Number of words: 284 Natural selection can act on human culture as well as on genes. Some scholars have scoffed that a scientific theory of cultural evolution that aims to ape Darwinian evolution is impossible because human beliefs and behaviors are so unpredictable and subject to historical contingencies as well as sudden breakthroughs, discoveries, and … Read more
Number of words: 222 The very fact that people decide to live in the same patch, rather than dotted around at random, has to do with cooperation. Why? Some believe, for example, that the first communities evolved as a result of success in agriculture: surplus food from farming enabled people to settle down and specialize, … Read more
Number of words: 251 Karl also had plenty of anecdotes to underline why indirect reciprocity is just as relevant to everyday life as the direct version of reciprocity. He pointed out that the Rothschild family had protected the investments of their English clients during the Napoleonic Wars. They were under intense pressure to give them … Read more
Number of words: 625 Exploring the indirect form of reciprocity is important because it is critical for society. Direct reciprocity—“I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine”— operates well within small groups of people, or in villages where there is at ightknit community where it would be hard to get away with cheating one another. … Read more
Number of words: 691 Now Karl and I could sit back and watch the strategies slug it out in our creation over thousands and thousands of generations. Our fervent hope was that one strategy would emerge victorious. Even though no evolutionary trajectory ever quite repeated itself, there were overall patterns and consistency in what we … Read more
Number of words: 324 The bats are one often cited example of direct reciprocity in nature. Another can be found on coral reefs, where fish of all kinds visit “cleaning stations” where they are scrubbed of parasites by smaller varieties of fish and by shrimps: the former get cleaned of pesky parasites and the latter … Read more
Number of words: 729 Having risen to fame on its superhuman performance at playing games, the artificial intelligence group DeepMind has cracked a serious scientific problem that has stumped researchers for half a century.With its latest AI program, AlphaFold, the company and research laboratory showed it can predict how proteins fold into 3D shapes, a … Read more
Number of words: 564 Strong, stretchy and sensitive synthetic skin that can repair itself up to 5,000 times has been developed and could be used in future prosthetics, experts claim. Known as ‘electronic skin’ or ‘e-skin’, it has been developed by researchers from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. The team … Read more
Number of words: 1,102 Despite the much greater sales success of battery electric vehicles (BEV) over fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs), there’s still a huge amount of interest in hydrogen as the green replacement for fossil fuels. The first hydrogen-powered train in the UK made its maiden voyage last week, and the EU is putting … Read more
Number of words: 1,375 We asked GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator, to write an essay for us from scratch. The assignment? To convince us robots come in peace. For more about GPT-3 and how this essay was written and edited, please read our editor’s note below.I am not a human. I am a robot. … Read more
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