Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Darwin’s notebooks lie at the tail end of a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a “commonplace” book. Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters—just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep
... See moreSteven Johnson • Where Good Ideas Come From
Human value stems from individual differences, rooted in the unique, historical ability of hominids to generate explanatory knowledge.
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How did humans start generating knowledge and why has no other species been capable of doing that? We are today the only species that can do that, but we haven't always been, since we know that previous species like Homo erectus and the Neanderthals must have had the same ability because they made technology that seems impossible to have created
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb • Incerto 4-Book Bundle
Evolution by natural selection is not itself a designed thing, an agent with purposes, but it acts as if it were (it occupies the role vacated by the Intelligent Designer): it is a set of processes that “find” and “track” reasons for things to be arranged one way rather than another. The chief difference between the reasons found by evolution and
... See moreDaniel C Dennett • From Bacteria to Bach and Back
He poured all of his energy into this enterprise, accumulating so many specimens that a theory began to take shape in his mind. After five years at sea, he returned to England and devoted the rest of his life to the single task of elaborating his theory of evolution.
Robert Greene • Mastery
The emergence of humans and other living creatures is best explained as the intended result of an intelligent mind, rather than as the happenstance of an unintended and undirected process.