Topic
biology
- Stages Of Evolution Of Plant Species
“Stages of Evolution of Plant Species” , from the Whole Earth Catalog , Spring 1970.
- Circle of Life
Kevin Kelly: Because of the circle, no organism is privileged with being above another. A circle has not top. We humans are somewhere in the lineup, but where depends on how you turn the chart. This circle of life als…
- The Exploration Instinct
Latest Res Extensa , on our natural genetic wiring to explore, and its biological benefits of asymmetric bets:
- Map Of Human Metabolic Pathways
Map of humanmetabolic pathways. (via @burny_tech)
- Immune System
Carl Röhrig draws the immune system.
- Evolution Has No Goal
There’s a common misconception that evolution is "seeking" fitness — that there’s some inherent motivation in the process pushing toward a particular objective. But evolution is an undirected process of mutation, test…
- The Eden Project
The Eden Project is a complex of geodesic domes housing different biomes — a Mediterranean climate, and the world’s largest indoor rainforest. An island of foreign terrain in a retired mining pit in cold Cornwall, Eng…
- Illustrations By Naturalist Ernst Haeckel
Illustrations by naturalistErnst Haeckel. From his collection Kunstformen der Natur.
- Evolution
Environmental challenge + gradual adaptation + eons of time = magic.
- Weekend Reading: Raising Less, the Adjacent Possible, and Fire and Motion
🧰 There Are More Uses For A Screwdriver Than You Can Calculate Biologist Stuart Kauffman on biological functions and the "adjacent possible": The unexpected uses of features of organisms, or technologies, are precise…
- Antifragility and Tinkering in Biology (and in Business) Flexibility Provides an Efficient Epigenetic Way to Manage Risk
I found this piece cited in Taleb’s Antifragile, a unique case of an author citing a paper that was itself inspired by a galley of that book. The concept of “antifragility” (systems that gain or improve from disorder,…
- Weekend Reading: Figma Multiplayer, Rice vs. Wheat, and Tuft Cells
🕹 How Figma’s Multiplayer Technology Works An interesting technical breakdown on how Figma built their multiplayer tech (the collaboration capability where you can see other users’ mouse cursors and highlights in the…
- Weekend Reading: Darwinian Gastronomy, Humboldt, and Taxes
🌶 Darwinian Gastronomy Turns out cultures from warmer climates evolved a taste for spicy foods to combat the presence of more diverse bacteria: Alas, nothing in nature turns out to be that simple. Researchers now sug…
- Neuralink
Yesterday was Neuralink's unveiling of what they've been working on. Their team of engineers, neurosurgeons, and computer science experts are working on a "neural lace" brain-computer interface. Elon Musk announced th…
- Weekend Reading: T Cells, Creating Proteins, and SNI Awards
🦠T is for T Cell After reading The Breakthrough, I've been doing more reading on immunotherapy, how it works, and what the latest science looks like. Another book in my to-read list is An Elegant Defense, a deeper s…
- The Origin and Transmutation of Species
Since The Origin of Species, Darwin’s theory of natural selection has been the foundation of our thinking about the evolution of life. Along the way there have been challengers to the broadness of that theory, and Dav…
- Kunstformen der Natur
After recently finishing The Tangled Tree, I was reading about the different domains "Domain (biology)") of the tree of life. Somehow I landed on this work by Ernst Haeckel. Amazing art and even more incredible that n…
- Biology and Culture
In going through the backlog of Sam Harris’s Waking Up podcast, I put on this not-too-recent episode with Bret Weinstein, evolutionary biologist, free thinker, and polymath that I’ve heard in a number of other intervi…