Sublime

What this book aims to show is that the computational universe conceived of by Wheeler and popularized by Seth Lloyd is also the Darwinian universe described by universal Darwinism and evolutionary epistemology.

To see the videos, as well as find other supplementary materials, visit: https://preposterousuniverse.com/biggestideas/

I do believe that you can understand most of moral psychology by viewing it as a form of enlightened self-interest, and if it’s self-interest, then it’s easily explained by Darwinian natural selection working at the level of the individual. Genes are selfish,3 selfish genes create people with various mental modules, and some of these mental modules

creationists ask, rhetorically, “where does all the information in the DNA come from?” and Darwin’s answer is simple: it comes from the gradual, purposeless, nonmiraculous transformation of noise into signal, over billions of years.

If those molecules bump together and form something more complex, on and on, Cronin said, “that is the selection equivalent of gravity. And that process of complexity generates everything we have in the universe that’s associated with life.”

“What that’s trying to codify,” Walker said, “is the fact that some things have so many steps to produce them that it requires a memory.” That memory can be genetic or neurological or something we can’t imagine, but the result takes too many steps to arise otherwise.

He compared a chromosome to one of those old audio cassettes we used before new technologies banished them to the museum, with DNA the tape inside the cassette and genes the songs on the tape.

The great biologist D’Arcy Thompson once said: “Everything is the way it is because it got that way.” If he is right—if everything is the way it is because it got that way—then every science must be, in part, a historical science.