A mock debate on time with British physicist and science writer Julian Barbour and NYU philosophy professor Tim Maudlin, reposted from FQXi’s Setting Time Aright conference in Copenhagen.
Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest laws continue to shape human evolution in the modern age, research has shown.
An evolutionary transition that took several billion years to occur in nature has happened in a laboratory, and it needed just 60 days. Under artificial pressure to become larger, single-celled yeast became multicellular creatures. That crucial step is responsible for life’s progression beyond algae and bacteria, and while the latest work doesn’t duplicate prehistoric transitions,…
AS EVERY schoolchild knows, the dinosaurs were wiped out in an instant, when a rock from outer space hit what is now southern Mexico. That happened 66m years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period. Well-informed schoolchildren also know that this mass extinction was neither unique nor the biggest. The geological record speaks of…
A massive block of limestone in France contains what scientists believe are the earliest known engravings of wall art dating back some 37,000 years, according to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The 1.5 metric ton ceiling piece was first discovered in 2007 at Abri Castanet, a well known…
Serious futurologists are not a large group yet. “It’s a fairly new area of inquiry,” says Nick Bostrom, an Oxford University philosophy professor who heads the school’s Future of Humanity Institute. But they are trying to give a first draft of a map of the future, using the kinds of rigor that theologians and uneducated…
The idea that a cosmic impact ended the age of dinosaurs in what is now Mexico now has fresh new support, researchers say. The most recent and most familiar mass extinction is the one that finished the reign of the dinosaurs — the end-Cretaceous or Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, often known as K-T. The only survivors…