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In winter during the late afternoon before settling down to roost, flocks of thousands of starlings will twist and turn, turning the sky black with strange curves that seem to move with a mind of their own. The flocks of up to a million strong form for warmth, for security, and for social contact.

In the previous post, we discussed the Prisoner’s Dilemma and saw how a simple strategy called Tit-for-Tat enforced the Golden Rule and won a very interesting contest. But does Tit-for-Tat always come out on top? The most confounding thing about the strategy is that it can never win – at best, it can only tie [...]

Almost every decision we make involves someone else in one way or another, and we face a constant choice. Should we take advantage of them, go for the quick score and hope we never see them again – or should we settle for a more reasonable reward, co-operating in the hope that this peaceful relationship will continue long into the future?

A philosophy website recently conducted a very interesting survey about some of these greatest standing questions in philosophy.

When I was a kid, I used to wonder if everyone saw the world in the same way. We can all look at the same grass, but maybe the color I called green showed up in my brain as the color my friend called blue. Maybe all of our colors were shifted around to the [...]

It is said that when the 20th century is long gone, it will be remembered for two revolutionary theories – those of relativity and quantum physics.

How did humans evolve from early primates? How did “human like” traits such as a smaller jaw relative to apes and hairlessness pop up when they don’t appear in the wild in any real frequency? The typical explanation for why humans have smaller jaws than early primates is that our diets changed and our brains got bigger, pressures that caused a smaller jaw. But there’s another way to look at this – what if our diets changed and our brains got bigger due to proto-human society dealing and adapting to an increasingly frequent and nearly catastrophic mutation of the jaw?

One of the biggest “human” questions is “where did we come from?”. While the mechanisms of evolution are well established, the route humanity took to get to its present state is not as well detemined.

Sometimes we see things so often that we simply forget to ask “why are they like that?” For instance, let’s take a closer look at domestic animals. Dogs, cats, horses, cows, pigs – animals that we live with, and who couldn’t live without us.

Finding a beautiful and simple equation for something in the natural world is fascinating to me – it’s like picking at a corner of loose wallpaper in your room and suddenly seeing the scrolling green text of the Matrix on the wall behind it.