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[Steven Novella]

Interview with Simon Conway Morris
News Items: Fusion Breakthrough, Andrew Wakefield Rebuked, Return of Death Cat
Who's That Noisy
Your Questions and E-mails: Lady Gaga Illuminati
Science or Fiction

[Dolomedes]

WTN: drops of molten metal falling into water or oil, with slowed down audio.

[seaotter]

Wow late to this party. Listen while I make hangover pancakes.

[Evil Eye]

WTN - Cracking Ice Sheets?

Just adding -
http://silentlistening.wordpress.com/2008/05/09/dispersion-of-sound-waves-in-ice-sheets/

[Trinoc]

WTN - Cracking Ice Sheets?

Just adding -
http://silentlistening.wordpress.com/2008/05/09/dispersion-of-sound-waves-in-ice-sheets/

That was quick! Lucky guess or have you heard this stuff before?

[Anders]

Steve, you forget that the octopus may have diseases related to their arrangement. It may be that both arrangements are "sub-optimal" and have distinct patterns of diseases attached to them.

[I am Nintendo]

WTN - Cracking Ice Sheets?

Just adding -
http://silentlistening.wordpress.com/2008/05/09/dispersion-of-sound-waves-in-ice-sheets/

That was quick! Lucky guess or have you heard this stuff before?

I've heard it before and knew what to look up for a confirming link.

I'm a geek.

In the case of WTN... Confirmation bias actually works.

Crap....

This is EE... I forgot my son was logged in.

[seaotter]

WTN: Sounds from robotron

One Million + Robotron 2084 Standard D5	DQ

For those that don't know what I'm talking about. Looks like they used breaking ice sheets as a sound track.

[werecow]

That's so weird; I just listened to the #106 ep today in which Perry called in the quote from the hospital, and I was thinking about how tragically ironic it was that he should do his skeptical quote for one of the last times during an episode in which you discussed the death cat (also, his quote might have been equally ironic; it seems to fit him well). And now I check the new podcast ep, and there it is: the return of death cat. }|8o.

If I believed in empathic connections, this would have catered to my confirmation bias in a major way. As it stands, though, I'm pretty sure you're all just watching me through a hidden camera in my ceiling.... mocking me.

[DoctorAtlantis]

Re: Lady GaGa and the Illuminati

This rumor seems silly - but the more annoying rumor (like many, many stars before her) is the one about her being an hermaphrodite.  Snopes finally put up a page on this but I've even heard this rumor spoken at skeptics meetings. (FACEPALM)

We're supposed to be up on our urban legends, people!  Be more smarter!

[seaotter]

Great show as usual. Morris was scaring me. Are brains are antennas? The evolution thing was confusing me too. Is he saying that humans were inevitable just as velociraptors? I suppose that pack hunting was inevitable in that its a easy solution to a problem. What would be a summation of his proposal?

[seaotter]

Re: Lady GaGa and the Illuminati

This rumor seems silly - but the more annoying rumor (like many, many stars before her) is the one about her being an hermaphrodite.  Snopes finally put up a page on this but I've even heard this rumor spoken at skeptics meetings. (FACEPALM)

We're supposed to be up on our urban legends, people!  Be more smarter!

Rules her out of the military. At least for Hunter of California.

[LEAD FARMER - WWRPD?]

just in case that "cracking ice sheets" answer for WTN was wrong, I guess the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. I know it was made clear that the noise was not cables snapping, but maybe the devil is in the details.
When I was initially listening to it, all I could think of was some sort of asteroid like game.

[werecow]

Great show as usual. Morris was scaring me. Are brains are antennas? The evolution thing was confusing me too. Is he saying that humans were inevitable just as velociraptors? I suppose that pack hunting was inevitable in that its a easy solution to a problem. What would be a summation of his proposal?

He said at one point early on in the interview that he didn't want to suggest that humans were the inevitable result of evolution. It sounds to me like he's talking about convergent evolution on a larger scale than is usually considered. He seems to be suggesting that there is a certain very limited number of morphological/physiological niches that are optimal under a given set of circumstances, and that this will lead to similar evolutionary products. In essence, he seems to be arguing for a bigger role for evolutionary constraints imposed by self-organization (i.e. through strange attractors), which may be universally applicable.
I dunno about the brain thing, though. I'm gonna chalk that up to him treading outside his field.

[MisterMarc]

Great show as usual. Morris was scaring me. Are brains are antennas? The evolution thing was confusing me too. Is he saying that humans were inevitable just as velociraptors? I suppose that pack hunting was inevitable in that its a easy solution to a problem. What would be a summation of his proposal?

I'm not sure about the whole thing about our brains as antennae for consciousness....sounds like duelism to me, and raises the inevitable question of where that consciousness comes from (insert deist belief system here). I think not.

As for the majority of his theory, it doesn't strike me as that controversial. If I decoded it correctly, it seems like all he was saying is that there are a finite number of ways that biological organisms will develop to perform tasks required by a given biosphere, and that the nature of life dictates that most biospheres will most likely be very similar to our own. Thus "alien" life will not be fundamentally different in it's biology to life as we know it. At least, I think that's what he was saying. I have a hard time listening to most British professors....they have a tendency to speak with extended parenthetical statements and qualifications that are a titch hard to follow. Plain speakers they are not.

Of course, I think his perception of what most people would consider to be a very "alien" morphology compared to our own is unfair. Even if the biological underpinnings of aliens were more or less the same as humans, look at aliens in most sci-fi; something as simple as some face cartilage differences are enough to be horribly alien to most.