A Heretic's Blog
Linus Pauling and others claimed that vitamin C is a highly effective cancer treatment when used correctly. They supported these claims with initial clinical trials that indicated an unprecedented increase in life expectancy. In addition, the initial results suggested a remedy far more potent than existing medicine could provide. Pauling was not the originator of … Read more
Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system. The good regulator idea applies to all real-world systems, that is, all systems that manage others or are self-regulating. An organism needs a model of its environment to survive. Animals, or other organisms, with the best models, have an advantage. For example, … Read more
Imagine a world where organisms are intelligent. Clever like a smartphone rather than human genius, which is in short supply. We are all becoming familiar with artificial intelligence, its power and its limitations. When organisms have these properties, the fashionable and much-idolised genes become a low-level memory needed to generate proteins. By contrast, cells are … Read more
When the complexity of the environment exceeds the capacity of a system, the environment will dominate and ultimately destroy it Norbert Wiener coined the term cybernetics, concerned with control and communication in living things and machines. Cybernetics involves several disciplines, including control theory, information theory, systems theory, and robotics. However, Ashby’s simple law of requisite … Read more