How It All Evolved

The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures

How Intelligence Evolved?

A definition of intelligence in terms of the computational principles by which a sentient being may make sense of a universe structured according to the nilpotent universal computational rewrite system (NUCRS), with an infinite universal alphabet as discovered by Rowlands and Diaz, is briefly set out. This alphabet defines the semantics of quantum mechanics in terms of a universal grammar, such...

How BCPL Evolved from CPL

This paper describes how the programming language BCPL developed from the work on the design and implementation of CPL. It shows that BCPL is essentially just CPL with all the difficult bits removed and with just a few extensions. The CPL project lasted from early 1962 to December 1966 and the first outline of BCPL appeared in 1966. Its first compiler was implemented at MIT in early 1967 and, s...

How Could Language Have Evolved?

The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma. In this essay, we ask why. Language's evolutionary analysis is complicated because it has no equivalent in any nonhuman species. There is also no consensus regarding the essential nature of the language "phenotype." According to the "Strong Minimalist Thesis," the key distinguishing feature of language (and what evolutionary th...

How Humans Evolved Supersize Brains

There it was, sitting on the mantelpiece, staring at her with hollow eyes and a naked grin. She could not stop staring back. It looked distinctly like the fossilized skull of an extinct baboon. That was the sort of thing Josephine Salmons was likely to know. At the time — 1924 — she was one of the only female students of anatomy attending the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. On ...