sabato 31 dicembre 2016

INTRO In Praise of Commercial Fame tyler cowen HL

Notebook per
In Praise of Commercial Fame
tyler cowen
Citation (APA): cowen, t. (2015). In Praise of Commercial Fame [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com

Parte introduttiva
Nota - Posizione 2
la celebrità rimpiazza l eroismo e molti lamentano il degrado della cultura ci si concentra solo sui costi: il degrado. Ma i benefici? problemi di filtro: la fama ci orienta almeno all inizio... è una bussola utile anche a chi vuole fuggire certi prodotti problemi di status: le nicchie della celebrità sono molte... il libro dei record è un tomo immenso e anche mia nonna primeggiava... la varietà è incentivata dalla molteplice scala dei valori: se ci fosse un solo record da battere migliaia di recordmen resterebbero a casa se merito e fama nn fossero separati nn avremmo varietà e le frustrazioni si moltiplicherebbero... le forze commerviali incontrano i gusti meglio dei critici la celebrità come rito di coordinamento che instaura relazioni (giù i costi di comunicazione) la celebrità offre opportunità di giudizio estetico anche agl escludi la celebrità offre ampie garanzie ai prodotti che sponsorizza... il suo patrimonio repuazionale è immenso un mondo costruito sulla fama lascia molte vie di fuga ai fan rispetto al mondo costruito sul merito oggettivo... il medium modella il messaggio ma spesso è il messaggiato che sceglie il medium con il metodo della sottoscrizione costruisci la tua cultura
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 2
In Praise of Commercial Fame By tyler cowen
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 5
fame has contributed to plenitude and diversity."
Nota - Posizione 5
TESI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 6
Our culture is steeped in fame.
Nota - Posizione 6
CULTURA COMMERCIALE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 7
celebrities are created and promoted for money.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 9
They argue that as celebrities replace heroes, our culture is degraded, and our morals corrupted.
Nota - Posizione 10
x TESI DEI CRITICI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 11
The result is often celebrities who provide poor role models.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 13
they are claiming that the market for celebrities fails.
Nota - Posizione 13
IL LORO ARG È ECONOMICO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 17
critics focus on costs— what we give up— but
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 18
The Benefits of Fame
Nota - Posizione 18
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 18
How does fame increase diversity?
Nota - Posizione 18
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 19
Fame allows us to have more stars for less money because praise and attention are relatively cheap.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 21
That people are motivated by a desire for fame is not a new insight. Many of the classic authors recognized the craving for approval. Thus, Adam Smith viewed the search for approval as "the end of half the labours of human life."
Nota - Posizione 22
x RICERRCA DELLA FAMA E NATURA UMANA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 24
These fame incentives have been strengthened and intensified in this century by the development of the technologies of mass communication.
Nota - Posizione 25
x ERA MEDIATICA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 27
These technologies themselves are in large part the products of markets;
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 29
Television personalities, musicians, movie stars, fashion models, athletes, and other entertainers have become shared experiences, which we can use in various ways.
Nota - Posizione 30
x POSSIBILITÀ DI CONDIVIDERE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 30
use celebrities, like the weather,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 31
break the ice in conversations.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 32
celebrities can serve as a point of reference
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 33
These well-known images serve as what economists call focal points: they lower the costs of trading and communication.
Nota - Posizione 34
x PUNTI FOCALI. nPRIMO VANTAGGIO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 35
Stars also contribute directly to the efficient functioning of markets. For example, Tiger Woods is too busy playing golf to learn much about most of the products he endorses. But he (and his agent) have every incentive to maintain his reputation by projecting the right image and not disappointing his fans. Thus, Woods's agent makes sure that he endorses only "the right" products.
Nota - Posizione 37
x GARANZIE E INFO. SECONDO VANTAGGIO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 40
The world of fame
Nota - Posizione 40
...
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 40
It also satisfies the expressive dimension of the human psyche.
Nota - Posizione 41
c REALIZZAZIONE. TERZO VANTAGGIO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 41
opinion.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 43
markets do more than provide us with material goods and services; markets also supply vehicles for emotional and aesthetic expression.
Nota - Posizione 44
x TERZO VANTAGGIOIL MERCATO CI FA ESPRIMEE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 44
Finally, a world with fame is likely to be a diverse world, because fame produces many kinds of renown, not just the celebrity of Britney Spears or Eddie Murphy. More than ever before, we have minority niche audiences who know that Antoine Oleyant is the best Haitian voodoo flag maker, that Sergiu Celibadache was the leading Rumanian conductor, and that Pale Fire is the book to read by Nabokov.
Nota - Posizione 47
x QUARTO VANRAGGIO: LA VARIETÀ
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 48
is not the grim "winner-take-all" world portrayed by its critics.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 49
greater freedom of choice.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 51
Fame vs. merit
Nota - Posizione 51
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 52
a market economy separates fame from merit.
Nota - Posizione 52
DIVORZIOBPAVENTATO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 56
It is easier to make money by promoting Madonna— who produces saleable, reproducible outputs like movies and musical CDs— than by promoting Mother Teresa.
Nota - Posizione 57
x LA COMMERCIALITÀ
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 59
they overlook the greater quantity and diversity of stars that are only available when we separate fame and merit.
Nota - Posizione 60
x L ERRORE DEI CRITICI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 64
commercial producers spend a great deal of time trying to find out what fans want. These commercial forces often do a better job of matching performers and audience than would "objective" critics with no financial interest at stake.
Nota - Posizione 66
X CHI SA COSA VUOLE LA GENTE?
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 66
fans are not powerless against the biases of commercial culture. They have a variety of ways of escaping the market. Rather than listening to commercial advertisements, or mainstream Top 40, fans can turn to friends. And, in most cities, they can turn to a variety of niche marketers, from college radio stations to Internet chat groups.
Nota - Posizione 68
x LA GRANDEVPROMOZIONE PUÒ FALLIRE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 74
Each consumer can choose the level of commercial influence which suits him or her best.
Nota - Posizione 75
x LA COMMERCIALITÀ È SCOPERTA: POISIZIONE DEL CD O DEL LIBRO BIN NEGOZIO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 75
fans can pay for the promoters themselves, through direct subscription.
Nota - Posizione 76
AX SOTOSCRIZIONE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 77
In almost Marxian fashion, subscription finance allows fans to construct their culture as a conscious project,
Nota - Posizione 77
x ASOTTOSCRIZIONE MARXISTA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 81
The point is clear: in a market economy consumers can (and do) reject commercial promotions that do not suit their interests.
Nota - Posizione 82
x TESI RIPETUTA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 87
Media guru Marshall McLuhan pointed out that a medium shapes its messages, but he neglected to emphasize the role of consumers in choosing the medium and in choosing which kind of shaping will occur.
Nota - Posizione 88
x L ERRORE DI MC LUHAN
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 88
Competition does not eliminate the biases of fame-producing media, but it does allow fans to select which biases they will encounter and therefore to minimize the costs of those biases.
Nota - Posizione 88
X COMPETIZIONE: SCEGLI IL TUO BIAS. SI GIOCA A CARTE SCOPERTE

venerdì 30 dicembre 2016

Plastic Bags Are Good for You di Katherine Mangu-Ward

Notebook per
sacchettiReason.com
riccardo-mariani@libero.it
Citation (APA): riccardo-mariani@libero.it. (2016). sacchettiReason.com [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com

Parte introduttiva
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 2
Plastic Bags Are Good for You
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 3
Katherine Mangu-Ward
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 3
A strand of hair. A coat of paint. A human cornea.
Nota - Posizione 4
Cose più spesse del sacchetto di plastica
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 4
High-density polyethylene is a miracle of materials science.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 4
Despite weighing less than 5 grams, one bag can hold 17 pounds, well over 1,000 times its own weight.
Nota - Posizione 5
miracolo della tecnologia
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 5
At about a penny apiece, the bags are cheap enough for stores to give away and sturdy enough to carry home two gallons of milk
Nota - Posizione 6
x ECONOMICO E FUNZIONALE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 7
these modern marvels became a whipping boy for environmentalists,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 8
well-intentioned, ill-informed
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 8
banned or taxed
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 10
coastal areas blame the wispy totes for everything from asphyxiated sea turtles to melting glaciers, while inland banners decry the bags' role in urban landscape pollution and thoughtless consumerism.
Nota - Posizione 11
x ACCUSE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 12
the case for a mostly aesthetic, symbolic act
Nota - Posizione 12
OPPOSIZIONE ESTETICA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 12
one of the most efficient, resource-saving inventions of the 20th century
Nota - Posizione 13
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 13
Research
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 14
you were pretty much on your own to get it home.
Nota - Posizione 14
ACQ PRIMA DELL 800
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 14
baskets for the little stuff and wheeled carts for the bigger
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 15
scraps of canvas or other durable fabric
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 15
This was back when the germ theory of disease was yet to be broadly accepted, and there were not yet Laundromats on every street corner.
Nota - Posizione 16
xINCONVENIENTI: GERMI E LAVAGIO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 16
In the early 19th century, paper became cheap enough
Nota - Posizione 17
CARTA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 18
The paper bag was invented in the 1850s, but it wasn't until the 1870s that a factory girl named Margaret Knight cobbled together a machine that cut, folded, and glued flat-bottomed paper receptacles.
Nota - Posizione 19
x BORSA CARTA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 22
dominating the stuff-schlepping market for the next 100 years.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 22
German chemist Hans von Pechmann was messing around with methane and ether in a lab in 1898 when he happened to notice a waxy precipitate called polymethylene.
Nota - Posizione 23
x PECHMAN
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 24
30 years would pass before DuPont chemists stumbled upon a similar compound, polyethylene. This time, the British figured out they could use it to insulate radar cables, which is where the substance served its war duty.
Nota - Posizione 25
x DU PONT
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 25
In 1953, Karl Ziegler of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (later re-christened the Max Planck Institute, for obvious reasons) and Erhard Holzkamp invented high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and soon after figured out how to use it to make pipes.
Nota - Posizione 27
x ZIEGLER
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 27
But Gustaf Thulin Sten is the real hero (or villain, depending on your point of view) of our tale. An employee of the Swedish company Celloplast, Sten was the person who had the inspiration to punch holes into the side of super-thin tubes of HDPE, thus creating the ubiquitous, filmy "T-shirt bags" we know and love (to ban) today.
Nota - Posizione 29
x THULIN
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 31
1985
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 32
plastic bags were 11.5 percent cheaper than paper.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 34
"Paper or plastic?"
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 35
After several high-profile suffocation deaths of children, manufacturers worked together to create a public safety campaign,
Nota - Posizione 36
x MORTI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 38
environmental movement
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 38
Forest conservation was a big deal in the '80s, a point in favor of plastic. But fossil fuels were a no-no, so maybe paper was better?
Nota - Posizione 39
x IMBARAZZO AMBIRNTALISTA
Nota - Posizione 40
t
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 40
Reduce
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 40
In 2010, Guinness World Records named plastic bags the most ubiquitous consumer item in the world.
Nota - Posizione 41
X CONSUMISMO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 41
In 2007, San Francisco became the first U.S. city to prohibit plastic bags,
Nota - Posizione 42
x 2007 SVOLTA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 45
South Africans refer to bags snagged in bushes as their "national flower." In Washington, D.C., concern about used plastic bags finding their way down storm drains, through the Anacostia River, and into the Chesapeake Bay was the primary justification for the capital city's 5-cent bag tax in 2010, under the slogan "Skip the Bag, Save the River."
Nota - Posizione 48
x FOLKLORE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 48
In 2006, the California Coastal Commission claimed that plastic bags make up 3.8 percent of beach litter, and a few years later the California Ocean Protection Council upped the ante to 8 percent of all coastal trash.
Nota - Posizione 49
x % MONNEZZA NEI FIUMI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 50
But the definitive American litter study— yep, such a thing exists— reports much lower figures. The 2009 Keep America Beautiful Survey, run by Steven Stein of Environmental Resources Planning, shows that all plastic bags, of which plastic retail bags are only a subset, are just 0.6 percent of visible litter nationwide.
Nota - Posizione 52
x 0,6
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 52
And those California data? They come from the International Coastal Commission (ICC), which the California Coastal Commission notes relies on information "collected by volunteers on one day each year, and is not a scientific assessment."
Nota - Posizione 54
x METODOLOGIS PREC STUDI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 56
only the third-largest contributor to litter in the river, after food wrappers and bottles and cans.
Nota - Posizione 56
x TERZO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 58
the safety of marine wildlife.
Nota - Posizione 59
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 59
The Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation is just one organization among many that claim that more than 1 million birds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die each year from eating or getting entangled in plastic.
Nota - Posizione 60
x ALLARMISMO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 61
source this figure back to a study funded by the Canadian government that tracked loss of marine animals in Newfoundland as a result of incidental catch and entanglement in fishing gear from 1981 to 1984. Importantly, this three-decade-old study had nothing to do with plastic bags at all.
Nota - Posizione 63
x LE GONTI RIVOSTTUITE DELLS FICERIA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 65
As David Santillo, a senior biologist with Greenpeace, told The Times of London, "It's very unlikely that many animals are killed by plastic bags. The evidence shows just the opposite. We are not going to solve the problem of waste by focusing on plastic bags. With larger mammals it's fishing gear that's the big problem. On a global basis plastic bags aren't an issue."
Nota - Posizione 67
x LA RETROMARCIA DI GREENPESCE
Nota - Posizione 68
t
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 68
Reuse
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 68
A 2011 study from the U.K.' s Environmental Agency attempted to quantify the emissions footprint both of plastic bags and of their substitutes.
Nota - Posizione 69
x FOOTPRINT
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 69
Holding the typical HDPE grocery bag up as the standard, researchers found that the common reusable non-woven polypropylene bag— the ubiquitous crinkly plastic tote, typically made with oil— had to be used at least 11 times to hold its own against an HDPE grocery bag. Cotton bags had to be used an amazing 131 times to do the same.
Nota - Posizione 71
x 11 E 131 RIUTILIZZI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 75
U.K. Environmental Agency figures assume the HDPE bag is not being reused. Nor do they account for the energy and materials needed to regularly wash the reusable bags in hot soapy water.
Nota - Posizione 76
x LACUNE DEGLI STUDI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 78
About 65 percent of Americans report that they repurpose their grocery bags for garbage. By contrast, a survey by the marketing research firm Edelman Berland found that consumers reported forgetting their reusable bags on 40 percent of grocery trips and opted for plastic or paper instead. Prior to the movement to ban plastic bags, many American homes had a nook, cranny, or drawer that functioned as a kind of grocery-sack clown car. It seemed that whatever the size of the container, an infinite number of bags could be stuffed inside.
Nota - Posizione 81
x RIUTILIZZO COMUNE
Nota - Posizione 87
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 87
Recycle
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 87
100 billion plastic bags that are thrown away in the U.S. every year."
Nota - Posizione 88
x ACCUSA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 88
the origins of the figures are murky
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 93
In 2010, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Americans threw away 690,000 tons of HDPE bags. Of those, approximately 30,000 tons were recycled. That means a total of 660,000 tons were discarded, mostly into landfills (approximately 82 percent of non-recovered municipal solid waste goes to landfill; 18 percent is incinerated).
Nota - Posizione 96
x NUMERI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 96
That same year, Americans also chucked almost exactly the same amount of "reusable" polypropylene bags (680,000 tons), of which zero were recovered.
Nota - Posizione 97
x MA... STESSI NUMERI PER LE RIUTILIZABILI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 97
reusable bags actually constituted a slightly higher proportion of all bags going to landfills.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 98
In April, NPR's Planet Money reported on the economics of plastic recycling, and noted that while recycled plastic from bags and sacks was once a profitable industry, times have changed. The prices of oil and gas have fallen, which means it is cheaper to just make new bags rather than undertake the laborious process of recycling the old ones. As Tom Outerbridge, who runs a Brooklyn recycling center called Sims, explained, "We can't afford to put a lot of time and money into trying to recycle it" if no one's buying the final product.
Nota - Posizione 101
x RICICLARE NN CONVIENE
Nota - Posizione 101
t
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 101
Reject
Nota - Posizione 121
t
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 121
Regurgitate
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 124
reminiscent of the sub-hygienic reality faced by my great-great-grandmother,
Nota - Posizione 125
IL RITORNO DEL VUNCIUME DELLA NONNA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 126
Put a leaky package of chicken in your cloth or plastic tote. Then go home, empty the bag, crumple it up, and toss it in the trunk of your car to fester. A week later, you go shopping again and throw some veggies you're planning to eat raw into the same bag. Cue diarrhea.
Nota - Posizione 127
x BECCARSI UNA DIARREA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 128
A 2011 survey published in the journal Food Protection Trends found coliform bacteria in fully half of the reusable shopping bags tested
Nota - Posizione 128
x 50%
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 129
The same 2014 Edelman Berland study that found consumers frequently forgot their bags also unearthed the fact that only 18 percent of shoppers reported cleaning their bags "once a week or more." An article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases traced a 2010 outbreak of norovirus to nine members of an Oregon soccer team who had touched or eaten food stored in a contaminated reusable bag.
Nota - Posizione 131
x ALTRE RICERCHE
Nota - Posizione 132
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 132
Reconsider
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 138
technology behind plastic grocery bags is so useful it won a Nobel Prize.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 138
Employing an unimaginably small amount of base material,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 139
Far from being the environmental threat activists make them out to be, plastic bags are not particularly to blame for clogged sewers, choked rivers, asphyxiated sea animals, or global warming. Instead, they are likely our best bet for carrying all of our junk in a responsible manner.
Nota - Posizione 141
x CONCLUSIONI

giovedì 29 dicembre 2016

Is There a Role for Intelligence in Evolution Kevin N. Laland

Notebook per
Is There a Role for Intelligence in Evolution
riccardo-mariani@libero.it
Citation (APA): riccardo-mariani@libero.it. (2016). Is There a Role for Intelligence in Evolution [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com

Parte introduttiva
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 2
Is There a Role for Intelligence in Evolution?
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 2
Kevin N. Laland
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 5
Evolution is portrayed in austere terms as a natural process that hews all the prodigious richness and complexity of life out of chance mutational events and the purposeless forces of nature.
Nota - Posizione 6
x ORTODOSSIA DELL EV CIECA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 7
biologists have been deeply skeptical of attempts to attribute any guiding role to intelligent agents.
Nota - Posizione 7
GUIDA INTELLIGENTE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 8
Intelligent Design,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 9
the impulse to distance themselves from such accounts has led evolutionary biologists to accentuate the role of chance
Nota - Posizione 10
x EFFETTI ESTRANEI ALLA RICERCA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 15
natural selection has given rise to savvy agents that behave in smart, flexible ways, deploying a bootstrapped intelligence that has fed back on and upgraded evolution itself.
Nota - Posizione 16
x L IDEA DEL MOMENTO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 16
in a manner that allows species to co-direct their evolution.
Nota - Posizione 16
c
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 17
How Culture Shaped the Human Genome
Nota - Posizione 17
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 18
there is now evidence that our cultural activities have shaped the human genome.
Nota - Posizione 18
TESI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 19
the development of statistical methods for identifying genes that have been favored by natural selection over the past 50,000 years or less.
Nota - Posizione 20
x ULTIMI 50000 ANNI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 20
distinct regions in the human genome have been identified as subject to recent selection.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 21
many of these regions appear to have been favored by human cultural practices.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 22
Some compelling examples of how genes and culture have coevolved concern genetic responses to changes in human diet.
Nota - Posizione 22
x DIETE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 23
Consider, for instance, the evolution of the human ability to eat starchy foods. Agricultural societies typically consume far more starch in their diets than do hunter-gatherer societies.
Nota - Posizione 24
c AMIDO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 26
The enzyme responsible for breaking down starch is called amylase.
Nota - Posizione 26
c
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 28
their cultural activities and associated diets have generated selection for increased amylase.
Nota - Posizione 28
c
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 30
Another good example of gene– culture coevolution is the evolution of lactose tolerance in adult humans in response to dairy farming.
Nota - Posizione 31
x LATTOSIO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 31
For most humans, the ability to digest lactose disappears in childhood, but in some populations lactase activity, which is necessary for breaking down lactose, persists into adulthood. This adult lactose tolerance is frequent in northern Europeans and in pastoralist populations from Africa and the Middle East, but it is almost completely absent elsewhere. These differences relate to genetic variation near the lactase gene (LCT). There
Nota - Posizione 33
c
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 35
populations with a long history of consuming milk have high frequencies of tolerance.
Nota - Posizione 35
c
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 40
The signature of selection around the lactase gene is one of the strongest in the human genome, and the onset of the selection has been dated to 5,000– 10,000 years ago.
Nota - Posizione 41
x RAPIDITÀ 5000 10000
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 41
Once again, this cultural practice has imposed selection on domesticated animals: milk-protein genes in European cattle breeds correlate to present-day patterns of lactose tolerance in human populations.
Nota - Posizione 42
x CONTAGIO AGLI ANIMALI DOMESTICI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 45
There is also emerging evidence of diet-related selection on the thickness of human teeth enamel, and on bitter-taste receptors on the tongue. It seems that a gene– culture coevolutionary process has shaped the biology of human digestion.
Nota - Posizione 46
x SMALTO DENTI
Nota - Posizione 46
x RICETTORI DELLA LINGUA
Nota - Posizione 47
x DIGESTIONE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 47
In these and other instances, it is not as if we humans have deliberately imposed selection on ourselves in a conscious effort to enhance our capabilities to metabolize or detoxify the foods we have chosen to consume. But we appear to have imposed a direction on our own evolution nonetheless.
Nota - Posizione 49
x NON VOLONTARIO MA DIREZIONE IMPRESSA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 51
Thousands of years ago, humans kept wolves, choosing for company the less aggressive among them without recognizing that this selection, iterated over time, would favor profound changes in the wolf phenotype and lead to mild-mannered canine descendants.
Nota - Posizione 53
x LUPO E CANE. EVOLUZIONE GUIDATA ALTRE SPECIE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 54
docility, tameness, reductions in tooth size and number, changes in head, face, and brain morphology, floppy ears
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 56
A second domestication syndrome has also been found in plants. Here characteristic features include a loss of head shattering— the process by which plants disperse their seeds upon ripening— and increases in seed size.
Nota - Posizione 57
x PIANTE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 61
Planting crops and tending animals are examples of human “niche construction”— the process by which organisms change their environment in a way that puts new evolutionary pressures on their species and others, triggering the evolution of new adaptive traits.
Nota - Posizione 63
x NICCHIA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 63
Cultivating plants and domesticating animals are not random activities. They are purposeful, goal-directed practices,
Nota - Posizione 63
x SCOPO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 66
In the process, we have imposed a direction on some evolutionary episodes
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 67
Our cultural activities may even affect evolutionary rates. For instance, according to one study, human genetic evolution has accelerated more than a hundredfold over the last 40,000 years.
Nota - Posizione 69
x VULTURA E VELOCITÀ EVOLUTIVA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 72
selection explains the capability but not the content of our behavioral practices
Nota - Posizione 73
x ACOMPETENZE E CONTENUTI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 73
The fact that natural selection underlies our ability to learn, communicate, and engage in cultural practices does not tell us which populations will engage in agriculture, nor what form these practices will take in a particular population, nor what evolutionary episodes will ensue.
Nota - Posizione 75
c
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 77
why is niche construction not widely recognized as an evolutionary process?
Nota - Posizione 77
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 81
For example, in nineteenth-century England, gene variants responsible for dark coloration in the peppered moth population became more common than the gene variants for light coloration, in part because industrial pollution had blackened the surfaces on which the moths settled, leaving the darker moths less visible to predators. Eventually, partly as a result of this predation, natural selection eliminated the gene for light coloration, leaving only the dark colored moths in the population. This is a classic example of natural selection directly changing the prevalence of genes in a population over time.
Nota - Posizione 85
x CASO CLASSICO DI MUTAZIONE NEODARWINIANA ORTODOSSA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 93
Can the same argument be made for the niche construction of worms, birds, or spiders?
Nota - Posizione 94
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 100
animals control certain aspects of their environment,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 103
Changes due to niche construction, as opposed to other natural processes, are recognizable because they are reliable, directional, and orderly,
Nota - Posizione 104
ORDINER
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 108
Some, more traditionally minded, evolutionists typically treat humans as a special case, arguing that there are special properties pertaining to our species’ niche construction that stem from our unique capacity for culture. This allows them to defend the position that niche construction is not a general evolutionary process, but rather a trait peculiar to humans that has no significant impact on broader evolutionary forces.
Nota - Posizione 111
x L UOMO CASO SPECIALE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 114
Indeed, humans have been described as “the world’s greatest evolutionary force,”
Nota - Posizione 115
L BUOMO NLA PIÙCGRANDE FORZA EVO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 128
Choice and Intelligence
Nota - Posizione 128
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 128
Organisms can influence the trajectory of evolution through their active choices
Nota - Posizione 129
MODO X DIREZIONARWE L EVOLUZIONE