God Created the Integers, Man Created God

Michael Atiyah gives a presidential address on Mind, Matter, and Mathematics (good alliteration).  In it he discusses the difference between mathematical philosophy and natural philosophy.  It’s an interesting read throughout.
But, near the end he says:
Mathematical physicists believe that there are indeed simple and beautiful mathematical equations that govern the universe, and that the task of [...]

Proof that Humans Are Evil

The movie WΔZ was apparently inspired by Price’s equation:

Reed A. Cartwright goes into it here.
It describes how the change in trait with phenotypes is related to the phenotypes’ fitnesses, . Note that the genetics of the trait (mutation, ploidy, etc.) is contained in the second term. See Wikipedia for more details.
Now, [...]

Did Von Neumann Not Believe in Evolution?

over at the Panda’s Thumb
Jeffrey Shallit pointed me to a youtube video, in which David Berlinski makes the following remarkable claim: “… von Neumann, one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century, just laughed at Darwinian theory. He hooted at it.”
Thankfully, Douglas L. Theobald goes to some length to clear Von Neumann’s [...]

Who are You Descended From?

The Mathematical Genealogy Project is pretty sweet. Here’s how John Baez is related to Gauss.

Evolutionary Dynamics

A review of a new book, “Evolutionary Dynamics” by Martin A. Nowak
Martin Nowak is certainly not alone when he argues, in Evolutionary Dynamics, that evolution is the single most significant idea in biology. But almost all major mathematical syntheses of evolution have been confined to population genetics–the study of gene frequency changes in populations. By [...]

Genetic Programming

Genetic algorithms are all the rage – and a short handy book is available here! There is a free downloadable version, or you can purchase it (for a mere $13.07; quite reasonable).
In other news, class starts on Monday- I’ll be really busy for the first two weeks, and then hopefully I’ll be able [...]

Basic Math: Dumb as a Monkey

New study shows that even college students can perform as well as monkeys on an arithmetic test.
The results indicate that monkeys perform approximate mental addition in a manner that is remarkably similar to the performance of the college students. These findings support the argument that humans and nonhuman primates share a cognitive system for nonverbal [...]

More Human Evolution from John Hawks

John Hawks answers his “most rarely-asked Questions” about the Acceleration of Human Evolution.
I quote him over at Good Tithings. 

The Acceleration of Human Evolution

John Hawks has recently come out with a powerful paper about the Acceleration of Human Evolution. In a recent Blog Post he goes into it.
It is quite simple; the rate of mutations in a population is a linear product of the rate per genome and the population size.
Not all mutations are advantageous, and not [...]