Category:
Biology
Events:
Articles:
Mar 29, 2018
Systems Engineering as Cultural Group Selection: A Conversation with Guru Madhavan
Systems engineering can be seen as an exceptionally pure form of artificial cultural group selection, which explicitly treats a physical or a social system as the unit of selection and employs highly refined processes for evolving the system’s component parts.
Jan 29, 2018
Evolution as a Problem Solver in Computer Science
In computer science, there are many problems that are known to be "hard." What this means is that there is no efficient method to solve such problems exactly. However, we can use a clever computer algorithm to evolve an approximate solution, using ideas from real biological evolution.
Jan 19, 2018
Constructing Our Niches: Introducing the Importance of Cooperation and Ultimate Vs. Proximate Design Features
Collective and sustainable behavior is partially dependent on maintaining higher levels of cooperation among those involved, from the boardroom to the global stage.
Nov 1, 2017
Constructing Our Niches: Evolution’s Relevance to Modern Human Society
Human behaviors, the physical objects we create and use, as well as their associated intellectual traditions are part of our collective toolkit for adapting to the larger social/cultural and physical environments we live within.
Oct 23, 2017
How Star Trek: Discovery Gets Genetics Wrong, But Is Still Worth Watching Anyway
Discovery has made a genome-sequencing error into Star Trek canon. But it's hardly out of line with what came before. As much as it pains this Trekkie biologist to admit, the franchise has long had a fairly shaky grasp on the details of genetics and biological evolution.
Oct 16, 2017
Learning from Arizona State University about Inter-Disciplinarity: A Conversation with Robert Boyd
Inter-disciplinarity is something that most universities want but might not be able to achieve without organizational change.
Oct 10, 2017
Completing Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: A Conversation with Kevin Laland
At the heart of Kevin Laland's new book is a “cultural drive” mechanism, whereby selection for accurate, efficient information transmission shaped the evolution of the primate brain and intelligence.
Jul 25, 2017
Teaching Evolution Requires More Than Evidence, It Takes Empathy
It is possible for people to be highly knowledgeable and reject evolution for reasons beyond evidence. When that happens, it is important to listen in order to understand why so we can bridge those gaps.
Jun 19, 2017
Deconstructing Niche Construction: A Conversation between Gordon Burghardt and Kevin Laland
The concept of niche construction stresses a dialectical relationship between organisms and their environments, rather than one being passively shaped by the other. It has deep roots in evolutionary thought but only now is resulting in a systematic research program. Join Gordon Burghardt and Kevin Laland as they take a deep dive into the subject.
May 24, 2017
The Evolution of Language and its Speakers
What separates us from the apes is a sequence of social and technological revolutions, one major change after the other in the life experiences of human communities. The emergence of language was one such revolution, not the last and definitely not the first.
May 22, 2017
Challenging Chomsky and his Challengers: Brian Boyd Interviews Daniel Dor
If you want to think about language and evolution, about language and experience, about language and almost anything, or about almost anything in language, then start, or start all over again, with Daniel Dor’s The Instruction of Imagination.
May 8, 2017
How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog)
In 1959, Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut began what would come to be one of the longest-running experiments in biology. For the last 58 years they have been domesticating silver foxes and studying evolution in real time. But in 1952, seven years before this experiment began, Belyaev initiated a pilot study to determine whether or not his audacious ideas about domestication merited a full-fledged experiment. Here we tell that story.
Feb 21, 2017
Why Humanist Values Will Prevail: A Cultural Evolutionary View
Our geopolitical world seems increasingly unstable, and some see this instability as a threat to Humanist values. But do not fear.
Feb 1, 2017
Xenophobia in the Light of Evolution: On the Origins of Anti-Immigration Sentiment
Besides racial prejudice, what else are there behind xenophobia? Among the evolved human instincts, we can find at least two for the anti-immigration sentiment: territoriality and the endowment effect.
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Nov 1, 2016
When Evolutionists Acquire Superhuman Powers: A Conversation with Peter and Rosemary Grant
Two developments helped Peter and Rosemary Grant to peer into the genomes of finches. The first was the invention of tools to measure microsatellite DNA. With more than a dozen genetic loci they were able to characterize each finch with a unique DNA signature.
Oct 12, 2016
Memo To Amazon's Jeff Bezos: The Most Productive Workers Are Team Players, Not Selfish Individualists
‘Ruthless’ and ‘demanding’ are two descriptors of Amazon's working environment, sink or swim. But Amazon is not alone. Can evolutionary biology shed some light on why competition in the workplace does not alway produce the best outcomes?
