In "Life’s Chemical Secret," Addy Pross navigates how the discovery of a new material form may answer many of the questions surrounding evolution, the mind, and consciousness: mitpress.mit.edu/978026205483...
Loved the premiere! Counting down to the next. #Evolution @chrisgpackham.bsky.social
"Living in the Simulacra" uses the concept of the simulacra, as developed by Plato, Deleuze, and Baudrillard, as an overarching framework to explore how the digital landscape has transformed our understanding of reality. Available in paperback and #openaccess! mitpress.mit.edu/978026205310...
born from the mythical Samudra manthana, the apsara dance is a living fossil whose gestures carved into bas-reliefs survived the brink of extinction and rose again carrying a cultural memory that still breathes across southeast asia 🪷
If tree were like humans, you would see them reaching down with their branches and raking up all the leaves to hold onto them for security.... This our tendency, to pick up the pieces of our pet beliefs and theories, and hang on for dear life. —Adyashanti (in Emptiness Dancing)
A world of wonder and nature, told in one timeless voice. Happy 100th, Sir David!
New evidence suggests oxygen wasn’t the primary culprit behind 300-million-year-old mega-bugs. The data indicate such bug behemoths could exist today but likely don’t because bats and birds would quickly eat them into extinction. Let’s celebrate birds. #Paleontology 🧪🧪 New at @science.org
How did ancient bugs get so big? The prevailing theory may be wrong
Flying insect respiratory systems suggest abundant oxygen can’t explain ancient gigantism
science.org
We have a new preprint out! And one that is especially dear to my heart: "Re-Engineering Wimsatt for Limited Beings" https://zenodo.org/records/18293424 Bill Wimsatt is possibly the most underrated philosopher of science of our times. In this paper, I attempt […] [Original post on spore.social]
Introduced by Bernhard Riemann in the mid-19th century, manifolds are crucial to our understanding of the universe. Here’s how they work: www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-a-ma...
What Is a Manifold? | Quanta Magazine
In the mid-19th century, Bernhard Riemann conceived of a new way to think about mathematical spaces, providing the foundation for modern geometry and physics.
quantamagazine.org
🖤 Als Hommage an Jane Goodall jetzt wieder online:
Schimpansen im Kongo mit Jane Goodall - Die ganze Doku | ARTE
Mit Jane Goodall verstarb am 1. Oktober 2025 eine der bedeutendsten Primatenforscherinnen unserer Zeit. Anfang der 1990er-Jahre gründete sie in der Republik Kongo die Schimpansen-Auffangstation Tchimp...
arte.tv
Such a wise and timely essay. 1) Attending is a moral skill. Human flourishing requires “the capacity to attend—steadily, generously, and well.” >
Punctuated equilibrium, a concept introduced by paleontologists in 1972, reimagines evolution’s tempo as a stochastic burst rather than a steady beat. A new model finds support for their theory in both molecular and fossil data. @jakebuehler.bsky.social reports www.quantamagazine.org/the-sudden-s...
The Tangled Nature model opens a much-needed interdisciplinary trail across fields from ecology to sociology🪸
Communications Biology@commsbio.nature.com · last yr.Quantifying information-theoretic individuality as persistence of information in time reveals the emergence of higher-order organization in evolutionary systems, where groups of species exhibit enhanced collective persistence www.nature.com/articles/s42...
A conversation about intelligence and consciousness across species with philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith.
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
Other Earths, Gaian bottlenecks and Darwinized Gaias | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
In our galaxy, tens of billions of wet, rocky Earth-like planets orbit in the habitable zones of their host stars. Stellar spectra and models of devolatilization yield ranges of plausible chemistries on these Earths. The early emergence of biology on ...
royalsocietypublishing.org
Ricard Solé@ricardsole.bsky.social · last yr.Just 30 years ago, we didn’t know of a single planet beyond our Solar System. Now we’ve found thousands, and we know that almost every star has worlds of its own. The next great leap is proving that some of them harbour life. I wish Carl Sagan were here to see this cosmic golden age.
Why We Experience Society Differently: Intrinsic Dispositions as Drivers of Ideological Complexity in Adaptive Social Networks https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07848
In exactly three months, my book “What Is Intelligence?” will be released via @mitpress.bsky.social & Antikythera. Within, I rethink traditional notions about AI, the brain, intelligence, evolution, and the big philosophical questions that have dogged these topics for millennia.
