lifecycle

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change. —Charles Darwin Within evolutionary theory, evolutionary adaptation is defined as a biological mechanism through which organisms adjust to changes in their environment through morphological, physiological, behavioral and molecular modifications, which make them more suitable for their existence.  In fact, the word indicates this, since the term adaptation comes from the Latin adaptō which means I adjust to. Not all adaptations are completelyvpositive, and for it to be transmitted from generation to generation and persist in the population, reproductive success must be increased. In addition, there are numerous characteristics of the species that have not been developed to better transmit genetic material and that, therefore, are not adaptations, but are pure coincidences. The following definitions are given by the evolutionary biologist ...

 If you would persuade, appeal to interest and not to reason. —Benjamin Franklin I place this tendency first in my discussion because almost everyone thinks he fully recognizes how important incentives and disincentives are in changing cognition and behavior. But this is not often so. For instance, I think I’ve been in the top five percent of my age cohort almost all my adult life in understanding the power of incentives, and yet I’ve always underestimated that power. Never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes a little further my appreciation of incentive superpower. One of my favorite cases about the power of incentives is the Federal Express case. The integrity of the Federal Express system requires that all packages be shifted rapidly among airplanes in one central airport each night. And the system has no integrity for the customers if the night work shift can’t accomplish its assignment fast. And Federal Express had one hell of a time getting the night shift to do...

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." —Albert Allen Bartlett — We are surrounded by potential laws. A physical process responds to a potential law when the probability of an event occurring decreases as its magnitude increases. There are many phenomena that follow these laws: the relationship between the number of cities and inhabitants (few cities with many inhabitants and many with few), the connectivity of nodes on the Internet, the frequency of words in the language, the wealth of people, the size of living beings, internet links, terrorism, etc. It is curious that all these systems respond to potential laws quite accurately since, a priori, we could assume that people's wealth or the connection of nodes to the Internet are quite random phenomena in distribution where we would expect to obtain a bell curve. Therefore, in a potential law the events occur with variable frequency, where many events are small...

"There is a game, you can’t win, you can’t break even and you can’t even get out of the game." —Allen Ginsberg We, like all living beings, are open systems, that is, we exchange matter and energy with our environment. For example, you take in chemical energy in the form of food and do work on your surroundings by moving, talking, walking, and breathing. All the energy exchanges that occur within us, like your many metabolic reactions, and between us and our environment, can be described by the same laws of physics, as energy exchanges between hot and cold objects or gas molecules or whatever. "The laws of thermodynamics are a set of laws on which thermodynamics is based. Specifically, these are four laws that are universally valid when applied to systems that fall within the constraints implicit in each. Therefore, the deep impression which classical thermodynamics made on me. It is the only physical theory of universal content, which I am convinced, that within the  fra...

Love: I recognize the emotion for what it is, an irrational self- destructive impulse, which is disguised as joy. —Nikola Tesla to ignore faults of, and comply with wishes of, the object of his affection, to favor people, products, and actions merely associated with the object of his affection (as we shall see when we get to "Influence-from- Mere-Association Tendency," and to distort other facts to facilitate love. A newly hat ched baby goose is programmed, through the economy of its genetic program, to "love" and follow the first creature that is nice to it, which is almost always its mother. But, if the mother goose is not present right after the hatching, and a man is there instead, the gosling will "love" and follow the man, who becomes a sort of substitute mother. Somewhat similarly, a newly arrived human is "born to like and love" under the normal and abnormal triggering outcomes for its kind. Perhaps the strongest in-born tendency to love ...

 It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters. —Epictetus Stoicism proclaims that freedom and tranquility can be achieved only by being oblivious to material comforts, external fortune, and dedicating oneself to a life guided by the principles of reason and virtue (such is the idea of imperturbability or ataraxia). Assuming a materialistic conception of nature, the Stoics followed Heraclitus in the belief that the first substance is in the fire and in the veneration of the logos, which they identified with the energy, law, reason, and providence found in nature. The reason for men was also considered an integral part of the divine and immortal logos. The Stoic doctrine, which considered each person essential as a member of a universal family, helped break regional, social, and racial barriers, and paved the way for the spread of a universal religion. The Stoic doctrine of natural law, which converts human nature into a norm for evaluating social laws and insti...

 "You’ve got to have models in your head and you’ve got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—onto this latticework of mental  models." —Charlie Munger We will see the most important ideas of each science. This classification will serve as a tool to order them, and although it is not closed, some will inevitably affect several fields of knowledge. The fact that an idea can be related to several sciences is another sign that knowledge, on its own, is not compartmentalized and we should relearn to appreciate it like that. That said, it is important to have a mental map of the sciences, from the purest to the humanities. When we use mental models routinely, we must do so starting with the purest sciences—starting from left to right on the below diagram with philosophy, mathematics and physics, as these form the basis of our known world. Thus, this map is not only of classification but of order. BRANCHES OF KNOWLEDGE Philosophy Mathematics Physics Statistics Engineer...

"Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance." —Daniel Kahneman Psychology is a discipline that aims to analyze the mental and behavioral processes of human beings and their interactions with the physical and social environment. The word psychology comes from the Greek psycho or psykhé, which means soul, psyche or mental activity, and from logy, which means study'or treatise'. Therefore, psychology means study or treatise on the psyche. A cognitive bias is a systematic misinterpretation of available information that influences the way we process thoughts, make judgments, and make decisions. The concept of cognitive bias was introduced by Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1972. "The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story, the mind has managed to construct." —Daniel Ka...

 "Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome." —Charlie Munger An incentive is a mechanism that relates a reward or punishment to a certain performance or behavior. The objective of establishing an incentive is to induce a certain behavior. It is assumed that the subject to which it is applied will act as a rational agent evaluating costs and benefits (homo economicus). Therefore, the objective subject will consider optimal to develop the behavior that the designer of the incentive seeks, provided that said stimulus is well designed. Thus, for example, if you want to motivate a worker to try harder, you can design an incentive that rewards their best effort. If it is a salesperson, a common incentive is to share in the highest sales through commissions. TYPES OF INCENTIVES There are at least four types of incentives: Monetary or financial incentives: They are the most widely used and surely one of the most effective. They can include a higher salary, payment of sale...

 Life is a relationship among molecules and not a property of any molecule. —Linus Pauling — Molecular geometry is basically the three-dimensional arrangement, shape and structure of the atoms that make up a molecule. When the molecules are formed by a chemical bond, which means that the atoms join one another, the suborbitals involved in the bond or bonds create different molecular shapes that depend on many factors. The chemical composition and molecular geometry of a molecule is what mainly determines the properties of the molecule. Like taste, boiling point, magnetism, dynamics, polarity, color, and all other properties. A bond angle is a geometric angle between two adjacent bonds. Some common shapes of simple molecules include: Linear: The atoms are linked together to form a straight line. The bonding angles are 180 degrees and, for example, carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitric oxide (NO). Triangular planar: Geometry is formed when a compound has one atom in the center attached to...

  Be a physical chemist, an analytical chemist, an organic chemist, if you will; but above all, be a chemist. —Ira Remsen— Chemistry is the science of matter at or near the atomic scale. Matter is the substance of which all physical objects are made. Chemistry deals with the properties of matter, and the transformation and interactions of matter and energy. Central to chemistry is the interaction of one substance with another, such as in a chemical reaction, where a substance or substances are transformed into another. Chemistry primarily studies atoms and collections of atoms such as molecules, crystals, or metals that make up ordinary matter. According to modern chemistry, it is the structure of matter at the atomic scale that determines the nature of a material.  Chemistry has many specialized areas that overlap with other sciences, such as physics, biology, or geology. Historically, the science of chemistry is a recent development but has its roots in alchemy, which has be...

  The central idea in the Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare. —Nassim Taleb A Black Swan is an unlikely event; its consequences are important, and all the explanations that can be offered afterward do not take into account chance and only seek to fit the unpredictable into a perfect model. The success of Google and YouTube, and even 9/11, are Black Swans. Black swans are an integral part of our world, from the rise of religions to the events of our personal lives. Why can’t we identify this phenomenon until it has already happened?  Because humans insist on investigating things already known, forgetting what we do not know, this prevents us from recognizing opportunities and makes us too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, forgetting to reward those who know how to imagine the impossible. A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day confirms to its staff of analysts that ...

" Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. " —Archimedes— A lever is a simple machine consisting of a beam or rigid rod pivoted at a fixed hinge or fulcrum. Simple machine that essentially consists of a bar that rests or can rotate  on a point (fulcrum) and is designed to overcome a force (resistance) by  applying another force (power). It is one of the six simple machines identified by Renaissance scientists,  along with the wheel and axle, force multipliers, inclined plane, pulley,  screw and wedge. A lever can be used to maximize the mechanical force applied to an object,  increase its speed or the distance it travels, through the application of a  proportionally smaller amount of force. Depending on the proximity or distance of the fulcrum from the body to  be moved, more or less applied force will be required and a greater or  lesser effect will be achieved. There are three types of lever, de...