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Category: evolution

Analysis of inept interviewer raises several interesting questions

Analysis of inept interviewer raises several interesting questions

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Misleading and sensationalist news personalities have ceased to be noteworthy. They are the norm in American mainstream media. Interviewers strive to oversimplify and shape guests’ messages–tactics interviewees who are good communicators can cast in sharp relief. Experts tend to present information in systemic, relational, and process terms no longer welcome in or compatible with the aims of popular media outlets. A fascinating article in The Atlantic not only surfaces these tactics (which may have become habits more than deliberate interviewing methods) but highlights…

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The evolution of synergy

The evolution of synergy

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Very interesting, short video on how evolution relies on synergy, the forming of new organisms by teaming up with others. It also applies to how synergy leads to social organization. An enticing quote: “It outlines a path for completely new organisms to evolve which does not rely on natural selection for increased complexity. In fact, just the opposite. It relies on relaxed selection and degradation” (9:15).

The religious brain and atheism

The religious brain and atheism

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As much of the world settles into the spectacle and cozy embrace of culturally reinforced magical thinking, New Scientist has several interesting recent articles about the evolved intuitive nature of religious thinking as a cognitive by-product (of the value of assuming agency in environmental phenomena, for example) and delving into how atheism is and is not like religious thinking. I find the point interesting that religion and atheism (or any ism), as social constructs, cannot be studied and compared in the…

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We have the wrong paradigm for the complex adaptive system we are part of

We have the wrong paradigm for the complex adaptive system we are part of

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This very rich, conversational thought piece asks if we, as participant designers within a complex adaptive ecology, can envision and act on a better paradigm than the ones that propel us toward mono-currency and monoculture. We should learn from our history of applying over-reductionist science to society and try to, as Wiener says, “cease to kiss the whip that lashes us.” While it is one of the key drivers of science—to elegantly explain the complex and reduce confusion to understanding—we…

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Book review – Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, by Max Tegmark

Book review – Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, by Max Tegmark

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Max Tegmark’s book, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, introduces a framework for defining types of life based on the degree of design control that sensing, self-replicating entities have over their own ‘hardware’ (physical forms) and ‘software’ (“all the algorithms and knowledge that you use to process the information from your senses and decide what to do”). It’s a relatively non-academic read and well worth the effort for anyone interested in the potential to design the…

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Your brain on AI-powered, immersive, virtual reality social networks

Your brain on AI-powered, immersive, virtual reality social networks

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Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired Magazine, forecasts virtual reality (VR) becoming our primary social environment within five years. VR experiences will be increasingly interactive (physically and socially). Our brains will process VR sensations as real. The price of this novelty is all your data, historical and biometric, and with that will come more advertising than ever. What is the beginning of a new dimension of fun, will be the end of privacy. AI more advanced than what keeps people…

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Are We Racists?

Are We Racists?

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BMAI friends. The following ramble is my first cut at making sense of the grave role racial (and other) bias is playing in the world today. This was prompted by comments I see daily from my family and friends on social media. Thinking about the great lack of self- and group-awareness many of the commenters display, I turned my scope inward. How do my own innate, evolved biases slant me to take my group’s and my own privileges for granted and…

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Daniel Dennett on the evolution of the mind

Daniel Dennett on the evolution of the mind

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The Google talk on his new book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds. The blurb: “How did we come to have minds? For centuries, this question has intrigued psychologists, physicists, poets, and philosophers, who have wondered how the human mind developed its unrivaled ability to create, imagine, and explain. Disciples of Darwin have long aspired to explain how consciousness, language, and culture could have appeared through natural selection, blazing promising trails that tend, however, to end…

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Future discussion topic recommendations

Future discussion topic recommendations

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Several of us met on Labor Day with the goal of identifying topics for at least five future monthly meetings. (Thanks, Dave N, for hosting!) Being the overachievers we are, we pushed beyond the goal. Following are the resulting topics, which will each have its own article on this site where we can begin organizing references for the discussion: sex-related influences on emotional memory gross and subtle brain differences (e.g., “walls of the third ventricle – sexual nuclei”) “Are there…

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Mathematical field of topology reveals importance of ‘holes in brain’

Mathematical field of topology reveals importance of ‘holes in brain’

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New Scientist article: Applying the mathematical field of topology to brain science suggests gaps in densely connected brain regions serve essential cognitive functions. Newly discovered densely connected neural groups are characterized by a gap in the center, with one edge of the ring (cycle) being very thin. It’s speculated that this architecture evolved to enable the brain to better time and sequence the integration of information from different functional areas into a coherent pattern. Aspects of the findings appear to…

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