312 | Thomas Levenson on the Mutual History of Humans and Germs

The number of neurons in the human brain is comparable to the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Unlike the stars, however, in the case of neurons the real action is in how they are directly con...

9 Dec 20241h 9min

Welcome to the December 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pa...

2 Dec 20243h 55min

Not too long ago, Brad Pitt and Eric Bana starred in a (loose) adaptation of Homer's epic poem The Iliad; next month, Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche will headline a film based on The Odyssey. Give...

25 Nov 20241h 15min

Biological evolution via natural selection is a simple idea that becomes enormously complicated in its realization. Populations of organisms are driven toward increased "fitness," a measure of how suc...

18 Nov 20241h 15min

Emergence is a centrally important concept in science and philosophy. Indeed, the existence of higher-level emergent properties helps render the world intelligible to us -- we can sensibly understand ...

11 Nov 20241h 35min

Welcome to the November 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pa...

4 Nov 20243h 50min

Erwin Schrödinger said that the important characteristic of life is that it "goes on doing something... for a much longer period than we would expect an inanimate piece of matter to keep going under s...

28 Okt 20241h 11min

A large economy is one of the best examples we have of complex dynamics. There are multiple components arranged in complicated overlapping hierarchies, out-of-equilibrium dynamics, nonlinear coupling ...

21 Okt 20241h 11min