"We've glorified resilience as this virtue," he told me. "Bounce back, return to normal, weather the storm. But the literal definition of resilience is the ability of a system to return to its original baseline after being disturbed."
For a long time, Paranthropus boisei, a hominid that inhabited the Earth from 2.6 million years ago to 1.3 million years ago, had been considered by experts to be a relative of humans. Its robust jaw, large molars, and powerful chewing muscles evidenced a diet as primitive as it was difficult to process, consisting of tough grasses and reeds that other species perhaps couldn't consume.
The systemic set of processes that enables value-sensitive acquisition, encoding, evaluation, storage, retrieval, decoding and transmission of information. All learning systems are cognitive systems. All living systems and artificial learning-systems are therefore cognitive systems. In other words, cognition is the capacity to learn from experience in a value-sensitive way-discriminating what is beneficial or harmful, and with behavior shaped accordingly.
When you learned about the history of human evolution in school, there's a good chance you were shown one all-too-familiar image. That picture probably showed a conga line of human-like creatures, from a primitive ape at one end to a modern man proudly strolling into the future at the other. For many people, this iconic image captures evolution's slow but inevitable march from the simple to the complex.
The spotted ratfish is a two-foot-long fish with a big head and a long, skinny tail that lives in the northeastern Pacific Ocean. It belongs to a group of fish called chimaeras that are closely related to sharks. (Chimaeras are sometimes called ghost sharks.) Like most vertebrate creatures, it has teeth in its mouth. Unlike other vertebrates it also has teeth in another location: its forehead. It uses these forehead teeth for sex.
Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection did more than explain evolution, it revealed how complexity can emerge without a designer. Nobel laureate Paul Nurse unpacks Darwin's insights, from the logic of tiny differences to the profound impacts these variations have on our understanding of life. Nurse explores the deep genetic connections linking all organisms, from humans to gorillas to yeast. This shared ancestry, he argues, reframes how we think about responsibility: If all life is related, what do we owe to the living world?
Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition, but then again no one could have predicted the giraffe, the iPhone or JD Vance. The laws of physics don't demand them; they all just evolved, expressions of how (for better or worse) things happened to turn out. Ecologist Mark Vellend's thesis is that to understand the world, physics and evolution are the only two things you need. Evolution, here, refers in the most general sense to outcomes that depend on what has gone before.
