evolution simulation

David Shaw of D. E. Shaw Research presents Anton, a special-purpose machine that speeds up biomolecular simulations about a hundred-fold. The lecture covers molecular dynamics and how simulation helps understand how drugs bind.

Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky lectures on the evolution of behavior, including the Prisoner's Dilemma and tit-for-tat strategies in animals. It is part of his Human Behavioral Biology course.

An excerpt from Richard Dawkins's lecture on Climbing Mount Improbable demonstrating how a complex eye can evolve through incremental steps. It answers the creationist irreducible complexity argument.

Energy scholar Vaclav Smil argues that global energy transitions are slow and that renewable targets should not rest on wishful thinking. He appraises how energy dependencies are likely to change and asks for using much less.

Chuck Spinney, a long-time associate of John Boyd, presents Boyd's thinking on the OODA loop and evolutionary epistemology. The talk runs about two and a half hours and includes Q&A.

Daniel Dennett's Royal Institution lecture on whether the brain is a computer and where its software comes from. He argues that minds are built by evolution and culture, with competence arising without comprehension.

A Royal Institution lecture in which Nicholas Humphrey presents his theory of phenomenal consciousness and its evolution. He draws on the book Sentience and discusses evidence for animal sentience.

The opening lecture of Robert Sapolsky's Stanford course on Human Behavioral Biology, explaining the course premise and how to avoid categorical thinking. It starts a roughly 25-lecture series on how biology, genes, hormones and environment shape behavior.

Nick Lane's Royal Institution lecture on the origin of life and why it is the way it is. It draws on his book The Vital Question and the alkaline hydrothermal vent theory of abiogenesis.

Simon Peyton Jones gives Churchill College's annual computer science lecture on Haskell's birth and evolution. He covers the most influential ideas, from laziness to monads and type system evolution, plus current developments and guesses about the future.

Jordan Peterson's first lecture in his Biblical Series examines the idea of God as sovereignty and power abstracted from any individual ruler, and as the pattern inherent in human dominance hierarchies.

Rick Roderick's 1993 lecture on Baudrillard, the last in his series The Self Under Siege. It covers hyperreality, simulation and what Baudrillard calls fatal strategies.

A three-minute clip of Richard Feynman using the rules of chess as an analogy for how science works, discovering rules by observation and sometimes meeting surprises like castling. It touches on incremental progress versus revolutions.