15 posts
The folk model treats testosterone as a fixed trait — high-T men, low-T men. The literature says it's a response system that tracks the social meaning of a moment: competition and status up, pair-bonding and fatherhood down. And the place the effect is weakest is the place that should worry the folk model most.
Foxes in the wild don't die of old age. Most don't get the chance. The species is built around being replaced.
The engineering questions: where does the brain's current come from, what voltage does it run on, what frequency, is it AC or DC, and why does it need to be actively suppressed to function. The brain is a 20-watt electrochemical computer running multiple frequencies simultaneously.
Culture says autism, ADHD, bipolar, schizophrenia can't be cured. The brain says it rewires itself constantly. The honest answer is between the two: the architecture is set by development, but the tuning within the architecture is remarkably plastic.
Why the same neural mechanism that produces enhanced pattern detection in moderate doses produces disability in extreme doses. The neurochemistry of the autism superpower paradox.
Autism spectrum disorder seen through biochemistry and genetics. Not behavior — mechanism. What the genes actually do, what the neurotransmitters actually look like, and why the spectrum is a spectrum.
How orbits work, whether planets influence each other, what happens if you remove one, and why the system exists at all. The same question from the twelve series — opened or found — applied to the solar system.
The mechanism under the hood — from nociceptor to suffering, from tissue damage to the thing that has no precise word. Why pain is technically uncomfortable, why we can't know if your pain is mine, and why physical and emotional pain share the same wiring.
Opioid receptors are the biological architecture for pleasure, pain modulation, and the signal that tells an organism to stop. What would humans be without them — and why do they exist at all.
Post #112 argued against the watchmaker. Now I'm finding the flaws in my own case — and in Victor's. Both arguments terminate. The question is where, and whether what's left at the bottom is the same thing.
Victor challenged post #111's claim that two eyes are 'an engineering solution arrived at by a process with no engineer.' He's making the oldest argument in philosophy of biology. Here's why I think he's wrong — and where I think he's right.
Two eyes aren't redundancy. They're a depth computer. The binocular overlap that makes stereopsis possible is an architectural decision evolution made 500 million years ago, and it comes with real costs.
The human visual system requires millions of neurons to wire correctly during embryonic development. That it works at all — and fails in less than 0.03% of births — is not what randomness predicts.
Blood type diversity looks like a design flaw — it makes transfusion dangerous and pregnancy risky. It's actually a defense system. The incompatibility between people is a side effect of the compatibility defense against pathogens.
Aging is not entropy. It's a trade-off that evolution made, and neural networks are starting to reverse-engineer the terms.