LINKS - August 9th, 2023
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human. LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
Remains found in China may belong to third human lineage
By Bob Yirka , Phys.org
“The research team suggests that the unique features of the jawbone resemble those of both modern humans and Late Pleistocene hominids. But they also found that it did not have a chin, which suggests that it was more closely related to older species. They found other features that resemble hominins of the Middle Pleistocene, which, when taken together, suggested the individual most resembled a Homo erectus species. And that, they conclude, suggests a hybrid of modern human and ancient hominid.”
Math’s Famous Map Problem: The Four Color Theorem
“Can you fill in any map with just four colors? The so-called Four-Color theorem says that you can always do so in a way that neighboring regions never share the same color. But a proof eluded mathematicians for more than a century before Wolfgang Haken and Kenneth Appel controversially used a computer to show it must be true. This breakthrough forever changed mathematics.”
Virgin Galactic’s first space tourism flight is about to launch
“Two of the passengers, mother-daughter pair Keisha Schahaff and Anastatia Mayers from Antigua and Barbuda, won their seats in a charity raffle. The third will be Jon Goodwin, a former Olympic canoeist from the UK, who bought his ticket for about $250,000 in 2005 shortly after Virgin Galactic was founded. As the company’s first launch to space was delayed – it finally happened in 2018 – Goodwin held onto his ticket, and now he is finally able to cash it in.”
Longtermism poses a real threat to humanity
By Émile P Torres, The New Statesman
“Longtermism combines this kind of ‘moral’ reasoning with a fantastical sci-fi vision of techno-utopia among the heavens. That’s incredibly dangerous, and the statements from Bostrom, Yudkowsky and other longtermists support the conclusion. This is not an ideology that we should want people in positions of power to accept, or even be sympathetic to. Yet longtermism has become profoundly influential. There is Musk, as mentioned; and a UN Dispatch article reports that ‘the foreign policy community in general and the United Nations in particular are beginning to embrace longtermism’.”
The Great Chain of Being: The evolutionary misconception that just won’t go extinct
By Prosanta Chakrabarty, Big Think
“The problem with that antiquated, single-file view of how life is organized is that it makes you think of life as evolving in a straight line. Even people who accept evolution can get things wrong by taking this linear view. They see all other living things besides us as subordinate precursors leading to humans. They see chimpanzees as a step before humans as if we evolved directly from them. With that view, they see chimps and other apes as “primitive” antecedents of humans, which they are not. They also see a fish as a step before a frog, and a frog as a step before an alligator or some other reptile.”