"Big Questions" Paper Roundups
A monthly email digest of papers you'd find sitting on the desk of an old timey natural philosopher who'd been whisked to the present.
How did life begin? Could we create life in the lab? How do genomes code for organisms? Do living things shape their own evolution? What is consciousness? How do we learn, perceive, and act? How intelligent is AI, actually? What is intelligence, even? Are we alone?
How does order and complexity emerge from chaos and simplicity?
It's easy to ask big questions, but there are scientists out there doing the hard work of actually finding answers. Every month, I publish a curated list of the most fascinating, groundbreaking inflammatory, or otherwise bold new scholarship on "big questions."
Each paper roundup includes some short commentary on a handful of highlights and a list of a few dozen noteworthy journal articles that came out in the last month. I like to imagine these are the papers you'd find sitting on the desk of an old timey natural philosopher who'd been whisked to the present.
Any glaring omissions, bad recommendations, or typos are 100% human fallibility and 0% AI hallucination.
Fields and topics that tend to come up include:
- Astrobiology and the search for life
- Artificial life/ALife
- Origins of life
- Cognitive neuroscience
- Artificial intelligence
- Language
- Sleep
- Consciousness
- Emergence
- Causation
- Philosophy of science
- Statistical physics and information
- Scaling laws and phase transitions
- Evolution and persistence
- Function and purpose in biology
- Agency and free will
- Quantum biology
- Physical biology and biophysics
- Morphogenesis
- Deep time and Earth history
- Exoplanet astronomy
- Solar system exploration
- Cosmology
The point of curation is to make it easier to find interesting things, not to flood you with all the things. So I skip most papers, even in relevant fields. If you're a maximalist, consider becoming a paid subscriber: I'm setting up a perk that will allow patrons to subscribe to the RSS feeds I've set up to collate new publications and Google Scholar alerts relevant to various astrobiology, origins, and complexity topics. I am also considering setting up opt-in weekly email digests for paid subscribers who want to closely follow fields I keep especially close tabs on, like exoplanet astrobiology.
Recommendations are welcome. Send them to elise@reviewertoo.com with "Paper Roundup Recommendation" in the subject line.