Rambles at starchamber.com

How long have we got? Depending on who you ask, we’re roughly halfway through the time of tolerable tenure for life on Earth. The planet has been around for 4.6 billion years, give or take, and it’s got about that much more time before the swelling Sun boils our bathwater.
See the Universe Timeline for more [...]

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I recently finished Before The Dawn by Nicholas Wade, a book about the evolution of the human race which I happily recommend.
Studying the history of human development has typically drawn on things buried in the dirt: paleontological/biological artifacts like the fossilized bones in Olduvai Gorge for one example, and archaeological/cultural artifacts like the ruins [...]

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I just finished reading Sean Carroll’s book The Making of the Fittest. Subtitled “DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution”, it’s the follow-on book to Endless Forms Most Beautiful. In this book Carroll devotes several chapters to demonstrating how, against our natural intuition, there really is enough time (given a few hundred million years) [...]

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Read this story and you may well conclude a robot uprising is right around the corner.
Carl Zimmer’s recent post Evolving Robotspeak describes robotics research done by social evolution researcher Laurent Keller in Switzerland. Plenty of folks have used genetic algorithms to “breed” robots, but this is the first time I’ve heard of someone using family [...]

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I was recently reading Sean Carroll’s excellent book on evolutionary developmental biology, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, in which he says that “brain size [in humans] roughly doubled in a million years.” This was a dramatic (and expensive) departure in the brainweight-to-bodyweight ratio compared to all other mammals. Carroll goes on to say:

The brain is a [...]

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