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            The nervous system has so many different tasks to do every day that it is a wonder that there are not more mishaps in the day-to-day function of humans.  Despite the fact that overall, our nervous systems allow us to make it through everyday without falling over or running into things, there are cases where somewhere wires get crossed and the usual predicted outcomes do not occur.  One of the easiest examples to observe is anything to do with sensory input, because so many different things in our environment go into a single experience every instant of our lives.  There are people with synesthesia who associate smells, tastes, or colors with certain words, or other kinds of sensory recombinations.  Another interesting example is that of how pain is experienced and interpreted by the nervous system.  As I thought about this function of the nervous system in relation to other senses, the phrase “blinding pain” entered my thoughts and would not go away.  I began a search of this phrase that does not really make sense upon further thought but is used so frequently in common discourse.

It is a rather frightening and rather unnerving thought that psychosurgical procedures can be traced back to Neolithic times, roughly 40,000 years ago (2, 6, 7).  Current psychosurgical techniques are by no way in a state of perfection so one can only imagine how crude and often fatal these ancient procedures were.  Modern psychosurgery can better be understood through a more recent historical investigation of the era of neuroscientific inquiries that was going on during the 19th century (2). 

The first indications of skull surgery come from the archeological unearthing of skulls with holes carbon dating back to 1500 BC (2).  Further study of the bone surrounding the hole, evidence of proper healing, and estimation of the individual’s lifespan indicate that the hole was in fact surgical in nature rather than some sort of head wound.  This ancient method is called trepanning and was more than likely used in order to release demons and evil spirits that were thought to be trapped in the skull and were linked with madness and brain disease.  In many cases the reasons for trepanning were completely bogus and purely based on religious and spiritual beliefs and therefore showed no benefit. However, in other sincere medical cases such as strong headaches, brain tumors, intracranial pressure due to hematomas, hydrocephalus, etc., this procedure potentially had some therapeutic effect and is actually a technique that is still being used to this day to relieve intracranial pressure.   This procedure was performed without any sort of anesthetic and took about 30 to 60 minutes to cut through the skull.  If the tool used to make the hole in the skull does not touch the brain itself, the patient had a relatively high chance of survival. 

In America today, the tension between science and religion seems only to be growing. The country is rapidly becoming more religiously conservative than it has been for the last several decades, sparked in part by the conflict with Islamic extremists in the Middle East. Between the push and pull of evolutionism and creationism, though, is the Intelligent Design camp, or ID for short, which is gradually gaining much steam and becoming a way for people to reconcile perceived conflicts between Christian religious beliefs and scientific evidence, which seems to support the evolutionary theory.

The book begins with a river in Prussia. In the 18th century, there was a series of bridges in Konigsberg that connected the banks of either side of the river to each other an island in the middle. A popular topic of discussion in cafes at the time asked if you could cross each bridge only once and come back to where you started. A man named Euler finally solved this problem. It's not significant that he solved it. The significance is in how he solved it.

Euler abstracted the bridges into a series of nodes and links. The nodes were the landmasses the bridges connected and the links were the bridges themselves. Using this graph, Euler discovered that the only way such a feat is possible is if the nodes with an odd number of links are either the starting or ending point in the traversal. That means there can only be two such nodes. Unfortunately, all the nodes on the Konigsberg bridge graph had an odd number of links so the answer to the problem is no.

This is important because Euler representing a real-life construct and as graph which had inherent properties through which its behavior could be deduced. Considering that graphs are just small networks, this discovery is significant.

Linked discusses "scale free networks," which are networks that consist of a huge number of small nodes connected to a small number of huge hubs via links. Scale-free networks can be found in naturally occurring systems such as the food web and social networks and in man-made systems such as the Web. Despite their dissimilarities, they all share some important properties.

 In understanding biological evolution as a meaningless process with no certain destination or endpoint whatsoever, many questions are raised.  How does this explain the meaning that we as a human species have applied to our existence?  What, then, is the purpose of art or culture that we have created?  What about the moral standards we have applied to our societies?  It might be difficult to accept or admit that the moral codes, on which we base our governments, religions, and all social structures, may just be a by-product of the evolutionary process.  However, this fact may prove to be the reason that so many differing, and often contradicting moral codes may exist.  Additionally, we are also able to explain the reasons for which the evolutionary process came about.

The evolution of humor and how it impacts evolution

The theory of evolution dictates that we as humans are the products of a random process consisting of natural selection and common descent. Furthermore, our existence as a human species is rooted in innumerable variables beyond anyone’s control as well as an ancestral heritage consisting of apes. Beyond just our physical arrival, there are cultural ramifications of evolution that distinguish the human species from any other evolved animal. “All the achievements of human culture – language, art, religion, ethics, science itself – are themselves artifacts… of the same fundamental process that developed the bacteria, the mammals, and Homo sapiens” (Dennett, 144). Over the course of our time here, the human species has experienced developments of moral codes, growth of languages, and a widespread interest in the arts. Humans have expanded their meaning to transcend just survival, but also to include morality, pleasure, organization, and culture. A quality unique to humans is our proneness to engage in humor – for the most part, we enjoy laughing, telling jokes, and being funny. I claim that humor is a necessary trait in the success of evolution and serves as an adaptive quality.

by: rob korobkin

Murray Bookchin was one of the great twentieth century American anarchist thinkers and activists.  From his birth on January 14, 1921 to his death last year on July 30, 2006, his life impacted many, both politically as a leader of the anti-nuclear movement and the Green party and intellectually through his theories of “social ecology” and “libertarian municipalism.”  His largest influence on the radical intellectual theoretical canon came primarily in his introducing concepts of “ecology” and emphasizing the role of the natural world to movements that had previously been entirely social in orientation.  His book of essays, The Modern Crisis offers four essays that explore many of these key ideas.

“Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push – in just the right place – it can be tipped.” - Malcolm Gladwell

In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell describes how major changes in society happen rather unexpectedly and quickly. The main focus of the book is why some trends, including epidemics, fashion trends, ideas, messages, etc., manage to become very popular, and spread like viruses of infectious disease, while others do not. He gives examples, such as how Syphilis spread in Baltimore, how Paul Revere spread the initial message of the British attack and in turn initiated the American Revolution, and how television shows like Sesame Street were able to teach children how to read, to explain how he believes trends spread. Gladwell believes that when a certain trend reaches a “tipping point,” it instantly becomes popular. This tipping point is reached when three important conditions are met.

    Milgram’s Six Degrees experiment presented a unique and provocative insight into the world as a whole.  The idea that six billion people might all be more closely connected than we originally believed is fascinating – it has the possibility to change both the ways we think about information, approach organizational infrastructures, and our relations to each other.
    Watts approaches Milgram’s experiment as a way into what he calls the “science of networks,” the study of the interconnectedness in our world.  To help elucidate matters, he first refers to the massive West Coast power outage from the 90’s.  The massive failure of this particular system was caused as a result of the safety precautions taken.  These supposed precautions led to a series of interactions that were entirely unpredicted and unexpected, and that brought down power to a massive area of the nation.  The idea that a system can contain within it characteristics that lead to unexpected results on a massive scale is the key to the science of networks.

“At the heart of the universe is a steady, insistent beat: the sound of cycles in sync…almost as if nature has an eerie yearning for order” (1).
 

In Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order, Cornell professor Steven Strogatz draws upon a vast array of situations in order to analyze the dynamic, decentralized behavior of coupled oscillators through such interdisciplinary lenses as mathematics, neuroscience, physics, and sociology. For his 2003 publication, Strogatz weds computational modeling to natural observation in producing a thoughtful narrative that both highlights his own contributions to the realm of chaos theory and also provokingly reflects on questions raised by colleagues’ research.