The presence of peculiar forms of life such as the horseshoe crab, the nautilus, echinoids, and assorted other animals and plants puzzled Darwin. How could these species have survived millions of years with little change while most other species evolved, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, and then mostly becoming extinct? He resolved the question to his […]
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The experience of looking at art has neurobiological correlates in the brain. Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain describes these. Semir Zeki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semir_Zeki) uses a range of examples from artists including Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Magritte, Malevich and Picasso. The book constitutes a kind of aesthetic tour of the brain. Zeki offers a systematic
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Catching a mysterious pool of early morning sunlight playfully cast across his kitchen ceiling gave Caspar Henderson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar_Henderson) pause for wonder. The experience inspired him to think more closely about the nature of wonder. His reflections have issued in this enthusiastic tour of much that seems ordinary but which is upheld by the complex and
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In this book David Gelernter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gelernter), a professor of computer science at Yale, argues that the current trend in cognitive science toward ‘computationalism’ ignores basic, glaringly obvious truths about the difference between brain and mind. He makes the case that human intellect and selfhood are not merely the product of a calculating brain. He explores
In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/copernicus/) publicly defended the hypothesis that the Earth is a planet and the sun a body resting near the centre of a finite universe. Copernicus’s reordering of the universe mattered because it was the first in a string of new and daring scientific claims at odds with traditional representations of
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William J Broad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Broad) offers this fascinating history of oceanography. He points out the roll of the military in developing new technologies within that field. By 1957, the US Navy was searching for new weaponry to use in undersea warfare; a decade later, it had established a global network of deep microphones that spied on
The Universe Below Read More »
This book argues that the universe is fundamentally hostile to complex life and that while microbial life may be common across the galaxies, complex intelligent life requires an exceptionally unlikely set of circumstances, and must be extremely rare. The book argues that among the essential criteria for life are a terrestrial planet with plate tectonics
Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris describe an aspect of human perception known as ‘inattentional blindness’. In the best known version of the experiment, volunteers were told to keep track carefully of how many times basketball players tossed the ball. While they did this, someone in a gorilla suit walked across the court in plain view,
The Invisible Gorilla Read More »
In the last few years we’ve become accustomed to lies, distortion, pick n’ mix ‘facts’ and ‘fake news’ splashing around like an angry Falls of Clyde. Lies, falsity, religion and superstition have existed for as long as conscious minds, of course. The new twist is the ubiquity of instant means of digital communication. The trap is
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