each other messages:
New Scientist: Fungal threads are the internet of the plant world
A new biomolecular movie has been released from the same Harvard team that brought us the phenomenal Inner Life of the Cell. This video is also 100% atomically accurate and depicts the mitochondria which provide the chemical energy that powers the cells of animals (and also have their own DNA because they were originally a separate organism before symbiotically fusing with animal cells).
[vodpod id=Video.4897947&w=425&h=350&fv=]
For more animations such as The Inner Life of the Cell or this fantastic portrayal of cellular apoptosis, check out molecularmovies.com.
Quite exciting watching this story unfold.
Here’s another 10 minute film about the skull that focuses more on its anatomical anomolies than it’s DNA:
David Pearce is an independent researcher and vegan animal activist based in Brighton UK.
In 1995, he wrote an online manifesto, The Hedonistic Imperative, advocating the use of biotechnology to abolish suffering throughout the living world. David predicts that our descendants will be animated by gradients of cerebral bliss orders of magnitude richer than anything accessible today.
[In his BLTC (Better Living Through Chemistry) Research websites, most recently The Abolitionist Project] David has also written on the philosophy of mind and perception; utilitarian ethics; psychopharmacology; life extension; cognitive enhancement technologies; mood enrichment; genetic recalibration of the hedonic treadmill; ecosystem redesign; reprogramming predators; and more speculatively on a posthuman future based on paradise engineering.
In 1998, David and Nick Bostrom set up the World Transhumanist Association (now rebranded as Humanity +. Transhumanists promote the responsible use of advanced technology to overcome our biological limitations.
This lecture was recorded on 24th April 2010 at the UKH+ meeting. For information on further meetings please see:
http://extrobritannia.blogspot.com/
