How living systems change. Below, everything that touches this field, including pieces that live mostly in neighboring territory.
The original “fitness beats truth” (FBT) theorems do not require an explicit assumption that “seeking truth is costly.” The key requirement, instead, is that evolution favors any perceptual or cognitive…
One caveat up front that matters for reading the table: "scout fraction" is not measured the same way across studies — some report a dedicated scout caste, others a trail-lapse rate (foragers that ignore an…
In a fun but deeper-than-it-sounds article (Evolution of the Italian pasta ripiena: the first steps toward a scientific classification: the authors use phylogenetic techniques to analyze the possible…
In 2011, I had the privilege of guest writing James Fallows' blog on The Atlantic for one week. One of the posts was about Darwin's "Strange Inversion of Reasoning" (the title of a 200 PNAS paper or…
At a time of increasing polarization in the US and in the world, I have been thinking a lot about what it would mean to have a "speciation" event whereby two or more groups become so incompatible that no…
On Its Head You Can Only Manage What You Can’t Measure Inside the box thinking Why Optimization Is Often Sub-Optimal Simplicity Is Overrated Right-Brain Analytics The New LBO: Left-Brain Outsourcing The Return…
Open-endedness represents perhaps the most profound challenge in computational science: how do systems transcend their initial constraints to generate genuinely novel, complex, and meaningful structures? This…
Open-endedness represents one of the most profound and elusive concepts in computational science, spanning domains from artificial life to creative systems. Rather than focusing on specific algorithms, this…
Gordon Pask's electrochemical devices represent one of the most remarkable achievements in cybernetics and early artificial life research. Between the 150s and 160s, Pask constructed genuinely self-organizing…
Gordon Pask's electrochemical devices from the 150s and 160s are entirely unique in AI history because they challenged conventional computational orthodoxy by demonstrating that complex intelligence,…
Based on the handwritten notes in the image, the text is organized into a large mind map titled "The Future Belongs to Curators". Here is a detailed extraction of all the notes, grouped by their apparent…
Aspect Psychological Speciation Political Speciation --- --- --- Definition Formation of distinct psychological groups that process information and reason differently Development of separate political…
A recent article about "hashtagAI Deception" ("AI deception: A survey of examples, risks, and potential solutions": reviews some AI systems' "ability to deceive via techniques such as manipulation, sycophancy,…
In a fun and short speculative PNAS article titled “Could humans and AI become a new evolutionary individual?” (PNAS 122 (2025) No. 37 e250122122), Paul Rainey (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in…
Or, evolving on chemical space(s)! The appeal of the concept for me comes from the fact that the topology of a chemical space (the "construction operators") and its boundary conditions are so natural to map to…
Antibiotics have been much maligned for promoting resistant strains of pathogenic bacteria and wiping out good bacteria in the gut. While caution is definitely warranted, it turns out that a number of other…
As Brooks Leitner reminds us ( VO2max, a measure of cardiorespiratory fitness, is also a strong independent predictor of all-cause mortality. Of course I wanted to explore possible correlations between serum…
Some 27 years ago, I was so impressed by Pablo Funes' work (with his PhD advisor the always ideating Jordan Pollack) (P. Funes and J.B. Pollack, “Evolutionary Body Building: Adaptive Physical Designs for…
I just received Blaise Aguera y Arcas's wonderful little treasure, 'What is Life?", a play on Erwin Schrödinger's opus of the same title, published as the first tome of the Antikythera series as part of…
An intriguing article, "How Might Artificial Intelligence Influence Human Evolution?" by Robert C Brooks (UNSW in Sydney) is exploring the possible impact of hashtagAI on the hashtagevolution of our species…
Fascinating preprint by some reasonably credible mathematicians (Terence Tao, Javier Gómez-Serrano) working with Google DeepMind's Bogdan Georgiev and Adam Zsolt Wagner: MATHEMATICAL EXPLORATION AND DISCOVERY…
One irregular dispatch when a new piece lands: notes on AI, evolution, complexity, and the biology of discovery. No noise.
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