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POPSBiocultural Evolution in the 21st Century: The Evolutionary Role of Religion My outline introduces the concept of biocultural evolution, particularly with reference to the Twentieth Century and the prospects for the Twenty-First Century. I then explore the concept of complex distributed systems to characterize all highly creative processes in both culture and nature. Subsequently, I turn to the problem of complexity horizons and the challenge that these present for traditional moral reflections. Humans are then characterized as a Lamarckian wild card in epic of evolution. I close by discussing the evolutionary role of religion. See source for the full paper: http://metanexus.net/magazine/ArticleDetail/tabid/68/id/8779/Default.aspx
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POPSQuestioning Consciousness What we should be doing instead is trying to explain just how we have been set up—and why. 1. What exactly is the real-world brain activity that we are engaging with when we say a sensation is like something? 2. Why does this activity have the (tricky) properties it has, such that our experience of it is seemingly something so strangely private, not of this world, and indescribable in common terms? 3. What makes this trick work? How is it done? 4. What is the point? Why was it designed like this? What might have been the evolutionary advantage of our having these marvelous experiences? I believe we can already propose plausible answers to each of these questions—although they are all quite radical. Here they are.
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POPSThe Paradox of Political Animals “The paradox of a highly social species like rhesus monkeys and humans is that our complex sociality is the reason for our success, but it’s also the source of our greatest troubles,” he said. “Throughout human history, you see that the worst problems for people almost always come from other people, and it’s the same for the monkeys. You can put them anywhere, but their main problem is always going to be other rhesus monkeys.” aka 'le condition social'?
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POPSNoble or savage? We have been solving them, too. Pessimists will point out that each solution only brings us face to face with the next crisis, optimists that no crisis has proved insoluble yet.
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POPSNature Insight on Proteomics This Insight covers some of the most vibrant areas of research into the 'protein world', taking a journey from single protein dynamics to functional proteomics and drug discovery, through some of the latest technological developments in structural, cellular, evolutionary and computational biology.
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POPSDuelity Just go to http://www.duelity.net/ & click "watch". There are three short movies.
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POPSVarying Environments Can Speed Up Evolution Using computer simulations, we find that evolution toward goals that change over time can, in certain cases, dramatically speed up evolution compared with evolution toward a fixed goal. The highest speedup is found under modularly varying goals, in which goals change over time such that each new goal shares some of the subproblems with the previous goal. The speedup increases with the complexity of the goal: the harder the problem, the larger the speedup. Modularly varying goals seem to push populations away from local fitness maxima, and guide them toward evolvable and modular solutions. This study suggests that varying environments might significantly contribute to the speed of natural evolution.
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POPSPropagandizing Islamic Creationism Mr. Yahya’s ideas “cast evolution as part of the corrupting influence of the West on Islamic culture, and that promotes a profound anti-science attitude that is certainly not going to help the Islamic world catch up to the West.” As the scientists ponder what to do with the book — for many, it is too beautiful for the trash bin but too erroneous for their shelves — they also speculate about the motives of its distributors.
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POPSLife From Beyond Full Report: The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems (html) Executive Summary (pdf)
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POPSDoes Pointing hold the Secret of Language? Thank you Clipmarks, for letting me point to this. It should promote a mutual contemplation. Looky there: M. Tomasello: Why Don't Apes Point?" Pollick & De Waal: Ape gestures and language evolution
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