Sublime
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The value (“fitness”) of a given combination of building blocks often cannot be predicted by a summing up of values assigned to the component blocks. This nonlinearity (commonly called epistasis in genetics) leads to co-adapted sets of blocks (alleles) that serve to bias sampling and add additional layers to the hierarchy.
Jessica C. Flack • Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984–2019 (Compass)
Francis Fukuyama • The Origins of Political Order
As he spoke, it seemed to me that he was being rocketed upward by the power of his own vision, into the highest reaches of space, watching the earth become smaller and smaller until it shrank into a single pixel. Arendt once referred to the view of the earth from space as the “Archimedean point,” drawing on the popular anecdote that Archimedes once
... See moreMeghan O'Gieblyn • God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
And they are instantiated as a distributed processing system on human beings. They don’t particularly care about human beings. Their motives are inscrutable, to the extent that they have any, except that they’d like to get bigger. They’ve run on people. They’re implemented on people. But they are not people. They are not persons in any meaningful s
... See moreW. Brian Arthur • Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium
Did the Ancient Hainish postulate that continuous sexual capacity and organized social aggression, neither of which are attributes of any mammal but man, are cause and effect?
Ursula K. Le Guin • The Left Hand of Darkness: 50th Anniversary Edition (Ace Science Fiction)
But, contrary to libertarian rhetoric, we are not monads. From birth until death, our ability to reach our goals, even to survive, is tightly linked to our social interactions with others in our society.
Herbert A. Simon • The Sciences of the Artificial
The discovery that capuchin monkeys are averse to receiving unequal outcomes, much like humans, suggests that these tendencies are evolved rather than learned.
Keith Payne • The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Changes the Way We Think, Live and Die
A curious legal crusade to redefine personhood is raising profound questions about the interdependence of the animal and human kingdoms.
Lawrence-wright • The Elephant in the Courtroom
‘There is a serious snag in the specialist way of life’, Desmond Morris said in his bestseller, The Naked Ape, which compares human and animal behaviour. ‘Everything is fine as long as the special survival device works, but if the environment undergoes a major change the specialist is left stranded’. So, for example, the koala subsists almost entir
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