Can Life Produce Chaos?

In the 1980s and 1990s, scientists around the world raced to answer a simple question: is life capable of chaos? Mathematically, chaos means extreme sensitivity to small changes (Figure 1). This is sometimes referred to as the “butterfly effect”: in a chaotic system, it is as if something as small as the flapping of a […]

You Don’t Have a Lizard Brain

Despite our best intentions, scientists sometimes make a very basic mistake: we look for what makes humans unique. Certainly, humans are not just unique, but extraordinary. Nothing else in the known universe has produced art, science, technology, or civilization. But, our history of searching for how, precisely, we came to be exceptional has often led to […]