Why do humans have language and other animals apparently don’t? It’s one of the most enduring questions in the study of mind and communication. Across all cultures, humans use richly expressive languages built on complex structures, which let us talk about the past, the future, imaginary worlds, moral dilemmas and mathematical truths. No other species does this.

Yet we are fascinated by the idea that animals might be more similar to us than it seems. We delight in the possibility that dolphins tell stories or that apes can ponder the future. We are social and thinking creatures, and we love to see our reflection in others. That deep desire may have influenced the study of animal cognition.

Climate change is one of the instances, Stiglitz and Stern told me in an email, in which “it is generally agreed there is extreme risk — we know there are some really extreme events that could occur — and we know we cannot pretend (i.e., act as if) we know the probabilities. Nordhaus’s work doesn’t appropriately take into account either extreme risk or deep uncertainty.”

In other words, the economist who has been embraced as a guiding light by the global institution tasked with shepherding humanity through the climate crisis, who has been awarded a Nobel for climate costing, who is widely feted as the doyen of his field, doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

In 2021, U.S. Sen.Ted Cruz compared critical race theory — an academic subfield that examines the role of racism in American institutions, laws, and policies — to the Ku Klux Klan, the most notorious homegrown terrorist organization in U.S. history. In doing so, he opened a playbook that resembles one put into practice by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and others: Attack ideas that are unfriendly to a narrow view of the world, and do so by eliminating them from our school curricula and public conversation. The movement against critical race theory has now swallowed up high school Advanced Placement African American Studies in several states and threatens the teaching of basic facts about U.S. history. And this movement has devolved from pundit tough talk into authoritarian policies to ban books, modify curricula, and threaten intellectual freedom across the country (and world).

By now, many realize that these policies are a harbinger of things to come —  even for fields ostensibly unrelated to African American studies, like biology. Modern breakthroughs in biology are producing a picture of life that is increasingly incompatible with authoritarian preferences for neat boxes that dictate what people are and how they should behave. Consequently, biologists must shed the naive belief that our work is apolitical and recognize that the recent attacks on how to teach U.S. history are a battle in a larger war on ideas that includes the natural sciences.

Even with all the profound advantages the South Pole enjoys compared to Mars, even on a planet where living things have spent billions and billions of years figuring out how to adapt to and thrive within an incredibly diverse array of biomes—on a planet where giant tubeworms the size of NBA basket stanchions have colonized lightless ocean depths at which a human would be crushed like a grape under a piano—the South Pole simply cannot support complex life. It is too cold, and its relationship with sunlight too erratic, for living things to sustain themselves there. On astronomical scales it is for all practical purposes in the exact same spot as some of the most life-rich and biodiverse places in the known universe, and yet no species has established a permanent self-sustaining population there. Ever.

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Even with steady year-round subtropical sunlight, even with conditions infinitely more nurturing than those found anywhere on Mars, the summit of Mount Everest cannot support complex life. It's too cold; the air is too thin; there is no liquid water for plants and animals to drink. Standing on the top of Mount Everest, a person can literally look at places where plants and animals happily grow and live and reproduce, yet no species has established a permanent self-sustaining population on the upper slopes of Everest. Even microbes avoid it.

Life on earth writ large, the grand network of life, is a greater and more dynamic terraforming engine than any person could ever conceive. It has been operating ceaselessly for several billions of years. It has not yet terraformed the South Pole or the summit of Mount Everest. On what type of timeframe were you imagining that the shoebox of lichen you send to Mars was going to transform Frozen Airless Radioactive Desert Hell into a place where people could grow wheat?

Les scientifiques sont clairs : le dérèglement du climat menace l'Humanité à moyen terme et pourtant les politiques climatiques sont encore extrêmement timides. D'où cette question : pourquoi cette inaction climatique ? Pourquoi l'alerte des scientifiques n'est-elle pas entendue ? Pour y répondre nous recevons Albert Moukheiber, docteur en neurosciences, psychologue clinicien et auteur neuromania (chez Allary éditions).

There are indeed theoretical approaches to brain function, including to the most mysterious thing the human brain can do – produce consciousness. But none of these frameworks are widely accepted, for none has yet passed the decisive test of experimental investigation. It is possible that repeated calls for more theory may be a pious hope. It can be argued that there is no possible single theory of brain function, not even in a worm, because a brain is not a single thing. (Scientists even find it difficult to come up with a precise definition of what a brain is.)

In his book In Our Own Image (2015), the artificial intelligence expert George Zarkadakis describes six different metaphors people have employed over the past 2,000 years to try to explain human intelligence.

In the earliest one, eventually preserved in the Bible, humans were formed from clay or dirt, which an intelligent god then infused with its spirit. That spirit ‘explained’ our intelligence – grammatically, at least.

The invention of hydraulic engineering in the 3rd century BCE led to the popularity of a hydraulic model of human intelligence, the idea that the flow of different fluids in the body – the ‘humours’ – accounted for both our physical and mental functioning. The hydraulic metaphor persisted for more than 1,600 years, handicapping medical practice all the while.

By the 1500s, automata powered by springs and gears had been devised, eventually inspiring leading thinkers such as René Descartes to assert that humans are complex machines. In the 1600s, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical motions in the brain. By the 1700s, discoveries about electricity and chemistry led to new theories of human intelligence – again, largely metaphorical in nature. In the mid-1800s, inspired by recent advances in communications, the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz compared the brain to a telegraph.

The mathematician John von Neumann stated flatly that the function of the human nervous system is ‘prima facie digital’, drawing parallel after parallel between the components of the computing machines of the day and the components of the human brain

Each metaphor reflected the most advanced thinking of the era that spawned it. Predictably, just a few years after the dawn of computer technology in the 1940s, the brain was said to operate like a computer, with the role of physical hardware played by the brain itself and our thoughts serving as software.

Far from triumphantly breezing out of Africa, modern humans went extinct many times before going on to populate the world, new studies have revealed.

There would be a 5% chance that a single chimp would successfully type the word "bananas" in its own lifetime. And the probability of one chimp constructing a random sentence - such as "I chimp, therefore I am" - comes in at one in 10 million billion billion, the research indicates.

"Je ne dis pas cela méchamment, mais j’espère vraiment que ce document est tout simplement erroné. Une détérioration rapide du puits de carbone terrestre dans un avenir proche pourrait avoir des conséquences vraiment terribles." Voici ce qu’a déclaré Robert Rohde, directeur scientifique au Berkeley Earth, le jour de la sortie de l’étude.