"Singularity discussions seem to be splitting up into three major schools of thought: Accelerating Change, the Event Horizon, and the Intelligence Explosion."

"'It's always nice to knock down an urban myth with good data,' he said. "

"The approximately 800 million mostly middle class adults and children act as a massive epidemiological experiment that allows hypotheses that faith in a creator or disbelief in evolution improves or degrades societal conditions to be tested on an international scale. ... the data examined in this study demonstrates that only the more secular, pro-evolution democracies have, for the first time in history, come closest to achieving practical “cultures of life” that feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion. The least theistic secular developed democracies such as Japan, France, and Scandinavia have been most successful in these regards."

"The following exchange is mirrored humbly and verbatim in case of disappearance. It represents pwnage on a scale most of us can only dream of."

"A population of 1,000 random pictures, created in October 2007. You allow the fittest pictures to survive. The higher your rating for a pic the more mutated offspring it produces."

"And this particular form of sexual dimorphism is apparently not shared with our relatives the chimps and gorillas, so it must have evolved during the same period that human speech and language did."

"The Blind Watchmaker algorithm was conceived by Richard Dawkins and is described in his book The Blind Watchmaker. ... demonstrates very effectively how random mutation followed by non-random selection can lead to interesting, complex forms."

"Researchers from St Andrews University have shown that the animals intentionally modify or repeat their signals to get their messages across."

"Og knew. The tortoises were coming."

"By comparing modern man with our ancestors of 37,000 years ago, the Chicago team discovered big changes in two genes linked to brain size. One of the new variants emerged only 5,800 years ago yet is present in 30% of today's humans, they believe."