Convergent Evolution and Multiple Discovery

Convergent evolution is “the development of similar structures in distantly related organisms as a result of adapting to similar environments and/or strategies of life”. I’ve talked before about multiple independent simultaneous discovery and invention in science, technology, and art. I’ve mentioned that multiple discovery supports an evolutionary view of culture, but I haven’t really discussed [...]

Ockham versus Darwin

Contemplating the comments on my last post, I began thinking about Ockham’s Razor versus Darwinian Evolution. Both of them can be used as heuristics or algorithms for creation, invention, and discovery. In 1964, Ray Solomonoff proposed A Formal Theory of Inductive Inference (Parts I and II). His theory is an Ockhamian algorithm for searching through [...]

Ockham’s Razor is Dull

Ockham’s razor is the principle that entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity. There are many different interpretations of Ockham’s razor. For me, the idea that simplicity is a guide to truth is the core of Ockham’s razor.
For any set of observations, there are an infinite number of theories that can fit the observations, with [...]

Everything Evolves

What is evolution? There are three main components to evolution: variation, heredity, and differential fitness. The best definition I have seen is in Robert Brandon’s Concepts and Methods in Evolutionary Biology:
The following three statements are crucial components of the Darwinian (or neo-Darwinian) theory of evolution:

Variation: There is (significant) variation in morphological, physiological and behavioral traits [...]

The Book That Changed My Life

People like to say that a certain book “changed their life”: The quoted phrase “book that changed my life” gets 61,000 hits on Google. I have some favourite books, but can I honestly say that one of them significantly changed my life? It seems more likely that my life has been influenced by the gestalt [...]

Incremental Doubt

Richard Feynman has said many wise things about the nature of scientific research. His emphasis on the importance of doubt is very insightful:
Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.
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I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to [...]

The Seductive Power of Mathematics

I believe that math is very important: My first paper was mathematical (How many ways can an N-dimensional hypercube be unfolded into (N-1)-dimensional space?) and my most recent paper was mathematical (How can a very large tensor be decomposed with limited RAM?). But medan agan: everything in moderation; nothing in excess. In machine learning and [...]

Why Computational Linguistics?

I was thinking about what to say to a student who is contemplating a career in computational linguistics. How can I convey my enthusiasm? How can I explain my fascination with language? Here are some of the things that came to mind:
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Scientific Productivity, Age, and Field

I once saw a graph that plotted scientific productivity as a function of the scientist’s age, with different curves for different scientific fields. I remember that the curve for mathematics peaked between the ages of 20 and 30, but the curve for chemistry peaked somewhere around 50. There was no curve for AI researchers, and [...]

The Evolution of Movies

In a previous post, I discussed multiple, independent, simultaneous discovery in science and technology, which supports the claim that science evolves. The authors of Multiple Discovery devote a chapter to arts and literature, but their main focus is science. I was thinking about multiple, independent, simultaneous creation in the arts, and I recalled several cases [...]