Featuring cosmologist Neil Weiner, string theorist Eva Silverstein, and physicist Vijay Balasubramanian, with moderation from philosopher of science Jill North, this podcast explores what the future holds for physics. 카지노사이트
Modern physics and its leading theories have been remarkably successful in describing the history of our universe, and large-scale experiments, such as the Large Hadron Collider, are continuously producing new data that extend our knowledge of the world. Nevertheless, our understanding of some physical concepts that seek to explain our universe—dark matter and dark energy, quantum gravity, supersymmetry, and the cosmological constant—remain unresolved. This podcast features audio from our first Physics of Everything event.
This podcast was made possible through the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speaker(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.
Ever since Darwin shined a bright light — by far the brightest — into the deep and dark cavern of the mystery of life, there has been some progress in understanding how human minds have evolved into their present form. While it is no doubt that the development of the human mind is a Darwinian matter and will ultimately be explained under Darwinian terms, the exact mechanisms by which the human mind has evolved still remain a mystery. 바카라사이트
It is my contention that the best explanation that has been advanced for understanding the evolution of the human mind is the underrated theory of the cognitive niche popularized by Steven Pinker, but first proposed by anthropologists John Tooby and Irven DeVore in the 1980s.
In biology, a niche is the ecological fit of a species to its environment. The niche of a particular bird species, for example, might be a species of tree in which certain kinds of insects that the bird preys on are found. The bird will spend most of its time in that tree, build its nest there, and so on.
The cognitive niche is the distinctly informational, rather than ecological, fit that Homo sapiens have with their environment. The idea that humans have evolved to fit the cognitive niche, is simply the idea that people are distinct from all other animals in that they transform and fit their habitats — no matter how initially inhospitable — to their needs and goals rather than the other way around. People do this by bypassing the rule of biological adaptation, namely, physical interaction with the environment, and embracing informational and cognitive methods of interacting with the world: reasoning, cooperating, and communicating.
The idea of the cognitive niche stems from a simple yet profound observation. Humans managed to step outside of the coevolutionary arms race that characterizes what Darwin called, the “struggle of existence” for every other life form. 온라인카지 For every other organism, one individual’s success is achieved at the loss of another, namely, one individual consuming another. Lions prosper only at the death of Zebras and Zebras prosper only at the death of lions.
