corrente

Who am I - were did I come from....?

Fear and laptops on the genesis project
There's a fascinating essay in today’s New York Times Magazine about how a group of scientists are searching for the origins of blogging. It seems that in January 2006, the Stardust spacecraft will return from its encounter with the comet Wild 2, bringing with it a payload of cosmic debris "which scientists now expect may offer significant clues about blogging’s origins here on earth."

Until recently, many scientists believed that blogs were formed in a kind of primordial soup formed when a bunch of people got really pissed off:

Left-wing politics are thriving on blogs the way Rush Limbaugh has dominated talk radio, and in the last six months, the angrier, nastier partisan blogs have been growing the fastest. Daily Kos has tripled in traffic since June. Josh Marshall’s site has quadrupled in the last year. It's almost as though, in a time of great national discord, you don’t want to know both sides of an issue. The once-soothing voice of the nonideological press has become, to many readers, a secondary concern, a luxury, even something suspect. It’s hard to listen to a calm and rational debate when the building is burning and your pants are smoking.

While acknowledging that some bloggers lack the evolutionary maturity necessary to appreciate the "calm and rational debate" the American media offered when it keenly analyzed Bill Clinton’s fraudulent land deals, Wen Ho Lee’s treasonous espionage, Al Gore's criminal eye-rolling, and Saddam Hussein's fearsome cache of weapons of mass destruction, most scientists now believe that the origins of blogging go back much further than had previously been imagined.

Indeed, the search for a "Last Universal Common Ancestor," or LUCA, may not only answer the question of how blogs first arose from inorganic media; it may also help to explain the process of evolution itself – or, as one researcher puts it, "the question of how the primitive, early Kaus became the highly intelligent Kos we know today." (more......)

[:-) ...See:Michael Berube's blog, (non fattening - 100% ad free!)

*