Adam Frank
speaker
594 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Adam Frank’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
If the gas is dense enough that a curved surface, if you move through the curved surface, it's going to produce lift. Yeah, there you go. Evolutional trip on that. So I think you can expect certain classes of solutions to the basic problems that life is going to be presented with. Stay alive, reproduce. But...
One of the weird things about like with the UFO things is that you always see like, oh, they all look like humans. They're just like basically humans with, you know, triangular heads. And that's where we get to contingency, right? So what we've been talking about is convergence. You expect that evolution will converge on wings multiple times when presented with the problems that wings can solve.
Um, but contingency is accidents, right? That, you know, you've got something that's evolving a certain kind of wing, a leathery wing, right? Uh, and then, you know, the climate changes and they all die out. End of story. Or, you know, an asteroid, a total accident, asteroid hits. And so contingency accidents play also a huge role in evolution.
And one of the things that, you know, lots of evolutionary biologists have talked about is the idea that if you ran the tape of Earth's history over again, would you get the same creatures? Now, Stephen Jay Gould was of the opinion that no way, that you wouldn't find anything on Earth that resembled any species today. They've done experiments actually on this with E. coli.
You take a bunch of E. coli. You let them evolve for a while. You take a bunch of them out, freeze them. Let that population continue to evolve. The other one's frozen. Now start it over again with the frozen. And it seems to me that contingency tends to win. right? The contingency, at least from what we can tell.
I mean, that's not a, that's not a hard result, but in those experiments, what you find is that accidents really do matter. So the idea, and this is important. So yes, you should expect legs or jointed sticks. How many joints they're going to be? Anybody's guess.
You know, do you expect humanoids, you know, things with a, you know, a sensing apparatus on top of a shoulder with two arms and two legs? That's probably a pretty random set of occurrences that led to that.
It doesn't have to be. So my favorite word, word of the day, is liquid brains, right? This idea of distributed cognition, which fascinating idea. And we've come to understand how much distributed cognition there is. Obviously, eusocial animals like termites, et cetera, and ants, that's an example of distributed cognition. The organism is the whole colony.
This is one thing that's been really interesting in the state of the study when we cut to for aliens is that when we've come to recognize that human intelligence is It's not actually – it's been – the kinds of things that go into intelligence are distributed all across the biosphere. Lots of different examples of things show various pieces of what we have.
Jason Wright will describe it as like a deck of cards. The cards are all there. We got the hand that actually led to the kind of technological progress that we –
We see, but the kinds of, you know, the basic idea of using tools, the basic idea of recognizing each other eye to eye, all the things that we define as intelligence, you can find many places in many other, um, uh, places across many other line lineages across the earth.
So it could be, they could be very, very different with something like, yeah, maybe that's, you know, the hive mind idea or, you know, bacterial colonies that actually managed to, you know, come to their own version of high cognition. Yeah.
Technology seems to operate on, and certainly markets can operate in ways that look very Darwinian. So basically, a planet...
Right, right. Because, yeah, cultural, it's true. It's amazing that cultural evolution totally disconnects from the Darwinian process. But I'd be careful to say that, like, a planet is working hard to do this. Because, you know, it's really important, looking at us, we're
Like what we think of as ideas and culture and, you know, it's quite possible we're going to make it another 200 years and this is gone, right? Because it actually wasn't a very good idea long term. I mean, we just don't know. Oh, so maybe the idea generation organism is actually the thing that destroys everything. Not the biosphere, but it destroys itself. It may not be very long-term.
It may be very potent for a short period of time, but that it's not sustainable. It doesn't become, like we were talking about before, mature. It's very hard to make it integrated into a mature bio-slash-technosphere. And of course, evolution is not working for anything. Well, here's the actually interesting thing, right?
So people are very much, you know, evolutionary biologists will get very, their hair will stand on end if you start talking about evolution having a purpose or anything. But the very interesting thing about purpose is that once you do get to a idea generating species or collective organism, yeah, then, you know, kind of all bets are off. And there is... There is teleology.
There is a, you know, now suddenly, you know, absolutely there's a direction implied. So that's kind of the cool, interesting thing that once you get to that, evolution stops being goalless and directionless and suddenly, yeah, we're the ones who supply or any kind of creature like us has an absolute direction that they decide on.
It's an unholy mess, but you know, but at some point, like the expansion into the solar system, say like that would be both direction. I mean, depending on how you look at it, it was directional. There was a, there was a decision that the collective of human beings made to like anti-accrete to start spreading out into the solar system.
So that was definitely a goal there that may have been reached in some crazy sort of, you know, non-linear way, but it was still right. There was still, it's still a goal was set and it was achieved.
Showing 341–360 of 594 · page 18 of 30
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