Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, journalist James Nestor questions the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function, breathing. Nestor tracks down . . .   Read More

How many mass extinctions has the Earth had, really? Most people talk today as if it’s five, but where one draws the line determines everything, and some say over twenty. However many it might be, new mass extinctions seem to reveal themselves with shocking frequency. Just last year researchers argued for another . . .   Read More

Big questions abound regarding the protracted childhood of Homo sapiens, but there’s a growing argument that it’s an adaptation to the increased complexity of our social environment and the need to learn longer and harder in order to handle the ever-raising bar of adulthood. (Just look to the explosion . . .   Read More

Gizmodo asks half a dozen natural historians to speculate on who is going to be doing what jobs on Earth after the people disappear. One of the streams that runs wide and deep through this series of fun thought experiments is how so many niches stay the same through catastrophic changes . . .   Read More

Living in a world with multiple spatiotemporal scales, the very small and fast can often drive the future of the very large and slow: Microscopic genetic mutations change macroscopic anatomy. Undetectably small variations in local climate change global weather patterns (the infamous “butterfly effect”). And now, one more . . .   Read More

Pleistocene dormouse Leithia melitensis was the size of a house cat. New computer-aided reconstructions show a skull as long as an entire modern dormouse. It’s a textbook example of “island gigantism,” in which, biologists hypothesize, fewer terrestrial predators and more pressure from predatory birds selects for a much larger . . .   Read More

Complexity Explained is a new project that distills key aspects of complexity science, also known as complex science systems, into an easy-to-digest, interactive visual explainer. The explainer is also available as a free booklet, downloadable at this link. . .   Read More

What makes a species invasive? What makes a species native? Ecologist and evolutionary biologist Chris Thomas on the need to think on a global, international scale when it comes to conservation. From Chris Thomas’s Long Now Seminar “Are We Initiating the Great Anthropocene Speciation Event,” which you can watch in full here.

&nbsp. . .   Read More

Why do disasters like blackouts and financial crises cascade so quickly, but fixing them takes so long? The answer, game developer Nicky Case says, is “attractors”—the parts of a complex system that attract the system towards failure.

This is an excerpt from Nicky Case’s August 02017 Long Now talk, “Seeing Whole Systems.” Watch. . .   Read More

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

Enhancing Humans, Advancing Humanity
Wednesday July 22, 02015 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Naam Seminar page.
*********************
Audio is up on the Naam Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.
*********************

Enhancing humans and humanity. . .   Read More