Tag: Evolution
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The Score by C Thi Nguyen review – a brilliant warning about the gamification of everyday life
For Nguyen, wonder, absorption and play are central to human flourishing. Metrics are a kind of invasive species threatening to replace our weird, delicate joys with the dumbed-down epistemic fundamentalism of league tables and graphs. — Read on www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jan/06/the-score-by-c-thi-nguyen-review-a-brilliant-warning-about-the-gamification-of-everyday-life
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The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore – The Atlantic
For one thing, the organization of living matter defies physicists’ usual expectations about the universe. Your body is made of matter, just like everything else. But the atoms you’re built from today won’t be the atoms you’re built from in a year. That means you and every other living thing aren’t an inert object, like…
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The space of intelligences is large
LLMs are shaped a lot less by biological evolution and a lot more by commercial evolution. It’s a lot less survival of tribe in the jungle and a lot more solve the problem / get the upvote. LLMs are humanity’s “first contact” with non-animal intelligence. Except it’s muddled and confusing because they are still rooted…
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The Genetic Evolution of the Human Race and Its Consequences for the Industrial Revolution
We do not claim that the Black Death instantly made Europeans smarter. Instead, we suggest that the post-plague economy may have amplified long-running selection on traits linked to educational attainment: learning ability, self-control, and long-term planning. In that sense, the Black Death looks less like a one-off catastrophe and more like a hinge in the…