Evolution

In the final chapter of the book Complexity: A Guided Tour, Mitchell gets to the heart of the real issues that I've been griping about in this blog. She begins by citing a harsh, 1995 piece by John…

Another instance of a misleading passage in Complexity: A Guided Tour: Another example where Evo-Devo is challenging long-held views about evolution concerns the notion of convergent evolution. In my…

A quote from an extremely mediocre book, Complexity: A Guided Tour. Like most people coming out of the 'complexity sciences', the author has a mediocre grasp of molecular biology, both current…

My recent article The Origins of Virtue sparked a discussion in which Josh Witten has assumed that Gerhard Adam and I are confused as to the subject of genic selection. The confusion lies entirely…

In How Many Limbs Should Humans Have? I described my Limb Law, an empirical law I discovered which relates how long an animal’s limbs are to how many limbs it has. This law is explained by virtue of…

A mass extinction of fish 360 million years ago hit the reset button on life, setting the stage for modern vertebrate biodiversity, say researchers writing in PNAS. The mass extinction scrambled the…

A crucial aspect of the complexity approach is how interacting elements produce aggregate patterns that those elements in turn react to. This leads to the emergence of aggregate properties and…

Yeast cells' ability to convert sugar into alcohol, essential for the production of beer and wine, can be attributed to a series of gene duplications that allow for optimal conversion of different…

The scientific method which provides us with so many technological goodies does not resemble the science of 1600. Ever since Bacon, science has undergone a slow evolution. Landmarks in the history of…

The Cyc knowledge base (KB) is a formalized representation of a vast quantity of fundamental human knowledge: facts, rules of thumb, and heuristics for reasoning about the objects and events of…