How the Neo-Darwinists tried for 50 years to slam the door on a conversation we needed to be having all along:
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Philip Ball’s new book “How Life Works” is an outstanding introduction to the new biology that transcends the dead-on-arrival textbook version of evolution that has kept science stuck in the 1970s for so long.
Philip Ball’s “How Life Works” sets a new standard for biology.
Denis Noble wrote a beautiful review of Ball’s book in Nature Magazine, saying “It’s time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life. The view of biology often presented to the public is oversimplified and out of date. Scientists must set the record straight.
Michael Levin posted this excellent video offering a new definition of cancer:
Check out this amazing video project by Harvard student Jordan Strasser – about cancer in the broader context of multiscale complex systems:
This video explains, using simple and elegant mathematical proofs, why the universal computational ability proves a computer is not conscious – because all of the meanings and conventions of any computer (IOS vs Android, Java vs. PHP, WAV vs MP3 etc) are assigned by conscious beings: Read more »
“The Selfish Gene was the best selling science book of the 20th century. But The Selfish Gene got cause and effect backwards, assigning agency to natural selection instead of the organism itself. It embraced the greatest errors of the Modern Synthesis while downplaying much of what it got right.
“It crowned the gene king of biology, even though genes are only servants of the cell. Gene-centric duality caused genomics to promise far more than it could, or ever can deliver, since it cannot distinguish between correlation and functional causation.
“That failure has been at great cost to health care by promising miracle genetic cures that have not met the greatest challenge to health services for ageing populations caused by complex multi-factorial diseases that cannot be reduced to genetic causation.
“Thus did The Selfish Gene turn Neo-Darwinism into a pop religion with its own dogmas, dressed up as science, but without the gold standard of a scientific hypothesis: an empirical test independent of the central assumption of the theory. Read more »
Are your sense of “self” and your experiences and memories just a set of brain states? Is a human basically a wet computer? Or is your brain just a mechanism for channeling these things into the physical world?
Physicist Marco Masi is fascinated with consciousness studies and evolution. He lives in Germany.
Are we purely physical beings? Or are our minds extensions of something larger?
Marco Masi’s new paper “An evidence-based critical review of the mind-brain identity theory” challenges the current materialistic view.
Masi points out cases of people living normal lives despite missing large chunks of their brains from birth defects, surgery, or disease… like a man missing 75% of his brain tissue. Read more »
Michael Levin at Tufts University has stumbled into a new universe. Today (30 Nov 2023) he released a new paper revealing that when nurtured outside the body, human lung cells can morph into autonomous organisms that can repair damaged nerve tissues. These creatures are called “Anthrobots.”
Michael Levin at Tufts University has discovered “Anthrobots” – human tissue cells that self-organize as autonomous creatures.
Michael writes: “We envision many future uses in the human body – laying down pro-regenerative molecules, clearing plaque from arteries, healing spinal cord or retinal damage, dealing with cancer cells or bacteria in the gut, or informing us of the status of the surrounding tissues.
“It’s crucial to note that the effect we saw – healing the neuronal scratch – was not test #78 out of hundreds of things we attempted. This was one of the first assays we tried.”
Michael’s team removed lung cells, fed them and gave them time to develop. The cells re-shaped themselves; and the cells’ cilia, the little hairs that normally push dirt and mucous on the surface of the lung, developed into organs for propelling these cells. They are highly mobile. Read more »
In my paper “The Role of Quantum Mechanics in Cognition Based Evolution,” I propose a new perspective on biology: thinking creates codes, which in turn control chemicals, much like a brain sending instructions to the body.
This challenges the traditional view in biology where it’s believed chemicals create codes leading to consciousness. There’s no evidence to support this traditional view in biology – only speculation.
Watch my live presentation “From Quantum Mechanics to ChatGPT” HERE.
I’ve been a Rush fan since Moving Pictures in the early 80s. Bought it when I was 12. Best album of my youth.
I didn’t make it to one of their shows until my late 20s. My wife bought me a ticket. Witnessing that show axis-shifted my notion of musical performance. Even though I had a bunch of their albums, I didn’t really ‘get it’ until I saw them pull it off live.
One thing I don’t hear very many people come out and say is: I believe Rush inspires *some* of their fans – especially me – to say to themselves:
“I can’t play drums like that. I can’t play bass like that. I can’t play guitar like that. BUT… Read more »
The overwhelming success of genetics and molecular biology in the 1970s had an unfortunate side effect. DNA became the ‘be all’ and ‘end all’ of biology and “the selfish gene” became the new secular pop religion.
Physiology and medicine suffered great blows from this shift. The human genome project, though valuable, did not deliver even 10% of what it promised and the consequences to healthcare have been devastating.
The new book Understanding Living Systems by Raymond and Denis Noble is an easy-to-read guide to the New Biology that brings purpose back into nature and respects the agency and autonomy of each organism and its systems.
Podcast Link: https://evo2.org/podcasts/understanding-living-systems-with-ray-and-denis-noble/
Denis Noble website: https://www.dpag.ox.ac.uk/team/denis-noble
Ray Noble website: https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=RNOBL24
