conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a description for a book titled Climbing Mount Improbable about BRAND, BOOK.WE, PROVIDE with the genre: New, Used & Rental Textbooks, Science & Mathematics
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: THIS IS BRAND NEW BOOK.WE PROVIDE 100% CUSTOMER SATISFACTION.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first four paragraphs for this book. End with the sentence ' There would have to be little automatic machines, tiny robots, not unlike miniature versions of the industrial robots we met earlier in this chapter.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Climbing Mount Improbable
  Who knows whether humans will ever attempt to build things by gigatechnology? But people are already talking about nanotechnology. Just as 'giga' means a billion, 'nano' means a billionth. Nanotechnology means engineering things that are a billionth of the size of the builder.
  There are people--and the leading ones are not all New Agers or cult fanatics--who are now saying that something like Figure 9.5 will be a reality in the not too distant future. If they are right, there is hardly an area of human life that will not be dramatically affected. Doctoring is an example. Modern surgeons are highly skilled people, with delicate, precision instruments. To remove the lens of an eye when it is clouded with cataract and replace it with a substitute lens, as modern surgeons do, is an amazing feat of skill. The instruments that they use are impressively fine and precise. But, compared with the scale of nanotechnology, they are still immensely crude. Listen to Eric Drexler, the American scientist who is emerging as the high priest of nanotechnology, as he invokes a nano-scale view of present-day scalpels and surgical stitching.
  Modern scalpels and sutures are simply too coarse for repairing capillaries, cells, and molecules. Consider 'delicate' surgery from a cell's perspective: a huge blade sweeps down, chopping blindly past and through the molecular machinery of a crowd of cells, slaughtering thousands. Later, a great obelisk plunges through the divided crowd, dragging a cable as wide as a freight train behind it to rope the crowd together again. From a cell's perspective, even the most delicate surgery, performed with exquisite knives and great skill, is still a butcher job. Only the ability of cells to abandon their dead, regroup, and multiply makes healing possible.
  The 'obelisk', of course, is a delicate surgical needle, and the cable as wide as a goods train is the finest surgical thread. Nanotechnology holds out the dream of constructing surgical instruments small enough to work on the same scale as the cells themselves. Such instruments would be far too tiny to be controlled by the fingers of a surgeon. If a piece of thread is the width of a goods train on the cells' scale, think how wide a surgeon's fingers would be. There would have to be little automatic machines, tiny robots, not unlike miniature versions of the industrial robots we met earlier in this chapter.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: three more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: What is the evidence, in practice, that the stable balance theory is working among these wasps, rather than the best of a bad job theory? The key difference between the two theories is that on the first theory, but not the second, both kinds of male wasp should do equally well. The Hamiltons found evidence suggesting that the two kinds of male really do succeed equally well in mating with females. They looked at ten different species. They found that, in all species, the proportion of winged to wingless males was approximately equal to the proportion of females that left their natal figs unmated. Thus a species in which 80 per cent of the females flew out of their natal figs unmated, was also a species in which 80 per cent of the males were winged. A species in which 70 per cent of the females were mated before leaving their natal figs was also a species in which 70 per cent of the males were wingless. It really does look as though the proportions of the two kinds of males are exactly what they should be to ensure an equal share of females all round. This is evidence for the stable balance theory and against the best of a bad job theory. Sorry it was so complicated, but that is par for the course in the world of figs.
  The figs in which the following story is set are 'dioecious'. This means that, instead of having one kind of fig containing both male and female flowers like the 'monoecious' trees we've so far talked about, there are male trees and female trees. Female trees produce figs containing only female flowers. Male trees make figs containing male flowers, but that isn't all. These so-called male figs also contain pseudo-female flowers and this is very important for the wasps. Unlike the real female flowers in the female figs, the pseudo-female flowers in the male figs cannot set seed, even if they are pollinated. What they are good at is providing food for baby wasps, and--thereby will hang a tale--they need to be pollinated before they will do this. The fertile female flowers in the all-female figs are a genetic graveyard for wasps though they are vital for fig reproduction. Female wasps enter them and pollinate them, but their eggs cannot grow in them.
  Here we have the elements of a rich strategic game which we can describe in terms of the 'wants' (in the special Darwinian sense) of the various players. Both male and female figs 'want' wasps to enter them, but the wasps want to enter only male figs--and then only because of the nutritious pseudo-female flowers within them. The male tree wants eggs to be laid in its pseudo-female flowers so that the female young that hatch out will then load themselves up with the male fig's pollen and fly off with it. The tree has no direct interest in male wasps hatching inside its figs because male wasps don't transport pollen. This may seem surprising since male wasps are, after all, necessary for the continuation of the race of fig wasps. We people, with our penchant for looking ahead and thinking of the larger consequences of our actions, find it hard to purge our minds of the idea that natural selection too looks ahead. I have already made this point in another connection. If natural selection were capable of taking the long view, animals and plants would take steps to preserve the race--their own and those that they depend on like their prey and their pollinators. But nature, unlike humans with brains, has no foresight. 'Selfish genes' and short-term benefit are always favoured in a world where others are coping with the long-term needs of the race. If an individual fig tree could get away with fostering nothing but female wasps it would do so, relying on other fig trees to produce the males needed to preserve the race of wasps. The point is that, as long as the other trees are producing male wasps, a single selfish rebel tree that discovered a way to increase its production of female wasps, and hence increase the amount of pollen that it could export, would have an advantage. As the generations went by, more and more trees would become selfish, relying on fewer and fewer trees to produce the needed male wasps. Finally, the last tree with a penchant for nurturing male wasps would die because it would still be doing less well than its rivals producing only female wasps.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Finally, the last tree with a penchant for nurturing male wasps would die because it would still be doing less well than its rivals producing only female wasps. The Hamiltons found evidence suggesting that the two kinds of male really do succeed equally well in mating with females. They looked at ten different species. They found that, in all species, the proportion of winged to wingless males was approximately equal to the proportion of females that left their natal figs unmated. Thus a species in which 80 per cent of the females flew out of their natal figs unmated, was also a species in which 80 per cent of the males were winged. A species in which 70 per cent of the females were mated before leaving their natal figs was also a species in which 70 per cent of the males were wingless. It really does look as though the proportions of the two kinds of males are exactly what they should be to ensure an equal share of females all round. This is evidence for the stable balance theory and against the best of a bad job theory. Sorry it was so complicated, but that is par for the course in the world of figs.
  The figs in which the following story is set are 'dioecious'. This means that, instead of having one kind of fig containing both male and female flowers like the 'monoecious' trees we've so far talked about, there are male trees and female trees. Female trees produce figs containing only female flowers. Male trees make figs containing male flowers, but that isn't all. These so-called male figs also contain pseudo-female flowers and this is very important for the wasps. Unlike the real female flowers in the female figs, the pseudo-female flowers in the male figs cannot set seed, even if they are pollinated. What they are good at is providing food for baby wasps, and--thereby will hang a tale--they need to be pollinated before they will do this. The fertile female flowers in the all-female figs are a genetic graveyard for wasps though they are vital for fig reproduction. Female wasps enter them and pollinate them, but their eggs cannot grow in them.
  Here we have the elements of a rich strategic game which we can describe in terms of the 'wants' (in the special Darwinian sense) of the various players. Both male and female figs 'want' wasps to enter them, but the wasps want to enter only male figs--and then only because of the nutritious pseudo-female flowers within them. The male tree wants eggs to be laid in its pseudo-female flowers so that the female young that hatch out will then load themselves up with the male fig's pollen and fly off with it. The tree has no direct interest in male wasps hatching inside its figs because male wasps don't transport pollen. This may seem surprising since male wasps are, after all, necessary for the continuation of the race of fig wasps. We people, with our penchant for looking ahead and thinking of the larger consequences of our actions, find it hard to purge our minds of the idea that natural selection too looks ahead. I have already made this point in another connection. If natural selection were capable of taking the long view, animals and plants would take steps to preserve the race--their own and those that they depend on like their prey and their pollinators. But nature, unlike humans with brains, has no foresight. 'Selfish genes' and short-term benefit are always favoured in a world where others are coping with the long-term needs of the race. If an individual fig tree could get away with fostering nothing but female wasps it would do so, relying on other fig trees to produce the males needed to preserve the race of wasps. The point is that, as long as the other trees are producing male wasps, a single selfish rebel tree that discovered a way to increase its production of female wasps, and hence increase the amount of pollen that it could export, would have an advantage. As the generations went by, more and more trees would become selfish, relying on fewer and fewer trees to produce the needed male wasps.What is the evidence, in practice, that the stable balance theory is working among these wasps, rather than the best of a bad job theory? The key difference between the two theories is that on the first theory, but not the second, both kinds of male wasp should do equally well.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last five paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Vollrath, F. (1992) 'Analysis and interpretation of orb spider exploration and web-building behavior'. Advances in the Study of Behavior, 21, 147-99.
  Watson, J. D., Hopkins, N. H., Roberts, J. W., Steitz, J. A., and Weiner, A. M. (1987) Molecular Biology of the Gene (4th edn). Menlo Park: Benjamin/Cummings.
  Williams, G. C. (1992) Natural Selection: Domains, Levels and Challenges. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  Wilson, E. O. (1971) The Insect Societies. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
  Wright, S. (1932) 'The roles of mutation, inbreeding, crossbreeding and selection in evolution'. Proceedings 6th International Congress of Genetics, 1, 356-66.