evolution items › MachineMachine /stream

Twitter Links Computer viruses infecting worms to create hybrid 'Frankenmalware'

Most computer users are all too aware of the threat of viruses and worms infecting their machines, but according to security research firm BitDefender…

January 28 2012, 11:36am | Comments

Twitter Links Female Orgasm: An Evolutionary Journey

Dr. Elisabeth A. Lloyd, among others, has described female orgasm as the female equivalent to male nipples, anatomy that one sex needed, while the…

January 23 2012, 9:21am | Comments

Twitter Links Rereading Darwin

The Dangers of Extrapolation (“Much light will be thrown on the origin of man.” Two centuries before Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of…

January 17 2012, 6:06pm | Comments

Findings quote from High Techne - Rutsky

The position of human beings in relation to this techno-cultural un-conscious cannot, therefore, be that of the analyst (or theorist) who, standing outside this space, presumes to know or control it.It must in-stead be a relation of connection…

January 6 2012, 8:52am | Comments

Twitter Links What We Learned About Our Human Ancestors in 2011

Genetic hints of extinct human lineages — and the benefits we might have received from having sex with them — were among the discoveries…

December 20 2011, 6:53pm | Comments

Instapaper It Does Take a Village

It is possible to see Hrdy’s most recent book, Mothers and Others, as the third in a trilogy that began with The Woman That…

December 1 2011, 4:37am | Comments

Link What happens to a caterpillar's brain during metamorphosis?

Basically, three things can happen to any given neuron in the central nervous system. It's a really complex proccess! A) some neurons are born very early in the caterpillar's life…

November 30 2011, 12:50pm | Comments

Twitter Links Paper On Super Flu Strain May Be Banned From Publication

"A Dutch researcher has created a virus with the potential to kill half of the planet's population."

November 29 2011, 7:53am | Comments

Link Neanderthal Neuroscience

As scientists began to build a database of human DNA in the 1990s, it became possible to test these ideas with genes. In his talk, Paabo described how he and…

November 21 2011, 3:09am | Comments

Link The Scariest Zombies in Nature

Once the fungus invades its victim’s body, it’s already too late. The invader spreads through the host in a matter of days. The victim, unaware of what is happening, becomes…

October 29 2011, 4:45pm | Comments

Link Is mental time travel what makes us human?

A stonishing animals show up everywhere these days. Cooperative apes, grief-stricken elephants, empathetic cats and dogs crowd our bookshop shelves. It’s all the rage to plumb the cognitive and emotional…

October 28 2011, 10:32am | Comments

Link The Roots of Religion: Myth, Play and Human…

Robert Bellah, one of America's most distinguished sociologists, caps off his luminous academic career with "Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age" , a near 800-page…

October 19 2011, 3:17am | Comments

Twitter Links Delusions of Peace

Stephen Pinker argues that we are becoming less violent. Nonsense, says John Gray

October 6 2011, 2:37am | Comments

Link Innovation Starvation

SF has changed over the span of time I am talking about—from the 1950s (the era of the development of nuclear power, jet airplanes, the space race, and the computer)…

October 2 2011, 4:47am | Comments

Link The ancient cloud

The crowd-sourced, wikinomic cloud is the new, new thing that all management consultants are now telling their clients to embrace. Yet the cloud is not a new thing at all.…

September 24 2011, 8:50am | Comments

Biblio The Logic of Life by Francois Jacob

August 31 2011, 7:31am | Comments

Twitter Links Implications of 'uplifting'

Is it Ethical to Make Animals as Smart as People?

August 30 2011, 5:52am | Comments

Link Ancient DNA reveals secrets of human history

By comparing individual DNA letters in multiple modern human genomes with those in the Neanderthal genome, the date of that interbreeding has now been pinned down to 65,000–90,000 years ago.…

August 15 2011, 2:45am | Comments

Link On Discovering Life

There is an aspect of life sciences that has been largely absent: the confrontation of fundamental questions of biology much as particle accelerators grapple with fundamental questions of physics. The…

July 27 2011, 3:05pm | Comments

Link New York - Empire of Evolution

Dr. Munshi-South has joined the ranks of a small but growing number of field biologists who study urban evolution — not the rise and fall of skyscrapers and neighborhoods, but…

July 26 2011, 1:55pm | Comments

Link What's human? What's animal? And what of the…

Friday's report by the Academy of Medical Sciences on the increasingly fuzzy boundaries between the human and the animal is the latest in a long series of policy reflections on…

July 25 2011, 3:20pm | Comments

Wikipedia Risks to civilization, humans and planet Earth Risks to civilization, humans, and planet Earth are existential risks that could threaten humankind as a whole, have adverse consequences for the course of human civilization, or even…

June 26 2011, 11:00am | Comments

Link Being human

Please respect FT.com's ts&cs and copyright policy which allow you to: share links; copy content for personal use; & redistribute limited extracts. Email //= 0; i=i-1){ if (l[i].substring(0, 1) ==…

June 25 2011, 8:55am | Comments

Link Three arguments against the singularity

This is my take on the singularity: we're not going to see a hard take-off, or a slow take-off, or any kind of AI-mediated exponential outburst. What we're going to…

June 23 2011, 2:48am | Comments

Link The Origin of Our Species

"If there has been no spiritual change of kind / Within our species since Cro-Magnon Man . . ." The poet Louis MacNeice was voicing a commonplace that was accepted…

June 16 2011, 4:18pm | Comments

Link Human influence comes of age

Humanity's profound impact on this planet is hard to deny, but is it big enough to merit its own geological epoch? This is the question facing geoscientists gathered in London…

May 11 2011, 11:27am | Comments

Link Biomathematics: The formula of life

Biology used to be about plants, animals and insects, but five great revolutions have changed the way that scientists think about life: the invention of the microscope, the systematic classification…

May 11 2011, 3:32am | Comments

Link We are as gods and have to get…

The shift that has happened in 40 years which mainly has to do with climate change. Forty years ago, I could say in the Whole Earth Catalog, "we are as…

April 28 2011, 3:27am | Comments

Link Neandertal hybridization & Haldane’s rule

Mr. James Winters at A Replicated Typo pointed me to a short hypothesis paper, Neanderthal-human Hybrids. This paper argues that selective mating of Neandertal males with females of human populations which…

April 28 2011, 3:15am | Comments

Link Gigantic New SuperOrganism with 'Social Intelligence' is Devouring…

In 2000, Roy Cullimore, a microbial ecologist and Charles Pellegrino, scientist and author of Ghosts of the Titanic discovered that the Titanic --which sank in the Atlantic Ocean 97 years…

April 24 2011, 2:53am | Comments

Link Views on Evolution, Intelligent Design Hinge on Death…

It may be the foundation of modern biology, but fewer than 40 percent of Americans say they believe in the theory of evolution. While frustrated scientists sometimes blame religion for…

April 7 2011, 3:39am | Comments

Link The Unbearable Wholeness of Beings

If you try to describe the living processes of the cell in a rather more living language than is typically found in the literature of molecular biology — if you…

April 6 2011, 1:48pm | Comments

Link Where Do Animals Come From?

The origin of animals was one of the most astonishing and important transformations in the history of life. From single-celled ancestors, they evolved into a riot of complexity and diversity.…

March 20 2011, 5:37am | Comments

Link 40th Anniversary of the Computer Virus

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Creeper, the world’s first computer virus. From Creeper to Stuxnet, the last four decades saw the number of malware instances boom from 1,300…

March 16 2011, 2:50pm | Comments

Link Humans, Version 3.0

This view of the future of humankind is grounded in an appreciation of the biologically innate powers bestowed upon us by hundreds of millions of years of evolution. This deep…

March 5 2011, 5:01am | Comments

Link Darwin Among the Machines (Samuel Butler, 1863)

The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious questions of the day. We refer to the…

March 3 2011, 8:55am | Comments

Link The not so universal tree of life or…

According to this view, ancient viruses, as with the ones today, could only make copies of themselves by succesfully infecting a host. So they become engines of innovation, using every…

March 2 2011, 7:32am | Comments

Link The Loneliest Whale in the World

...this particular baleen whale has apparently been tracked by NOAA since 1992, using a "classified array of hydrophones employed by the Navy to monitor enemy submarines." It sings at 52…

February 25 2011, 11:04am | Comments

Link Technology Wants to Keep Evolving

Kelly argues that all technologies, from the stone ax to the computer chip, should be seen as a collectivity—the technium, which is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology…

February 22 2011, 1:03pm | Comments

Link Unnatural: the Heretical Idea of Making People

We human beings persist in thinking of ourselves as a unique species, endowed with special insight into a universe that we can manipulate. In fact, this notion is based on…

February 21 2011, 2:23am | Comments

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