A neuroscientist on how we came to be aware of ourselves.
The Attention Schema Theory (AST), developed over the past five years, may be able to answer those questions. The theory suggests that consciousness arises as a solution to one of the most fundamental problems facing any nervous system: Too much information constantly flows in to be fully processed. The brain evolved increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for deeply processing a few select signals at the expense of others, and in the AST, consciousness is the ultimate result of that evolutionary sequence.
.. Selective enhancement therefore probably evolved sometime between hydras and arthropods—between about 700 and 600 million years ago, close to the beginning of complex, multicellular life. Selective signal enhancement is so primitive that it doesn’t even require a central brain.
Solving the Mystery of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot
“We’re going to skim within 3,100 miles of Jupiter’s cloud tops—in between the cloud tops and just inside the most intense portion of the radiation belt,” said Rick Nybakken, Juno’s project manager. “Nobody’s ever ventured there before. No spacecraft has ever operated this close to Jupiter.”
Watch The Creationism Vs. Evolution Debate: Ken Ham And Bill Nye
Does it damage children to teach them biblical creationism? What are the costs of denying evolution, one of biology’s core tenets?
Those questions were asked Tuesday night, in a live debate between best-selling Christian author Ken Ham and Emmy Award-winning educator Bill Nye (“the Science Guy”) at the Creation Museum of Petersburg, Ky.
Here’s a video feed of their debate. Below that are highlights from their exchanges:
Sean B Carroll recommends the best books on Biology
.. Unlike physics, where matter behaves in a very regular way under so many different conditions, biology doesn’t necessarily have laws. It more has tendencies, and we’re trying to figure out what those tendencies are. For example, one rule at a larger level is that, much to ecologists’ surprise, there are species that have disproportionately large effects on the stability and diversity of the community they live in. You might think, looking at a forest or a tide pool, that all the creatures in it are equal. But it turns out that some individual creatures have a much bigger influence than others. There’s a name given to those creatures, keystone species. They work much like the keystone in a Roman arch: if they are removed, the whole thing collapses.
.. Most of these folks were derailed by World War II, they had to be doing other things before they got back to their research. You get a sense of the epic sweep of where we went from blind ignorance about life at the molecular level to being on the verge of manipulating it ourselves through genetic engineering, in just a couple of decades.
.. What’s different about the birth of molecular biology is the discoveries being so crystal clear. One day we were in the dark about heredity, something as fundamental as how life makes life, and the next day it was phenomenally clear. Those are pretty hard revolutions to match.
.. He was brilliant, he became a physician, but he concluded that the most important thing anybody could ever discover was the supposed missing link between humans and apes. He decided he was going to find it. In what must be one of the most rash and perhaps luckiest expeditions in the history of palaeontology, he decided that the cradle of humanity must be in Asia, and he thought, ‘Let’s go to the Dutch East Indies!’ How convenient, if you are a Dutchman! He searched in Indonesia, and darned if he didn’t find what we know today as Java Man, or the speciesHomo erectus. He threw the luckiest dart in the history of palaeontology.
.. Dubois was, in many ways, his own worst enemy in the way he behaved. He had a difficult personality and he made his own world more difficult. It’s a tale that we find in other places in literature, of people who are visionaries and great dreamers, and committed to that vision, but at the same time they are shooting themselves in the foot and dragging down the people around them.
.. Wallace’s work on islands in the Malay archipelago in the 19th century was fundamental to him coming up with similar ideas to Darwin about evolution. He went island hopping across that archipelago – visiting islands like Borneo, Sumatra, Lombok, Bali. He put in thousands of miles and dozens of crossings trying to understand the distribution of plants and animals there.
More broadly, the book covers the role that islands have played in our thinking about how nature works, all the way up to the current issues and debates of the time.
.. But I’m also optimistic because, although nothing happens as fast as we’d like it to, we know lots more now than 30 or 40 years ago. We also have a lot of success stories that just aren’t talked about much. When we protect species or places they can really rebound. There are lots of examples of this from sea otters, elephant seals and whales to bald eagles, wolves and bears.
.. nature is incredibly resilient and, given a chance, she can rebound on a timescale that is surprising. We see that in the oceans when we protect fisheries, we see that on the land.