Brian Cox - Wonders of Life - Expanding Universe

Our knowledge of the world comes from our experience of the world. And our experience is based on our sensory apparatus, but how do our senses work? What is it about the physical laws of the universe that make it possible for creatures like us to perceive anything at all?

In the following documentary, Brian Cox visits some interesting animals in the US (giant catfish, glowing scorpions, mantis shrimp and octopi, among others) to explore and understand how they, and we, are able to create mental representations of our environment through taste (chemicals), sound (air waves) and vision (light), and how it is that the gradual process of evolution through natural selection has slowly sculpted the amazing machinery of perception, by taking fish jaws, for instance, and slowly turned them into the ear bones that make hearing possible for you and me...

To catch that catfish, he didn't have to enlist the help of a scientist... he could have just told a redneck to go noodling :)

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The Examined Life

While defending himself against his accusers (at least in Plato's Apology), Socrates uttered a sentence that has captured the essence of philosophy and that has reverberated through the centuries: "The unexamined life is not worth living."

More than two thousand years later, now that we live in a society that's technologically advanced and that has benefited from the lessons learned through science and history, is there any need to question our most basic presuppositions, to wonder whether we are on the path to achieving wisdom, to ask whether we are worthy human beings, to remove the mask of superficiality and peer into the depths of our being? You'd better believe it!

And to prove it, today we are showcasing the documentary The Examined Life, which consists of a few sections in which a bunch of philosophers (people like Cornel West, Peter Singer, Martha Nussbaum, Slavoj Zizek and others) talk for a few minutes about various issues that we may normally take for granted as settled. And as you'll see, these short discussions will make it painfully obvious that things aren't nearly as neat and settled as we tend to assume. And once the philosophical gadfly bites you, even though you might feel uncomfortable, you'll be better off than you were before since now at least you have some kind of idea about what's really going on. And it is in that realization and doubt that the seed of wisdom can be planted. The question then becomes whether you'll help cultivate it and grow...

We are featherless, two-legged, linguistically conscious creatures, born between urine and feces, whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. That's us.

Awesome :)

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Sea of Faith - Soren Kierkegaard

Among the many theologians and religious philosophers that have become famous throughout history, the most interesting, enjoyable, thought-provoking and challenging has got to be the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (whose 200th birthday is being celebrated this week).

Wielding Hegel's dialectic method, Kierkegaard set out both to refute Hegel's conclusions, and to simultaneously defend and to problematize the question of faith and the meaning of life.

Apart from Socrates and Nietzsche (the former who invented the concept, the latter who gave it its most paradoxical twist), no other philosopher has epitomized the concept of irony quite so powerfully and masterfully as Kierkegaard.

His thought is sometimes difficult to pin down, partly due to the fact he wrote under a number of symbolic pseudonyms who expressed differing points of view (Johannes de Silentio, Hilarius Bookbinder, Constantin Constantius, Johannes Climacus: total porn nom de plum, by the way), and partly because the dialectic process he embraced is inherently dynamic and ever-changing. Just to give you a small taste of the incredible kind of balancing act he sought to perform, Kierkegaard argued against an increasingly secular public that faith is an immediacy higher than that afforded by reflection and the intelligibility of universal ethical categories. And arguing against maudlin conceptions of faith (all-too-common today), he contended that faith ought to be experienced in the shudder of existential fear and trembling. To strike this balance of a higher existence to be experienced in anguish, Kierkegaard explores the question of whether Abraham was justified in being willing to sacrifice his son Isaac in such a way that, whatever perspective you come from, you can't help both to admire Abraham and to be horrified by him.

But instead of letting me yap endlessly about this master of philosophy, here's a nice introduction to Kierkegaard and his thought, narrated by the influential non-realist (or anti-representationalist) philosopher of religion, Don Cupitt:

Happy birthday, Soren!

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Richard Dawkins - Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life (1)

Dostoevsky's dictum "without God, anything is permitted" is often used by religious believers to make the point that, quite aside from the issue of its truth, religion plays an important role, perhaps even a necessary one, in fomenting moral behavior and virtue. Without God, where would morality come from? If we were simply left to our own devices, what would be there to prevent absolute chaos, violence, crime and wanton lasciviousness?

Well, whatever you may think about the moral foundation of morality, as an empirical claim, it simply isn't true that without God or religion we would turn into savages. How do we know? For one, because non-human animals, presumably not being religious believers, do have all sorts of customs and rules by which they abide without having to descend into anarchy. And second, because when you look at the behavior or religious and non-religious people, you find that there is almost no difference there.

What religious people do have, though, is a lot of shame and guilt for things that should not be quite as big a deal as they think. So it seems as though religion is a self-perpetuating industry of devotion based on making its followers feel bad about themselves and then making them turn to religion for "salvation." Not much different from drug pushers, huh?

And it's getting to the point that religious people will go to all kinds of extremes to reconcile the inevitable cognitive dissonance they experience from the conjunction of their religious beliefs and their biological nature. Richard Dawkins explores these and other related issues

What exactly is the fascination with virgins? I never understood that one...

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Secrets of Our Living Planet - The Emerald Band

I may not be able to blog this week, since I'm going to be spending some quality time with my family, so I'm leaving you dear readers with a fascinating documentary.

We've seen in multiple cases before the intricacies of various animals. What's different about today's documentary is that it showcases the interesting and intricate relationships between various organisms to explain why there is so much biological diversity in the Earth's rain forests, why so many of these organisms are so weird, and why these relationships and processes matter.

Part of the key has to do with the runaway result of an evolutionary arms races of specialization and ingenious manipulation between plants and pests, predators and prey, parasites and hosts. And underneath it all is the process of natural selection, that blind watchmaker that can produce incredible adaptations out of physical, chemical and biological necessity.

See you next week!

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The Birth of Calculus - Newton and Leibniz

Before you run away in fear of having seen the word calculus, let me preface this entry by saying that you don't have to understand how it works, or even be able to do it, to understand and appreciate why it's important and why calculus represents one of the greatest intellectual achievements of human history: the modern world would not exist without it. You may choose to turn a blind eye to it, but that doesn't make it go away, so why not embrace it?

And while you probably know that it was invented, that's right... invented, by two geniuses, Newton and Leibniz, working (mainly) independently of each other, do you know the differences in their approaches? If you've never quite had an appreciation for the beauty and elegance of math, the following short documentary, should be able to change that:

And if you don't know anything about the priority dispute between these two men, here is a short introduction to that regrettable nightmare:

Did you know both Newton and Leibniz were first-borns? From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, it makes a lot of sense why their priority dispute got so heated and cantankerous. Now Wallace and Darwin, on the other hand, were way later-borns, and look how that turned out :)

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Breaking the Code - The Biography of Alan Turing

Computers don't grow on trees, and even though they are ubiquitous today, that wasn't always the case. In fact, they've only been around for less than a hundred years, and although there are certain folks to whom we owe a huge debt of gratitude for laying down the conceptual foundations (the philosopher Leibniz for inventing the binary language system upon which programming depends, for instance, or the enchantress of numbers Ada Lovelace's brilliant insight into the power of computation rather than mere calculation), the individual most directly responsible for modern computation is Alan Turing.

His was a remarkable life, full of genius, insight, inspiration, courage and intellectual creativity. His contributions during World War II (like the fact he broke the Nazi code and was privy to the information sent in secret messages to Hitler and his thugs even before they received it) may be directly responsible for saving hundreds of thousands of lives, and of accelerating the end of the war.

For all of his importance, however, his life was also very tragic. Because of the top-secret nature of his mathematical work during the war, he was never officially recognized. And to add insult to injury, his homosexuality was used to ban him from his own work, to treat him worse than a common criminal, and eventually it led to his suicide. This is his life:

For more on Turing's mathematical and philosophical importance, check out two of my favorite documentaries in this whole blog: Dangerous Knowledge with David Malone, and The Secret Life of Chaos with Jim Al-Khalili.

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Sex: An Unnatural History - The Church

One of the ways in which religions have managed to control their followers is by controlling their sexuality, telling them what's allowed, what's forbidden, what they can be punished for eternally, what the purpose of sex is, and so on. And for a very long time, religions managed to do this quite well, primarily because they also controlled the means of indoctrination and communication, but then modernity and education happened...

Few events have shocked the church quite the way the introduction of the anti-contraceptive pill did because, for the first time in history, sexuality became democratized and people finally had some control over their own reproduction, control that had previously been the dominion of the church.

With the sexual revolution of the sixties, and the general secularization of the zeitgeist over the last few centuries, orthodox traditional religious restrictions on sexuality (like their adherence to natural law theory and its injunctions against birth control, abortion and homosexuality), though still strongly supported by church officials, have been mainly ignored by the faithful, and the church has lost its grip on the conscience and soul of its constituents.

But is sex only about physical gratification, or is there some important spiritual component to it over which the church really ought to have something to say? Or can such components be achieved without it? Does the very idea of sex as metaphorical forbidden fruit enhance the sexual experience? Are atheists missing out?

And check out a brief summary of the history of the church and child sexual abuse.

Or check out the Unnatural History of Sex (The Revolution and Love).

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Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity - Spark

The ancient Greeks knew that if you rubbed two pieces of amber, you'd produce static electricity, but apart from that, it would be another two thousand years until this weird, invisible, ephemeral, mysterious and (literally) shocking phenomenon would be systematically studied, controlled, stored, understood and made to flow continuously. But as with any nascent science, there were false starts, one question answered only leading to more questions.

In this first installment of the documentary series Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity, professor Jim Al-Khalili explores the history of the scientific exploration of electricity through the work and incredible creativity and experimental rigor of luminaries such as Pieter van Musschenbroek with his Leyden Jar; Benjamin Franklin's famous explanation of electricity as a liquid with positive and negative charge,  and yes, even the apocryphal kite story, demonstrating, like Newton had done before, that phenomena previously presumed to be heavenly in kind (thunder and lightning) were actually just instances of the same general laws that apply to mundane objects here on Earth; Henry Cavendish's experiments with the torpedo fish, which gave rise to the distinction between electric charge and voltage; Humphrey Davy's popular demonstrations at the Royal Society; the fascinating (and somewhat gruesome) dispute between the "animal" electricity of Galvani and the "no-nonsense" secular electricity of Volta; ; the isolation of chemical elements; and the prospect of resurrection and life after death...

Pure awesomeness :)

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Inside Nature's Giants - Kangaroo

When you read the title of this entry, your first reaction might be bewilderment. Kangaroos are among nature's giants? Well, yes and no. The largest kangaroos on record, who stood at an impressive ten feet tall, went the way of the dodo a long time ago, so their present-day descendants are not as impressive as you may expect. Still, kangaroos today are the largest living marsupials, so that helps them qualify.

But you've already come to love this documentary series full of fascinating lessons on evolutionary biology, so why are we quibbling on technicalities when we can just enjoy the awesome and truly surprising lessons in evolution that studying these and other lovable Australian animals (marsupials like wallabies and koalas, and monotremes like the platypus) can teach us?

Bet you weren't expecting to see what a young Joey looks like, huh?

And in case you're curious about the plural of platypus... it's either platypus or platypuses, but not platypi (you'd have to know a little bit of Latin to understand why).

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Beautiful Minds - Richard Dawkins

If you've been following this blog for a while, you're probably familiar with the various documentaries, debates and lectures Richard Dawkins has delivered over the years. Sure, his fame of late has to do with the religion/atheism and creationism/evolution controversies, but he's a much more important thinker than that. Dawkins is such a prolific thinker that even when he's wrong, he manages to make you think and to reconsider your own position. The man doesn't know how not to be interesting.

His original fame derives from a fabulous book he penned over 30 years ago: The Selfish Gene, which was originally inspired by the ground-breaking work of biologists like Bill Hamilton, and which provided a powerful and eloquent new way of understanding behaviors and traits that did not originally seem to conform to Darwinian natural selection, but which, after careful consideration, turned out to be remarkable revelations that confirmed and enhanced the theory.

The following documentary is all about the man, his story, his influence, his courage, his intellect and his ideas:

For a defense of The Selfish Gene, you might want to watch Nice Guys Finish First.

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T-Rex - Warrior or Wimp?

For the last hundred years since its discovery, Tyrannosaurus Rex has ruled the public imagination as the greatest and most ferocious predator to ever live on our planet. While we all love dinosaur movies, or to visit museums and stare endlessly at their impressive skeletal structures, no one (except perhaps for a few adrenaline addicted junkies) would want to be in the vicinity of a real hungry T-Rex...

But was this even a predator? Could it have been no more than a mere scavenging vulture? What does the scientific evidence actually suggest? Well, because the data is limited and our access indirect and sometimes more circumstantial than definitive, there is a lot of speculation that has to go into these conjectures, so there are no conclusive answers just yet, but at least a few aspects of the evidence do raise some very interesting questions, as the following documentary shows:

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To Infinity and Beyond

Apparently the title of this documentary also has something to do with Toy Story? Well, I haven't seen that movie, but I can tell you what this documentary is about... Infinity. The most obvious way to start thinking about infinity is through numbers: take any number, and you'll soon realize that there is no such thing as the biggest number because you can always add 1. No, a googol won't do it, nor even a googolplex or Graham's number. Yes, these numbers contain more zeros than there are atoms in the observable universe, but they still fall short, infinitely short, in fact, of infinity.

But the strangeness doesn't end there because infinity may not only be a mathematical conceptual idea: infinity raises all kinds of interesting scientific and philosophical questions and paradoxes (what Immanuel Kant called antinomies of reason) about the physical universe that even modern cosmology doesn't quite know what to do with: is space infinite? If not, what's beyond its edge? Infinite empty space? What about time? If it is, and the amount of matter in the universe is finite, then everything that could logically happen has happened, and will continue to happen, an infinite number of times... And hey, are there an infinite amount of universes? And as you'll see in this fascinating documentary, this is just the beginning of the weirdness:

For a fascinating treatment of the problems of infinity, check out the documentary Dangerous Knowledge.

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The Fabric of the Cosmos - The Illusion of Time

In the first episode of the Fabric of the Cosmos series, we learned a little bit about the weirdness of space, so hopefully that massaged your brain enough for something even weirder: time.

Philosophers and scientists have been trying to understand what time is since antiquity, and one thing that they have found is that it's incredibly difficult to say anything about time without already presupposing it in some sort of viciously circular argument. Nevertheless, curiosity drives us to ask questions that we then have to test by conceptual analysis and by empirical means, and we often find out that these come in conflict with each other in ways that elude simple solutions.

There are philosophical accounts of time (and I'll provide a short introduction soon), as well as scientific accounts, most of which are based to various extents on some of the incredible insights to come out of Einstein's theories of special and general relativity.

So fasten your seat-belts as Brian Greene takes us on a tour to understand some of the deepest of mysteries: What is time? Does the past exist? Does the future? Can we change the future? Can we travel back in time? If so, can we change the course of history? And hey, if you can go back in time and meet your former self, which one is really you? That last one is more of a philosophical question, just to show you how badass we are :)

If your head isn't spinning by now, then you might want to get yourself checked into a hospital :)

And if you want to watch the original from NOVA, here it is:

Watch The Fabric of the Cosmos: The Illusion of Time on PBS. See more from NOVA.

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Inside Nature's Giants - The Camel

I've never thought much of camels, what with their lenky legs, their weird humps and simultaneously pretentious and dumb-looking ruminant mouths, I never thought these were interesting animals, but watching this documentary about them absolutely blew my mind!

As the team prepares to dissect one specimen, the main question guiding the exploration concerns how it is that these large animals have evolved to put up with the scorching heat of the desert, as well as with its scarcity of water. And when conditions are tough, that's exactly when evolution reveals itself to be that wise blind watchmaker capable of seemingly miraculous solutions that go way beyond anything you could have ever expected.

So join the team to explore the camel's anatomy and physiology, as well as its incredible evolution, as they travel to one of the most camel densely populated regions in the world: Australia. Say what???

Want more? Check out the entire Inside Nature's Giants series.

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Synthetic Biology - Playing God?

Whenever new technologies arise, such as the ability to genetically engineer biological organisms, one of the classic luddite objections is that such novelty represents human hubris as we attempt to "play God" and do something "unnatural." I've never quite understood such objections, since we run the risk of "creating life" whenever we have a few too many at the local pub and we happen to find an equally hammered partner with whom to engage in all kinds of unnatural acts. True story :)

Still, there is something to be said for the risk of unintended consequences, especially as 21st century advances in science and technology, not to mention their democratization and cheap and easy access, have the potential to produce dangers against which evolution has never had to fight. Some of these innovations are probably inevitable, so while we might not always be able to stop them, we might want to become acquainted with them so we can then start to think about how to manage and regulate them. And to introduce some of these advances, here is Adam Rutherford as he explores some of the truly state-of-the-art advances that synthetic biology is producing, starting with the spider-goat:

Unless by "playing God" people mean that he's the only one allowed to wipe most of life out of the face of the Earth...

There was an interesting interview in The Atlantic recently with philosopher Nick Bostrom on the question of whether we are underestimating the risk of human extinction. He thinks we are, and bases his calculations on what looks to me like an analogy of the Drake equation, so I'm not fully convinced (since the values we assign to such probabilities seem somewhat arbitrary), but the arguments are interesting nevertheless.

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The Secret You

What does it mean to be you? How is it that the physical matter making up the many neurons in your brain somehow produce your subjective, conscious experience? Are your neurons themselves conscious? While we're at it, what exactly is consciousness? Where does your sense of self come from? Do you actually have a self? Can you be made to experience your self from outside your body? Can your consciousness be transferred to an inanimate object, or to someone else's body? If you are your consciousness somehow, do you get to consciously make your own choices, or are these determined by factors over which you have no conscious awareness and control?

Those are just some of the fascinating questions that Marcus du Sautoy explores in the following mind-bending documentary that gets right to the intersection of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience:

For more, check out the Brainspotting tag.

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The Fabric of the Cosmos - What Is Space?

That's probably not the first question that comes to mind for most people when they wake up in the morning, but it is definitely one that has kept some of the greatest minds of all time awake at night. What exactly is space? Is it a substance? Is it merely a relationship between objects? Whatever it is, is it static or dynamic, absolute or relative, immanent or transcendent? If there no physical objects in the universe, would empty space still exist, or is that an incoherent question, like asking what happened before the beginning of time? Join Brian Greene in a fascinating (if gimmicky) exploration of one of the most fundamental scientific and philosophical questions in this first episode of The Fabric of the Cosmos:

And in case the youtube video stops working at some point, here's the original from NOVA:

Watch The Fabric of the Cosmos: What Is Space? on PBS. See more from NOVA.

For more related videos, check out the Elegant Universe Tag.

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Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Born Equal

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection provides a wonderful scientific explanation of biological adaptation and diversity. The theory is wonderful. The process of evolution itself is torturous, blind, indifferent, and cruel.

And when you take a ruthless process, and mix it up with some extreme political and social ideology, what you get is the pseudo-scientific distortion of scientific evolution: social darwinism in its many forms, the most extreme version of which resulted in the infamous movement of eugenics, but don't blame the Nazis for this one. This idea came from the Brits, got instituted by the Americans, and only then did it make it back across the Atlantic to Germany.

Fortunately, as Andrew Marr explains in the second part of the fascinating documentary Darwin's Dangerous Idea, a better understanding of evolution, as well of ethical philosophy, is giving rise to a new, positive sense of eugenics, one in which individual choice and autonomy, without government imposition, is helping create a healthier and more prosperous world.

Wow... we've come full circle :)

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Faster Than the Speed of Light?

Some months ago, news broke indicating that scientific measurements in Italy had determined that some neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light. The media jumped on the hype bandwagon and declared the "death of Einstein's theory of relativity." Physicists (aka, the experts on these questions) were skeptical because ALL previous experimental and observational data, including neutrinos and light traveling from super nova explosions really really far away and reaching Earth at exactly the same time, confirmed Einstein's predictions, so they concluded there must have been some error in the measurement, the analysis, the equipment, etc. on which the Italians relied. Of course, there were also cultural reasons for doubt: as Sergio Bertolucci, research director at CERN indicated, "I have difficulty to believe it, because nothing in Italy arrives ahead of time." :)

News are starting to pop up everywhere now that there was indeed a glitch in the equipment. Still, whatever the real answer turns out to be, and since everyone seems to be paying attention to the story, this presents a great opportunity to learn some fundamental lessons not only about relativity and other ground-breaking research in theoretical physics and cosmology, but how science itself works and makes the tremendous progress it does, so let's watch this delightful documentary narrated by Professor Marcus du Sautoy:

Sometimes I do wonder whether these physicists are insane in the mem-brane :)

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