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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 16 Feb 2023

Taken: 16 Feb 2023

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DNA / Deoxyribonucleic acid / Cosmic Bully

DNA / Deoxyribonucleic acid / Cosmic Bully

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Mist people are nevergoing to die because they are never going to born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of the Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. ~ Richard Dawkins, “Unweaving the Rainbow”
15 months ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
. . . . In this book I have concentrated on Dawkin’s formulations of the neo-Darwinist worldview rather than on more moderate statements because their very extermeness makes them instructive. Their strong colours bring out the disturbing implications of ideas that pass as usuable when they are expressed moe vaguely. And these ideas, in their more discreet, muted forms, are still very widely shared today, even though they have often attacked. Many people who would wince at Dawkin’s rhetoric probably do not notice that they are taking much of his worldview for granted.

This notable thing about his story here is not its atheism but its fatalism. The drama that it presents of helpless humans enslaved by a callous fate-figure is, of course, not new and, like all such myths, it conveys not just meaninglessness but a positive, sinister meaning -- the presence of an active oppressor. The new thing about the current version is merely the cast-list and the backing provided for the story. Fatalism is not offered, not as just one possible philosophical attitude among others with reasons given for and against it, but as a fact backed by the tremendous authority of science. The cosmic bully whom it invokes is now not a pagan deity but a chemical, DNA, a part of our won cells that -- since we, like other organisms, are just lumbering robots ruled by it -- it invoked as the true source of our acts. And the only motivation that it supplies for us is unqualified egoism: “selfishness.” ~ Page 3

The Solitary Self
14 months ago. Edited 14 months ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
DNA messages are written in true alphabets. Like the Roman, Greek and Cyrillic writing systems, the DNA alphabet is a strictly limited repertoire of symbols with no self-evident meaning. Arbitrary symbols are chosen and combined to make meaningful messages of unlimited complexity and size Where the English alphabet has 26 letters and the Greek one 24, the DNAS alphabets is a four-letter alphabet. Most useful DNA spells out three-letter words for a dictionary limited to 64 words, each word called “codon’. Some of the codons in the dictionary are synonymous with others, which is to say that the genetic code is technically ‘degenerate.’ ~ Page 20 (The Ancestor’s Tale - Richard Dawkins)
7 months ago.

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