I, for one, welcome my Neandertal ancestry. It may not sound like a lot — between 1 and 4 percent. But that’s the equivalent of one great-great-great grandparent’s DNA contribution. In the case of the Neandertal contribution, more than 1500 generations ago, it’s an enduring legacy of an ancient group of people, spread across many [...]
The title’s only a little bit of an exaggeration. According to research by Mark Changizi, summarized in a great interview on Neuronarrative, what we see is our brain’s approximation of the world in a tenth of a second, not the world at the instant that we see. Confused? Here’s an excerpt from Changizi. When light [...]
When my great-great-great grandfather William Candlish was born in Virginia in 1804, there were 1 billion people in the world. It had taken thousands of years for the world to reach that milestone of human saturation. When my father was born in the 1930′s, the number of people in the world had just passed the [...]
The things I couldn’t learn in school: chemistry, physics, other languages. These have become the things that are at the core of understanding. At one not-to-distant point in time, understanding human nature was the provenance of the humanities, with some sprinkling of the pseudo-science of anthropology sprinkled in. Context and comparison gave you the framework [...]
You are reading this on a device powered by a micro-processor, rendered by photo-electric diodes, built from bits and bytes. You are processing the signifier of each letter in its encoded meaning through each word, and cumulatively, through the combination of words that appear on the screen. The contract between you and I is that [...]
via bldgblog.blogspot.com Biosphere 2 was a ill-conceived effort to recreate the earth’s ecosystem within an vast geodesic dome, a kind of Earth-pod on the surface of Earth. BldgBlog is featuring the photos of Noah Sheldon, who recently visited the defunct structure and recorded nature’s steady creep. A dead building, BldgBlog proclaims. A dead building is [...]
Be confident in seeing what is in front of you. From Scientific American, a rebuttal to the phenomenon of positive psychology, summed up in the equation: H = S + C + V (Happiness = your Set range + the Circumstances of your life + the factors under your Voluntary control) “Human intellectual progress, such [...]
via neuronarrative.wordpress.com A theory that emotion is one of the earliest attributes that evolved in the genome. Emotion is, in fact, a rudimentary system that we have to adapt to the more complex systems, such as culture and civilization, that have evolved to help assure the best possible behaviors for the propagation of the species.
via mjperry.blogspot.com More people, living longer, consuming more resources, increasing competition, drives innovation. I look back over my lifetime and believe that the single biggest force of change has been the growth of the U.S. population from 150 million to 300 million and the global population from about 3 billion to 7 billion. One major [...]
Seed Magazine has a post elaborating on the phenomenon of the uncanny valley, and connecting the writing of Freud and the genesis of the concept of the uncanny valley from Masahiro Mori with the recent work from Asif Ghazanfar. The hypothesizing about the uncanny value has focused on the premise of humanness, the essence of [...]