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In essence, the bee's azimuth system acts like a sundial run in reverse, and like a sundial, it has to be calibrated. A sundial, which must be orient… - Gary F. Marcus
" "In essence, the bee's azimuth system acts like a sundial run in reverse, and like a sundial, it has to be calibrated. A sundial, which must be oriented with respect to a known compass direction, calculates the time of day based on where the sun is; the navigational centers in the bee's brain calculate where the sun should be based on the time of day. As a consequence, the one thing that bees can't cope with is the discalibration that results from jet lag. In a famous 1960s experiment, Max Renner packed up a hive of bees in Long Island, New York, flew them to Davis, California, and tested their ability to navigate with the sun as a landmark. The jetlagged bees consistently misoriented themselves by 45 degrees, precisely as though they believed it was three hours later. The complex circuitry that allows the bee to use the sun as a guide is built in, but it is not that genes trump the environment (or the other way around). Instead, genes enable creatures to make sensible use of their particular environment. Learning is not the antithesis of innateness but one of its most important products.
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Additional quotes by Gary F. Marcus
Our sense of a composition largely inheres in how we feel about the individual parts; narrative arcs are almost always essential in drama but (unless there are lyrics involved) often less essential in music. All of this is, I suspect, again symptomatic of human memory limitations. We live, to a remarkable degree, in the present; what happened thirty seconds ago is already rapidly fading from our memory (or at least rapidly becomes harder for us to retrieve).
But the real story is how narrow Duplex was. For all the fantastic resources of Google (and its parent company, Alphabet), the system that they created was so narrow it could handle just three things: restaurant reservations, hair salon appointments, and the opening hours of a few selected businesses. By the time the demo was publicly released, on Android phones, even the hair salon appointments and the opening hour queries were gone. Some of the world’s best minds in AI, using some of the biggest clusters of computers in the world, had produced a special-purpose gadget for making nothing but restaurant reservations. It doesn’t get narrower than that.
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Biology doesn't know in advance what the end product will be; there's no Stuffit Compressor to convert a human being into a genome. But the genome itself is very much akin to a compression scheme, a terrifically efficient description of how to build something of great complexity-perhaps more efficient than anything yet developed in the labs of computer scientists (never mind the complexities of the brain, there are trillions of cells in the rest of the body, and they are all supervised by the same 30,000-gene genome). And although there is no counterpart in nature to a program that compresses a picture into a compact description, there is a natural counterpart to the program that decompresses the compressed encoding, and that's the cell. Genome in, organism out. Through the logic of gene expression, cells are self-regulating factories that translate genomes into biological structure.
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