The Poetry of Reality | Symphony of Science

(Source: astrodidact, via we-are-star-stuff)

Before some of you may gripe about Richard Dawkins and his brash delivery of information, you may want to watch the original lecture, as he was quoting a former editor of New Scientist when he said this.

(via carl-sagan)

And now for something completely different. Enjoy this. You’re going to watch it twice.

“Richard Dawkins Hates Stupid Questions”.

Human Neocortex is More Complex than a Galaxy - Carl Sagan and Rodger Penrose 

According to physicist, Roger Penrose, What’s in our head is orders of magnitude more complex than anything one sees in the Universe: ”If you look at the entire physical cosmos,” says Penrose, “our brains are a tiny, tiny part of it. But they’re the most perfectly organized part. Compared to the complexity of a brain, a galaxy is just an inert lump.” 

Each cubic millimeter of tissue in the neocortex, reports Michael Chorost in World Wide Mind, contains between 860 million and 1.3 billion synapses. Estimates of the total number of synapses in the neocortex range from 164 trillion to 200 trillion. The total number of synapses in the brain as a whole is much higher than that. The neocorex has the same number of neurons as a galaxy has stars: 100 billion. 

“All stars can do is pull on each other with gravity,” writes Chorost, and, if they are very close, exchange heat.”

One researcher estimates that with current technology it would take 10,000 automated microscopes thirty years to map the connections between every neuron in a human brain, and 100 million terabytes of disk space to store the data.

Galaxies are ancient, but self-aware, language-using, tool-making brains are very new in the evolutionary timeline, some 200,000-years old. Most of the neurons in the neocortex have between 1,000 and 10,000 synaptic connections with other neurons. Elsewhere in the brain, in the cerebellum, one type of neuron has 150,000 to 200,000 synaptic connections with other neurons. Even the lowest of these numbers seems hard to believe. One tiny neuron can connect to 200,000 neurons.

“The universe could so easily have remained lifeless and simple -just physics and chemistry, just the scattered dust of the cosmic explosion that gave birth to time and space,”

says Richard Dawkins, the famed Oxford evolutionary biologist reflecting on the sheer wonder of the emergence of life on Earth and the evolutionary process in his classic The Ancestor’s Tale.

“The fact that it did not -the fact that life evolved out of literally nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved literally out of nothing -is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice. And even that is not the end of the matter. Not only did evolution happen: it eventually led to beings capable of comprehending the process by which they comprehend it.”

The Neocortex

Latin for “new bark,” is our third, newly human brain in terms of evolution. It is what makes possible our judgments and our knowledge of good and evil. It is also the site from which our creativity emerges and home to our sense of self.

The Neocortex says Carl Sagan in his iconic Cosmos, is where “matter is transformed into consciousness.” It comprises more than two-thirds of our brain mass. The realm of intuition and critical analysis,—it is the Neocortex where we have our ideas and inspirations, where we read and write, where we compose music or do mathematics. “It is the distinction of our species,” writes Sagan,”the seat of our humanity. Civilization is the product of the cerebral cortex.”

Sagan believes that extraterrestrials will have brains, “slowly accreted by evolution, as ours have,” and will perhaps share similarities. He believes any successful, long-lived civilization will, by necessity, have resolved the tensions of our various brain components. Extraterrestials, too, “will have extended their Mind extrasomatically into intelligent machines.”

Sagan believes that building upon our ability to communicate better, learn better the language and culture, with higher terrestrial cultures— and extending our intelligence into machines—that when we do finally encounter the Extraterrestrial, we and our machines will be better prepared to understand the *other’s* intelligence, language and cultural forms, and machines. “We are a “local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness.” We have become “starstuff pondering the stars.”

The Daily Galaxy via World Wide Mind and Cosmos

via electricspacekoolaid

Stay Curious! Watch: “Ode to the Brain” via Symphony of Science to watch Carl Sagan examine the brain and it’s complex systematic processes…

(via scifigeneration)

The Best of Richard Dawkins
via zombieofgod

Richard Dawkins Dies
Christians often ask people like Dawkins, “What if God IS real, and you didn’t believe?” This is my exploration of how absurd that unlikely situation might look like, when Dawkins meets the God who has been either unable or unwilling to account for himself objectively.

via Correctology DotCom

This American Life’s Ira Glass on how and why he became an atheist.

Complement with Alain de Botton’s religion for atheists,  Penn Jillette on why every day is an atheist’s holiday, astrophysicist Brian Cox on why he rejects the label atheist, and atheist kingpin Richard Dawkins’s animated encounter with “God.”

(↬ Open Culture)

via explore-blog

(Source: , via explore-blog)

Your daily dose of DUH. Just a reminder to all that we must not only encourage children, but adults, moreso, to learn ‘how’ to think, not ‘what’ to think. This applies across the board throughout all religions, conversations, opinions and uncertainties.

(Source: breakingshabbos, via retromantique)

Richard Dawkins’ latest anti-Muslim Twitter spat lays bare his hypocrisy

Is Richard Dawkins a Racist?

Islamo-Nonsense

I mentioned Richard Dawkins’ (along with Sam Harris, whom I feel is an incredibly well-spoken advocate of scientific literacy) ‘racism’ and how I don’t subscribe to his current views. I wasn’t calling him a racist, I was just stating that, because I personally respect Professor Dawkins, his intellect, passion and work, I simply wanted to distinguish myself from his most recent remarks. His opinions on those topics were not the the topic of conversation.

Personally, I do not subscribe or affiliate myself with any human-created labels, such as atheist, agnostic, liberal, militant anything. Actually, if I’m going to support being militant about any cause or fight, it would be the environment and scientific literacy as it applies to the conservation of the natural world and preservation of all species, including our own. Whether we like it or not, we have no true borders on on this planet other than the ones we’ve created amongst ourselves in our minds, which govern the way in which we feel, speak and act toward each other.

Astrology = Pseudoscience.

Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins and James Randi thoroughly debunk Astrology

NOTE: I don’t subscribe to the recently controversial views voiced by Richard Dawkins. But this thorough representation of the rubbish pseudoscience of astrology couldn’t be passed up to share with you.

science-junkie:

Highlights include:

•     Ira Flatow greeting Neil deGrasse Tyson with a fist bump.
•     Richard Dawkins being Richard Dawkins
•     Bill Nye being Bill Nye
•     Starry Night
•     The importance of educating women in science
•     Neil deGrasse Tyson flipping out at Lawrence Krauss and Brian Greene about the motivations behind big-budget science
•     Tyson and Krauss bickering about pretty much anything (there’s a lot the two don’t see eye to eye on)
•     When you should and shouldn’t respect other people’s opinion
•     The role of science-/speculative fiction in communicating and understanding science (Dawkins, for one, claims he came to understand information theory through SF. Bill Nye thinks contemporary scifi cifi could stand to return to its days of intense optimism, as characterized by Star Trek.)
•     And much, much more

Richard Dawkins on evidence in science, life and love: A must-read letter to his 10-year-old daughter

(via Brain Pickings)

(via jtotheizzoe)

astrodidact:

Happy 72nd Birthday Richard!! Wishing you many, many more. After losing Hitch at such a young age, I couldn’t bare losing him any time soon. Aside from being  an outspoken advocate of atheism and Science, he is a brilliant individual. I’m proud to have someone like him on my side.

we-are-star-stuff:

Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941), evolutionary biologist and science writer, popularized the notion that natural selection is gene-driven. His best-sellers include The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and The God Delusion, in which he argues hard for evolution against creationist ideas.

At the age of 72, Dawkins hasn’t slipped into quiet retirement, but instead continues his lifelong effort to combat anti-science. Not content to merely roast those who worship ignorance, he also lights the fires of curiosity and awe, drawing our attention to the vast, complex, dangerous, wondrous, beautiful, jaw-droppingly awesome world we live in.

Happy Birthday Professor Dawkins. Thank you for being you.

(Source: questionall)