Performance, Feedback, Revision

Baba Brinkman might just be the smartest rapper out there. I recommend you listen to his entire Rap Guide to Evolution album, but this track stands out.

How is tweaking a lyric just like natural selection? Creativity and mutation leads to performance, selection or audiences provide feedback, and the genome or the rapper continue to revise. 

This. Is. Awesome.

Evolution is really just kind of an algorithm that goes like this: Performance, Feedback, Revision

(If you’re more into classical literature, Baba Brinkman also took a stab at The Canterbury Tales)

Source: youtube.com

Evolution in a Jiffy The processes that drive evolution are not known for their speedy nature. Human ancestors, for instance, made the jump to hairless bodies as little as 1.2 million years ago. That’s a long time for a fairly routine adaptation. Of course, when the environment places extreme pressure on an organism to adapt or die, the process of natural selection can be greatly accelerated, as with the famous peppered moths of soot-blackened England, which evolved dark wings within half a century in order to be camouflaged on blackened tree trunks. This Australian sea star may be a record-holder, though. After being geographically isolated (part of the “Five Fingers of Evolution” we saw in this TED Ed video) from their relatives, they were forced to shift from sexual reproduction to asexual reproduction in just 14,000 years! That’s the blink of an eye for evolution, and like warp drive for a change that significant. The power of natural selection never ceases to amaze …  (↬ ScienceShot)
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Evolution in a Jiffy

The processes that drive evolution are not known for their speedy nature. Human ancestors, for instance, made the jump to hairless bodies as little as 1.2 million years ago. That’s a long time for a fairly routine adaptation. Of course, when the environment places extreme pressure on an organism to adapt or die, the process of natural selection can be greatly accelerated, as with the famous peppered moths of soot-blackened England, which evolved dark wings within half a century in order to be camouflaged on blackened tree trunks.

This Australian sea star may be a record-holder, though. After being geographically isolated (part of the “Five Fingers of Evolution” we saw in this TED Ed video) from their relatives, they were forced to shift from sexual reproduction to asexual reproduction in just 14,000 years! That’s the blink of an eye for evolution, and like warp drive for a change that significant.

The power of natural selection never ceases to amaze … 

(↬ ScienceShot)

Source: news.sciencemag.org

You are listening to music, evolved.

I don’t mean that in the sense that it’s tomorrow’s next big electronica style, but rather that the music itself has undergone Darwinian selection.

DarwinTunes is a project of Bob MacCallum and Armand Leroi from Imperial College London. They wondered if music might evolve by means similar to the way natural selection acts on genetic traits, with the best bits surviving and remixing into a more fit future tune.

They began with this cacophony, a real mess of dissonance. Then they let listeners pick their favorite bits and allowed those loops to “mate”. What you hear above is the result after 3,000 generations of musical replication, and clear tendencies toward beat and harmony are evident. Of course, listeners come into this experiment with modern notions of what pleasant sounds mean, and real musical evolution took place over thousands of years and with hugely differing cultural influences. 

Still, it’s a supremely cool melding of science and music, and a reminder that whether its cultural or genetic, everything is a remix. Check out Ed Yong’s writeup at the link below, hear the whole evolution here, and visit DarwinTunes for more. 

(via Not Exactly Rocket Science)

Source: SoundCloud / uncoolbob