The ‘Cambrian explosion’ is the name given to the geologically short time period of about 20 million years that occurred around 500 million years ago in which there seemed to be a surge of new kinds of organisms that appeared in the fossil record. Critics of evolutionary theory, always on the look out for what they see as possible signs of divine intervention, seized on it as something that seemed unlikely to have happened due to the slow processes of natural selection and thus a signal that god may have intervened to speed things up a bit. [Read more…]

One of the most famous experiments in psychology is that of Stanley Milgram who in 1962 purported to show how a surprisingly high percentage (65%) of ordinary people could be persuaded by authority figures to inflict extremely high levels of pain on others, well beyond what one might expect normal people to do. I wrote about this back in 2008. [Read more…]

While I am pretty ignorant about the processes of encryption and decryption, I have become intrigued with the topic, particularly since the decision by the mail service companies Lavabit and Silent Mail to shut down their businesses rather than having to be forced to hand over the keys to the government to snoop on their clients’ emails. [Read more…]

I was interested that the government of Costa Rica has decided to close all its zoos as part of its program to protect animals. The country banned circuses with animals in 2002. But what will happen to the animals in the zoos? The government plans to return them to the wild, which is not as simple as it sounds. [Read more…]

I wrote recently about Stephen Pinker’s efforts to defend scientism, where he argued that although the use of the word is not consistent and is often used as an epithet, it deserves to be defended because there is a positive meaning that can be salvaged.

There are some problems with his essay. One is that he starts out with a partial straw man. [Read more…]

When it comes to probabilities, our intuitions are not reliable, as I have written about before (see here and here). On so many occasions, I have thought that the result to a problem was so obvious as to not be worth thinking about more deeply, only to find myself proven wrong. And the new solution seems also so obvious that you wonder why you ever believed the earlier wrong answer. [Read more…]

We are constantly told to make our passwords more complex and harder to guess. And that is a good thing. But we should not imagine that merely making them longer or more obscure is sufficient.

Consider for example the password: Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn1 [Read more…]

I have been fascinated with the research on the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of human beings ever since I read the research of Joseph Chang et. al. that suggested that that person could have lived as recently as about 50 CE or so, around the time of Jesus. (See here, here, and here for my previous posts on this topic.) [Read more…]

Over two years ago, I wrote about Chaser, a border collie that not only had a vocabulary of over a thousand words, she could also make logical inferences. I now learn via Machines Like Us that Chaser has got even smarter. Dan Nosowitz got a demonstration of what Chaser can do. [Read more…]

It is a little frustrating that we cannot see the workings of our own brain without the aid of external devices. But optical illusions are a fun way of getting some insight into the interplay of vision and cognition. I have a fondness for optical illusions and have shown and written about some of them in the past (see here, here, and here). There is something about the way that our brain manipulates the visual input to create something new and sometimes dynamic that fascinates me. [Read more…]