Music: Yamandu Costa & Alessandro Penezzi — ‘Capitão do Mato’
Author Archives: Attention to the Unseen
Music: Ana Clara Horta — ‘Pé Atrás’
Aliens in our midst
Douglas Fox writes: Leonid Moroz has spent two decades trying to wrap his head around a mind-boggling idea: even as scientists start to look for alien life in other planets, there might already be aliens, with surprisingly different biology and brains, right here on Earth. Those aliens have hidden in plain sight for millennia. They have plenty to teach us about the nature of evolution, and what to expect when we finally discover life on other worlds.
Moroz, a neuroscientist, saw the first hint of his discovery back in the summer of 1995, not long after arriving in the United States from his native Russia. He spent that summer at the Friday Harbor marine laboratory in Washington. The lab sat amid an archipelago of forested islands in Puget Sound – a crossroads of opposing tides and currents that carried hundreds of animal species past the rocky shore: swarms of jellyfish, amphipod crustaceans, undulating sea lilies, nudibranch slugs, flatworms, and the larvae of fish, sea stars and countless other animals. These creatures represented not just the far reaches of Puget Sound, but also the farthest branches of the animal tree of life. Moroz spent hours out on the pier behind the lab, collecting animals so he could study their nerves. He had devoted years to studying nervous systems across the animal kingdom, in hopes of understanding the evolutionary origin of brains and intelligence. But he came to Friday Harbor to find one animal in particular.
He trained his eyes to recognise its bulbous, transparent body in the sunlit water: an iridescent glint and fleeting shards of rainbow light, scattered by the rhythmic beating of thousands of hair-like cilia, propelling it through the water. This type of animal, called a ctenophore (pronounced ‘ten-o-for’ or ‘teen-o-for’), was long considered just another kind of jellyfish. But that summer at Friday Harbor, Moroz made a startling discovery: beneath this animal’s humdrum exterior was a monumental case of mistaken identity. From his very first experiments, he could see that these animals were unrelated to jellyfish. In fact, they were profoundly different from any other animal on Earth.
Moroz reached this conclusion by testing the nerve cells of ctenophores for the neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine and nitric oxide, chemical messengers considered the universal neural language of all animals. But try as he might, he could not find these molecules. The implications were profound.
The ctenophore was already known for having a relatively advanced nervous system; but these first experiments by Moroz showed that its nerves were constructed from a different set of molecular building blocks – different from any other animal – using ‘a different chemical language’, says Moroz: these animals are ‘aliens of the sea’.
If Moroz is right, then the ctenophore represents an evolutionary experiment of stunning proportions, one that has been running for more than half a billion years. This separate pathway of evolution – a sort of Evolution 2.0 – has invented neurons, muscles and other specialised tissues, independently from the rest of the animal kingdom, using different starting materials. [Continue reading…]
Music: Ana Clara Horta — ‘Primavera’
Music: Alicyn Yaffee — ‘Older’
Music: Alicyn Yaffee — ‘Lonely Lemon Pie Girl’
The real threat of artificial intelligence
Kai-Fu Lee writes: What worries you about the coming world of artificial intelligence?
Too often the answer to this question resembles the plot of a sci-fi thriller. People worry that developments in A.I. will bring about the “singularity” — that point in history when A.I. surpasses human intelligence, leading to an unimaginable revolution in human affairs. Or they wonder whether instead of our controlling artificial intelligence, it will control us, turning us, in effect, into cyborgs.
These are interesting issues to contemplate, but they are not pressing. They concern situations that may not arise for hundreds of years, if ever. At the moment, there is no known path from our best A.I. tools (like the Google computer program that recently beat the world’s best player of the game of Go) to “general” A.I. — self-aware computer programs that can engage in common-sense reasoning, attain knowledge in multiple domains, feel, express and understand emotions and so on.
This doesn’t mean we have nothing to worry about. On the contrary, the A.I. products that now exist are improving faster than most people realize and promise to radically transform our world, not always for the better. They are only tools, not a competing form of intelligence. But they will reshape what work means and how wealth is created, leading to unprecedented economic inequalities and even altering the global balance of power.
It is imperative that we turn our attention to these imminent challenges.
What is artificial intelligence today? Roughly speaking, it’s technology that takes in huge amounts of information from a specific domain (say, loan repayment histories) and uses it to make a decision in a specific case (whether to give an individual a loan) in the service of a specified goal (maximizing profits for the lender). Think of a spreadsheet on steroids, trained on big data. These tools can outperform human beings at a given task.
This kind of A.I. is spreading to thousands of domains (not just loans), and as it does, it will eliminate many jobs. Bank tellers, customer service representatives, telemarketers, stock and bond traders, even paralegals and radiologists will gradually be replaced by such software. Over time this technology will come to control semiautonomous and autonomous hardware like self-driving cars and robots, displacing factory workers, construction workers, drivers, delivery workers and many others.
Unlike the Industrial Revolution and the computer revolution, the A.I. revolution is not taking certain jobs (artisans, personal assistants who use paper and typewriters) and replacing them with other jobs (assembly-line workers, personal assistants conversant with computers). Instead, it is poised to bring about a wide-scale decimation of jobs — mostly lower-paying jobs, but some higher-paying ones, too. [Continue reading…]
Music: Alicyn Yaffee — ‘Softly As In a Morning Sunrise’
First support for a physics theory of life
Natalie Wolchover writes: The biophysicist Jeremy England made waves in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of thermodynamics. His equations suggested that under certain conditions, groups of atoms will naturally restructure themselves so as to burn more and more energy, facilitating the incessant dispersal of energy and the rise of “entropy” or disorder in the universe. England said this restructuring effect, which he calls dissipation-driven adaptation, fosters the growth of complex structures, including living things. The existence of life is no mystery or lucky break, he told Quanta in 2014, but rather follows from general physical principles and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”
Since then, England, a 35-year-old associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been testing aspects of his idea in computer simulations. The two most significant of these studies were published this month — the more striking result in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and the other in Physical Review Letters (PRL). The outcomes of both computer experiments appear to back England’s general thesis about dissipation-driven adaptation, though the implications for real life remain speculative.
“This is obviously a pioneering study,” Michael Lässig, a statistical physicist and quantitative biologist at the University of Cologne in Germany, said of the PNAS paper written by England and an MIT postdoctoral fellow, Jordan Horowitz. It’s “a case study about a given set of rules on a relatively small system, so it’s maybe a bit early to say whether it generalizes,” Lässig said. “But the obvious interest is to ask what this means for life.”
The paper strips away the nitty-gritty details of cells and biology and describes a simpler, simulated system of chemicals in which it is nonetheless possible for exceptional structure to spontaneously arise — the phenomenon that England sees as the driving force behind the origin of life. “That doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to acquire that structure,” England explained. The dynamics of the system are too complicated and nonlinear to predict what will happen. [Continue reading…]
Music: Bill Evans — ‘Remembering the Rain’
Half the atoms inside and around us came from outside the Milky Way
The Guardian reports: Nearly half of the atoms that make up our bodies may have formed beyond the Milky Way and travelled to the solar system on intergalactic winds driven by giant exploding stars, astronomers claim.
The dramatic conclusion emerges from computer simulations that reveal how galaxies grow over aeons by absorbing huge amounts of material that is blasted out of neighbouring galaxies when stars explode at the end of their lives.
Powerful supernova explosions can fling trillions of tonnes of atoms into space with such ferocity that they escape their home galaxy’s gravitational pull and fall towards larger neighbours in enormous clouds that travel at hundreds of kilometres per second.
Astronomers have long known that elements forged in stars can travel from one galaxy to another, but the latest research is the first to reveal that up to half of the material in the Milky Way and similar-sized galaxies can arrive from smaller galactic neighbours.
Much of the hydrogen and helium that falls into galaxies forms new stars, while heavier elements, themselves created in stars and dispersed in the violent detonations, become the raw material for building comets and asteroids, planets and life. [Continue reading…]
Music: Bill Evans Trio — ‘I Will Say Goodbye’
Music: Bill Evans — ‘What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life’
Music: Bill Evans — ‘You Must Believe In Spring’
Why religion breeds both compassion and hatred
Tom Jacobs writes: President Donald Trump probably would not have been elected if not for the overwhelming support he enjoyed from evangelical Christians. This continues to puzzle and frustrate his opponents, who ask why they voted for a man whose campaign was largely based on hatred and vilification.
While it’s easy to blame tribalism or simple hypocrisy, newly published research suggests religiosity exerts two distinct psychological pulls.
It argues genuine piety can be a catalyst for compassion. But the shared rituals that create a cohesive congregation “may also produce hatred of others”—especially among those who lack deeply felt spiritual beliefs.
“Our data suggest that the social activities which accompany religion drive the hostility towards other groups, rather than the quality of one’s belief or the degree of devotion,” a research team led by Rod Lynch of the University of Missouri writes in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science.
Building on research that dates back to the 1960s, Lynch and his colleagues remind us that religious people come in two varieties: true believers, and those who embrace a faith tradition as a way of fulfilling some secular need, such as peace of mind or connection to a community.
This distinction between “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” religiosity was laid out by the influential psychologist Gordon Allport in the 1960s, who reported ethnic prejudice was associated only with the latter. Much later research found this to also be true of homophobia. [Continue reading…]
Music: Bill Evans — ‘Reflections in D’
How to turn a fox into a dog
Lee Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut: Deep inside my soul,” says Lyudmila Trut, “is a pathological love for animals.” She inherited this from her mother, who was a great dog lover. Lyudmila had grown up with dogs as pets, and even during World War II, when food was horribly scarce, her mother would feed starving stray dogs, telling her, “If we don’t feed them, Lyudmila, how will they survive? They need people.” Following her mother’s example, Lyudmila always carries some kind of treat in a pocket in case she encounters a stray dog. And she’s never forgotten that domesticated animals need people. She knows that this is how we’ve designed them.
In 1958, Lyudmila was just finishing up her studies at Moscow State University, home of Leonid Krushinsky, a pioneering Russian researcher in animal behavior. Dmitri Belyaev was friends with Krushinsky and admired his work. Belyaev had recently accepted a position as vice director of a new research institute in a giant Soviet city of science called Akademgorodok, near Novosibirsk, Siberia. He was searching for someone to lead an experiment he would begin in earnest at Akademgorodok. Dmitri intended to run an experiment domesticating silver foxes, and so the person he sought needed the kind of sophisticated skills in animal behavior that Krushinksy taught.
Belyaev went to visit Krushinsky at his office at Moscow State’s Sparrow Hill campus for advice about who might work with him on this experiment. Ensconced in the grand setting of Krushinsky’s building, with its palatial ceilings, marble floors, ornate columns, and fine art statues, he described his plans for the experiment and explained that he was looking for talented graduates to assist with the work. Krushinsky put the word out, and when Lyudmila heard about the opportunity, she was immediately captivated. Her own undergraduate work had been on the behavior of crabs, and as fascinating as their complex behavior could be, the prospect of working with foxes, so closely related to her beloved dogs, and with such a well-respected scientist as Belyaev, was tantalizing.
In early 1958, Lyudmila went to meet with Belyaev at his office. She was immediately struck by how unusual he was for a male Soviet scientist, especially one of his rank. Many were quite high-handed, and condescending to women. Lyudmila, who has a genial, smiling manner and stands just five feet tall, with her wavy brown hair cropped quite short, looked young for her age, and she hadn’t even finished her undergraduate studies, but Dmitri spoke to her as an equal. She was riveted, she recalls, by his piercing blue eyes, which so strongly communicated his intelligence and drive, but also emanated an extraordinary empathy.
She felt privileged to be invited into the confidence of this extraordinary man, who shared with her so openly about the bold work he was proposing. She had never experienced such a distinctive combination of confidence and warmth in a person. Dmitri told Lyudmila what he had in mind. “He told me that he wanted to make a dog out of a fox,” she recalls. Probing how creative she would be about conducting the experiment, Belyaev asked her, “You are now located on a fox farm that has several hundred foxes, and you need to select the 20 calmest ones for the experiment. How will you do it?” She had no experience whatsoever with foxes, and had only a vague notion of what the fox farms might be like and what sort of welcome she might receive at them. But she was a confident young woman, and she did the best she could to suggest some reasonable possibilities. She would try different methods, she said, talk to people who had worked with foxes, read up on what was known in the literature. Dmitri sat back and listened, gauging how committed she would be to the work and to developing techniques for such a novel study. She must be not only rigorously scientific, but also quite inventive. Was she really ready to go to Novosibirsk, to move to Akademgorodok, he asked her? After all, moving to the heart of Siberia was a life change not to be taken lightly. [Continue reading…]
Humans first settled in Australia as early as 65,000 years ago
Science News reports: Tools, paints and other artifacts excavated from an ancient rock-shelter in northern Australia are giving new glimpses into early life Down Under. The first humans may have arrived on the continent 65,000 years ago — 5,000 years earlier than previously thought — and they were sophisticated craftspeople, researchers report July 19 in Nature.
Archaeologists unearthed three distinct layers of artifacts at Madjedbebe, Australia’s oldest known site of human habitation, during digs in 2012 and 2015. The oldest, deepest layer contained more than 10,000 relics of human handiwork. This cache included the world’s oldest polished ax heads, Australia’s oldest seed-grinding and pigment-processing tools, stone points that may have been spearheads, as well as hearths and other remnants of human activity.
“When people think about our ancient ancestors, they either tend to have a view that our ancestors must have been primitive, less culturally diverse, or they take the view that our ancestors were probably extraordinarily culturally impressive,” says Peter Hiscock, an archaeologist at the University of Sydney who was not involved in the study. “This indicates the latter view. The moment people get to Australia, they’re doing all this really smart stuff.” They were probably building fires to light nighttime activities, grinding seeds for food and using ochre paints to decorate cave walls or their own bodies, Hiscock says. [Continue reading…]