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BIOMASS allocation of living things on this planet is a funny way to describe a cartoon of planet earth. But if I told you that my zoo inhabitants were 4,000,000 kgs of species A, 1,500,000 kgs of species B, and 8,000 of species C, you would really be none the wiser. This is the Sumo wrestler argument. Better to say I had 13 great apes, 3 ruminants, and 100 smaller monkeys. Counting noses seems to make more sense. View in LinkedIn

BY WEIGHT. "The biomass of plants on land has been estimated to be around 1,000 times that of animals." Autotrophs who derive their energy from the sun win by sheer weight. http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150211-whats-the-most-dominant-life-form View in LinkedIn

THE PROPORTION OF AUTOTROPHS is part of the answer to the question of whether the fundamental fact of life is that "life eats life". There are some who like to count the accumulated weight of each group. And others who like to count noses. View in LinkedIn

"AGING evolved first to promote demographic stability." https://lnkd.in/du2zdbF View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues from last weekend with a consideration of "nature red in tooth and claw", which is the ubiquitous -- and tiresome -- media message on any nature broadcast. This out-dated viewpoint needs to be modified to bring it in line with current research thinking. It also has social Darwinism influences, which are also rather past their sell-by-date. Time to refresh the message. View in LinkedIn

DARK DRIVER OF EVOLUTION. "Evolution advances by means of death (as opposed to the survival of the "fit")? That's a dark spin on Darwinian theory that I didn't expect to come across." All creatures die. Death is a synonym for natural selection. No evolution without death. No fresh genes without death. And even genes have life cycles. Even genes die. https://lnkd.in/ddsS3VH View in LinkedIn

RARE AND SUBTLE. "Thus, despite some undeniable empirical examples, the quantitative evidence from this meta-analysis suggests that this form of adaptive plasticity may be quite rare in natural systems, that the effect is much more subtle than typically assumed or that it is common yet existing studies have failed to demonstrate its existence." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jeb.12212/full View in LinkedIn

REINFORCED LEARNING. "A learning system is a system that improves its performance at some task with experience. A simple kind of learning (often likened to natural selection) is reinforcement learning. This utilises a reward function to reinforce good behaviour or good outputs (or punish bad outputs) when they occur." http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11692-015-9358-z View in LinkedIn

BORROWING FROM LEARNING SYSTEMS. "We make this argument by recognising that analogous behaviours are possible, and are well-understood, in another domain—and because the underlying principles are mathematically equivalent, specific results and insights from one domain can be transferred to the other. This is a domain where the idea of a system that changes itself over time is not controversial—namely, learning systems." http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11692-015-9358-z View in LinkedIn

EVOLUTION may be seen as an intelligent learning machine capable of anticipating the unknown. What lessons can we learn from this analogy? Is it so very far fetched? View in LinkedIn