Podcasts about Convergent evolution

On today's episode: Whale poop and pee is more important than you might think! Um… What? Huh? And lots of other examples of why my public speaking teacher was wrong. All that and more today on All Around Science...RESOURCESDiscovery: The Great Whale Pee Funnel Huh? The valuable role of interjectionsSpeech interjections aren't throwaway linesIs “Huh?” a Universal Word? Conversational Infrastructure and the Convergent Evolution of Linguistic ItemsListeners as co-narrators | APA PsycNetCREDITS:Writing - Bobby Frankenberger & Maura ArmstrongBooking - September McCrady THEME MUSIC by Andrew Allenhttps://twitter.com/KEYSwithSOULhttp://andrewallenmusic.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We're experimenting and would love to hear from you!In this episode of 'Discover Daily', the IRS is making waves in government tech adoption with its upcoming acquisition of an Nvidia SuperPod AI supercomputer. This sophisticated system, featuring thirty-one servers with Blackwell processors, will be installed at their Martinsburg, West Virginia computing center. The system aims to revolutionize the agency's machine learning capabilities, particularly in fraud detection and taxpayer behavior analysis, marking a significant step forward in AI integration within government operations.In a recent study on AI energy consumption, ChatGPT's latest model GPT-4 has been found to use significantly less power than previously thought. Research by Epoch AI reveals that each query consumes approximately 0.3 watt-hours, ten times lower than earlier estimates. This efficiency improvement is attributed to advanced hardware implementation, system optimization, and more accurate calculation methods, though the cumulative energy impact remains substantial given millions of daily queries.Lastly, research published in Science has unveiled how birds and mammals have independently evolved complex brains through distinct pathways while achieving similar cognitive abilities. The study, led by Dr. Fernando García-Moreno, used advanced spatial transcriptomics and mathematical modeling to reveal fundamental differences in brain development between species. Despite using different genetic tools and developmental processes, both groups have achieved remarkable cognitive capabilities, challenging our traditional understanding of brain evolution and intelligence.From Perplexity's Discover Feed: https://www.perplexity.ai/page/irs-acquiring-nvidia-supercomp-bQ9BUXJuSLOUpHZdCJ.vEA https://www.perplexity.ai/page/chatgpt-energy-use-overestimat-cn02azRBR2._eM_sH2n_Pw https://www.perplexity.ai/page/complex-brains-evolved-indepen-uPS546tuRJaWwidjGvrNCQ**Introducing Perplexity Deep Research:**https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/introducing-perplexity-deep-research Perplexity is the fastest and most powerful way to search the web. Perplexity crawls the web and curates the most relevant and up-to-date sources (from academic papers to Reddit threads) to create the perfect response to any question or topic you're interested in. Take the world's knowledge with you anywhere. Available on iOS and Android Join our growing Discord community for the latest updates and exclusive content. Follow us on: Instagram Threads X (Twitter) YouTube Linkedin

In this episode of Tiny Show and Tell Us, we cover an aurora-like phenomenon — STEVE (Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement) — and how citizen science led to its discovery and unforgettable name. Then we talk about convergent evolution in tenrecs, a fascinating family of animals endemic to Madagascar. Some look identical to hedgehogs, some are similar to opossums, and others look like moles. We need your stories — they're what make these bonus episodes possible! Write in to tinymatters@acs.org *or fill out this form* with your favorite science fact or science news story for a chance to be featured in a future episode and win a Tiny Matters mug!A transcript and references for this episode can be found at acs.org/tinymatters.

TWiV reviews nominees to head NIH, FDA, and CDC, cervical cancer decline following HPV vaccination, local dengue in Texas, human isolate of H5N1 virus is transmissible and virulent in animal models, and shared mechanisms of immune evasion among animal and bacterial viruses. Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Alan Dove, Rich Condit, Kathy Spindler, Brianne Barker, and Jolene Ramsey Subscribe (free): Apple Podcasts, RSS, email Become a patron of TWiV! Links for this episode Bhattacharya nominated to head NIH (Science) Makary nominated to head FDA (Science) Weldon nominated to head CDC (Chief Healthcare Exec) Cervical cancer declining following vaccination (JAMA Net) Local dengue case in Texas (Texas HHS) H5N1 human isolate transmissible and virulent (Nature) H5 current situation (CDC) Global H5N1 cases (Our World in Data) Conserved immune evasion in animal and bacterial viruses (Cell) Timestamps by Jolene. Thanks! Weekly Picks Brianne – Pale Blue Pod Kathy – PhysicsGirl recent Instagram post, ScienceAdvisor signup free daily sci news distillation, Semi-conducting hydrogels, Bot that can pick up things with a soft touch, “Pigeonbot II”, a drone called LisRaptor, zapping forever chemicals like PFAS with light and here Rich – Vendee Globe Jolene – Center for the Improvement of Mentored Research Experiences Vincent – These two ancient human relatives crossed paths 1.5 million years ago Intro music is by Ronald Jenkees Send your virology questions and comments to twiv@microbe.tv Content in this podcast should not be construed as medical advice.

Nathan hosts Professor Michael Levin and Staff Scientist Dr. Leo Pio Lopez from Tufts University in this episode of The Cognitive Revolution. They discuss their groundbreaking paper that combines biological datasets into a unified network model of disease using advanced embedding techniques. The conversation covers the technical details of their work, including a predicted link between GABA and melanoma, and explores broader topics in AI for biology. From multi-scale intelligence in biological systems to the future of human enhancement and digital life, this thought-provoking episode reminds us of the rapidly approaching future and the work needed to prepare for it. Links to the papers discussed in the episode: 1) Universal Multilayer Network Embedding Reveals a Causal Link Between GABA Neurotransmitter and Cancer 2) https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06037-4.pdf Apply to join over 400 Founders and Execs in the Turpentine Network: https://www.turpentinenetwork.co/ SPONSORS: Notion: Notion offers powerful workflow and automation templates, perfect for streamlining processes and laying the groundwork for AI-driven automation. With Notion AI, you can search across thousands of documents from various platforms, generating highly relevant analysis and content tailored just for you - try it for free at https://notion.com/cognitiverevolution Omneky: Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off https://www.omneky.com/ Oracle: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds; offers one consistent price, and nobody does data better than Oracle. If you want to do more and spend less, take a free test drive of OCI at https://oracle.com/cognitive CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) Teaser (00:00:52) About the Show (00:01:15) About the Episode (00:04:45) Intro (00:06:32) Multi-Layer Networks (00:10:41) Network Embedding (Part 1) (00:16:50) Sponsors: Notion (00:18:30) Network Embedding (Part 2) (00:18:30) GABA and Cancer (00:24:08) AI for Biology (00:29:59) Emergent Cognition (Part 1) (00:33:57) Sponsors: Omneky | Oracle (00:35:18) Emergent Cognition (Part 2) (00:36:42) Data Limitations (00:42:48) Modeling Wellness (00:52:16) Multi-Scale Intelligence (01:02:54) Digital Life (01:07:11) Diverse Intelligence (01:13:02) Outro SOCIAL LINKS: Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai Twitter (Podcast): https://x.com/cogrev_podcast Twitter (Nathan): https://x.com/labenz LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanlabenz/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution-ai-builders-researchers-and/id1669813431 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6yHyok3M3BjqzR0VB5MSyk

Nels and Vincent look at how plant prickles, sharp epidermal projections that provide defense from predators and other advantages, arose by convergent evolution, the emergence of analogous traits in distantly related species. Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello Subscribe (free): Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS, email Become a patron of TWiEVO Links for this episode Join the MicrobeTV Discord server Convergent evolution of plant prickles (Science) Timestamps by Jolene Science Picks Nels – Trees as a metaphor to understand relationships in biology Vincent – Project 2025 vs. The Public's Health Music on TWiEVO is performed by Trampled by Turtles Send your evolution questions and comments to twievo@microbe.tv

Today on Moment of Zen, Samo Burja and Rudyard Lynch return for for a mind-bending discussion and deep dive into the concept of "long ripples" — how ideas and events from the distant past continue to shape our present and future in unexpected ways. From Plato's influence on modern political movements to the unforeseen consequences of the Industrial Revolution, this conversation challenges our understanding of historical cause and effect. Are we truly progressing, or are we caught in cycles we fail to recognize? Can we learn from the past, or are we doomed to repeat it in new, technologically-amplified ways? This episode is a rollercoaster ride through time, technology, and human nature, forcing us to reconsider our place in the grand sweep of history.  Both Samo and Rudyard are hosts of Turpentine shows, Live Players and History 102, respectively. CHECK OUT: Live Players: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5fbMTkHBnom1JIBWYNVBK1 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/live-players-with-samo-burja-and-erik-torenberg/id1718925188 History 102: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/36Kqo3BMMUBGTDo1IEYihm Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-102-with-whatifalthists-rudyard-lynch-and/id1730633913 —

In this episode of History 102, 'WhatIfAltHist' creator Rudyard Lynch is joined again by Bismarck Analysis's Samo Burja (podcast host: Live Players) for a mind-bending discussion and deep dive into the concept of "long ripples" — how ideas and events from the distant past continue to shape our present and future in unexpected ways. From Plato's influence on modern political movements to the unforeseen consequences of the Industrial Revolution, this conversation challenges our understanding of historical cause and effect. Are we truly progressing, or are we caught in cycles we fail to recognize? Can we learn from the past, or are we doomed to repeat it in new, technologically-amplified ways? This episode is a rollercoaster ride through time, technology, and human nature, forcing us to reconsider our place in the grand sweep of history. 

On this episode of ID the Future out of the vault, we bring you the last of three short interviews with MIT-trained physicist Dr. Lee Spetner. We were saddened to learn of the recent passing of Dr. Spetner at 91 years old, and we're sharing these conversations in tribute to his significant contributions to the evolution debate. Host Ira Berkowitz interviews Dr. Spetner in Jerusalem. Together they explore key arguments from Spetner's books Not by Chance and The Evolution Revolution. Here, Spetner challenges the idea of convergent evolution and explains his non-random evolutionary hypothesis. This is Part 3 of a three-part interview. Listen to Part 1 and Part 2. Dig Deeper Source

Will alien life look like anything on Earth? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice deep dive into questions about astrobiology, revisiting the Drake Equation, and life beyond Earth with NASA astrobiology strategist, David Grinspoon a.k.a Dr. Funkyspoon.NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://startalkmedia.com/show/revisiting-the-drake-equation-with-david-grinspoon/Thanks to our Patrons Edvardo Cullen, Harriet Harmon, Andre Rivera Hinostroza, David Rolfe, Piotr Toruński, Karen Mills, Ghost Rider, Leonard Leonidas, Beatriz Clemente, Jon Johnson, Loren Blaine, John Bigelow, and Leslie Colonello for supporting us this week. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Last week, a leader of the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that COVID is “still a pandemic.” We are now being told to worry about a family of variants called FliRT that appear to have independently picked up the same set of mutations. It has been four years – are we about to get fooled again by these mad scientists, bureaucrats, and Big Pharma executives who profit off of death and disease? They are counting on ignorance and fear to pass their health treaty where the United States will cede its sovereignty to a world body. The Intelligence Industrial Complex that was directly responsible for the misinformation “pandemic,” and associated slow-kill bioweapon “vaccines,” is now gearing up to disrupt, or even possibly outright cancel the presidential election. Tonight on Ground Zero (7-10pm, pacific time), Clyde Lewis talks about CONVERGENT EVOLUTION – FROM HELL'S AMBASSADOR. Listen Live: https://groundzero.radio Archived Shows: https://aftermath.media

------------------Support the channel------------ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thedissenter PayPal: paypal.me/thedissenter PayPal Subscription 3 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ybn6bg9l PayPal Subscription 5 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ycmr9gpz PayPal Subscription 10 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y9r3fc9m PayPal Subscription 20 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y95uvkao   ------------------Follow me on--------------------- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedissenteryt/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheDissenterYT   This show is sponsored by Enlites, Learning & Development done differently. Check the website here: http://enlites.com/   Dr. Amalia Bastos is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Social & Cognitive Origins Group at Johns Hopkins University. She is interested in how evolutionary pressures have shaped the minds of different species, and which cognitive mechanisms animals employ while interacting with the world around them. Her current work focuses on how chimpanzees perceive third-party social interactions through eye-tracking technology, alongside research on dog cognition.   In this episode, we talk about animal cognition and comparative psychology. We start by talking about kea parrots, and their tool use and tool innovation. We discuss the problem with the “bird brain” expression, and animal culture. We go through aspects of animal cognition like naïve realism; contrafreeloading; statistical inference: the ability to represent both the identity and trajectory of hidden objects, and how it relates to causal understanding; and interspecies communication. We talk about how the study of animal cognition can contribute to the conservation of species. We get into dog cognition, and discuss if dogs experience jealousy. Finally, we talk about comparative psychology, and convergent evolution. -- A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: PER HELGE LARSEN, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, OLAF ALEX, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, PHIL KAVANAGH, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, DANIEL FRIEDMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, PAUL-GEORGE ARNAUD, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, DIOGO COSTA, ANTON ERIKSSON, CHARLES MOREY, ALEX CHAU, AMAURI MARTÍNEZ, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, STARRY, MICHAEL BAILEY, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, IGOR N, JEFF MCMAHAN, JAKE ZUEHL, BARNABAS RADICS, MARK CAMPBELL, TOMAS DAUBNER, LUKE NISSEN, CHRIS STORY, KIMBERLY JOHNSON, BENJAMIN GELBART, JESSICA NOWICKI, LINDA BRANDIN, NIKLAS CARLSSON, ISMAËL BENSLIMANE, GEORGE CHORIATIS, VALENTIN STEINMANN, PER KRAULIS, KATE VON GOELER, ALEXANDER HUBBARD, LIAM DUNAWAY, BR, MASOUD ALIMOHAMMADI, PURPENDICULAR, JONAS HERTNER, URSULA GOODENOUGH, GREGORY HASTINGS, DAVID PINSOF, SEAN NELSON, MIKE LAVIGNE, JOS KNECHT, ERIK ENGMAN, AND LUCY! A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, TOM VANEGDOM, BERNARD HUGUENEY, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, JONCARLO MONTENEGRO, AL NICK ORTIZ, AND NICK GOLDEN! AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, BOGDAN KANIVETS, AND ROSEY!

We finally got to the TAXONOMY episode. Join me as we explain what taxonomy is, how it works, and how we use it to arrange a big old family tree that contains every bird and maps how they're all related to each other. It's an overview of bird family tree from the dinosaurs to today.To support Bird of the Week and gain access to our second podcast, What's up with that's Bird's Name? click on through to Patreon: www.patreon.com/birdoftheweekWant birds in your inbox? Drop me a line at weekly.bird@outlook.com and I'll hook you up with a free weekly bird.Would you like some bird art in your life? Then visit Seni Illustration for some bespoke bird art: https://www.seniillustrations.com/Notes:Bird Taxonomy: https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/speciesMorphology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphology_(biology)Convergent Evolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolutionTherapod: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheropodaFeathered dinosaurs: https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/dinosaurs-among-us/feathersOpposite birds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EnantiornithesNeoaves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeoavesHoatzin: https://ebird.org/species/hoatzi1

Embark on a captivating journey with The Biome Podcast as we meander through the dense Amazonian foliage to spotlight the enigmatic Hoatzin. Dive into the unique life history of this avian oddity and uncover its baffling adaptations. Animal Spotlight:Unravel the mysteries of the Hoatzin. From chicks that sport claws to a digestive system akin to ruminants, this bird is a bundle of surprises awaiting discovery. Technical Deep-Dive:Ever observed strikingly similar traits in vastly different creatures? We'll dissect the intriguing concept of convergent evolution, exploring how unrelated species sometimes evolve identical adaptations in response to similar environmental challenges. This episode promises an engaging blend of detailed insights and broader ecological narratives. Dive deep with The Biome Podcast. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/biome-media/message

Dan Kuebler interviews Simon Conway Morris, emeritus professor of evolutionary paleobiology at the University of Cambridge.  Simon Conway Morris recently published the book From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds, in which he dismantles six myths of evolution.In the interview, Dan and Dr. Conway Morris discuss a few of these myths, and how the truth about evolution could reveal purpose in the universe.Have your call in questions be featured on the podcast: Leave a voicemail at 949-257-2436 Learn more and read articles: https://www.magiscenter.com/purposeful-lab

This week Kadie chats with Dr. Kassandra Ford, an evolutionary biologist who will be starting as an Assistant Professor in the Fisheries, Wildlife, & Conservation Biology Department at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities in Fall 2023. Kassandra's work examines how head and skull shape relates to diet and habitat occupancy, and how these patterns have evolved over time. Her PhD and postdoctoral work largely focused on tropical freshwater fishes, but she is looking forward to expanding her research to the native fishes in the Midwest and Great Lakes! She will also be overseeing the Ichthyology Collection at the Bell Museum and assisting with outreach events to connect scientists with the public. In this episode, we cover how Kassandra became interested in skull morphology, some recent projects on convergent evolution in freshwater electric fish, and Kassandra's plans for her new lab and work as the curator of the Ichthyology Collection at the Bell Museum. Main point: evolution is not linear If you'd like to reach Dr. Ford or learn more about her work, you can check out her website at kassandraford.com, find her on twitter @kassthefish, or send her an email at kassthefish@gmail.com. Also, read Dr. Ford's 2022 paper on convergent evolution in freshwater electric fish craniofacial morphology here!   Get in touch with us! The Fisheries Podcast is on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram: @FisheriesPod  Become a Patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/FisheriesPodcast Buy podcast shirts, hoodies, stickers, and more: https://teespring.com/stores/the-fisheries-podcast-fan-shop Thanks as always to Andrew Gialanella for the fantastic intro/outro music. The Fisheries Podcast is a completely independent podcast, not affiliated with a larger organization or entity. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by the podcast. The views expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. Views and opinions expressed by the hosts are those of that individual and do not necessarily reflect the view of any entity with those individuals are affiliated in other capacities (such as employers).

GuestRichard Anderson, AuthorOn Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/RichardAndersonAuthorHostsDr. Susan Byrne Stone, Therapist, Coach, Professor, Consultant, Talk Show Producer & Host and MentorOn ITSPmagazine | https://itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/dr-susan-birne-stoneMarco Ciappelli, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine [@ITSPmagazine] and Host of Redefining Society PodcastOn ITSPmagazine | https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/marco-ciappelli____________________________This Episode's SponsorsAre you interested in sponsoring an ITSPmagazine Channel?

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Lessons from Convergent Evolution for AI Alignment, published by Jan Kulveit on March 27, 2023 on LessWrong. Prelude: sharks, aliens, and AI If you go back far enough, the ancestors of sharks and dolphins look really different: But modern day sharks and dolphins have very similar body shapes: This is a case of convergent evolution: the process by which organisms with different origins develop similar features. Both sharks and dolphins needed speed and energy efficiency when moving in an environment governed by the laws of hydrodynamics, and so they converged on a pretty similar body shape. For us, this isn't very surprising, and doesn't require much knowledge of evolution: we have a good intuitive understanding of how water works, and humans knew a lot of the underlying maths for the laws of hydrodynamics before they understood anything about evolution. Starting from these laws, it isn't very surprising that sharks and dolphins ended up looking similar. But what if instead of starting with knowledge of hydrodynamics and then using that to explain the body shape of sharks and dolphins, we started with only knowledge of sharks' and dolphins' body shape, and tried to use that to explain underlying laws? Let's pretend we're alien scientists from an alternative universe, and for some weird reason we only have access to simplified 3D digital models of animals and some evolutionary history, but nothing about the laws of physics in the human/shark/dolphin universe. My guess is that these alien scientists would probably be able to uncover a decent amount of physics and a fair bit about the earth's environment, just by looking at cases of convergent evolution. If I'm right about this guess, then this could be pretty good news for alignment research. When it comes to thinking about AI, we're much closer to the epistemic position of the alien scientist: we either don't know the ‘physics' of life and intelligence at all, or are only just in the process of uncovering it. But cases of convergent evolution might help us to deduce deep selection pressures which apply to AI systems as well as biological ones. And if they do, we might be able to say more about what future AI systems might look like, or, if we are lucky, even use some of the selection pressures to shape what systems we get. Introduction This post argues that we should use cases of convergent evolution to look for deep selection pressures which extend to advanced AI systems. Convergent evolution is a potentially big deal for AI alignment work: Finding deep selection pressures could help us predict what advanced AI systems will be like. It seems plausible that some of the properties people in the alignment space assume are convergent don't actually extend to advanced AI. In this post, I'll: Share some basics of convergent evolution, Argue that this is a big deal for alignment work, and then Respond to the objection that biology is super different from AI. The basics of convergent evolution The body shape of sharks and dolphins is just one of very many examples of convergent evolution in biology. For example: Visual organs arose “possibly hundreds of times”. Multicellularity evolved independently probably at least 11 times. Some form of higher-level intelligence evolved multiple times - in primates, apes, corvids, cetaceans, elephants - and possibly many other cases, depending on thresholds and definitions. We can think about convergent evolution in terms of: a basin of convergent evolution, an attractor state(s), and selection pressure(s). The basin of convergent evolution is the region of the abstract space in which, once an organism enters the basin, the pull of the selection pressure brings the organism closer to the attractor state. In the case of sharks and dolphins: The basin of convergent evolution is hunting fish ...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Lessons from Convergent Evolution for AI Alignment, published by Jan Kulveit on March 27, 2023 on LessWrong. Prelude: sharks, aliens, and AI If you go back far enough, the ancestors of sharks and dolphins look really different: But modern day sharks and dolphins have very similar body shapes: This is a case of convergent evolution: the process by which organisms with different origins develop similar features. Both sharks and dolphins needed speed and energy efficiency when moving in an environment governed by the laws of hydrodynamics, and so they converged on a pretty similar body shape. For us, this isn't very surprising, and doesn't require much knowledge of evolution: we have a good intuitive understanding of how water works, and humans knew a lot of the underlying maths for the laws of hydrodynamics before they understood anything about evolution. Starting from these laws, it isn't very surprising that sharks and dolphins ended up looking similar. But what if instead of starting with knowledge of hydrodynamics and then using that to explain the body shape of sharks and dolphins, we started with only knowledge of sharks' and dolphins' body shape, and tried to use that to explain underlying laws? Let's pretend we're alien scientists from an alternative universe, and for some weird reason we only have access to simplified 3D digital models of animals and some evolutionary history, but nothing about the laws of physics in the human/shark/dolphin universe. My guess is that these alien scientists would probably be able to uncover a decent amount of physics and a fair bit about the earth's environment, just by looking at cases of convergent evolution. If I'm right about this guess, then this could be pretty good news for alignment research. When it comes to thinking about AI, we're much closer to the epistemic position of the alien scientist: we either don't know the ‘physics' of life and intelligence at all, or are only just in the process of uncovering it. But cases of convergent evolution might help us to deduce deep selection pressures which apply to AI systems as well as biological ones. And if they do, we might be able to say more about what future AI systems might look like, or, if we are lucky, even use some of the selection pressures to shape what systems we get. Introduction This post argues that we should use cases of convergent evolution to look for deep selection pressures which extend to advanced AI systems. Convergent evolution is a potentially big deal for AI alignment work: Finding deep selection pressures could help us predict what advanced AI systems will be like. It seems plausible that some of the properties people in the alignment space assume are convergent don't actually extend to advanced AI. In this post, I'll: Share some basics of convergent evolution, Argue that this is a big deal for alignment work, and then Respond to the objection that biology is super different from AI. The basics of convergent evolution The body shape of sharks and dolphins is just one of very many examples of convergent evolution in biology. For example: Visual organs arose “possibly hundreds of times”. Multicellularity evolved independently probably at least 11 times. Some form of higher-level intelligence evolved multiple times - in primates, apes, corvids, cetaceans, elephants - and possibly many other cases, depending on thresholds and definitions. We can think about convergent evolution in terms of: a basin of convergent evolution, an attractor state(s), and selection pressure(s). The basin of convergent evolution is the region of the abstract space in which, once an organism enters the basin, the pull of the selection pressure brings the organism closer to the attractor state. In the case of sharks and dolphins: The basin of convergent evolution is hunting fish ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Lessons from Convergent Evolution for AI Alignment, published by Jan Kulveit on March 27, 2023 on The AI Alignment Forum. Prelude: sharks, aliens, and AI If you go back far enough, the ancestors of sharks and dolphins look really different: But modern day sharks and dolphins have very similar body shapes: This is a case of convergent evolution: the process by which organisms with different origins develop similar features. Both sharks and dolphins needed speed and energy efficiency when moving in an environment governed by the laws of hydrodynamics, and so they converged on a pretty similar body shape. For us, this isn't very surprising, and doesn't require much knowledge of evolution: we have a good intuitive understanding of how water works, and humans knew a lot of the underlying maths for the laws of hydrodynamics before they understood anything about evolution. Starting from these laws, it isn't very surprising that sharks and dolphins ended up looking similar. But what if instead of starting with knowledge of hydrodynamics and then using that to explain the body shape of sharks and dolphins, we started with only knowledge of sharks' and dolphins' body shape, and tried to use that to explain underlying laws? Let's pretend we're alien scientists from an alternative universe, and for some weird reason we only have access to simplified 3D digital models of animals and some evolutionary history, but nothing about the laws of physics in the human/shark/dolphin universe. My guess is that these alien scientists would probably be able to uncover a decent amount of physics and a fair bit about the earth's environment, just by looking at cases of convergent evolution. If I'm right about this guess, then this could be pretty good news for alignment research. When it comes to thinking about AI, we're much closer to the epistemic position of the alien scientist: we either don't know the ‘physics' of life and intelligence at all, or are only just in the process of uncovering it. But cases of convergent evolution might help us to deduce deep selection pressures which apply to AI systems as well as biological ones. And if they do, we might be able to say more about what future AI systems might look like, or, if we are lucky, even use some of the selection pressures to shape what systems we get. Introduction This post argues that we should use cases of convergent evolution to look for deep selection pressures which extend to advanced AI systems. Convergent evolution is a potentially big deal for AI alignment work: Finding deep selection pressures could help us predict what advanced AI systems will be like. It seems plausible that some of the properties people in the alignment space assume are convergent don't actually extend to advanced AI. In this post, I'll: Share some basics of convergent evolution, Argue that this is a big deal for alignment work, and then Respond to the objection that biology is super different from AI. The basics of convergent evolution The body shape of sharks and dolphins is just one of very many examples of convergent evolution in biology. For example: Visual organs arose “possibly hundreds of times”. Multicellularity evolved independently probably at least 11 times. Some form of higher-level intelligence evolved multiple times - in primates, apes, corvids, cetaceans, elephants - and possibly many other cases, depending on thresholds and definitions. We can think about convergent evolution in terms of: a basin of convergent evolution, an attractor state(s), and selection pressure(s). The basin of convergent evolution is the region of the abstract space in which, once an organism enters the basin, the pull of the selection pressure brings the organism closer to the attractor state. In the case of sharks and dolphins: The basin of convergent evolution is ...

Forrest Galante is a world-renowned wildlife biologist, conservationist, and TV host. He is known for his work in high-risk wildlife biology fieldwork, where he focuses on animals on the brink of extinction. He founded the production company named Phantasticus Pictures. Phantasticus' mission is to create seminal wildlife and adventure programming with a purpose. Phantasticus is the only production company that actively finances conservation work in exchange for filming rights and the ability to bring exposure to causes. He has also gained popularity through his TV shows, including "Extinct or Alive" on Animal Planet, where he travels the globe searching for animals that have been deemed extinct, and "Naked and Afraid," where he scored one of the highest Primate Survival Ratings (PSRs) ever on the show. Forrest is a passionate advocate for conservation and uses his media platform to inspire and educate people about the importance of preserving our planet's natural wonders. Visit his website to learn more: https://www.forrestgalante.com https://www.phantasticuspictures.com https://www.discovery.com https://www.animalplanet.com Visit his Social Media Accounts: https://www.instagram.com/forrest.galante https://www.facebook.com/ForrestGalante https://twitter.com/ForrestGalante https://www.tiktok.com/@forrestgalante 0:00 - Intro 01:27 - Life Background 03:33 - The Start of the Journey 05:45 - Impact on People 06:51 - Shows 07:55 - Challenges in Wildlife 09:51 - Undiscovered Animals 12:41 - Preparing for Leads 13:49 - Funds and Sponsors 17:38 - Conservation 20:37 - Animal Translocation 22:00 - Colossal (Animal recreation) 25:11 - Oldest Animal 27:39 - Undiscovered Species 28:27 - Convergent Evolution 29:42 - David Attenborough 30:36 - organizing things 32:26 - Getting Leads 34:37 - Large animals 36:01 - Getting Wildlife Information 39:29 - Challenges for Getting Leads 43:27 - Life with Sharks 46:40 - Outro

Dr. Susan Finkbeiner is a lecturer of Biology at California State University of Long Beach, as well as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Chicago. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Entomology from Cornell University, and a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of California, and joins me on episode 385 […]

Dennis McCarthy is a writer, historian, and independent researcher who, in the process of tracing Hamlet's origin, ended up unwinding the entire legend of Shakespeare. Digging deeper into the history of Shakespeare's plays alongside collaborators June Schlueter and Michael Blanding, McCarthy uncovered evidence that all but two of Shakespeare's plays were written by Sir Thomas North, an English translator, lawyers, and justice of the peace. We dig into the evidence for the overlap between the two figures, unpack the myth of the lone genius, and seek to understand how the origin of ideas is driven by the sum total of the biogeographic connections that impinge on a given time and place. Support DemystifySci & Dennis McCarthy while getting learned: https://amzn.to/3xTPels Support the scientific revolution by joining our Patreon: https://bit.ly/3lcAasB Tell us what you think in the comments or on our Discord: https://discord.gg/MJzKT8CQub #genius #shakespeare #demystifysci (00:00) Go! (00:10:13) Of Politics and Plays (00:15:12) Are North and Shakespeare the same Person? (00:20:38) Myths of Lone Genius (00:25:24) Shifting Cultural Frames (00:34:43) An Idea is Fine, but a Theory is Too Much (00:39:57) How Many of the Plays are North's? (00:43:48) Biogeography & The Spread of Ideas (00:52:52) No True Origin Stories (01:02:44) How Much Did North Know? (01:12:30) Here Be Dragons (01:17:16) Artistic Explosions (01:24:30) Archetypal Tendencies (01:33:33) Convergent Evolution of Stories (01:40:34) Getting Published by Oxford (01:51:26) Does the Opposition Ever Chill? (01:54:51) Physics (02:11:26) The Source of Motivation (02:16:48) Close Check our short-films channel, @DemystifySci: https://www.youtube.com/c/DemystifyingScience AND our material science investigations of atomics, @MaterialAtomics https://www.youtube.com/@MaterialAtomics Join our mailing list https://bit.ly/3v3kz2S PODCAST INFO: Anastasia completed her PhD studying bioelectricity at Columbia University. When not talking to brilliant people or making movies, she spends her time painting, reading, and guiding backcountry excursions. Michael Shilo also did his PhD at Columbia studying the elastic properties of molecular water. When he's not in the film studio, he's exploring sound in music. They are both freelance professors at various universities. - Blog: http://DemystifySci.com/blog - RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/2be66934/podcast/rss - Donate: https://bit.ly/3wkPqaD - Swag: https://bit.ly/2PXdC2y SOCIAL: - Discord: https://discord.gg/MJzKT8CQub - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/DemystifySci - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DemystifySci/ - Twitter: https://twitter.com/DemystifySci MUSIC: -Shilo Delay: https://g.co/kgs/oty671

On today's ID the Future, Casey Luskin rebuts the oft-repeated claim that the human and chimp genomes are 98-99% similar and therefore surely resulted from Darwinian common descent. Luskin cites an article in the journal Science which describes the 98-99% claim as a myth. The original figure was derived from a single protein-to-protein comparison, but once you compare the entire genomes, and use more rigorous methods, the similarity drops several percentage points, and on one account, down into the mid-80s. Additionally, the chimp genomes used in the original comparison studies borrowed the human genome for scaffolding, thus artificially boosting the degree of similarity. What about supposed junk DNA similarities between human and chimp? Why would an intelligent designer put the Read More › Source

On this ID the Future from the vault, Andrew McDiarmid reads from Marcos Eberlin's fascinating book Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose. In this excerpt, the distinguished Brazilian scientist highlights the challenge the Venus flytrap poses for evolutionary theory. Dr. Eberlin describes the problem: The Venus flytrap, like all carnivorous plants, has no use for its insect-trapping function unless it also has an insect-digesting function. And vice versa. But the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection selects for current function, not potential future function. Unlike a designing intelligence, natural selection can't look into the future and plan in that way. So for natural selection to have selected these twin systems, they would somehow have had to evolve together. Read More › Source

On today's ID the Future host Andrew McDiarmid brings listeners a couple of fascinating recent articles from Evolution News & Science Today by David Coppedge. The first is “Animals Tune Behavior by  Lunar Cycle; but How?” The second article is “Darwin, We Have a Problem: Horse Teeth Are Not Less Evolved.” In the first, some ingenious molecular engineering crops up in widely divergent creatures, giving them some impressive abilities to read lunar cycles. The evolutionists' go-to explanation is “convergent evolution,” an incantation that fails to explain how something like this could have evolved even once, much less multiple separate times. And in the second, a much-beloved story of ruminant tooth evolution gets a kick in the teeth from a series Read More › Source

Crane Hawks of Central and South America and African Harrier-Hawks both have legs that bend forward and backward. Each bird's wonderfully peculiar leg adaptation is completely original - it evolved all on its own - even though the end result is the same. Scientists call this convergent evolution.More info and transcript at BirdNote.org. Want more BirdNote? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter. Sign up for BirdNote+ to get ad-free listening and other perks. BirdNote is a nonprofit. Your tax-deductible gift makes these shows possible.

And we're back! You, the listeners picked the episode today, and we have quite the episode! In what will be a 2 part series, we will be exploring the flying primate hypothesis, the idea that the large bats, flying foxes and fruit bats, were descended from primates! In this episode, we introduce the flying primate hypothesis, and introduce some of the drama and controversy surrounding it, and the supporting evidence.     4 part paper drama:  Pettigrew, J. 1991. Wings or Brain? Convergent Evolution in the Origins of Bats. Syst. Zool. (40)2: 199-216 Baker RJ, Novacek MJ, Simmons NB. 1991. On the monophyly of bats. Syst Zool. (40)2: 216-231 Simmons NB, Novacek MJ, Baker RJ. 1991. Approaches, Methods, and the Future of the Chiropteran Monophyly Controversy: A Reply to JD Pettigrew. Syst. Zool. (40)2: 239-243 Pettigre1 J. 1991. A fruitful, Wrong Hypothesis? Response to Baker, Novacek, and Simmons. Syst Zool (40)2: 231-239    

Let's talk about the Regional Fakes, Convergent Evolution, and more! Hidden Power is a Pokémon Podcast covering Pokémon News, Theories, Speculation, and Deep Dives. Hosted by @DustyGogoat , @LumiosePost & @SoulSilverArt DustyGogoat Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCerc0TvJ33bhEjtKyauXWpQ LumiosePost Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqwWrNcvoloB0_ZNBI4irng SoulSilverArt Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiOMGzGS-mK1vyPQ4h_kt5g DustyGogoat Twitter: https://twitter.com/dustygogoat LumiosePost Twitter: https://twitter.com/lumiosepost SoulSilverArt Twitter: https://twitter.com/soulsilverart --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/hidden-power/message

Link to bioRxiv paper: http://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2022.12.17.520895v1?rss=1 Authors: Wirthlin, M. E., Schmid, T. A., Elie, J. E., Zhang, X., Shvareva, V. A., Rakuljic, A., Ji, M. B., Bhat, N. S., Kaplow, I. M., Schäffer, D. E., Lawler, A. J., Annaldasula, S., Lim, B., Azim, E., Zoonomia Consortium,, Meyer, W. K., Yartsev, M. M., Pfenning, A. R. Abstract: Vocal learning, the ability to modify vocal behavior based on experience, is a convergently evolved trait in birds and mammals. To identify genomic elements associated with vocal learning, we integrated new experiments conducted in the brain of the Egyptian fruit bat with analyses of the genomes of 222 placental mammals. We first identified an anatomically specialized region of the bat motor cortex containing direct monosynaptic projections to laryngeal motoneurons. Using wireless neural recordings of this brain region in freely vocalizing bats, we verified that single neuron activity in this region relates to vocal production. We profiled the open chromatin of this vocal-motor region, which we used to train machine learning models to identify enhancers associated with vocal learning across mammals. We found 201 proteins and 45 candidate enhancers that display convergent evolution associated with vocal learning, many of which overlapped loci associated with human speech disability. One such locus contains the neurodevelopmental transcription factors TSHZ3 and ZNF536 and multiple candidate vocal learning-associated enhancers, suggesting the co-evolution of protein and regulatory sequences underlying vocal learning. Copy rights belong to original authors. Visit the link for more info Podcast created by Paper Player, LLC

What do Fossas, big cats and lemurs have in common? Everything and Nothing! The answer to this riddle lies in today's episode, where Ella and Alexis do an excellent impression of scientist-type-people and deep dive into the weird and wonderful world of convergent evolution. How are critters that look so similar, actually so different? Tune in to get nerdy! Plus, a Ready Pet Go, and more! Don't forget to join our discord here: and to buy our merch (REAL LIFE MERCH, SO EXCITING) here: maxfunstore.org!Send us YOUR pet stories (Ready, Pet, Go!) at comfortcreatures@maximumfun.org and don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe! Plus, follow us on social media: @Ccreaturespod on Twitter and @comfortcreaturespodcast on Instagram!

Simon Conway Morris on Convergent Evolution & Creative Mass Extinctions https://pca.st/e8bm323n Para a escritora Chelsea Conaboy, instinto materno é, cientificamente, uma ideia falsa https://www.estadao.com.br/saude/para-a-escritora-chelsea-conaboy-instinto-materno-e-cientificamente-uma-ideia-falsa/ meu canal no Koo https://www.kooapp.com/profile/renedepaula meu mastodon: rené de paula jr (@renedepaula@c.im) https://c.im/@renedepaula meu “twitter” no telegram: https://t.me/renedepaulajr meu twitter http://twitter.com/renedepaula radinho no telegram: http://t.me/radinhodepilha aqui está o link para a ... Read more

Complete, EXTENSIVE show notes at PatreonRate and review the show at Apple PodcastsBrowse my newsletter, original art, prints, merchandise, etc.How much of natural history is inevitable, and how much is the result of chance? Do mass extinctions slow the evolution of the biosphere, or speed it up? These are two of the six great questions of biology explored by Simon Conway Morris, famous evolutionary theorist, in his latest book. From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution (Templeton Press) is a meticulously researched, cheeky and inspiring romp through both the living and extinct worlds, challenging a handful of widespread beliefs and offering provocative alternatives. Conway Morris is a character, even amidst the strange ranks of his fellow natural history researchers, and his arguments bear careful scrutiny. As someone drawn to mavericks and weirdos and enamored by contrarian perspectives, I can't help but like his work — and reading him forced me to reconsider some of my assumptions even as it validated other long-held hunches.In this episode, we talk about his book and what his work implies — and I get fanboy on him and assault him with a bunch of lengthy questions like Tim Murphy in Jurassic Park. Strap in for a deep dive into evolution's laziness, complexity and process, cooption and repurposing of novel traits, great puzzles in prehistory, ancient food webs, evolutionary radiation, symbiosis, flowers, death, and more… And when you're done, go read his book and dig a dozen more related episodes on Patreon! Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

To get us warmed up on this first episode of our long overdue new series/season, Tony talks to Matt Fitzgerald, an endurance coach, nutritionist and prolific author about physiology and running, the joys of exercise, the ABCs of fitness, and the 80/20 philosophy of training that puts the emphasis on keeping most workouts easy. Matt also explains the pitfall of Superhumanization in regard to East African running dominance, the reality of the Group Effect within sports, how what biologists call Convergent Evolution resulted in the proven 80/20 method, discusses his Coaches of Color program, and talks about his long battle with Long Covid. In part 2, around the 1-hour mark, Tony describes how an overdue new challenge was inspired in part by conversation with Matt about his book How Bad Do You Want It?. On October 1, Tony will be hiking rather than running, and hopefully within the 10-hour cut-off, the Cat's Tail Trail Marathon in support of the Palace for Life foundation's annual south London Marathon March. In the final section,Tony checks in with Jim Daly of the FYP Podcast in the midst of the main march on Sep 24, and plays an excerpt from his own appearance on the FYP Podcast discussing his personal challenge in detail. Please support Tony's efforts, if only to offer encouragement, at https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/tonyfletcher64 The Palace for Life foundation is at https://www.palaceforlife.org/The FYP Podcast is at https://fypfanzine.uk/podcast.htmlMatt can be found at: https://www.8020endurance.com/ and https://mattfitzgerald.org/Matt's podcast can be found at https://www.8020endurance.com/80-20-podcast/The Coaches of Color Initiative is at https://8020foundation.org/initiatives/The Running Public interviews with Matt Fitzgerald can be found here; on the most recent one he talks in greater depth about Long Covid and also about his new book, Race Pace.Questions/comments/suggestions? Email Onestepbeyond@ijamming.net.Find One Step Beyond at:Instagram is OneStepBeyondPodcastFacebook is One Step Beyond with Tony FletcherTwitter is OneStepBeyondP1Theme song is 'Yes Men' by The Dear Boys. Listen in full here.Logo by Mark Lerner. Photo taken at Arte Sumepaz in Cundinimarca, Colombia. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/onestepbeyond. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The weekend flew by as we rap about the recent events. We talk Unity games CEO disparaging developers, the dangers of unionizing under corporate identities, and how Ohio politicians are working against their own constituents. Here we go again. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/khary-robertson/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/khary-robertson/support

On today's ID the future, German paleoentomologist Günter Bechly and host Casey Luskin unpack a recent article of Bechly's at Evolution News, “Species Pairs: A New Challenge to Darwinists.” There Bechly describes a challenge to evolutionary theory that thus far has been given little attention, namely “the morphological similarity of modern species pairs.” He says this “poses a severe problem for Darwinian theory “because it implies that the macroevolutionary processes that allegedly were at work and common during all periods of Earth history and in all groups of organisms, apparently were totally absent in the origins of all of the millions of living species.” Or as he puts it in a follow-up article on the same topic, “Among the 350,000 Read More › Source

In this episode, Kevin and Steve explore parallel worlds. Multiverses are all the rage, so we go over the varied kinds: Sliding Doors, Alternate History, Simulated Reality/Fictionalized Universes, Fantasy visions/tales, traditional Multiverses, Convergent Evolution (pure and contamination), and Isekai, of course. We also discuss what multiverse games should do. We hope you enjoy and take care of yourselves!Interact with us on Twitter:https://twitter.com/RoImperfectionSend us a comment or question:roimperfection@gmail.comVisit our website:https://roimperfection.com/

Hosts Phil Hawkins and Azaii Calderon Muniz dive into the concept of evolution and how it relates to the MCAT. In this episode, you will learn, what you should know about evolution for the MCAT, how you may be tested on the MCAT, and the key concepts that you should know. Key terms for this topic include Convergent Evolution, Analylugus Evolution, Homologous Evolution, and Coevolution. Plus learn how avocados are completely dependent on humans to survive, how feathers decrease survivability, but increase reproduction, and how a species of flying squirrel reflects florescent pink. 0:00 Intro 1:37 Darwinian Fitness 3:12 Fisherian Selection 7:01 Sexual Dimorphism 10:08 External Pressures of Reproduction 15:40 Speciation 19:22 Convergent Evolution 24:27 Analogous Evolution 26:00 Homologous Evolution 28:30 Coevolutuion 38:19 Evolution and the MCAT About Jack Westin: The team at Jack Westin is dedicated to a single goal: Giving students the highest quality learning resources. Jack Westin understand that students can't crush the MCAT without the perfect blend of critical thinking and fundamental science knowledge. To this end, Jack Westin is dedicated to providing students with cutting edge comprehensive tools, courses, and practice materials. The Jack Westin MCAT science and CARS courses, taught by the world's best and most engaging MCAT instructors, are designed to do more than just teach students the MCAT—it supercharges studying and encourages lifelong learning. Want to learn more? Shoot us a text at 415-805-6292 Free Resources: https://jackwestin.com Live Education Sessions: https://jackwestin.com/sessions Courses: https://jackwestin.com/courses Tutoring: https://jackwestin.com/services/live-online-mcat-tutoring Follow Us On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com

On today's ID the Future, radio host Hank Hanegraaff continues his conversation with Animal Algorithms author Eric Cassell. Here they look at more insects with strikingly sophisticated innate behavior, suggesting intricate algorithms encoded into their brains from birth, all of which cannot be effectively explained by reference to Darwinian evolution. Cassell and Hanegraaff touch on wasp martial arts; termite altruism and termite architectural skills, including a cooling system that has inspired a human design; interdependent social caste systems that enhance fitness; and spiderweb architecture and the extraordinary properties of spider silk, including the different kinds of silk and the spider's ability to employ different types precisely tailored for different needs. Cassell looks at evolutionary explanations for these innate abilities that Read More › Source

Jeffrey Tucker, Founder of the Brownstone Institute joins us for an in-depth conversation on issues of passing import, like societal cohesion, trust in authority figures, the remote possibility of honesty and dignity in any of the people perched atop our governmental structure. Y'know, the small stuff. Tune in! Enlightentainment does not get much more fundamental! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/messytimes/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/messytimes/support

The problem of so-called convergent evolution for assuming common ancestry from biological similarity.

The role of incongruent data and the hypothesis of common design as two barriers to assuming the shared biological similarities support the theory of universal common ancestry.

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Jonathan Losos about convergent evolution. They begin by defining convergent evolution and what the role of the environment is for convergent evolution. They discuss the importance of phenotypes and behaviors, speciation, and adaptive radiation. They mention how evolution can work fast using examples from nature. They also talk about evolution in the lab, the LTEE, and E. Coli. They also discuss the future of evolution, life on other planets, and many other topics.  Jonathan Losos is an evolutionary ecologist who studies rapid evolution, ecology, and phylogenetics. He has his PhD from the University of California and taught at Harvard University for over 10 years. Currently, he is a professor at Washington University (St. Louis) and is the founder of the Living Earth Collaborative. He is the recipient of the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal, the Theodosius Dobzhansky Prize, the Edward O. Wilson Naturalist Award, and the David Starr Jordan Prize. His book, Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution, can be found here. You can find his work here. 

On this ID the Future, geologist Casey Luskin discusses biogeography and the problems it poses for the idea of universal common descent. To make it work, evolutionists have to propose, for instance, that old world monkeys rafted across the Atlantic from Africa to South America on a natural raft. Really? That's some raft. And how did the monkeys not starve to death? Or die of thirst? They couldn't drink salty ocean water, after all. And talk about a genetic bottleneck! That's just one of several problems Luskin raises with the idea that all species gradually evolved from a universal common ancestor. In his conversation with host Emily Reeves, he also touches on the problem of convergence, as when two creatures Read More › Source

Today's ID the Future is Part 2 of a recent live webinar with Eric Cassell fielding questions about his new book, Animal Algorithms: Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts. He and host Casey Luskin explore the engineering wonders of web-spinning spiders and their extraordinary silk, and the challenge of transforming solitary insects into social insects (with their complex and interdependent caste systems) via a blind step-by-step evolutionary process, and the many thousands of genetic changes required. What does Cassell consider the best explanation? He invokes design theorist William Dembski's work with No Free Lunch theorems to argue that blind processes are a no-go for explaining their origin. From there Luskin opens the webinar up to questions from the Read More › Source

Then evolutionists say similarity among unrelated creatures is because of “convergent evolution.” This isn't science—just imagination.

About RachelRachel Stephens is a Senior Analyst with RedMonk, a developer-focused industry analyst firm. RedMonk focuses on how practitioners drive technological adoption. Her research covers a broad range of developer and infrastructure products, with a particular focus on emerging growth technologies and markets. (But not crypto. Please don't talk to her about NFTs.)Before joining RedMonk, Rachel worked as a database administrator and financial analyst. Rachel holds an MBA from Colorado State University and a BA in Finance from the University of Colorado.Links: RedMonk: https://redmonk.com/ Great analysis: https://redmonk.com/rstephens/2021/09/30/a-new-strategy-r2/ “Convergent Evolution of CDNs and Clouds”: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2020/06/10/convergent-evolution-cdns-cloud/ “Everything is Securities Fraud?”: https://cafe.com/stay-tuned/everything-is-securities-fraud-with-matt-levine/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/rstephensme TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by my friends at ThinkstCanary. Most companies find out way too late that they've been breached. ThinkstCanary changes this and I love how they do it. Deploy canaries and canary tokens in minutes and then forget about them. What's great is the attackers tip their hand by touching them, giving you one alert, when it matters. I use it myself and I only remember this when I get the weekly update with a “we're still here, so you're aware” from them. It's glorious! There is zero admin overhead  to this, there are effectively no false positives unless I do something foolish. Canaries are deployed and loved on all seven continents. You can check out what people are saying at canary.love. And, their Kub config canary token is new and completely free as well. You can do an awful lot without paying them a dime, which is one of the things I love about them. It is useful stuff and not an, “ohh, I wish I had money.” It is speculator! Take a look; that's canary.love because it's genuinely rare to find a security product that people talk about in terms of love. It really is a unique thing to see. Canary.love. Thank you to ThinkstCanary for their support of my ridiculous, ridiculous non-sense.   Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats v-u-l-t-r.com slash screaming.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn. The last time I spoke to Rachel Stephens over at RedMonkwas in December of 2019. Well, on this podcast anyway; we might have exchanged conversational tidbits here and there at some point since then. But really, if we look around the world there's nothing that's materially different than it was today from December in 2019, except, oh, that's right everything. Rachel Stephens, you're still a senior analyst at RedMonk, which hey, in this day and age, longevity at a company is something that is almost enough to occasion comment on its own. Thanks for coming back for another round, I appreciate it.Rachel: Oh, I'm so happy to be here, and it's exciting to talk about the state of the world a few years later than the last time we talked. But yeah, it's been a hell of a couple years.Corey: Really has, but rather than rehashing pandemic stuff because I feel like unless people have been living in a cave for the last couple of years—because we've all been living in caves for the last couple of years—they know what's up with that. What's new in your world? What has changed for you aside from all of this in the past couple of years working in one of the most thankless of all jobs, an analyst in the cloud computing industry?Rachel: Well, the job stuff is all excellent and I've had wonderful time working at RedMonk. So, RedMonk overall is an analyst firm that is focused on helping people understand technology trends, particularly from the view of the developer or the practitioner. So, helping to understand how the people who are using technologies are actually driving their overall adoption. And so there has been all kinds of interesting things that have happened in that score in the last couple of years. We've seen a lot of interesting trends, lots of fun things to look at in the space and it's been a lot.On a personal side, like a week into lockdown I found out that I was pregnant, so I went through all of locking down and the heart of the pandemic pregnant. I had my maternity leave earlier this year and came back and so excited to be back in. But it's also just been a lot to catch up on in the space as you come back from leave which I'm sure you are well familiar with.Corey: Yes, I did the same thing, slightly differently timed. My second daughter Josephine was born at the end of September. When did your kiddo arrive on the scene to a world of masked strangers?Rachel: So, I have an older daughter who just turned four, and then my youngest is coming up on his first birthday. He was born in December.Corey: Excellent. It sounds like our kids are basically the same age, in both directions. And from my perspective, at least looking back, what advice would I give someone for having a baby in a pandemic? It distills down to ‘don't,' just because it changes so much, it's no longer a trivial thing to have a grandparent come out and spend time with the kid. It's the constant… drumbeat of is this over? Is this not over?And that manifested a bunch of different ways. And I'm glad that I got the opportunity to take some time off to spend time with my family during that timeframe, but at the same time, it would've great if there were options such as not being stuck at home with every rambunctious—at the time—three-year-old as I went through that entire joy of having the kid.Rachel: Yeah. No, for the longest time, my thing was like, okay, like, there's no amount of money you could pay me to go back to middle school. I would never do it. And my new high bar there is no amount of money that you could pay me to go back to April 2020. That was the hardest month of my entire life was getting through that, like, first trimester, both parents at home, toddler at home, nowhere to go, no one to help. That was a [BLEEP] hard month. [laugh] that was bad.Corey: Oh, my God, yes, and we don't talk about this because we're basically communicating with people on social media, and everyone feels bad looking at social media because they're comparing their blooper reel with everyone else's highlights. And it feels odd on some level to complain about things like that. And let's be very clear as a man, I wind up in society getting lauded for even deigning to mention that I have children, whereas when mothers wind up talking about anything even slightly negative it's, “Oh, you sound like a bad mom.” And it is just one of the most abhorrent things out there in the world, I suppose. It's a strange inverted thing but one of the things that surprised me the most when I was expecting my first kid was looking at the different parenting forums, and the difference in tone was palpable where on the dad forums, everyone is super supportive and you got this dude it's great. You're fine. You're doing your best.Sure, these the occasional, “I gave my toddler beer and now people yell at me,” and it's, “What is wrong with you asshole?” But everyone else is mostly sane and doing their best. Whereas a lot of the ‘mommy' forums seem to bias more toward being relatively dismissive other people's parenting choices. And I understand I'm stereotyping wildly, not all forums, not all people, et cetera, et cetera, but it really was an interesting window into an area that as a stereotypical white man world, I don't see a lot of places I hang out with that are traditionally male that are overwhelmingly supportive in quite the same way. It was really an eye-opening experience for me.Rachel: I think you hit on some really important trends. One of the things that I have struggled with is—so I came into RedMonk—I've had a Twitter account forever, and it was always just, like, my personal Twitter account until I started working at RedMonk five years ago. And then all of a sudden I'm tweeting in technical and work capacities as well. And finding that balance initially was always a challenge.But then finding that balance again after having kids was very different because I would always—it was, kind of, mix of my life and also what I'm seeing in the industry and what I'm working on and this mix of things. And once you started tweeting about kids, it very much changes the potential perception that people have of who you are, what you're doing. I know this is just a mommy blogger kind of thing.You have to be really cognizant of that balance and making sure that you continue to put yourself in a place where you can still be your authentic self, but you really as a mom in the workspace and especially in tech have to be cognizant of not leaning too far into that. Because it can really damage your credibility with some audiences which is a super unfortunate thing, but also something I've learned just, like, I have to be really careful about how much mom stuff I share on Twitter.Corey: It's bizarre to me that we have to shade aspects of ourselves like this. And I don't know what the answer is. It's a weird thing that I never thought about before until suddenly I find that, oh, I'm a parent. I guess I should actually pay attention to this thing now. And it's one of those once you see it you can't unsee it things and it becomes strange and interesting and also more than a little sad in some respects.Rachel: I think there are some signs that we are getting to a better place, but it's a hard road for parents I think, and moms, in particular, working moms, all kinds of challenges out there. But anyways, it's one of those ones that is nice because love having my kids as a break, but sometimes Mondays come and it's such a relief to come back to work after a weekend with kids. Kids are a lot of work. And so it has brought elements of joy to my personal life, but it has also brought renewed elements of joy to my work life as really being able to lean into that side of myself. So, it's been a good year.Corey: Now that I have a second kid, I'm keenly aware of why parents are always very reluctant to wind up—the good parents at least to say, “Oh yeah, I have X number of kids, but that one's my favorite.” And I understand now why my mom always said with my brother and I that, “I can't stand either one of you.” And I get that now. Looking at the children of cloud services it's like, which one is my favorite?Well, I can't stand any of them, but the one that I hate the most is the Managed NAT Gateway because of its horrible pricing. In fact, anything involving bandwidth pricing in this industry tends to be horrifying, annoying, ill-behaved, and very hard to discipline. Which is why I think it's probably time we talk a little bit about egress charges in cloud providers.You had a great analysis of Cloudflare's R2, which is named after a robot in Star Wars and is apparently also the name of their S3 competitor, once it launches. Again, this is a pre-announcement, yeah, I could write blog posts that claim anything; the proof is really going to be in the pudding. Tell me more about, I guess, what you noticed from that announcement and what drove you to, “Ah, I have thoughts on this?”Rachel: So, I think it's an interesting announcement for several reasons. I think one of them is that it makes their existing offering really compelling when you start to add in that object store to something like the CDN, or to their edge functions which is called their Workers platform. And so, if you start to combine some of those functionalities together with a better object storage story, it can make their existing offering a lot more compelling which I think is an interesting aspect of this.I think one of the aspects that is probably gotten a lot more of the traction though is their lack of egress pricing. So, I think that's really what took everyone's imaginations by storm is what does the world look like when we are not charging egress pricing on object storage?Corey: What I find interesting is that when this came out first, a lot of AWS fans got very defensive over it, which I found very odd because their egress charges are indefensible from my point of view. And their response was, “Well, if you look at how a lot of the data access patterns work this isn't as big of a deal as it looks like,” and you're right. If I have a whole bunch of objects living in an object store, and a whole bunch of people each grab one of those objects this won't help me in any meaningful sense.But if I have one object that a bunch of people grab, well, suddenly we're having a different conversation. And on some level, it turns into an interesting question of what differentiates this with their existing CDN-style approach. From my perspective, this is where the object actually lives rather than just a cache that is going to expire. And that is transformative in a bunch of different ways, but my, I guess, admittedly overstated analysis for some use cases was okay, I store a petabyte in AWS and use it with and without this thing. Great, the answer came out to something like 51 or $52,000 in egress charges versus zero on Cloudflare. That's an interesting perspective to take. And the orders of magnitude in difference are eye-popping assuming that it works as advertised, which is always the caveat.Rachel: Yeah. I remember there was a RedMonk conversation with one of the cloud vendors set us up with a client conversation that want to, kind of, showcase their products kind of thing. And it was a movie studio and they walked us through what they architecturally have to do when they drop a trailer. If you think about that thing from this use case where all of a sudden you have videos that are all going out globally at the same time, and everybody wants to watch it and you're serving it over and over, that's a super interesting and compelling use case and very different from a cost perspective.Corey: You'll notice the video streaming services all do business with something that is not AWS for what they stream to end-users from. Netflix has its own Open Connect project that effectively acts as their own homebuilt CDN that they partner with providers to put in their various environments. There are a bunch of providers that focus specifically on this. But if you do the math for the Netflix story at retail pricing—let's be clear at large scale, no one pays retail pricing for anything, but okay—even assuming that you're within hailing distance of the same universe as retail pricing; you don't have to watch too many hours of Netflix before the data egress charges cost more than you're paying a month than subscription. And I have it on good authority—read as from their annual reports—that a much larger expense for Netflix than their cloud and technology and R&D expenses is their content expenses.They're making a lot of original content. They're licensing an awful lot of content, and that's way more expensive than providing it to folks. They have to have a better economic model. They need to be able to make a profit of some kind on streaming things to people. And with the way that all the major cloud providers wind up pricing this stuff, it's not tenable. There has to be a better answer.Rachel: So, Netflix calls to mind an interesting antidote that has gone around the industry which is who can become each other faster? Can HBO become Netflix faster, or can Netflix become HBO faster? So, can you build out that technology infrastructure side, or can you build out that content side? And I think what you're talking to with their content costs speaks to that story in terms of where people are investing and trying to actually make dents in their strategic outlays.I think a similar concept is actually at play when we talk about cloud and CDN. We do have this interesting piece from my coworker, Steve O'Grady, and he called it “Convergent Evolution of CDNs and Clouds.” And they originally evolved along separate paths where CDNs were designed to do this edge-caching scenario, and they had the core compute and all of the things that go around it happening in the cloud.And I think we've seen in recent years both of them starting to grow towards each other where CDNs are starting to look a lot more cloud-like, and we're seeing clouds trying to look more CDN-like. And I think this announcement in particular is very interesting when you think about what's happening in the CDN space and what it actually means for where CDNs are headed.Corey: It's an interesting model in that if we take a look at all of the existing cloud providers they had some other business that funded the incredible expense outlay that it took to build them. For example, Amazon was a company that started off selling books and soon expanded to selling everything else, and then expanded to putting ads in all of their search portals, including in AWS and eroding customer trust.Google wound up basically making all of their money by showing people ads and also killing Google Reader. And of course, Microsoft has been a software company for a lot longer than they've been a cloud provider, and given their security lapses in Azure recently is the question of whether they'll continue to be taken seriously as a cloud provider.But what makes Cloudflare interesting from this approach is they start it from the outside in of building out the edge before building regions or anything like that. And for a lot of use cases that works super well, in theory. In practice, well, we've never seen it before. I'm curious to see how it goes. Obviously, they're telling great stories about how they envision this working out in the future. I don't know how accurate it's going to be—show, don't tell—but I can at least acknowledge that the possibility is definitely there.Rachel: I think there's a lot of unanswered questions at this point, like, will you be able to have zero egress fees, and edge-like latencies, and global distribution, and have that all make sense and actually perform the way that the customer expects? I think that's still to be seen. I think one of the things that we have watched with interest is this rise of—I think for lack of a better word techno-nationalism where we are starting to see enclaves of where people want technology to be residing, where they want things to be sourced from, all of these interesting things.And so having this global network of storage flies in the face of some of those trends where people are building more and more enclaves of we're going to go big and global. I think that's interesting and I think data residency in this global world will be an interesting question.Corey: It also gets into the idea of what is the data that's going to live there. Because the idea of data residency, yes, that is important, but where that generally tends to matter the most is things like databases or customer information. Not the thing that we're putting out on the internet for anyone who wants to, to be able to download, which has historically been where CDNs are aiming things.Yes, of course, they can restrict it to people with logins and the rest, but that type of object storage in my experience is not usually subject to heavy regulation around data residency. We'll see because I get the sense that this is the direction Cloudflare is attempting to go in, and it's really interesting to see how it works. I'm curious to know what their stories are around, okay, you have a global network. That's great. Can I stipulate which areas my data can live within or not?At some point, it's going to need to happen if they want to look at regulated entities, but not everyone has to start with that either. So, it really just depends on what their game plan is on this. I like the fact that they're willing to do this. I like the fact they're willing to be as transparent as they are about their contempt for AWS's egress fees. And yes, of course, they're a competitor.They're going to wind up smacking competition like this, but I find it refreshing because there is no defense for what they're saying, their math is right. Their approach to what customers experience from AWS in terms of egress fees is correct. And all of the defensiveness at, well, you know, no one pays retail price for this, yeah, but they see it on the website when they're doing back-of-the-envelope math, and they're not going to engage with you under the expectation that you're going to give them a 98% discount.So, figure out what the story is. And it's like beating my head against the wall. I also want to be fair. These networks are very hard to build, and there's a tremendous amount of investment. The AWS network is clearly magic in some respects just because having worked in data centers myself, the things that I see that I'm able to do between various EC2 instances at full network line rate would not have been possible in the data centers that I worked within.So, there's something going on that is magic and that's great. And I understand that it's expensive, but they've done a terrible job of messaging that. It just feels like, oh, bandwidth in is free because, you know, that's how it works. Sending it out, ooh, that's going to cost you X and their entire positioning and philosophy around it just feels unnecessary.Rachel: That's super interesting. And I think that also speaks to one of the questions that is still an open concern for what happens to Cloudflare if this is wildly successful. Which, based off of people's excitement levels at this point, it's seems like it's very potentially going to be successful. And what does this mean for the level of investment that they're going to have to make in their own infrastructure and network and order to actually be able to serve all of this?Corey: The thing that I find curious is that in a couple of comment threads on Hacker News and on Twitter, Cloudflare's CEO, Matthew Prince—who's always been extremely accessible as far as executives of giant cloud companies go—has said that at their scale and by which they he's referring to Cloudflare, and he says, “I assume that Amazon can probably get at least as decent economics on bandwidth pricing as we can,” which is a gross understatement because Amazon will spend years fighting over 50 cents.Great, but what's interesting is that he refers to bandwidth at that scale as being much closer to a fixed cost than something that's a marginal cost for everything that a customer uses. The way that companies buy and sell bandwidth back and forth is complex, but he's right. It is effectively a fixed monthly fee for a link and you can use as much or as little of that link as you want. 95th percentile billing aficionados, please don't email me.But by and large, that's the way to think about it. You pay for the size of the pipe, not how much water flows through it. And as long as you can keep the links going without saturating them to the point where more data can't fit through at a reasonable amount of time, your cost don't change. So, yeah, if there's a bunch of excitement they'll have to expand the links, but that's generally a fixed cost as opposed to a marginal cost per gigabyte.That's not how they think about it. There's a whole translation layer that's an economic model. And according to their public filings, they have something like a 77% gross margin which tells me that, okay, they are not in fact losing money on bandwidth even now where they generally don't charge on a metered basis until you're on the Cloudflare Enterprise Plan.Rachel: Yeah. I think it's going to just be really interesting to watch. I'm definitely interested to see what happens as they open this up, and like, 11 9s of availability feels like a lot of availabilities. It's just the engineering of this, the economics of this it feels like there's a lot of open questions that I'm excited to watch.Corey: You're onto my favorite part of this. So, the idea of 11 9s because it sounds ludicrous. That is well within the boundaries of probability of things such as, yeah, it is likely that gravity is going to stop working than it is that's going to lose data. How can you guarantee that? Generally speaking, although S3 has always been extremely tight-lipped about how it works under the hood, other systems have not been.And it looks an awful lot like the idea of Reed-Solomon erasure coding, where for those of us who spent time downloading large files of questionable legality due to copyright law and whatnot off of Usenet, they had the idea of parity files where they'd take these giant media files up—they're Linux ISOs; of course they are—and you'd slice them into a bunch of pieces and then generate parity files as well.So, you would wind up downloading the let's say 80 RAR files and, oh, three of them were corrupt, each parity file could wind up swapping in so as long as you had enough that added up to 80, any of those could wind up restoring the data that had been corrupted. That is almost certainly what is happening at the large object storage scale. Which is great, we're going to break this thing into a whole bunch of chunks. Let's say here is a file you've uploaded or an object.We're going to break this into a hundred chunks—let's say arbitrarily—and any 80 of those chunks can be used to reconstitute the entire file. And then you start looking at where you place them and okay, what are the odds of simultaneous drive failure in these however many locations? And that's how you get that astronomical number. It doesn't mean what people think of does. The S3 offers 11 9s of durability on their storage classes, including the One Zone storage class.Which is a single availability zone instead of something that's an entire region, which means that they're not calculating disaster recovery failure scenarios into that durability number. Which is fascinating because it's far, like, you're going to have all the buildings within the same office park burn down than it is all of the buildings within a hundred square miles burn down, but those numbers remain the same.There's a lot of assumptions baked into that and it makes for an impressive talking point. I just hear it as, oh yeah, you're a real object-store. That's how I see it. There's a lot that's yet to be explained or understood. And I think that I'm going to be going up one side and down the other as soon as this exists in the real world and I'm looking forward to seeing it. I'm just a little skeptical because it has been preannounced.The important part for me is even the idea that they can announce something like this and not be sued for securities fraud tells me that it is at least theoretically economically possible that they could be telling the truth on this. And that alone speaks volumes to just how out-of-bounds it tends to be in the context of giant cloud customers.Rachel: I mean, if you read Matt Levine, “Everything is Securities Fraud?“ so, I don't know how much we want to get excited about that.Corey: Absolutely. A huge fan of his work. Corey: You know its important to me that people learn how to use the cloud effectively. Thats why I'm so glad that Cloud Academy is sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense. They're a great way to build in demand tech skills the way that, well personally, I learn best which I learn by doing not by reading. They have live cloud labs that you can run in real environments that aren't going to blow up your own bill—I can't stress how important that is. Visit cloudacademy.com/corey. Thats C-O-R-E-Y, don't drop the “E.” Use Corey as a promo-code as well. You're going to get a bunch of discounts on it with a lifetime deal—the price will not go up. It is limited time, they assured me this is not one of those things that is going to wind up being a rug pull scenario, oh no no. Talk to them, tell me what you think. Visit: cloudacademy.com/corey,  C-O-R-E-Y and tell them that I sent you!Corey: So, we've talked a fair bit about what data egress looks like. What else have you been focusing on? What have you found that is fun, and exciting, and catches your eye in this incredibly broad industry lately?Rachel: Oh, there's all kinds of exciting things. One of the pieces of research that's been on my back-burner, usually I do it early summer, and it is—due to a variety of factors—still in my pipeline, but I always do a piece of research about base infrastructure pricing. And it's an annual piece of looking about what are all of the cloud providers doing in regards to their pricing on that core aspect of compute, and storage, and memory.And what does that look like over time, and what does that look like across providers? And it is absolutely impossible to get an apples-to-apples comparison over time and across providers. It just can't actually be done. But we do our best [laugh] and then caveat the hell out of it from there. But that's the piece of research that's most on my backlog right now and one that I'm working on.Corey: I think that there's a lot of question around the idea of what is the cost of a compute unit—or something like that—between providers? The idea of if I have this configuration will cost me more on cloud provider a or cloud provider B, my pet working theory is that whenever people ask for analyses like that—or a number of others, to be perfectly frank with you—what they're really looking for is confirmation bias to go in the direction that they wanted to go in already. I have yet to see a single scenario where people are trying to decide between cloud providers and they say, “That one because it's going to be 10% less.” I haven't seen it. That said I am, of course, at a very particular area of the industry. Have you seen it?Rachel: I have not seen it. I think users find it interesting because it's always interesting to look at trends over time. And in particular, with this analysis, it's interesting to watch the number of providers narrow and then widen back out because we've been doing this since 2012. So, we used to have [unintelligible 00:26:24] and HPE used to be in there. So, like, we used to—CenturyLink. We used to have this broader list of cloud providers that we considered that would narrow down to this doesn't really count anymore.And now why do you need to back out? It's like, okay, Oracle Cloud you're in, Alibaba, Tencent, like, let's look at you. And so, like, it's interesting to just watch the providers in the mix shift over time which I think is interesting. And I think one of just the broad trends that is interesting is early years of this, there was steep competition on price, and that leveled off for solid three, four years.We've seen some degree of competitiveness reemerge with competitors like Oracle in particular. So, those broad-brush trends are interesting. The specifics of the pricing if you're doing 10% difference kind of things I think you're missing the point of the analysis largely, but it's interesting to look at what's happening in the industry overall.Corey: If you were to ask me to set up a simple web app, if there is such a thing, and tell you in advance what it was going to cost to host, and I can get it accurate within 20%, I am on fire in terms of both analysis and often dumb luck just because it is so difficult to answer the question. Getting back to our earlier conversational topic, let's say I put CloudFront, Amazon's sorry excuse for a CDN, in front of it which is probably the closest competitor they have to Cloudflare as a CDN, what'll it cost me per gigabyte? Well, that's a fascinating question. The answer comes down to where are you visiting it from? Depending where on the planet, people who are viewing my website, or using my web app are sitting, the cost per gigabyte will vary between eight-and-a-half cents—retail pricing—and fourteen cents. That's a fairly wide margin and there's no way to predict that in advance for most use cases. It's the big open-ended question.And people build out their environments and they want to know they're making a rational decision and that their provider is not charging three times more than their competitor is for the exact same thing, but as long as it's within a certain level of confidence interval, that makes sense.Rachel: Yeah, and I think the other thing that's interesting about this analysis and one of the reasons that it's a frustrating analysis for me, in particular, is that I feel like that base compute is actually not where most of the cloud providers are actually competing anymore. So, like, it was definitely the interesting story early in cloud.I think very clearly not the focus area for most of us now. It has moved up an abstraction layer. It's moved to manage services. It has moved to other areas of their product portfolio. So, it's still useful. It's good to know. But I think that the broader portfolio of the cloud providers is definitely more the story than this individual price point.Corey: That is an interesting story because I believe it, and it speaks to the aspirational version of where a lot of companies see themselves going. And then in practice, I see companies talking like this constantly, and then I look in their environment and say, “Okay, you're basically spending 70% of your entire cloud bill on EC2 instances, running—it's a bunch of VMs that sit there.”And as much as they love to talk about the future and how other things are being considered and how their—use of machine learning in the rest, and Kubernetes, of course, a lot of this stuff all distills down to, yeah, it runs in software. It sits on top of EC2 instances and that's what you get billed for. At re:Invent it's always interesting and sad at the same time that they don't give EC2 nearly enough attention or stage time because it's not interesting, despite it being a majority of AWS bill.Rachel: I think that's a fantastic point, well made.Corey: I'll take it even one step further—and this is one where I think is almost a messaging failure on some level—Google Cloud offers sustained use discounts which apparently they don't know how to talk about appropriately, but it's genius. The way this works is if you run a VM for more than in a certain number of hours in a month, the entire month is now charged for that VM at a less than retail rate because you've been using it in a sustained way.All you have to do to capture that is don't turn it off. You know, what everyone's doing already. And sure if you commit to usage on it you get a deeper discount, but what I like about this is if you buy some reserved instances is or you buy some committed use discounting, great, you'll save more money, but okay, here's a $20 million buy. You should click the button on, people are terrified to click at that button because I don't usually get to approve dollar figure spend with multiple commas in them. That's kind of scary. So, people hem and they haw and they wait six months. This is maybe not as superior mathematically, but it's definitely an easier sell psychologically, and they just don't talk about it.It's what people say they care about when people actually do are worlds apart. And the thing that continually astounds me because I didn't expect it, but it's obvious in hindsight that when it comes to cloud economics it's more about psychology than it is about math.Rachel: I think one of the things that, having come from the finance world into the analyst world, and so I definitely have a particular point of view, but one of the things that was hardest for me when I worked in finance was not the absolute dollar amount of anything but the variability of it. So, if I knew what to expect I could work with that and we could make it work. It was when things varied in unexpected ways that it was a lot more challenging.And so I think one of the things that when people talked about, like, this shift to cloud and the move to cloud, and everyone is like, “Oh, we're moving things from the balance sheet to the income statement.” And everyone talked about that like it's a big deal. For some parts of the organization that is a big deal, but for a lot of the organization, the shift that matters is the shift from a fixed cost to a variable cost because that lack of predictability makes a lot of people's jobs, a lot more difficult.Corey: The thing that I always find fun is a thought exercise is okay, let's take a look at any given cloud company's cloud bill for the last 18 to 36 months and add all of that up. Great, take that big giant number and add 20% to it. If you could magically go back in time and offer that larger number to them as here's your cloud bill and all of your usage for the next 18 to 36 months. Here you go. Buy this instead.And the cloud providers laugh at me and they say, “Who in the world would agree to that deal?” And my answer is, “Almost everyone.” Because at the company's scale it's not like the individual developer response of, “Oh, my God, I just spent how much money? I've got to eat this month.” Companies are used to absorbing those things. It's fine. It's just a, “We didn't predict this. We didn't plan for this. What does this do to our projections, our budget, et cetera?”If you can offer them certainty and find some way to do it, they will jump at that. Most of my projects are not about make the bill lower, even though that is what is believed, in some cases by people working on these projects internally at these companies. It's about making it understandable. It's about making it predictable, it's about understanding when you see a big spike one month. What project drove that?Spoiler, it's almost always the data science team because that's what they do, but that's neither here nor there. Please don't send me letters. But yeah, it's about understanding what is going on, and that understanding and being able to predict it is super hard when you're looking at usage-based pricing.Rachel: Exactly.Corey: I want to thank you for taking so much time to speak with me. If people want to hear more about your thoughts, your observations, et cetera, where can they find you?Rachel: Probably the easiest way to get in touch with me is on Twitter, which is @rstephensme that's R-S-T-E-P-H-E-N-S-M-E.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:34:08]. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.Rachel: Thanks for having me. This was great.Corey: Rachel Stephens, senior analyst at RedMonk. I'm Cloud Economist, Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment, angrily defending your least favorite child, which is some horrifying cloud service you have launched during the pandemic.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

The Spooky Bunch might be gone, but this week we're discussing a topic that CJ finds terrifying! This week, The Birdy Bunch Podcast discusses everything about Convergent Evolution. In addition, CJ discusses a bat bridge in Kentucky, Matt shares some informative conservation videos, and Brittany features a creature that convergently evolved to a hedgehog. Make sure to follow us on social media at @TheBirdyBunchPodcast for more updates!   Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro        02:22 - Creature Feature             04:09 - Current Events      18:08 - Convergent Evolution       42:08 - Outro         Thank you to Sarah Dunlap - for designing our logo, Elliot Heye - for being our Writing and Production Assistant, and Conner Wittman - for producing our music. Visit www.thebirdybunchpodcast.com for more information.

Science Fiction often shows us aliens who look much like humans, and suggest this is a result of convergent evolution to useful traits. But is such convergence to the human form or mind likely with extraterrestrial life? Start listening with a 30-day Audible trial and your first audiobook is free. Visit http://www.audible.com/isaac or text "isaac" to 500-500. Watch the Video Version: https://youtu.be/C7ikC9v9ZDI Visit our Website: http://www.isaacarthur.net Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/IsaacArthur Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1583992725237264/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Isaac_A_Arthur on Twitter and RT our future content. SFIA Discord Server: https://discord.gg/53GAShE Credits: Convergent Evolution Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur Episode 313, October 21, 2021 Written by: Curt Hartung Isaac Arthur Produced & Narrated by Isaac Arthur Editors: Jerry Guern https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxgArWbEhZg Keith Blockus Cover Art: Jakub Grygier https://www.artstation.com/jakub_grygier Graphics: Jeremy Jozwik https://www.artstation.com/zeuxis_of_losdiajana Legiontech Studios Sergio Botero https://www.artstation.com/sboterod?fref=gc Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator

Science Fiction often shows us aliens who look much like humans, and suggest this is a result of convergent evolution to useful traits. But is such convergence to the human form or mind likely with extraterrestrial life? Start listening with a 30-day Audible trial and your first audiobook is free. Visit http://www.audible.com/isaac or text "isaac" to 500-500. Watch the Video Version: https://youtu.be/C7ikC9v9ZDI Visit our Website: http://www.isaacarthur.net Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/IsaacArthur Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1583992725237264/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Isaac_A_Arthur on Twitter and RT our future content. SFIA Discord Server: https://discord.gg/53GAShE Credits: Convergent Evolution Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur Episode 313, October 21, 2021 Written by: Curt Hartung Isaac Arthur Produced & Narrated by Isaac Arthur Editors: Jerry Guern https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxgArWbEhZg Keith Blockus Cover Art: Jakub Grygier https://www.artstation.com/jakub_grygier Graphics: Jeremy Jozwik https://www.artstation.com/zeuxis_of_losdiajana Legiontech Studios Sergio Botero https://www.artstation.com/sboterod?fref=gc Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator

Have you ever wondered how completely different animals, for some reason evolve very similar characteristics even though they are in a different area of the world, from different ancestors and lineages? Adam Thorn explains.

(Jul 29, 2021) Animals that resemble each other may not be closely related. Sometimes the setting shapes their bodies more than their ancestry. Manatees may look like whales or walruses, but that is only because they adapted to the marine environment in a similar way. Martha Foley and Curt stager talk about convergent evolution.

(Jul 29, 2021) Animals that resemble each other may not be closely related. Sometimes the setting shapes their bodies more than their ancestry. Manatees may look like whales or walruses, but that is only because they adapted to the marine environment in a similar way. Martha Foley and Curt stager talk about convergent evolution.

There are so many similarities seen between swifts and swallows that they were originally classified as the same family. But what makes them so similar? Convergent Evolution! These birds are shaped by their environment. Since they live in the same area and do the same things, eating the same food/insects, they are seen to be […]

Abbey and Madison practice a bit of ecotheology in this special episode of Bristlecone Firesides in an attempt to demonstrate that Christianity is a natural religion. The Earth lives a continual pattern of change that enables the ever regeneration of life. From the seasons to the water cycle, the Earth forever in a state or process of change. This pattern of order, disorder, reorder is the pattern of the Gospel — Life, Death, and Resurrection. The magic in the universe is that dead things become the grounding for new life. In the life and death of Jesus, this becomes a Resurrection Journey. By re-grounding the good news of the Gospel in natural Earth processes, we see that the Gospel is bigger than any Church and is a force of nature. And that Faith is much more about saying “yes” to this Journey and experiencing our membership in the Family of Things Links: Book of Nature An Early Resurrection by Adam Miller Why the Church is as True as the Gospel by Eugene England Convergent Evolution Go to the Limits of Your Longing by Rilke Wild Geese by Mary Oliver The post 08: Nature's Gospel and the Way of Resurrection appeared first on Bristlecone Firesides.

w/ Eldin

Learn about why animals keep evolving into crabs in a principle called “carcinization,” whether water is actually wet, and if there’s any truth behind the old adage "feed a cold, starve a fever." Animals keep evolving into crabs by Grant Currin Delbert, C. (2020, October 19). Animals Keep Evolving Into Crabs, Which Is Somewhat Disturbing. Popular Mechanics; Popular Mechanics. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a34389129/crab-evolution-carcinization/  ‌Crustaceans. (2015). Mesa.Edu.Au. http://www.mesa.edu.au/crustaceans/crustaceans05a.asp  PBS Eons. (2020). Why Do Things Keep Evolving Into Crabs? [YouTube Video]. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvfR3XLXPvw  ‌Keiler, J., Wirkner, C. S., & Richter, S. (2017). One hundred years of carcinization – the evolution of the crab-like habitus in Anomura (Arthropoda: Crustacea). Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 121(1), 200–222. https://doi.org/10.1093/biolinnean/blw031 Is Water Wet? Listener question answered by Ashley Hamer and Cody Gough Original episode: https://www.curiositydaily.com/is-water-wet-neutron-star-weight-how-to-keep-exper/ Is There Any Truth Behind the Old Adage "Feed a Cold, Starve a Fever"? by Joanie Faletto Fischetti, M. (2014, January 3). Fact or Fiction?: Feed a Cold, Starve a Fever. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-feed-a-cold/  Wang, A., Huen, S. C., Luan, H. H., Yu, S., Zhang, C., Gallezot, J.-D., Booth, C. J., & Medzhitov, R. (2016). Opposing Effects of Fasting Metabolism on Tissue Tolerance in Bacterial and Viral Inflammation. Cell, 166(6), 1512-1525.e12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2016.07.026  Subscribe to Curiosity Daily to learn something new every day with Ashley Hamer and Natalia Reagan (filling in for Cody Gough). You can also listen to our podcast as part of your Alexa Flash Briefing; Amazon smart speakers users, click/tap “enable” here: https://www.amazon.com/Curiosity-com-Curiosity-Daily-from/dp/B07CP17DJY  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Land acknowledgements:Jordan recorded this week's episode from the occupied land of the Shawnee people, the Adena culture, the Osage nation, and the Hopewell tradition–also known as Athens, Ohio.March recorded this week’s episode from Chicago, the homeland of the Council of Three Fires (the Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi) as well as the Peoria and Kickapoo nations.Sources:Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Joneshttps://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blogs/on-exhibit-posts/the-first-whale-pakicetushttps://www.scienceworld.ca/stories/evolution-flight/https://www.livescience.com/convergent-evolution.htmlCredits:Follow us on Twitter @ilsicpodcast https://twitter.com/ilsicpodcastPodcasting by March Washelesky and Jordan PazolIntro music and editing by Jordan PazolThumbnail art by Reagan PazolProverb - “If you can imagine something, it will be.” N.K. Jemisin

Learn about how patient O became patient zero, what it takes for a species to evolve twice, and how pesky fruit flies keep getting into your garbage. Please nominate Curiosity Daily for Best Technology & Science Podcast in the 2020 Discover Pods Awards! It's free and only takes a minute. Thanks so much! https://awards.discoverpods.com/nominate/ It's "Patient O," Not "Patient Zero" by Ashley Hamer Researchers Clear “Patient Zero” From AIDS Origin Story. (2016, October 26). NPR.Org. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/10/26/498876985/mystery-solved-how-hiv-came-to-the-u-s  ‌Worobey, M., Watts, T. D., McKay, R. A., Suchard, M. A., Granade, T., Teuwen, D. E., Koblin, B. A., Heneine, W., Lemey, P., & Jaffe, H. W. (2016). 1970s and ‘Patient 0’ HIV-1 genomes illuminate early HIV/AIDS history in North America. Nature, 539(7627), 98–101. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature19827  With Iterative Evolution, a Species Can Evolve TWICE by Cameron Duke Brigit Katz. (2019, May 13). How Evolution Brought a Flightless Bird Back From Extinction. Smithsonian Magazine; Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-evolution-brought-flightless-bird-back-extinction-180972166/ Mancini, M. (2019, May 31). Iterative Evolution: Did the Aldabra Rail Evolve Twice? HowStuffWorks. https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/evolution/iterative-evolution.htm Hume, J. P., & Martill, D. (2019). Repeated evolution of flightlessness in Dryolimnas rails (Aves: Rallidae) after extinction and recolonization on Aldabra. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 186(3), 666–672. https://doi.org/10.1093/zoolinnean/zlz018 How do fruitflies keep getting into my house? by Ashley Hamer (Listener question from Julien) Binns, C. (2012, November 18). Where Do Fruit Flies Come From? Livescience.Com; Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/32251-where-do-fruit-flies-come-from.html  ‌Drosophila melanogaster. (2020). Animal Diversity Web. https://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Drosophila_melanogaster/  ‌Fruit Flies | Entomology. (2017). Uky.Edu. https://entomology.ca.uky.edu/ef621  ‌van Breugel, F., & Dickinson, M. H. (2014). Plume-Tracking Behavior of Flying Drosophila Emerges from a Set of Distinct Sensory-Motor Reflexes. Current Biology, 24(3), 274–286. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.12.023  ‌Markow, T. A. (2015). The secret lives of Drosophila flies. ELife, 4. https://doi.org/10.7554/elife.06793  Subscribe to Curiosity Daily to learn something new every day with Ashley Hamer and Natalia Reagan (filling in for Cody Gough). You can also listen to our podcast as part of your Alexa Flash Briefing; Amazon smart speakers users, click/tap “enable” here: https://www.amazon.com/Curiosity-com-Curiosity-Daily-from/dp/B07CP17DJY  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Gabriel Ugueto. “Chamosaurine Phylogeny.” 2016. Similarly to how social media collapsed high and low culture into a sinuous, middling unibrow; it made room for the fringe to graze the m… https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/08/19/convergent-evolution/

Gabriel Ugueto. “Chamosaurine Phylogeny.” 2016. Similarly to how social media collapsed high and low culture into a sinuous, middling unibrow; it made room for the fringe to graze the m… https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/08/19/convergent-evolution/

Welcome to ASMR TirarADeguello.   Today, Doctor Andrew Michaels shares a secret with you that is known by only a handful of people in the world. Those few who are entrusted with this knowledge never speak of it. They merely hold it in trust should the security of the planet ever have need of it.   If you are interested in additional ASMR content, you may view our library of videos at youtube.com/tiraradeguello.   Please remember to subscribe if you haven't already, and consider reviewing this podcast on iTunes and sharing it with your friends and family. It really does help. You can also support this podcast by joining Doctor Andrew Michaels on the Tingles app. Just go to tingles.app.link/tiraradeguello. If you would like merch, you can buy TirarADeguello shirts and mugs at https://teespring.com/stores/tiraradeguellos-store. To support this podcast directly, please visit our PayPal. The theme song, Atlantis, is by Jason Shaw of audionautix.com, and is used by permission.  Correspondence, including questions or requests, may be sent to TirarADeguello@gmail.com.  You can also join us on Twitter.   On behalf of Dr. Andrew Michaels, thank you.

The gang discuss two papers that describe unique animal fossils which have been known but haven’t (until now) been formally described. The first is “Collins Monster”, a lobopod from the Cambrian, and the second is a fossil dolphin which is similar to an orca. Meanwhile, James rehabilitates some dolphins, Amanda saw a thing, and Curt witnesses true beauty.   Up-Goer Five (Amanda Version):  Today our friends talk about a strange animal with cute legs and big parts that go to a point, and a really big animal that used to have hair that looks like an animal with no legs but actually does have legs. Both of these things have been known about for a long time, but no one gave them a name. They were used to figure out the family tree of animals, but never had a name. These papers give them a name, which is a very important thing. The strange animal with cute legs and big parts that go to a point is very close to other strange animals with cute legs that we have talked about before. The paper does put them in a different box than we are used to seeing, which we talk about a little and find maybe a little strange. The big animal that used to have hair and looks like an animal that has no legs but it actually has legs looks like it is close to one animal that had hair and looks like it has no legs, which shows that these things show up many times as time goes on. They also show some family trees, but only one is in the paper, the rest are in the other stuff on the space where people store all their stuff today.      References:  Caron, Jean‐Bernard, and Cédric Aria. "The Collins’ monster, a spinous suspension‐feeding lobopodian from the Cambrian Burgess Shale of British Columbia." Palaeontology (2020).   Boessenecker, Robert W., et al. "Convergent Evolution of Swimming Adaptations in Modern Whales Revealed by a Large Macrophagous Dolphin from the Oligocene of South Carolina." Current Biology (2020). 

Link to bioRxiv paper: http://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.05.16.099010v1?rss=1 Authors: Bloch, S., Hagio, H., Thomas, M., Heuze, A., Hermel, J.-M., Lasserre, E., Colin, I., Saka, K., Affaticati, P., Jenett, A., Kawakami, K., Yamamoto, N., Yamamoto, K. Abstract: Ascending visual projections similar to the mammalian thalamocortical pathway are found in a wide range of vertebrate species, but their homologous relationship is debated. To get better insights into their evolutionary origin, we examined the developmental origin of a visual relay nucleus in zebrafish (a teleost fish). Similarly to the tectofugal visual thalamic nuclei in amniotes, the lateral part of the preglomerular complex (PG) in teleosts receives tectal information and projects to the pallium. However, our cell lineage study reveals that the majority of PG cells are derived from the midbrain, not from the forebrain. We also demonstrate that the PG projection neurons develop gradually until juvenile stage, unlike the thalamic projection neurons. Our data suggest that teleost PG is not homologous to the amniote thalamus and that thalamocortical-like projections can evolve from a non-forebrain cell population. Thus, sensory pathways in vertebrate brains exhibit a surprising degree of variation. Copy rights belong to original authors. Visit the link for more info

Welcome to the Sci-Fi Roundtable podcast, the show for fans of all things science fiction and fantasy. Shane Thomas, and Damon Ballard are joined by Ken Goudsward to discuss convergent evolution. Subscribe today and please take a moment to share this episode and leave a review. Follow us on Twitter @SFRTpodcast. Scifi Roundtable, the writer’s group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/scifiroundtable/ Reading the Roundtable of Science Fiction and Fantasy, the reader’s group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/330870181072264/ Ken Goudsward is a writer and publisher based in northern Canada, specializing in sci-fi, dark comedy, and vampires. He enjoys studying ancient mysteries and speculating on philosophical quandaries. http://dimensionfold.com/books/     Damon Ballard can be found at all these places: Website: http://dcballard.com/  Blog: https://ascensionnovel.wixsite.com/scribblings  FB Author Page: https://www.facebook.com/D.C.BALLARD.Author/  FB Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AscensionNovel/  Amazon ebook: http://mybook.to/ChaosFountain   Amazon Print: http://mybook.to/ChaosFountainPrnt  Barnes&Nobel ebook: http://bit.ly/CF_BandN  Kobo ebook: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/chaos-fountain  Smashwords ebook: http://bit.ly/CF_Smash    Shane Thomas’s series Anki Legacies, his comedic serialized metafiction Parodia, world building articles, TONS of book reviews, book club chat videos with authors, free multi-author mashup stories, and a conspiracy theory blog all live in: www.ScienceFantasyHub.com   Edited by Jon Cronshaw Jon Cronshaw is the author of the Wasteland series, Blind Gambit, and The Ravenglass Chronicles. Jon's Author Diary podcast is at www.joncronshaw.libsyn.com. Website: joncronshaw.com. His non-fiction books The Stoic Writer and Podcasting for Authors are out now on Kindle and Paperback.

(Feb 20, 2020) Animals that resemble each other may not be closely related. Sometimes the setting shapes their bodies more than their ancestry. Manatees may look like whales or walruses, but that is only because they adapted to the marine environment in a similar way. Martha Foley and Curt stager talk about convergent evolution.

In the final episode of Season 4, we talk with Todd Barkman, Professor of Biology at Western Michigan University. Todd earned his PhD in Botany at the University of Texas at Austin with Beryl Simpson, and went on to a postdoc position at Penn State with Claude dePamphilis. He started his lab at Western Michigan in 2000, where his group studies the systematics and evolution of plants, as well as the molecular evolution of biosynthetic pathways. We talk with Todd about his lab’s publication, “Convergent evolution of caffeine in plants by co-option of exapted ancestral enzymes” which was published in PNAS in 2016. Todd tells us the story behind the paper, how flowering plants evolved to make caffeine, and how he became interested in this topic. Todd describes what it is like to work at an “R2, or Research 2” institution such as Western Michigan, where it is important to succeed as both an instructor and as a researcher, and where resources for the latter are modest compared to “R1” institutions. We talk about the pros and cons of this environment, and how to accomplish research goals with limited funds and time. Todd talks about the importance and limitations of collaborations and closes with advice and encouragement for early career scientists considering a career at an R2 or R3 institution. He also advocates for a less deliberate and more open-ended style of experimental planning, and acknowledges the power of serendipity in his work. Huang, R., O’Donnell, A. J., Barboline, J. J., & Barkman, T. J. (2016). Convergent evolution of caffeine in plants by co-option of exapted ancestral enzymes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(38), 10613-10618. Taproot S4E1: Identifying the Principle Components: Gender Dimorphism in Flowers and Consciously Building a Happy and Rewarding Career in Science http://bit.ly/38QivyY Todd's email: todd.barkman@wmich.edu Twitter Handles @ehaswell @baxtertwi @taprootpodcast

With all the incredible diversity of life, it’s fascinating how often evolution repeats itself. The fossil record and the modern world are full of signs of this pattern of convergent evolution – similar pressures drive organisms to similar features and lifestyles. In this episode, we’ll talk about what exactly convergent evolution entails, share some of our favorite examples, and talk about how things can get a bit confusing. Did we mention your favorite example of convergent evolution? In the news: rhino DNA, baby sea turtles, sea snake breathing, and dinosaur temperatures. Time markers: Intro & Announcements: 00:00:00 News: 00:04:00 Main discussion, Part 1: 00:32:30 Main discussion, Part 2: 01:02:00 Patron question: 01:35:30 Check out our blog for bonus info and pictures: http://commondescentpodcast.wordpress.com/ The Common Descent Store is open! Get merch! http://zazzle.com/common_descent Follow and Support us on: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/commondescentpodcast Twitter: https://twitter.com/CommonDescentPC Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/commondescentpodcast/ PodBean: https://commondescentpodcast.podbean.com/ iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-common-descent-podcast/id1207586509?mt=2 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCePRXHEnZmTGum2r1l2mduw The Intro and Outro music is “On the Origin of Species” by Protodome. More music like this at http://ocremix.org. Muscial Interludes are "Professor Umlaut" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Real nice and quick banger Intro to Carnivory and the Piney Woods of the North Carolina Acidic Coastal Plain, plus a cameo by the mysterious and elusive Serpentine Milkweed from Northern California Coast Ranges

(Apr 4, 2019) We think of evolution as moving in a linear progression from the sea to the land. But some creatures, such as whales and dolphins, clearly adapted to the land, then returned to the sea. Dr. Curt Stager and Martha Foley talk about convergent evolution.

I mention convergent evolution occasionally, but what is it really? This week we learn about what it is and some animals that demonstrate it. Thanks to Richard E. and Llewelly for their suggestions this week! Jaguars and leopards look so similar I’m not 100% sure this picture actually shows one of each: The adorable sucker-footed bat from Madagascar: The equally adorable TOTALLY UNRELATED disk-winged bat from South America: Metriorhynchus looked a lot like a whale even though it was a crocodile ancestor: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about some animals that represent convergent evolution. That’s a term that I mention every so often, so it’s time to really dig into it and see what it’s all about. We’ll start with animals that are fairly closely related, then work our way backwards to those that aren’t related at all. Basically, when unrelated organisms develop similar form, structure, or functions as each other, that’s called convergent evolution. One simple example is bats and birds. They’re not related, but both can fly using forelimbs that have been modified into wings. This topic idea was sparked by an idea from Richard E., who suggested an episode about evolution and how it doesn’t “improve” anything, just adapts. That’s an important distinction. Evolution is a reactive force, not a proactive. Sometimes we use terms like advanced to describe certain animals, and primitive to describe others with traits that haven’t changed in a long time. That implies that some animals are “better” than others, or better adapted. In actuality, one trait is not better or worse than another, as long as both traits help the animal survive and thrive. If an animal has traits that haven’t changed in millions of years but it’s still doing well, it’s as adapted as it needs to be. An animal that’s extremely specialized to an environment can sometimes be much more vulnerable to environmental change than a more generalized animal, too. From a scientific point of view, while it may look like species become more advanced as time goes on, all it means is that a lot of animals have evolved to occupy specific ecological niches. One example Richard gives is the panda, which we talked about in episode 42 about strange bears. The panda is an extremely specialized animal. It’s a bear that is no longer a carnivore, for one thing, and not only does it not eat meat, or hardly any meat since it will eat small animals and bird eggs when it finds them, it mostly just eats one type of plant. That plant, of course, is bamboo, which is low in nutrients. The panda has adapted in all sorts of ways to be able to digest bamboo, and one of the most obvious adaptations is what looks like a sixth toe on its forefeet. It’s not a toe but a projecting sesamoid bone that acts as a toe and helps the panda grasp bamboo. But the panda’s sixth toe evolved because of selective pressures, because pandas born with the toe were able to eat more bamboo and were therefore healthier and more likely to have babies than pandas without the toe. Richard also mentioned the similarities between jaguars and leopards. They are related, but not closely. The jaguar is more closely related to the leopard than to the lion, but the leopard is more closely related to the lion than to the jaguar. That’s not confusing at all. But both cats look very similar, tawny or golden in color with black spots called rosettes, and both frequently demonstrate an all-black coloring called melanism. But the jaguar lives in the Americas while the leopard lives in Asia and parts of Africa. Why do they look so similar? In this case, a big part of the similarities between jaguars and leopards are that they share a common ancestor that lived around three and a half million years ago. The jaguar migrated from Africa into Europe and then into North America on the land bridge Beringia,

If you happen to see a baby hummingbird take a closer look. You probably are looking at a Hummingbird Moth. Tune in to find out all about a moth that looks and acts like a hummingbird. Our sources for this episode include: Summer Hummer http://bugoftheweek.com/blog/2015/7/13/summer-hummer-hummingbird-moth-ihemaris-thysbei National Moth Week http://nationalmothweek.org Convergent Evolution https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/convergent_evolution.htm Is it rare to see a hummingbird moth? http://animals.mom.me/rare-see-hummingbird-moth-4660.html

In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you learn something new in just a few minutes:  These Are the Differences Between Men and Women Narcissists Whatever You Do, Don't Put Coffee Grounds in Your Garden This Is How Often You Should Clean Your Keyboard Amazon Echo users: say "Alexa, play my flash briefing" to learn something new in just a few minutes every day when you activate the Curiosity Daily Flash Briefing skill: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Learn about pets, how they evolved along with us and how they can help treat our ailments in today's episode Today We Cover Boris Levinson Hippotherapy Genetic similarities between humans and dogs Electrode therapy The science-practise gap We Read, Listened and Watched Panda’s falling video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLQiAqc1MI8 Joe Rogan Podcast: http://jrefan.com/the-joe-rogan-experience-episode-965-with-robert-sapolsky/ Podcast about doctor with aspergers: https://www.npr.org/2016/07/07/485138695/invisibilia-an-experiment-helps-one-woman-see-the-world-in-a-new-way The Letdown: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7320300/ Bullshit “Numbers” episode = Season 4, episode 9 Bullshit “Dolphins” episode = Season 6, episode 4 Equine therapy: https://www.youtube.com/embed/FakQVg0Ck34 Also, if you want, here are the buzzfeed lists/quizzes we talked about: https://www.buzzfeed.com/elainawahl/are-you-a-cat-person-or-dog-person?utm_term=.xmBnrR9LW#.uu1K1kqvd https://www.buzzfeed.com/jennifertonti/purr-fect-products-for-your-inner-cat-lady?utm_term=.ii75Zg1dx#.mm1voL1nq https://www.buzzfeed.com/sarahhan/gifts-for-anyone-who-wishes-they-had-a-dog?utm_term=.cxVGa8EXw#.rjRe28Oql https://www.buzzfeed.com/elainawahl/23-things-you-need-if-youre-obsessed-with-your-dog?utm_term=.wbbdqxenV#.uh3A8X5nl If you’re still reading this description, you might be the kind of person who likes to write as well. Would you like to write to us and tell us how it went? Socials Twitter: @whoknewwedidnt Facebook: https://facebook.com/whoknewwedidnt/ Instagram: @whoknewwedidnt Email: whoknewwedidnt@gmail.com   Money Minute Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/whoknewwedidnt  

Panel:  Ward Bell John Papa Joe Eames Charles Max Wood In the episode of Adventures in Angular the panel discusses Deploying Angular. Specifically, the panel talks about the complexities of the development server and CLI. Each panelist talks about their own paths on how they might deploy, the uses of guides, projects, tools or technologies and strategies they use to help the production. This is a great episode to grasp different approaches and tools to deploying Angular. In particular, we dive pretty deep on: •Is it easy Joe? Did you figure it out? Difficulties, Effort CLI is different in Production ng-doc. io Staging environments Deploying with Rails Using the web packer gem Fall back routes Web servers for deployment? Guides CLI as a crutch Reducing cost with Circle CI  Building a web server Schematics Docker File In person deploying…rather then someone else? Checking-In Code Ship, Git Lab Azure Comfortability to implement Investing time to learn how to do this! Building a docker image If you are not using VS Code, how long does it take? •and much more! Links:  Code Ship Git Lab Circle CI Azure Docker schwarty.com Picks: Charles •Stranger Things 2 Avengers: Infinity War  Joe •NG Conf. Knit Wit  Convergent Evolution  Ward Novel - The Shadow of the Wind  John Try other Technologies  

Panel:  Ward Bell John Papa Joe Eames Charles Max Wood In the episode of Adventures in Angular the panel discusses Deploying Angular. Specifically, the panel talks about the complexities of the development server and CLI. Each panelist talks about their own paths on how they might deploy, the uses of guides, projects, tools or technologies and strategies they use to help the production. This is a great episode to grasp different approaches and tools to deploying Angular. In particular, we dive pretty deep on: •Is it easy Joe? Did you figure it out? Difficulties, Effort CLI is different in Production ng-doc. io Staging environments Deploying with Rails Using the web packer gem Fall back routes Web servers for deployment? Guides CLI as a crutch Reducing cost with Circle CI  Building a web server Schematics Docker File In person deploying…rather then someone else? Checking-In Code Ship, Git Lab Azure Comfortability to implement Investing time to learn how to do this! Building a docker image If you are not using VS Code, how long does it take? •and much more! Links:  Code Ship Git Lab Circle CI Azure Docker schwarty.com Picks: Charles •Stranger Things 2 Avengers: Infinity War  Joe •NG Conf. Knit Wit  Convergent Evolution  Ward Novel - The Shadow of the Wind  John Try other Technologies  

Panel:  Ward Bell John Papa Joe Eames Charles Max Wood In the episode of Adventures in Angular the panel discusses Deploying Angular. Specifically, the panel talks about the complexities of the development server and CLI. Each panelist talks about their own paths on how they might deploy, the uses of guides, projects, tools or technologies and strategies they use to help the production. This is a great episode to grasp different approaches and tools to deploying Angular. In particular, we dive pretty deep on: •Is it easy Joe? Did you figure it out? Difficulties, Effort CLI is different in Production ng-doc. io Staging environments Deploying with Rails Using the web packer gem Fall back routes Web servers for deployment? Guides CLI as a crutch Reducing cost with Circle CI  Building a web server Schematics Docker File In person deploying…rather then someone else? Checking-In Code Ship, Git Lab Azure Comfortability to implement Investing time to learn how to do this! Building a docker image If you are not using VS Code, how long does it take? •and much more! Links:  Code Ship Git Lab Circle CI Azure Docker schwarty.com Picks: Charles •Stranger Things 2 Avengers: Infinity War  Joe •NG Conf. Knit Wit  Convergent Evolution  Ward Novel - The Shadow of the Wind  John Try other Technologies  

A recent paper about birds that get worse at flying when they move to islands, and a decent puzzle about balls in a bucket. Music: Bensound.com

Convergent evolution has shown us that nature will find similar solutions under similar conditions. So too might it be on other planets. Life might not look that much different that it does here

The audio only version of our first reading group discussion of "Convergent Evolution: Limited Forms Most Beautiful". Video can be seen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuHMgKuxho0

We'll hear how a scanning technique can home in on the biochemical signature of prostate cancer in this Naked Scientists NewsFlash, along with how bats and dolphins share genes for echolocation and why barefoot runners have a smoother ride. Plus, the discovery of a chemical signal that slows nerve degeneration.

In this week's Urban Legend segment, Warren discusses the recent discovery of sabre-toothed deer, which once lurked among regular grazing deer and pounced upon unsuspecting herbivores. A key aspect of their predatory habits (how this was learned from fossils is not revealed) was to keep their heads in the grass to conceal their enormous teeth, a strategy that may or may not be shared by certain mimics of female fireflies. You can probably imagine that given all the discussion of neck width, the origin of the species, and the mechanics of hybrid sex, we're going to need more than one episode to fully treat this topic. If so, your imagination is in luck! We'll have more sabre teeth in next week's episode. If you would rather we don't, you can email us (maskedman@limitedappeal.net). It won't make a difference, but it might make John annoyed in a way that is entertaining to some of us. Theme music courtesy of General Patton vs. The X-Ecutioners and Ipecac Recordings.

Lachlan Whatmore explains Convergent Evolution, Kachina Allen explores Ventriloquism, Marc West announces two of this years Ig Nobel prizes News by Ian Woolf, Presented by Jacqui Pfeffer, Produced by Matt Clarke