John Hawks, on the mathematics of family trees and recombinant DNA: In practice, even though we have billions of nucleotides, our DNA cannot follow billions of genealogical lines. Recombination over 30 — 40 generations does not divide chromosomes down to […]
Tag: evolution
Cognitive enhancement and a new social contract
Many serious people are projecting that within ten to fifteen years we’ll be able to start on a significant program of cognitive enhancement. To craft drugs, hormone cocktails, neurointerfaces, and neuroprotheses that will significantly make their users smarter and more […]
Quote: on the evolution of reading
Here, I am reminded not of the recent past but of a huge change that occurred in the middle-ages when humans transformed their cognitive lives by learning to read silently. Originally, people could only read books by reading each page […]
Brainstorm: An alternative to the tree of life
One of the greatest insights of modern biology is the Tree of Life metaphor– that all organisms share common ancestors if we go back far enough, and that we can understand a great deal about an organism based on which […]
New York: 2108
The New York Times recently published a set of speculations on what the lives of New Yorkers will be like in the year 2108. Among those asked were professors and Nobel Laureates, and discussion topics ranged from biotechnology to global […]
Transhumanism essay: part two
Part 1: The Transhumanism Movement.Part 2: Society is more delicate than transhumanists think. This short essay doesn’t delve into my personal ethics as applied to enhancement– which, I must admit, I don’t have figured out yet. And I’m assuming, for […]
Transhumanism essay: part one
Transhumanism: an odd name for an interesting movement. There’s a growing number of people who believe technology is going to make things Really Different around here. And while they’re still essentially a loose-knit, fragmented movement, they’ve made significant inroads among […]
Quote of the Week: July 8
I wasn’t sure about whether to keep up my weekly quotes during this month of science, but since I found one that connects rather ironically with my next science topic, I took it as a sign. This quote is from […]
Quote of the Week: April 29
From “Scientific Success: What’s Love Got to Do With It?” via gnxp.com: Several years ago, Satoshi Kanazawa, then a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, analyzed a biographical database of 280 great scientists–mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and […]
Friendly Foxes
I should be on a weekly schedule starting next week, perhaps with a long-delayed post on epigenetics. Until then, here’s something that I found fascinating. The New York Times recently tracked the progress of Dmitri Belyaev’s epic fox domestication experiment. […]