Intro LO: The term reverse evolution in this Phys article (below) was new to me. Moreover, it’s “a term that tends to be controversial among evolutionary biologists”. Latter remark made me curious. “That's because evolution isn't supposed to have a rewind button. It's generally viewed as a one-way march toward adaptation, not a circular path back to traits once...
Recently, I received an Aeon / Psyche email including an article that caught my immediate interest: Why are humans so good at cooperating? That question about cooperation had once been on my mind too, but I chose to ignore it. Actually, its second article contains a glimpse of an answer to the question above: Why large language models are mysterious – even to their...
Intro LO: Perhaps, the most important - though (very) implicit - conclusion is that all animal sounds are a form of communication. Our concept of (human) language is (“just”) a “single protein variant”. Moreover, this article strongly suggests that the Neanderthal must have had language skills, similar to ours. That would also support the ancient mating between Homo...
Intro LO: A 1 December 2024 SCMP article (see below) caught my immediate interest as I’ve had a similar idea mid 2022 that was based on an earlier idea in my 2018 blog: 2022: Is stupidity the flip side of beliefs? 2018: Knowledge = Power and the Great Filter in civilisations (5) I prefer my 2022 diagram in this specific stupidity context. Source: my 2022 blog...
Intro LO: In my view, the impact of this Quanta Magazine article reaches much and much further than its topic, being: even a single bacterial cell senses seasonal change. Hence, my blog title: consciousness on a cellular level. Lately, many more articles are about consciousness in other life-forms than humans (eg, animals, plants and trees). The (alleged)...
Recently, the Psychological Bulletin published a “meta-analytic review of the association between mental effort and negative affect”. That review was entitled as “The unpleasantness of thinking”. I agree that “critical thinking is not just hard work but also mentally draining”. I disagree that it’s “often unpleasant”. Source: The Debrief, covering the recent...
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