April's readings
Sociology
- The ideology is not the movement: Four stages of ethnogenesis that every tribe, cult or religion has to go through
- Reactionary philosophy in an enormous planet sized nutshell
- Antisocial behaviors encouraged and pro social behaviors punished in some cultures. “Public goods game” experiment confirms.
- Cross-partisan prejudice is very likely the strongest form of prejudice in US right now.
- Nations and Intelligence article documenting correlation amongst different cultures
- The problems with the music industry
- Everyone, irrespective of social class, is downloading illegal papers. Sci-Hub is gaining traction
Biology/Bioinformatics
- Detection of oxygen levels will help explain the emergence of sudden diversity in Cambrian explosion
- Programming language to design novel nucleotide code which gives new function to bacterial cells
- Experiments highlight altruism in rats. At least as likely to save a drowning companion than go for a tasty treat (in some cases more likely)
- Mathematical mirror to animal nature. How foraging patterns are guided by Levy flights
- The strange case of the Human Chimera
- Why you shouldn’t exercise to lose weight
- A review on evolutionary theories explaining aging
- Locus of evolution: Evo Devo and the Genetics of Adaptation. How big a role do mutations in cis regulatory regions play in evolution?
Technology
- Crazy long mildly funny essay on how Tesla could change our lives
- Good arguments for why the word “Singularity” is a misnomer (includes some not so good arguments)
- Engineering the perfect baby: Germ-line editing is inevitable and some scientists are worried about ethical implications such as re-emergence of eugenics
- China is embracing CRISPR and pushing for genetically customizable animals
Philosophy
- Philosophical argument against artificial intelligence killing us all. Let artificial intelligence evolve on its own, that way it will be benevolent
- A decent argument for dangers of AI, using AlphaGo’s victory and its style of playing