07.+What+is+Intelligence+(February+2006) - Get a Free Blog

What is Intelligence? 131
anything? Why does pricking your finger feel like pain? Why does a
red rose appear red?
This has been dubbed the "hard problem" of consciousness, and
some people have tried to explain it away by calling it an emergent
property of active networks of neurons - in other words, something
that arises from the interactions between these neurons, but which is
not found in the neurons by themselves. That, however, seems a bit
of a cop-out. What is more, this "explanatory gap" has attracted a
number of oddball theories proposing weird quantum states that
produce consciousness, mathematical explanations as to why
synchronous oscillating brain waves may be the key, and so on.
Some say that the gap will never be bridged because our brains are
ill-equipped to understand their own consciousness. And some
researchers argue that consciousness is just an illusion anyway.
Helen Phillips
7 What is sex for?
SEX sells, and not just in popular culture. Biologists have been
fascinated with it for more than 100 years and there's no danger of
them losing interest.
Why sex? Surely there is no mystery there - the reason 99.9 per cent
of multicellular species reproduce sexually is because it is the best
way of passing on your genes while ensuring there is plenty of
variation in the next generation. But this argument has a fundamental
flaw, which is the immediate and short-term wastefulness of sexual
reproduction.
Imagine a population of fish living in a lake and competing for limited
food. The fish reproduce sexually so each new generation contains
both females and males, all competing for the same resources. Now
imagine that one fish discovers how to reproduce asexually. All her
offspring are females, and in time they will all produce their own
female offspring, without the wasteful need for males. In just a few
generations the descendants of this single fish will outnumber their
sexual rivals and drive them to extinction. In the day-to-day battle for
survival, sex is a seriously losing strategy.
In the long term, of course, this does not hold true. Without sex to
shuffle the genetic pack, species accumulate harmful mutations and
quickly go extinct. The majority of asexual species last only a few
tens of thousands of years. But this is not a satisfactory explanation
for the near-ubiquity of sex. Natural selection doesn't care what
happens many generations into the future. To win the day, sex must
confer benefits right here, right now. And that's where things get
sticky.
How does sex win? There have been dozens of suggestions, most of
them focusing on its ability to generate variety. Because the
environments in which species live can vary so much in space and
time, the argument goes, only those that can adapt rapidly survive.
One of the most popular versions of this idea concerns the neverending
arms race between hosts and parasites. Problem solved.
Except that no one has been able to prove that this accounts for the
overwhelming dominance of sex in nature.
Perhaps there is a way out of this conundrum. Sex may be