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Vincent Tijms

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Vincent is Currently Reading

Vincent Tijms is currently reading

Kapitalisme is seksisme

by Doortje Smithuijsen

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Jul 07, 2025 09:39AM

Vincent Tijms is currently reading

The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution (Science and Cultural Theory)

by Susan Oyama

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— Aug 04, 2025 12:37PM

Aug 04, 2025 12:37PM

Vincent’s Notes & Highlights

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

by David Epstein

2 highlights

“While, as was noted earlier, the genes (or natural selection, which is the answer to the inevitable question, Who made the genes?) are invested with Godlike qualities, ultimately it may be that God and the soul, as well as the genetic architect in the cell—the Holy Ghost, the ghost in the machine, and the ghost in the ghost in the machine, are all our own spectral likenesses, projected outward and inward to aid understanding. We explain order anthropomorphically”
― Susan Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution

0 likes

“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

tags: brain, mind

3739 likes

“We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens—like science, or philosophy, it was a Greek invention. It’s never entirely clear what this is supposed to mean. Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say?”
― David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

tags: community, democracy, history, politics

55 likes

“When the middle class constitutes only 20–30 percent of the population, it may side with antidemocratic forces because it fears the intentions of the large mass of poor people below it and the populist policies they may pursue.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

4 likes

“But if, as has been argued in preceding chapters, genes do not create traits according to a plan written in their very structure, even by operating on conveniently available “raw materials,” if phenotypic characteristics arise only when sufficient interactants are present in the proper place and at the proper time, and if all these factors are therefore given comparable causal and formative significance, then defining heredity as the passing on of all developmental conditions, in whatever manner, is preferable to defining it by genetic information.”
― Susan Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution

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