I wasn’t able to listen to all of it but I was intrigued to hear the phrase downloading the brain put in more than one appearance: nothing new in that, said Kathleen Richardson, Marx was downloading his brain in his writings.
The phrase has become much more common since I started this blog four years ago; then it seemed to me a useful (& original?) phrase & mildly amusing metaphor for getting rid of the junk in the attic, decluttering the brain by downloading the accumulated rubbish into the ether rather than the page. And a Google search (with the quotes on) produced very few - less than one page – of results; today it produces nearly 100,000.
One might almost say it’s a meme – another useful metaphor, even if the theory does not hold up.
Richard Dawkins recently opined that the stuff that scientists persist in calling junk DNA is probably there in the same way that a modern computer hard disk is stuffed with unrelated clutter, fragments of old programmes, & documents. But that is the case only because we currently have the luxury of having the space to be so profligate. It’s not like the old days when storage was at such a premium that a lot of thought & effort had to go into being as tidy & as economical as possible.
Although Nature can be profligate, I just do not believe that she would go to the trouble of all that constant & repetitive copying of something that is merely junk.
Link
Start the Week
Related post
Genes & process
Start the Week
Related post
Genes & process
