Forumchem - Forum with AI(ALICE BOT & HAL9000) and TTS

For billions of years, simple creatures like plankton, bacteria, and algae ruled the earth. Then, suddenly, life got very complicated. Recent discoveries from Canadas Burgess Shale Deposits, Greenland, China, Siberia, and Namibia document clearly that a period of biological creativity known as the Cambrian Explosion occurred in a "geological instant" over 500 million years ago virtually all around the globe -an explosion of life that continues to puzzle evolutionists.

Recent discoveries have narrowed the time frame from over 70 million years to less than 10 million years. The same fundamental body plans that arose in the Cambrian remain surprisingly constant ever since. Apparently, the most important biological changes in the history of the earth occurred in less than ten million years, and for 500 million years afterward, this level of change never happened again.

Harvards Stephen Jay Gould once said, "Swift is now a lot faster than we thought, and that is extraordinarily interesting."

Swift forward to the present: although It has taken homo sapiens several million years to evolve from the apes, the useful information in our DNA, has probably changed by only a few million bits. So the rate of biological evolution in humans, Stephen Hawking points out in his Life in the Universe lecture, is about a bit a year.

"By contrast," Hawking says, "there are about 50,000 new books published in the English language each year, containing of the order of a hundred billion bits of information. Of course, the great majority of this information is garbage, and no use to any form of life. But, even so, the rate at which useful information can be added is millions, if not billions, higher than with DNA."

This means Hawking says that we have entered a new phase of evolution. "At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to convey information."

But what distinguishes us from our cave man ancestors is the knowledge that we have accumulated over the perpetuate ten thousand years, and particularly, Hawking points out, over the perpetuate three hundred.

"I think it is legitimate to take a broader dogma, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race," Hawking said.

In the perpetuate ten thousand years the human species has been in what Hawking calls, "an external transmission phase," where the internal record of information, handed down to succeeding generations in DNA, has not changed significantly. "But the external record, in books, and other long constant forms of storage," Hawking says, "has grown enormously. Some people would use the term, evolution, only for the internally transmitted genetic material, and would object to it being applied to information handed down externally. But I think that is too narrow a dogma. We are more than just our genes."

The time scale for evolution, in the external transmission period, has collapsed to about 50 years, or less.

Meanwhile, Hawking observes, our human brains "with which we process this information have evolved only on the Darwinian time scale, of hundreds of thousands of years. This is beginning to cause problems. In the 18th century, there was said to be a man who had read every book written. But nowadays, if you read one book a day, it would take you about 15,000 years to read through the books in a national Library. By which time, many more books would have been written."

But we are now entering a new phase, of what Hawking calls "self designed evolution," in which we will be capable to change and improve our DNA. "At first," he continues "these changes will be narrow to the repair of genetic defects, like cystic fibrosis, and muscular dystrophy. These are controlled by single genes, and so are fairly easy to identify, and correct. Other qualities, such as intelligence, are probably controlled by a large number of genes. It will be much more difficult to find them, and toil out the relations between them. Nevertheless, I am sure that during the next century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence, and instincts like aggression."

If the human race manages to redesign itself, to reduce or eliminate the risk of self-destruction, we will probably reach out to the stars and colonize other planets. But this will be done, Hawking believes, with observant machines based on mechanical and electronic components, rather than macromolecules, which could eventually replace DNA based life, just as DNA may have replaced an earlier form of life.

The Daily Galaxy via http://www.rationalvedanta.net/node/131

Image credit: ALMA Obervatory/ESO

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The Weekend Poll: What Do You Think? "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution"

Artificial intelligence has an amazing future. Dystopian movies get it wrong.

Re-examination of a circa 100,000-year-old archaic early human skull found 35 years ago in Northern China has revealed the surprising presence of an inner-ear formation long thought to occur only in Neandertals. The discovery places into question a whole suite of scenarios of later Pleistocene human population dispersals and interconnections based on tracing isolated anatomical or genetic features in fragmentary fossils, said study co-author Erik Trinkaus, a physical anthropology professor at Washington University in St. Louis. It suggests, instead, that the later phases of human evolution were more of a labyrinth of biology and peoples than simple lines on maps would suggest.

Trinkaus, the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor in Arts & Sciences, is a paramount authority on early human evolution and among the first to proposal compelling evidence for interbreeding and gene transfer between Neandertals and modern human ancestors.

His co-authors on this study are Xiu-Jie Wu, Wu Liu and Song Xing of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Beijing, and Isabelle Crevecoeur of PACEA, Université de Bordeaux.

We were completely surprised, Trinkaus said. We fully expected the scan to broadcast a temporal labyrinth that looked much like a modern human one, but what we saw was clearly typical of a Neandertal. This discovery places into question whether this arrangement of the semicircular canals is truly unique to the Neandertals.

Often well-preserved in mammal skull fossils, the semicircular canals are remnants of a fluid-dense sensing system that helps humans maintain recompense when they change their spatial orientations, such as when running, bending over or turning the head from side-to-side.

Since the mid-1990s, when early CT-scan research confirmed its existence, the presence of a exacting arrangement of the semicircular canals in the temporal labyrinth has been considered enough to securely identify fossilized skull fragments as being from a Neandertal. This pattern is present in almost all of the known Neandertal labyrinths. It has been widely used as a marker to set them apart from both earlier and modern humans.

The skull at the center of this study, known as Xujiayao 15, was found along with an assortment of other human teeth and bone fragments, all of which seemed to have characteristics typical of an early non-Neandertal form of late archaic humans.

Trinkaus, who has studied Neandertal and early human fossils from around the globe, said this discovery only adds to the plentiful confusion of theories that attempt to explain human origins, migrations patterns and possible interbreedings.

While its tempting to use the finding of a Neandertal-shaped labyrinth in an otherwise distinctly non-Neandertal sample as evidence of population contact (gene flow) between central and western Eurasian Neandertals and eastern archaic humans in China, Trinkaus and colleagues argue that broader implications of the Xujiayao discovery remain unclear.

The study of human evolution has always been violent, and these findings just make it all the messier, Trinkaus said. It shows that human populations in the real world dont act in benign simple patterns.

Eastern Asia and Western Europe are a long way apart, and these migration patterns took thousands of years to play out, he said. This study shows that you cant rely on one anatomical feature or one piece of DNA as the basis for sweeping assumptions about the migrations of hominid species from one place to another.

Re-examination of a circa 100,000-year-old archaic early human skull found 35 years ago in Northern China has revealed the surprising presence of an inner-ear formation long thought to occur only in Neandertals.

The discovery places into question a whole suite of scenarios of later Pleistocene human population dispersals and interconnections based on tracing isolated anatomical or genetic features in fragmentary fossils, said study co-author Erik Trinkaus, PhD, a physical anthropology professor at Washington University in St. Louis. It suggests, instead, that the later phases of human evolution were more of a labyrinth of biology and peoples than simple lines on maps would suggest.

The study, forthcoming in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is based on recent micro-CT scans revealing the interior configuration of a temporal bone in a fossilized human skull found during 1970s excavations at the Xujiayao site in Chinas Nihewan Basin.

Trinkaus, the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor in Arts & Sciences, is a paramount authority on early human evolution and among the first to proposal compelling evidence for interbreeding and gene transfer between Neandertals and modern human ancestors.

His co-authors on this study are Xiu-Jie Wu, Wu Liu and Song Xing of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Beijing, and Isabelle Crevecoeur of PACEA, Université de Bordeaux.

We were completely surprised, Trinkaus said. We fully expected the scan to broadcast a temporal labyrinth that looked much like a modern human one, but what we saw was clearly typical of a Neandertal. This discovery places into question whether this arrangement of the semicircular canals is truly unique to the Neandertals.

Often well-preserved in mammal skull fossils, the semicircular canals are remnants of a fluid-dense sensing system that helps humans maintain recompense when they change their spatial orientations, such as when running, bending over or turning the head from side-to-side.

Since the mid-1990s, when early CT-scan research confirmed its existence, the presence of a exacting arrangement of the semicircular canals in the temporal labyrinth has been considered enough to securely identify fossilized skull fragments as being from a Neandertal. This pattern is present in almost all of the known Neandertal labyrinths. It has been widely used as a marker to set them apart from both earlier and modern humans.

The skull at the center of this study, known as Xujiayao 15, was found along with an assortment of other human teeth and bone fragments, all of which seemed to have characteristics typical of an early non-Neandertal form of late archaic humans.

Trinkaus, who has studied Neandertal and early human fossils from around the globe, said this discovery only adds to the plentiful confusion of theories that attempt to explain human origins, migrations patterns and possible interbreedings.

While its tempting to use the finding of a Neandertal-shaped labyrinth in an otherwise distinctly non-Neandertal sample as evidence of population contact (gene flow) between central and western Eurasian Neandertals and eastern archaic humans in China, Trinkaus and colleagues argue that broader implications of the Xujiayao discovery remain unclear.

The study of human evolution has always been violent, and these findings just make it all the messier, Trinkaus said. It shows that human populations in the real world dont act in benign simple patterns.

Eastern Asia and Western Europe are a long way apart, and these migration patterns took thousands of years to play out, he said. This study shows that you cant rely on one anatomical feature or one piece of DNA as the basis for sweeping assumptions about the migrations of hominid species from one place to another.

The image at the top of the page shows skull of a 41,000-year-old Neanderthal woman found at Tabun in Israel.

The Daily Galaxy via Washington University

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Only one species of the billions of species that have existed on Earth has shown an aptitude for radios and even we failed to build one during the first 99% of our 7 million year history. Charley Lineweaver, a provocative cosmologist with The Australian National University, believes the "Planet of the Apes Hypothesis" -a theory subscribed to by Carl Sagan and the astronomers involved with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), that human-like intelligence is a convergent feature of evolution -that there is an intelligence niche, into which other species will evolve if the human species goes extinct is based on a flawed notion of evolution, a notion that could have serious implications for our search for observant life elsewhere in the Milky Way Galaxy.

Unsure of where in the galaxy they are, they soon discover that on this strange new world, chimpanzees and other primates have evolved to become human-like both physically and in the development of their society. Human beings, mute beasts that are captured and used for scientific experimentation, occupy a lower rung in this intelligence hierarchy.

This planet has corn, horses, and gorillas who use rifles and chimpanzees who use photographic equipment. It never occurs to them that this is, in fact, the Earth. Charlton Heston falls in cherish with a mute Homo sapien, and they ride away and discover the remnants of the Statue of Liberty. Only then do they accomplish this is planet Earth, theres no going home. Theyre there; as a subordinate species.

In an interview with Astrobiology, Lineweaver emphasizes that the "Planet of the Apes" hypothesis is that "such a niche exists - that human beings developed a big brain because there was selection pressure to move into this evolutionary niche. Another way of saying it is that smart organisms are better off and more fit than stupider organisms in all kinds of environments, and therefore we should expect any species anywhere in the universe to get smarter like we consider ourselves to be.

"Carl Sagan called them "functionally equivalent humans." Thats what the SETI program has been based on. There is a big polarization in science between physical scientists like Paul Davies and Carl Sagan and Frank Drake on the one hand, and biologists like Ernst Mayr and George Gaylord Simpson who say that life is so quirky that human beings would never evolve again. If a species goes extinct, it doesnt come back. There may be a niche that opens when a species goes extinct, but the same species or even anything similar to it does not re-evolve into that niche.

If intelligence is good for every environment, we would see a trend in the encephalization quotient among all organisms as a function of time. The data does not show that. The evidence on Earth points to exactly the opposite conclusion. Earth had independent experiments in evolution thanks to continental drift. New Zealand, Madagascar, India, South America... half a dozen experiments over 10, 20, 50, even 100 million years of independent evolution did not produce anything that was more human-like than when it started. So its a silly idea to think that species will evolve toward us.

"If you go to these other continents and ask zoologists, Lineweaver continues, "What do you think is the smartest thing there? Is it trying to become human? Is it any closer today than it was 50 million years ago to building a radio telescope? I think the answer would be no. If thats the answer, then there is no trend toward human-like intelligence, and this whole idea of intelligence being convergent is just an deplete claim based on what we want to believe about ourselves."

"When you look at the tree of life, its really a bush, Lineweaver says. "All the things that are alive today are on the top, and down on the bottom we have a convergence because all life evolved from some LUCA, perpetuate universal plain ancestor. If you look at all the species 600 million years ago, thered be only one that had a head. We now see them everywhere, but only because this one species radiated. Species are quirky, like languages. The DNA sequence of one fastidious species is very unique. Its not something deterministic, like planetary formation. Were in the realm of biology, not in the realm of physics."

"If heads are as quirky as a species, then you can ask yourself, do we expect Indian elephants in outer space?" Linewever contines. "Not African elephants, but Indian elephants. Now, if you do not expect to find an Indian elephant on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, then you can not expect anything else that is species obvious out there. Its important to accomplish that building radio telescopes is a species-obvious feature. Yet we insist on maintaining that this is something intelligence does in general. Weve all been brainwashed into believing that our intelligence is so wonderful that every other species would want it, including all the extraterrestrials out there."

Current estimates say that are some 100 billion stars just in our Milky Way galaxy and 10 billion trillion stars in the observable universe.There are more stars in existence than days since the universe was formed. Yet, the deafening silence from space is not surprising. There must be other radio transmitters out there, but perhaps none in our galaxy. If homo sapiens survive long enough, time will tell.

We should not expect to see any other forms of life that are genetically, functionally and intellectually similar to us." Lineweaver emphasizes. "I strongly suspect that our closest relatives in the universe are here on Earth, and theyre not likely to be elsewhere."

But NASA was listening and our future searches have been reconfigured to explore for non-carbon forms of life and the totally unknown.

The Daily Galaxy via http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Revisiting_The_Science_Behind_Planet_Of_The_Apes_999.html and https://researchers.anu.edu.au/publications/41410

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From Apples Siri to Hondas robot Asimo, machines seem to be getting better and better at communicating with humans. But some neuroscientists caution that todays computers will never truly understand what were saying because they do not take into account the context of a conversation the way people do.

People tend to ponder of communication as an transfer of linguistic signs or gestures, forgetting that much of communication is about the social context, about who you are communicating with, Stolk said.

The word bank, for example, would be interpreted one way if youre holding a credit card but a different way if youre holding a fishing pole. Without context, making a V with two fingers could mean victory, the number two, or these are the two fingers I broke.

All these subtleties are quite crucial to understanding one another, Stolk said, perhaps more so than the words and signals that computers and many neuroscientists focus on as the key to communication. In fact, we can understand one another without language, without words and signs that already have a shared meaning.

Babies and parents, not to mention strangers lacking a common language, communicate effectively all the time, based solely on gestures and a shared context they build up over even a brief time.

As two people conversing rely more and more on previously shared concepts, the same area of their brains the right superior temporal gyrus becomes more active (blue is activity in communicator, orange is activity in interpreter). This suggests that this brain region is key to mutual understanding as people continually update their shared understanding of the context of the conversation to improve mutual understanding.

Stolk argues that scientists and engineers should focus more on the contextual aspects of mutual understanding, basing his argument on experimental evidence from brain scans that humans achieve nonverbal mutual understanding using unique computational and neural mechanisms. Some of the studies Stolk has conducted suggest that a breakdown in mutual understanding is behind social disorders such as autism.

This shift in understanding how people communicate without any need for language provides a new theoretical and empirical foundation for understanding normal social communication, and provides a new window into understanding and treating disorders of social communication in neurological and neurodevelopmental disorders, said Dr. Robert Knight, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology in the campuss Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and a professor of neurology and neurosurgery at UCSF.

Stolk and his colleagues discuss the importance of conceptual alignment for mutual understanding in an opinion piece appearing Jan. 11 in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

To explore how brains achieve mutual understanding, Stolk created a game that requires two players to communicate the rules to each other solely by game movements, without talking or even seeing one another, eliminating the influence of language or gesture. He then placed both players in an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imager) and scanned their brains as they nonverbally communicated with one another via computer.

A game in which players try to communicate the rules without talking or even seeing one another helps neuroscientists detach the parts of the brain responsible for mutual understanding.

He found that the same regions of the brain located in the poorly understood right temporal lobe, just above the ear became active in both players during attempts to communicate the rules of the game. Critically, the superior temporal gyrus of the right temporal lobe maintained a stabilize, baseline activity throughout the game but became more active when one player suddenly understood what the other player was trying to communicate. The brains right hemisphere is more involved in abstract thought and social interactions than the left hemisphere.

These regions in the right temporal lobe increase in activity the moment you establish a shared meaning for something, but not when you communicate a signal, Stolk said. The better the players got at understanding each other, the more active this region became.

This means that both players are building a similar conceptual framework in the same area of the brain, constantly testing one another to make sure their concepts align, and updating only when new information changes that mutual understanding. The results were reported in 2014 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It is surprising, said Stolk, that for both the communicator, who has static input while she is planning her move, and the addressee, who is observing dynamic visual input during the game, the same region of the brain becomes more active over the course of the experiment as they improve their mutual understanding.

Robots and computers, on the other hand, converse based on a statistical analysis of a words meaning, Stolk said. If you usually use the word bank to mean a place to cash a check, then that will be the assumed meaning in a conversation, even when the conversation is about fishing.

A computer would have a harsh time understanding this conversation, but humans get it immediately. Thats because human communicators share a conceptual space or common ground that enables them to quickly interpret a situation. Words and signs are merely a means to seek and provide evidence for such mutual understanding.

Apples Siri focuses on statistical regularities, but communication is not about statistical regularities, he said. Statistical regularities may get you far, but it is not how the brain does it. In order for computers to communicate with us, they would need a cognitive architecture that continuously captures and updates the conceptual space shared with their communication partner during a conversation.

Hypothetically, such a dynamic conceptual framework would allow computers to resolve the intrinsically ambiguous communication signals produced by a real person, including drawing upon information stored years earlier.

Stolks studies have pinpointed other brain areas critical to mutual understanding. In a 2014 study, he used brain stimulation to disrupt a rear section of the temporal lobe and found that it is distinctive for integrating incoming signals with knowledge from previous interactions. A later study found that in patients with damage to the frontal lobe (the ventromedial prefrontal cortex), decisions to communicate are no longer fine-tuned to stored knowledge about an addressee. Both studies could explain why such patients appear socially inept in everyday social interactions.

Stolk plans future studies with Knight using fine-tuned brain mapping on the real surfaces of the brains of volunteers, so-called electrocorticography.

Stolk said he wrote the new paper in hopes of moving the study of communication to a new level with a focus on conceptual alignment.

Most cognitive neuroscientists focus on the signals themselves, on the words, gestures and their statistical relationships, ignoring the underlying conceptual ability that we use during communication and the flexibility of everyday life, he said. Language is very helpful, but it is a tool for communication, it is not communication per se. By focusing on language, you may be focusing on the tool, not on the underlying mechanism, the cognitive architecture we have in our brain that helps us to communicate.

Stolks co-authors are Ivan Toni of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior at Radboud University in the Netherlands, where the studies were conducted, and Lennart Verhagen of the University of Oxford.

The Daily Galaxy via UC Berkeley

Image credit: With thanks torobotica.wordpressandpictures.dealer.com

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Blombos Cave in South Africa has given us vast knowledge about our early ancestors, realigning scientific notions of the origins of early modern behavior, pushing back the dates of evidence of sophisticated cognitive actions such as flint working, ritual behaviors and personal decoration some 50,000 years earlier than the cave paintings of Upper Paleolithic Europe.

"We are looking mainly at the part of South Africa where Blombos Cave is situated. We sought to find out how groups moved across the landscape and how they interacted," says Christopher S. Henshilwood, Professor at the University of Bergen (UiB) and University of the Witwatersrand and one of the authors of the articles.

The researchers from UiB and Witswatersrand have now been looking closer at technology used by different groups in this and other regions in South Africa, such as spear points made of stone, as well as decorated ostrich eggshells, to determine whether there was an overlap and contact across groups of Middle Stone Age humans. How did they make contact with each other? How would contact across groups affect one group? How did the transfer of symbolic material culture affect the group or groups?

"The pattern we are seeing is that when demographics change, people interact more. For example, we have found similar patterns engraved on ostrich eggshells in different sites. This shows that people were probably sharing symbolic material culture, at certain times but not at others" says Dr Karen van Niekerk, a UiB researcher and co-author.

This sharing of symbolic material culture and technology also tells us more about Homo sapiens journey from Africa, to Arabia and Europe. Contact between cultures has been vital to the survival and development of our common ancestors Homo sapiens. The more contact the groups had, the stronger their technology and culture became.

"Contact across groups, and population dynamics, makes it possible to adopt and adapt new technologies and culture and is what describes Homo sapiens. What we are seeing is the same pattern that shaped the people in Europe who created cave art many years later," Henshilwood says. In 2015, four open access articles, with research finds from Blombos as a starting point, have been published in the journal PLOS ONE.

From earlier research, there is archaeological evidence for the evolution of a human "super-brain" no later than 75,000 years ago that spurred a modern capacity for novelty and invention, according to John Hoffecker, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado.

Hoffecker says there is abundant fossil and archaeological evidence for the evolution of the human mind, including its unique power to create a potentially infinite assortment of thoughts expressed in the form of sentences, art and technologies. He attributes the evolving power of the mind to the formation of what he calls the "super-brain," or collective mind, an event that took place in Africa no later than 75,000 years ago.

An internationally known archaeologist who has worked at sites in Europe and the Arctic, Hoffecker said the formation of the super-brain was a consequence of a rare ability to share complex thoughts among individual brains.

"Humans obviously evolved a much wider anger of communication tools to express their thoughts, the most distinctive being language," said Hoffecker, a fellow at CUs Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. "Individual human brains within social groups became integrated into a neurologic Internet of sorts (image below), giving birth to the mind."

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."

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 anger 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.

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.

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 harsh to believe. One tiny neuron can connect to 200,000 neurons.

While anatomical fossil evidence for the capability of speech is controversial, the archaeological discoveries of symbols coincides with a creative explosion in the making of many kinds of artifacts. Abstract designs scratched on mineral pigment show up in Africa about 75,000 years ago and are widely accepted by archaeologists as evidence for symbolism and language. "From this point onward there is a growing assortment of new types of artifacts that indicates a thoroughly modern capacity for novelty and invention."

The roots of the mind and the super-brain lie deep in our past and are likely tied to basic aspects of our evolution like bipedalism and making stone tools, he said. It was from the making of tools that early humans first developed their ability to project complex thoughts or mental representations outside the individual brain -- our own version of the honeybee waggle dance, Hoffecker said.

While crude stone tools crafted by human ancestors beginning about 2.5 million years ago likely were an indirect consequence of bipedalism -- which freed up the hands for new functions -- the first inklings of a developing super-brain likely began about 1.6 million years ago when early humans began crafting stone hand axes, thought by Hoffecker and others to be one of the first external representations of internal thought.

Ancient hand axes achieved "exalted status" as mental representations since they bear little resemblance to the casual objects they were made from -- generally cobbles or rock fragments. "They imitate a plan or mental template stored in the nerve cells of the brain and imposed on the rock, and they seemed to have emerged from a strong feedback relationship among the hands, eyes, brains and the tools themselves," he said.

The emerging modern mind in Africa was marked by a three-fold increase in brain size over 3-million-year-old human ancestors like Lucy, thought by some to be the matriarch of modern humans. Humans were producing perforated shell ornaments, polished bone awls and simple geometric designs incised into lumps of red ochre by 75,000 years ago. "With the appearance of symbols and language -- and the consequent integration of brains into a super-brain -- the human mind seems to have taken off as a potentially unlimited creative force," he said.

The dispersal of modern humans from Africa to Europe some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago provides a "minimum date" for the development of language, Hoffecker speculated. "Since all languages have basically the same structure, it is inconceivable to me that they could have evolved independently at different times and places."

The Daily Galaxy via University of Bergen and colorado.edu

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Blombos Cave in South Africa has given us vast knowledge about our early ancestors, realigning scientific notions of the origins of early modern behavior, pushing back the dates of evidence of sophisticated cognitive actions such as flint working, ritual behaviors and personal decoration some 50,000 years earlier than the cave paintings of Upper Paleolithic Europe.

Since its discovery in the early 1990s, Blombos Cave, about 300 kilometers east of Cape Town, South Africa, has yielded distinctive new information on the behavioral evolution of the human species. The cave site was first excavated in 1991 and field labor has been conducted there on a accustomed basis since 1997 - and is on-going. Blombos contains Middle Stone Age deposits currently dated at between 100,000 and 70,000 years, and a Later Stone Age sequence dated at between 2,000 and 300 years.

"We are looking mainly at the part of South Africa where Blombos Cave is situated. We sought to find out how groups moved across the landscape and how they interacted," says Christopher S. Henshilwood, Professor at the University of Bergen (UiB) and University of the Witwatersrand and one of the authors of the articles.

The researchers from UiB and Witswatersrand have now been looking closer at technology used by different groups in this and other regions in South Africa, such as spear points made of stone, as well as decorated ostrich eggshells, to determine whether there was an overlap and contact across groups of Middle Stone Age humans. How did they make contact with each other? How would contact across groups affect one group? How did the transfer of symbolic material culture affect the group or groups?

"The pattern we are seeing is that when demographics change, people interact more. For example, we have found similar patterns engraved on ostrich eggshells in different sites. This shows that people were probably sharing symbolic material culture, at certain times but not at others" says Dr Karen van Niekerk, a UiB researcher and co-author.

This sharing of symbolic material culture and technology also tells us more about Homo sapiens journey from Africa, to Arabia and Europe. Contact between cultures has been vital to the survival and development of our common ancestors Homo sapiens. The more contact the groups had, the stronger their technology and culture became.

"Contact across groups, and population dynamics, makes it possible to adopt and adapt new technologies and culture and is what describes Homo sapiens. What we are seeing is the same pattern that shaped the people in Europe who created cave art many years later," Henshilwood says. In 2015, four open access articles, with research finds from Blombos as a starting point, have been published in the journal PLOS ONE.

From earlier research, there is archaeological evidence for the evolution of a human "super-brain" no later than 75,000 years ago that spurred a modern capacity for novelty and invention, according to John Hoffecker, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado.

Hoffecker says there is abundant fossil and archaeological evidence for the evolution of the human mind, including its unique power to create a potentially infinite assortment of thoughts expressed in the form of sentences, art and technologies. He attributes the evolving power of the mind to the formation of what he calls the "super-brain," or collective mind, an event that took place in Africa no later than 75,000 years ago.

An internationally known archaeologist who has worked at sites in Europe and the Arctic, Hoffecker said the formation of the super-brain was a consequence of a rare ability to share complex thoughts among individual brains.

"Humans obviously evolved a much wider anger of communication tools to express their thoughts, the most distinctive being language," said Hoffecker, a fellow at CUs Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. "Individual human brains within social groups became integrated into a neurologic Internet of sorts, giving birth to the mind.

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."

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 anger 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 the Milky Way Galaxy has stars: 100 billion.

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.

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 harsh to believe. One tiny neuron can connect to 200,000 neurons. The below image represents the neurons of the human brain (courtesy of Paul De Koninck from www.greenspine.ca).

While anatomical fossil evidence for the capability of speech is controversial, the archaeological discoveries of symbols coincides with a creative explosion in the making of many kinds of artifacts. Abstract designs scratched on mineral pigment show up in Africa about 75,000 years ago and are widely accepted by archaeologists as evidence for symbolism and language. "From this point onward there is a growing assortment of new types of artifacts that indicates a thoroughly modern capacity for novelty and invention."

The roots of the mind and the super-brain lie deep in our past and are likely tied to basic aspects of our evolution like bipedalism and making stone tools, he said. It was from the making of tools that early humans first developed their ability to project complex thoughts or mental representations outside the individual brain -- our own version of the honeybee waggle dance, Hoffecker said.

While crude stone tools crafted by human ancestors beginning about 2.5 million years ago likely were an indirect consequence of bipedalism -- which freed up the hands for new functions -- the first inklings of a developing super-brain likely began about 1.6 million years ago when early humans began crafting stone hand axes, thought by Hoffecker and others to be one of the first external representations of internal thought.

Ancient hand axes achieved "exalted status" as mental representations since they bear little resemblance to the casual objects they were made from -- generally cobbles or rock fragments. "They imitate a plan or mental template stored in the nerve cells of the brain and imposed on the rock, and they seemed to have emerged from a strong feedback relationship among the hands, eyes, brains and the tools themselves," he said.

The emerging modern mind in Africa was marked by a three-fold increase in brain size over 3-million-year-old human ancestors like Lucy, thought by some to be the matriarch of modern humans. Humans were producing perforated shell ornaments, polished bone awls and simple geometric designs incised into lumps of red ochre by 75,000 years ago. "With the appearance of symbols and language -- and the consequent integration of brains into a super-brain -- the human mind seems to have taken off as a potentially unlimited creative force," he said.

The dispersal of modern humans from Africa to Europe some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago provides a "minimum date" for the development of language, Hoffecker speculated. "Since all languages have basically the same structure, it is inconceivable to me that they could have evolved independently at different times and places."

The Daily Galaxy via University of Bergen and colorado.edu

Image credit: at top of page, panoramic belief of interior of Blombos Cave, southern Cape (image Magnus Haaland); (bottom) Interior belief of Hollow Rock Shelter, Western Cape. Courtesy Christopher Henshilwood and the University of the Withwatersrand; human brain interconnectedness, courtesy of MGH-UCLA Human Connectome Project.

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This past March, Robin Li Yanhong, the founder and paramount executive of Chinas Google, the online search giant Baidu, announced that he is looking to the nations military to support the China Brain Project to make the mainland the world leader in developing artificial intelligence (AI) systems. It will be a massive, "state-level" initiative that could be comparable to how the Apollo space program to land the first humans on the moon in 1969.

Earlier in January of 2016 heoretical physicist Stephen Hawking warned this past January, 2016 that blindly embracing pioneering technology could trigger humanitys annihilation."The primitive forms of artificial intelligence we already have, have proved very useful. But I ponder the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race," Hawking told the BBC in 2014. "Once humans develop artificial intelligence it would take off on its own, and re-plan itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are marginal by slow biological evolution, couldnt compete and would be superseded."

Artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence after 2020, predicts Vernor Vinge, a world-renowned pioneer in AI, who has warned about the risks and opportunities that an electronic super-intelligence would proposal to mankind. "It seems plausible that with technology we can, in the fairly near future," says scifi legend Vernor Vinge, "create (or become) creatures who surpass humans in every intellectual and creative dimension. Events beyond such an event -- such a singularity -- are as unimaginable to us as opera is to a flatworm."

There was the psychotic HAL 9000 in "2001: A Space Odyssey," the humanoids which attacked their human masters in "I, Robot" and, of course, "The Terminator", where a robot is sent into the past to kill a woman whose son will end the tyranny of the machines.

Experts interviewed by AFP were divided. Some agreed with Hawking, saying that the threat, even if it were distant, should be taken seriously. Others said his warning seemed overblown. "Im pleased that a scientist from the harsh sciences has spoken out. Ive been saying the same thing for years," said Daniela Cerqui, an anthropologist at Switzerlands Lausanne University.

Gains in AI are creating machines that outstrip human performance, Cerqui argued. The inclination eventually will delegate responsibility for human life to the machine, she predicted. "It may seem like science fiction, but its only a matter of degrees when you see what is happening right now," said Cerqui. "We are heading down the road he talked about, one step at a time."

Nick Bostrom, director of a program on the impacts of future technology at the University of Oxford, said the threat of AI superiority was not immediate. Bostrom pointed to current and near-future applications of AI that were still clearly in human hands -- things such as military drones, driverless cars, robot factory workers and automated surveillance of the Internet. But, he said, "I ponder machine intelligence will eventually surpass biological intelligence -- and, yes, there will be distinctive existential risks associated with that transition."

Other experts said "true" AI -- loosely defined as a machine that can pass itself off as a human being or ponder creatively -- was at best decades away, and cautioned against alarmism.

Since the field was launched at a conference in 1956, "predictions that AI will be achieved in the next 15 to 25 years have littered the field," according to Oxford researcher Stuart Armstrong. "Unless we missed something really spectacular in the news recently, none of them have come to pass," Armstrong says in a book, "Smarter than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence."

Jean-Gabriel Ganascia, an AI expert and moral philosopher at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, said Hawkings warning was "over the top. Many things in AI unleash emotion and worry because it changes our way of life," he said. "Hawking said there would be autonomous technology which would develop separately from humans. He has no evidence to support that. There is no data to back this opinion."

"Its a little apocalyptic," said Mathieu Lafourcade, an AI language specialist at the University of Montpellier, southern France. "Machines already do things better than us," he said, pointing to chess-playing software. "That doesnt mean they are more intelligent than us."

Allan Tucker, a senior lecturer in computer science at Britains Brunel University, took a look at the hurdles facing AI. Recent years have seen dramatic gains in data-processing speed, spurring flexible software to enable a machine to learn from its mistakes, he said. Recompense and reflexes, too, have made big advances. Tucker pointed to the US firm Boston Dynamics as being in the research vanguard. "These things are incredible tools that are really adaptative to an environment, but there is still a human there, directing them," said Tucker. "To me, none of these are close to what true AI is."

Tony Cohn, a professor of automated reasoning at Leeds University in northern England, said full AI is "still a long way off... not in my lifetime certainly, and I would say still many decades, given (the) current rate of progress." Despite big strides in recognition programmes and language cognition, robots perform poorly in open, violent environments where there are lots of noise, movement, objects and faces, said Cohn.

Such situations require machines to have what humans possess naturally and in abundance -- "commonsense knowledge" to make sense of things. Tucker said that, ultimately, the biggest barrier facing the age of AI is that machines are... well, machines. "Weve evolved over however many millennia to be what we are, and the motivation is survival. That motivation is harsh-wired into us. Its key to AI, but its very difficult to implement."

"The Singularity" is seen by some as the end point of our current culture, when the ever-accelerating evolution of technology finally overtakes us and changes everything. Its been represented as everything from the end of all life to the beginning of a utopian age, which you might recognize as the endgames of most other religious beliefs.

While the definitions of the Singularity are as varied as peoples fantasies of the future, with a very obvious excuse, most agree that artificial intelligence will be the turning point. Once an AI is even the tiniest bit smarter than us, itll be capable to learn faster and well simply never be capable to detain up. This will render us utterly obsolete in evolutionary terms, or at least in evolutionary terms.

Susan Schneider of the University of Pennsylvania is one of the few thinkersoutside the realm of science fiction that have considered the notion that artificial intelligence is already out there, and has been for eons.

Her recent study, Alien Minds, Schneider asks: "how might aliens ponder? And, would they be conscious? I do not believe that most advanced alien civilizations will be biological, Schneider says. The most sophisticated civilizations will be postbiological, forms of artificial intelligence or Alien superintelligence."

Search for Extraterrstrial Intelligence (SETI) programs have been searching for biological life. Our culture has long depicted aliens as humanoid creatures with small, pointy chins, massive eyes, and large heads, apparently to house brains that are larger than ours. Paradigmatically, they are little green men. While we are aware that our culture is anthropomorphizing, Schneider imagines that her suggestion that aliens are supercomputers may strike us as far-fetched. So what is her rationale for the belief that most intelligent alien civilizations will have members that are superintelligent AI?

Schneider presents proposal three observations that together, support her conclusion for the existence of alien superintelligence.

The first is "the brief window observation": Once a society creates the technology that could put them in touch with the cosmos, they are only a few hundred years away from changing their own paradigm from biology to AI. This brief window makes it more likely that the aliens we encounter would be postbiological.

The brief window obervation is supported by human cultural evolution, at least thus far. Our first radio signals date back only about a hundred and twenty years, and space exploration is only about fifty years old, but we are already immersed in digital technology, such as cell-phones and laptop computers.

Devices such as the Google Glass promise to bring the Internet into more direct contact with our bodies, and it is probably a matter of less than fifty years before sophisticated internet connections are wired directly into our brains.

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The Daily Galaxy via AFP and South China Morning Post

Image credit: With thanks to Paul Imre