Here’s my random thought for the week:

So, since I wasn’t able to explain it really well on Thursday, here’s my musing on how it might actually be good for your genes to kill yourself. So as Yana (I think?) was saying, if you’re past the point where you can reproduce, and you’re taking resources away from your children and not contributing much back, the best option is to go off yourself to increase your children’s, little bundles of genes that they are, chance of survival. Now, say that you’re young and fit and in your 20’s, but you’re also a total loser. People of the opposite gender hate you, you’re not particularly good at hunting and gathering and thus mostly rely on other people to get you fed, and your chances of being able to raise a family are pretty slim. Now suppose you have a brother. Your brother is slick and hot and awesome. He already has 15 kids running around, which carry roughly a quarter of your genes. You on the other hand will probably never have kids, and are a drain on your family, decreasing your brother’s kid’s chances of survival. Probably better if you kick it for their sakes then.

Course, at what point you can say that your case is hopeless and other people are better off without you strikes me as very difficult to determine, especially since as social creatures we could in the above situation help out our brother’s kid’s by getting food/fighting off beats/ etc. Also, plenty of people who already have kids/ SOs/ contribute of their family’s survival, etc. commit suicide as well, so I’m not saying this is some sort of adaptive explanation for suicide, I’m just thinking out a case where it could be better for your genes for you to kill yourself, even if you’re still of reproductive age.

As for the Lynch paper, I’m about halfway through it, and am finding it veeery interesting, though as Scott points out, I’m not aware of any sort of objective measurement for complexity (though I think we can safely objectively state that say, the tobacco mosaic virus is less complex than a pony). Cells by themselves are incredibly complex (note: all I know about cells I know from Biol200), so how much more complex, in the scheme of things, are eukaryotes and multicellular creatures? Also, why does this paper mention intelligent design every other page?

Finally, as an example of ‘things that look uber-complex but probably aren’t’ and some unicellular complexity, here’s a podcast I was listening to today about slime mold: http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/09-10/qq-2010-01-23.html (scroll down to Taking Directions from Slime Mould, it also links to the original Science paper among a bunch of other things).