Physicists Talking About Physics
13:10 "Entanglement is not nonlocal!"
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Talking about biology as if it was just physics:
36:08 There was recently some research done on new species emerging very shortly after meteorite impacts on earth which supports this view. Published April 2026 "Discovery of stromatolite formation in post-impact hydrothermal lacustrine environments and its implications for early Earth" by Jaesoo Lim at al. But there is more to life than the diversity of species isn't there? In places where there is already an abundance of species the ecosystem as a whole could begin to develop new "metabolic regimes" where it essentially takes an active part in the creation of the conditions in which further evolution happens, and then that slower evolution may be different to the kind which initially sets the process going. Life tends to produce more temperate conditions where it is abundant. I am thinking about deserts like those I've seen in China and Mexico where plants create a much greater thermal gradient, and therefore produce far more entropy than purely physical processes could. Also the amount of solar energy delivered to the tropics seems to drive the development of very complex ecosystems. These ecosystems are perhaps more adaptive than those found around hydrothermal vents, and maybe they can respond to changes in energy/material flux without .requiring extra speciation, just by reconfiguring themselves as the individuals adapt their behaviour to the changing environment. [update 55:11 Eli Sarid's observation about the evolution of multicellular life is related to this. I think what was evolving during that period was not so much the species of single-celled organisms (though surely they were evolving, and perhaps very rapidly) as much as the extra cellular metabolic processes which also produced the molecular species which were then incorporated, along with organelles, into multi-cellular organisms. So that also addresses your question (59:21) as to why it took so long to get to multi-cellular organisms.] See my other comment to your IAS talk on consciousness for context.
57:11 I don't see why there couldn't be a uni-cellular intelligence here on earth right now with whom we could learn to communicate if we were just a little bit smarter. Unfortunately that seems to be beyond our collective wits as so-called human beings.
Maybe the extended phase of uni-cellular evolution is an effect of a murderous organic censorship, like the entry for the Bering Sea in the Soviet encyclopedia.
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