tag > Evolution
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If you don't believe in miracles perhaps you've forgotten you are one.
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Scientists discover how humans develop larger brains than other apes (phys.org)
A new study is the first to identify how human brains grow much larger, with three times as many neurons, compared with chimpanzee and gorilla brains. The study identified a key molecular switch that can make ape brain organoids grow more like human organoids, and vice versa.
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Werner Arber shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of restriction endonucleases "The most primitive cells may require at least several hundred different specific biological macromolecules. How such already quite complex structures may have come together, remains a mystery to me. The possibility of the existence of a Creator, of God, represents to me a satisfactory solution to this problem." ... "I know that the concept of God helped me to master many questions in life; it guides me in critical situations, and I see it confirmed in many deep insights into the beauty of the functioning of the world." - Werner Arber
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"Evolution is cleverer than you are." - Orgel's Second Rule
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Could a family dog help your child’s social and emotional development?
The bond between dogs and children can be remarkably strong. If you need proof just look at the countless viral videos of dogs and babies exhibiting very cute and very real friendships. Having a dog growing up is a quintessential childhood experience for many, and often the staple of tear-jerking dog-centred family films. Now, new research confirms there are significant social and emotional developmental benefits for children under the age of 5 who grow up around dogs.
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Joseph Henrich on cultural evolution, WEIRD societies, and more
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The biopsychosocial model is an interdisciplinary model that looks at the interconnection between biology, psychology, and socio-environmental factors. The model specifically examines how these aspects play a role in topics ranging from health and disease models to human development. This model was developed by George L. Engel in 1977 and is the first of its kind to employ this type of multifaceted thinking.
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Dolphins learn from their peers to use empty shells to catch fish (cell.com)
• Network-based diffusion analysis revealed that “shelling” spreads among associates
• Dolphin foraging innovations can spread socially outside of the mother-calf bond
• First quantification of a non-vertically learned foraging tactic in toothed whales -
Humans fundamentally misunderstood Evolution
"700,000 Years Of Progress" - Art by Alfred Frueh (1880-1968) The evolution of species is not going always "upwards" as commonly understood, but it is arguably even going "downwards" in recent times. Perceiving humans as more "advanced" as Trees, Worms or Dolphins is a very arrogant, reductionist, stupid joke. In the bigger picture, there is no discernible "objective function" or "arrow of progress" at all, only temporary patterns and habits in time. Evolution is not going anywhere at all. There is no "answer" or "destination" at the end of the rainbow - contrary to the gospel of the religion du jour (science), which keeps preaching visions of a "mathematically beautiful end state which we are racing towards" (which is essentially the science version of God).
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Neuroevolution of Self-Interpretable Agents (Yujin Tang, Duong Nguyen, David Ha - Google Brain, 2020)
Abstract: Inattentional blindness is the psychological phenomenon that causes one to miss things in plain sight. It is a consequence of the selective attention in perception that lets us remain focused on important parts of our world without distraction from irrelevant details. Motivated by selective attention, we study the properties of artificial agents that perceive the world through the lens of a self-attention bottleneck. By constraining access to only a small fraction of the visual input, we show that their policies are directly interpretable in pixel space. We find neuroevolution ideal for training self-attention architectures for vision-based reinforcement learning tasks, allowing us to incorporate modules that can include discrete, non-differentiable operations which are useful for our agent. We argue that self-attention has similar properties as indirect encoding, in the sense that large implicit weight matrices are generated from a small number of key-query parameters, thus enabling our agent to solve challenging vision based tasks with at least 1000x fewer parameters than existing methods. Since our agent attends to only task-critical visual hints, they are able to generalize to environments where task irrelevant elements are modified while conventional methods fail.
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Moms’ Obesity in Pregnancy Is Linked to Lag in Sons’ Development and IQ (Columbia)
#Comment: Yet another finding showing how obesity (a recent evolutionary occurrence) is horrible for all aspects of individual & societal health. How long until obese people have to pay higher insurance premiums, akin to what smokers? A pressing topic, given that modifiable lifestyle practices now account for some 80% of premature mortality.
