Terrence Sejnowski

Sejnowski's Law

For every important function that a cell needs to carry out Nature has created a gadget to make it more efficient.

(Gadgets are macromolecular complexes made from proteins, RNA, and DNA and often have hundereds of parts.)

Leo Chalupa

Chalupa's First Law

No matter how good or bad things are at any given point in time (in science as in life), remember that "this too shall pass."

This is key for attaining longevity in this business...people who "violate" or are unaware of this rule are doomed to failure. In other words, it is vitally important how one deals with success and failure in doing cutting edge science. Failure is the rule even among the most successful working scientists (since 90% of grant application are typically rejected and the top journals reject even a higher percentage); and with respect to success, in all but a few exceptional cases, institutional memory is exceedingly fleeting (i.e, yesterday's superstars are unrecognized by today's grad students, postdocs, junior faculty). So you've got to keep pitching if you want to stay in the science game.

Chalupa's Second Law

Don't underestimate the importance of fashion in doing science.

Another key for success in science...if you're too far ahead of the herd (with very few exception) you're not going to get funded by NIH/NSF or published in the premier journals. This is in spite of the fact that they claim that they fund innovative research. Anyone who has spend as much time on grant review committees as I have will recognize the power of this rule. In other words, there is a price to pay for originality and every working scientist knows this is the case.

Stuart Hameroff

Hameroff's Law

The sub-conscious mind is to consciousness what the quantum world is to the classical world.

The vast majority of brain activity is non-conscious; consciousness is "the tip of an iceberg" of neural activity. Yet the threshold for transition from pre-, non-, or sub-conscious processes into conscious awareness is unknown. The sub-conscious mind as revealed in dreams has been described by Matte Blanco as a place where "paradox reigns, and opposites merge to sameness". Reality is seemingly described by two separate sets of laws. In our everyday classical world, Newton's laws and Maxwell's equations accurately portray reality. However at small scales, the bizarre laws of quantum mechanics rule: particles are distorted in space and time (uncertainty), exist in multiple states or locations simultaneously (superposition) and remain connected in opposite states over distance (nonlocal entanglement). In the quantum world "paradox reigns and opposites merge to sameness".

The boundary, or threshold between the quantum and classical worlds (i.e. quantum state reduction, collapse of the wave function, measurement, decoherence) remains mysterious. Early quantum theorists attributed reduction/collapse to observation: "consciousness collapses the wave function". Modern physics attributes reduction/collapse to any interaction with the classical environment ("decoherence"). Neither solves the problem of isolated quantum superpositions which are nonetheless useful in quantum computation.

In quantum computation, information may be represented as isolated superpositions (e.g. as quantum bits—"qubits"—of both 1 AND 0) which interact/compute by nonlocal entanglement, and eventually reduce/collapse to classical solutions.

Based on a 1989 suggestion by Sir Roger Penrose, he and I have put forth a specific model of consciousness involving quantum computation in microtubules within the brain's neurons. Superpositions of multiple possible pre-/sub-conscious perceptions or choices reach threshold for self-collapse (by Roger's "objective reduction" due to properties of fundamental spacetime geometry), and select/reduce to particular classical perceptions or choices. Each reduction is a conscious event, a series of which gives a "stream of consciousness".

The main scientific objection to our proposal has been that the brain is too warm for quantum computation which in the technological realm seems to require ultra cold temperatures to avoid thermal decoherence. However recent evidence shows that quantum processes in biological molecules are enhanced by increased temperature. Evolution has had billion of years to solve the problem of decoherence. Consciousness may be a particular form of quantum state reduction: a process on the edge between the quantum and classical worlds.

Paul Ryan

Ryan's Law

Once the miind is freed to think positionally without orientation, a logic of relationships naturally ensues.

Steven Levy

Levy's Law

The truth is always more interesting that your preconception of what it might be.

In journalism, this means that the best practicioners should not have the stories written out in their heads before they report them. Preconceptions can blind you to the full, rich human reality that awaits you when you actually listen to your subjects and approach the material with an open mind. It wouldn't surprise me if the same tabula rasa principle applies when scientists try to answer the big questions.

Neil Gershenfeld

Gershenfeld's Law on Research

Experiments take pi times longer than planned (no matter how many factors of pi you account for).

Gershenfeld's Law on Writing

Good [theses, papers, books] are never finished, just abandoned.

Gershenfeld's Goal

Function from form.

"Form follows function" implies that they're separable; the most profound scientific and technological insights that I know follow from abstracting logical functions from physical forms.

Gino Segre

Segre’s First Law

Numbers are everything.

This is just a rephrasing of the Pythagorean credo, proclaimed 2500 years ago, that “All things are numbers”. Science began with it, but it’s still worth remembering that measurements are at the base of all science.

Segre’s Second Law

Understand what the numbers mean.

One has to keep looking for a theory that will explain the numbers. Our galaxy has a hundred billion stars and our brain has a hundred billion neurons. Understanding our galaxy and our brain are great challenges, but two different theories are required.

Henry Warwick

Warwick's First Law

Art takes you out of town, and gives you a destination. Science builds the bus that takes you there.

Art, at its best, takes you out of your town, your home, your living room, your armchair, your mind, and brings you some place—a destination, a wonderful place, a new way of looking at things, a deep shift in your understanding of what it means to be human with a sense of profundity and awe at the Creation, pointing toward a new and better environment for living, smiling a new smile—all by altering your consciousness in some useful and insightful way.

Cooking up the better paint or programming didn't make the better paintmaker a better painter, or the better word processor-maker a better writer, but the great painter required the skills of the better paint makers and the great writer needs the tool of the trade. If we are to go to these grand destinations, artists need the insights and tools provided by science—the " bus" to take us there. And we need to heed Art.

Art tells the jokes that science insists on explaining.

Simon Baron-Cohen

Baron-Cohen's Law of Sex differences in the Mind

In any random population, of those who score in the above-average range on tests of empathizing, females will significantly outnumber males. And of those who score in the above-average range on tests of systemizing, males will significantly outnumber females.

Baron-Cohen's Law of Autism

What unites individuals on the autistic spectrum is impaired empathizing in the presence of intact or even superior systemizing, relative to non-autistic individuals of the same mental age.

Chritsine Finn

Finn's Law

Uncertainty is the final test of innovation.

That is, new concepts are tested best by a sudden faltering confidence on the part of the innovator operating in an almost-liminal, almost-sure intellectual state.

Does not the palpible quiver preceding the sudden rush of certainty give that
final kick to real innovation?

This is especially good for interdisciplinary areas, where unusual conjunctions
generally involve more maverick trip-wire than usual.

Leonard Susskind

Susskind's Rule of Thumb

Don't ask what they think. Ask what they do.

My rule has to do with pardigm shifts—yes, I do believe in them. I've been through a few myself. It is useful if you want to be the first on your block to know that the shift has taken place. I formulated the rule in 1974. I was visiting the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) for a weeks to give a couple of seminars on particle physics. The subject was QCD. It doesn't matter what this stands for. The point is that it was a new theory of sub-nuclear particles and it was absolutely clear that it was the right theory. There was no critical experiment but the place was littered with smoking guns. Anway, at the end of my first lecture I took a poll of the audience. "What probability would you assign to the proposition 'QCD is the right theory of hadrons.'?" My socks were knocked off by the answers. They ranged from .01 percent to 5 percent. As I said, by this time it was a clear no-brainer. The answer should have been close too 100 percent.

The next day I gave my second seminar and took another poll. "What are you working on?" was the question. Answers: QCD, QCD, QCD, QCD, QCD,........ Everyone was working on QCD. That's when I learned to ask "What are you doing?" instead of "what do you think?"

I saw exacly the same phenomenon more recently when I was working on black holes. This time it was after a string theory seminar, I think in Santa Barbara. I asked the audience to vote whether they agreed with me and Gerard 't Hooft or if they thought Hawkings ideas were correct. This time I got a 50-50 response. By this time I knew what was going on so I wasn't so surprised. Anyway I later asked if anyone was working on Hawking's theory of information loss. Not a single hand went up. Don't ask what they think. Ask what they do.

Sherry Turkle

Turkle's Law of Evocative Objects

Every technology has an instrumental side, what the technology does for us and a subjective side, what the technology does to us, to our ways of seeing the world, including to our ways of thinking about ourselves.

So the Internet both facilitates communication and changes our sense of identity, privacy, and sexual possibility; gene sequencing both gives us new ways of diagnosing and treating disease and new ways of thinking about human nature and human history. On an instrumental level, interactive, "sociable" robotics offers new opportunities for education, childcare, and eldercare; on a subjective level, it offers new challenges to our view of human nature, and to our moral sense of what kinds of creatures are deserving of relationship.

Turkle's Law of Human Vulnerability to An Active Gaze

If a creature, computational or biological, makes eye contact with a person, tracks her gaze, and gestures with interest toward her, that person will experience the creature as sentient, even capable of understanding her inner state.

The human has evolved to anthropomorphize. We are on the brink of creating machines so "sociable" in appearance that they will push our evolutionary buttons to treat them as kindred. Yet they will not have shared our human biological and social experience and will thus not have our means of access to the meanings of moments in the human life cycle: a child's first step, an adolescent's strut, a parent's pride. Yet we will not be in complete control of our feelings for these objects because our feelings will not be based on what they know or understand, but on what we "experience" them as knowing, a very different thing.

We don't know what people and animals are "really" thinking but grant them a "species pass" in which we make assumptions about their inner states. It is a social and moral contract. Contemporary technology has put us close to the moment when we shall be called upon to make this kind of contract (or some other kind) about creatures of our own devising. We are called upon to answer the question: What kinds of relationships are appropriate to have with a machine? Our answer will not only affect the instrumental roles that we allow technology to play but the way technology will co-create the human psyche and sensibility of the future.

Steven Strogatz

Strogatz's First Law of Doing Math

When you're trying to prove something, it helps to know it's true.

Strogatz's Second Law of Doing Math

To figure out if something is true, check it on the computer. If the machine agrees with your own calculations, you're probably right.

Judith Rich Harris

Harris's First Law

Good things go together. Miller's Iron Law of Iniquity—" in practice, every good trait correlates positively with every other good trait"—is true, and follows from Harris's First Law.

Harris's Second Law

Bad things go together, too.

Harris's Third Law

People think they know why good things go together, and why bad things go together, but they are wrong.

Ivan Amato

Amato's First Law of Awe

Awe begins in the eye of the beholder.

Limited as it is, biology's homegrown sensory physiology is sufficient in our case to ignite wonder and curiosity about just where it is we find ourselves thrown, how we got there, and how we can even know anything at all. Therein lies the beginning of science.

Amato's Second Law of Awe

Transcending our own sensory limitations with technological tools of observation, a relentless theme of the history of science, enhances the experience of awe itself because it expands the variety of attributes of the universe that we can know about. Therein lies one of the most underrated values of science.

(For example, we used to see the world in only a rainbow of colors. Our tools have shown us that the rainbow is a mere sliver of electromagnetic wavelengths sandwiched between an infinitude of previously invisible ones.)

Rupert Sheldrake

Sheldrake's Principle

The "laws" of nature are more like habits.

Sheldrake's Reformulation of a Traditional Theory of Vision

Vision involves a movement of light into the eyes, changes in the brain, and the outward projection of images to where they seem to be.

Dave Winer

Winer's Law of the Internet

Productive open work will only result in standards as long as the parties involved strive to follow prior art in every way possible. Gratuitous innovation is when the standardization process ends, and usually that happens quickly.


Think about the process of arriving at a standard. Someone goes first with something new. Assume it catches on and becomes popular. Because the person did it in an open way, with no patents, or other barriers to competitors using the technology, a second developer decides to do the same thing. The innovator supports this, because he or she wants a standard to develop. At that point the second person has the power to decide how strong a standard it will be. If the new implementation strives to work exactly as the original does, then it's more likely the standard will be strong, and there will be a vibrant market around it. But if the second party decides to use the concept but not be technically compatible, it will be a weak standard.

One would assume that the second mover would make every effort to do it exactly the same way as the first, but over the years, but this has not been the case. As soon as a standard becomes popular, market forces lead to multiple incompatible ways forward. Microsoft called this Embrace & Extend, but all technology vendors are driven to break standards. Standards can only go a short distance before forking defeats the standardization process.

This is an extension to Postel's Law (the late Jon Postel was one of the key players of the development of the Internet), which says you should be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send. It goes further by saying that we should all collectively be conservative in what we send. This keeps the technology small and the market approachable by developers of all sizes. The large companies always try to make the technology complicated to reduce competition to other organizations with large research and development budgets.

Izumi Aizu

Aizu's Fisrt Law

Using is believing.

As was the case for the Internet, or the PCs, unless you use it, you cannot understand its real significance. To put it the other way around, if and when you use it, it will prevail.

Instead of "seeing" from afar, you must use it to understand. So many people denied the potential and the impact of the Net simply because they never tried to use it.

Aizu's Second Law

What changes the world is communication, not information.

We are living in a world where we can exchange ideas and emotions freely and inexpensively, the first time in the history. Information piled up, or disseminated one way down, never makes people happy or feel compelled to act that much, while communication, just a single line or word from your friends or beloved, or even from a total stranger, that catches your heart, often results in collective actions.

Randlph Nesse, M.D.

Nesse’s Laws for deciding when it is safe to use drugs to block evolved protective responses.

Aversive responses, such as pain, fever, vomiting and panic, were shaped by natural selection because they gave selective advantages in the face of various dangers. Optimal decisions about when to use our growing pharmacological powers to block these responses will require signal-detection models of how defenses are regulated.

Nesse's First Law

An optimal mechanism to regulate an all-or-none defensive response such as vomiting or panic will express the response whenever CD< ∑(pH x CH w/o defense) –∑(pH x CH w/defense). That is, expressing a defense is worth it whenever the cost of the defense (CD) is less than the estimated reduction in harm, based the probability (pH) and cost of various harmful outcomes (CH) with and without the expression of the defense. This means that optimal systems that regulate inexpensive defenses against large somewhat unpredictable potential harms will express many false alarms and that blocking these unnecessary responses can (and does) greatly relieve human suffering. Blocking responses yields a net benefit, however, only if we can anticipate when a normal response is likely to be essential to prevent catastrophe.

Nesse's Second Law

An optimal mechanism to regulate a continuously expressed defense, such as fever or pain, will increase the defensive response up to the point where the sum of CH and CD is minimized. At this point the marginal increase in the cost of the defense becomes greater than the marginal decrease in harm. This helps to explain why so many defenses, such as those involved in inflammation and the immune responses, so often seem excessive.

Many will recognize this analysis as a less grand and somewhat more practical variation on Pascal’s Wager. So far, however, few in the pharmaceutical industry seem to recognize the importance of routinely assessing the effects of new drugs on normal defensive responses.

Robert Sapolsky

Sapolsky's Three Laws for Doing Science

Sapolsky's First Law

Think logically, but orthogonally.

Sapolsky's Second Law

It's okay to think about nonsense, as long as you don't believe in it.

Sapolsky's Third Law

Often, the biggest impediment to scientific progress is not what we don't know, but what we know.

Gerald Holton

Holton's First Law

The turning points in individual and national life are most probably guided by probabilism. (Examples: You are one of about a billion possible yous, since only one spematozoon [or sometimes two] make it to the ovum, out of about a billion different competitors, none the same. Or on the national/ international scale, the availability of a Churchill in 1940.)

The Second Law

The probability of a right answer or a beneficent outcome is usually much smaller than that of the wrong or malignant ones. ( This is not pessimism, but realism—an amplified analogue of the Law of Entropy.)

The Third Law

In the limit of small numbers, the previous two Laws may not rigorously apply. Therefore if you need only one parking place when driving your car, look for one first right where you want to go.

Niels Diffrient

Diffrient's Law

The improvements derived from technological advances have an equal and opposite effect on culture and the environment magnified by time and scale.

Stuart Kauffman

The biosphere advances, on average, at the maximum rate it can sustain into the adjacent possible.

The adjacent possible, for a chemical reaction graph, is the set of novel molecules that can be created out of those existing now. The biosphere has advanced into the chemical adjacent possible over the history of life.The issue is, are there laws that govern this advance? And so too for technology. I'm very unsure about my candidate law, but at least it points to the reality that we do advance into the adjacent possible and perhaps some law governs how we do so.

Jordan Pollack

Pollack's Law

Progress requires the Pareto Optimization of Competitiveness and Informativeness

The simple idea that Nature is "Red in Tooth and Claw" lends a religious fervor to those promoting Competition as the right organizing principle for open-ended innovation, e.g. in Laissez Faire Capitalism, government procurement, Social Darwinism, personnel review, and even high-stakes educational testing.

Through the use of mathematical and computer models of learning, we discovered that competition between learning agents does not lead to open-ended progress. Instead, it leads to boom-bust cycles, winner-take-all monopolies, and oligarchic groups who collude to block progress. Unfortunately, cooperation (collaborative learning, altruism) fails as well, leading to weak systems easy to invade or corrupt.

The exciting new "law" is that progress can be sustained among self-interested agents when both competitiveness and informativeness are rewarded. A chess master who wins every game ­ like one who loses every game - provides no information on the strengths and weaknesses of other agents, while an informative agent, like a teacher, contributes opportunity and motivation for further progress. We predict that this law will be found in Nature, and will have ramifications for building new learning organizations.

The Pollack

A measurement of innovation rate.

There is no measure of the rate at which processes like art, evolution, companies, and computer programs innovate.

Consider a black box that takes in energy and produces bit-strings. The complexity of a bit-string is not simply its length, because a long string of all 1's or all 0's is quite simple. Kolmogorov measures complexity by the size of the smallest program listing that can generate a string, and Bennet's Logical Depth also accounts for the cost of running the program. But these fail on the Mandelbrot Set, a very beautiful set of patterns arising from a one-line program listing. What of life itself, the result of a simple non-equilibrium chemical process baking for quite a long time? Different algorithmic processes (including fractals, natural evolution, and the human mind) "create" by operating as a "Platonic Scoop," instantiating "ideals" into physical arrangements or memory states.

So to measure innovation rate (in POLLACKS) we divide the P=Product novelty (assigned by an observer with memory) by the L=program listing size and the C= Cost of runtime/space/energy.

Platonic Density = P / LC

Pollack's Law of Robotics

Start over with Pinball Machines.

Moore's law existed before computers; it is just economics of scale with zero labor. If enough demand can justify capital investment in fully automated factories, then the price of a good approaches the cost of its raw materials, energy dissipated, and (patent/copyright) monopoly tax. Everyone knows Moore's law has lead to ultra-small-cheap integrated circuits. But why don't we have ultra-small-cheap mechanical parts?

Pollack's law of Robotics states that we won't get a Moore's law for electro-mechanical systems until we return to the age of the Pinball Machine, and bootstrap the manufacture of general purpose integrated mechatronics, reducing scale from macro through mesa and MEMS. Leaping to Nano is likely to fail.

Dylan Evans

Evans' laws of the completeness of good old fashioned AI.

Evans' First Law

For every intelligent agent, there is a Turing-machine that provides an exhaustive description of its mind.

Evans' Second Law

When the Turing-machine that describes the mind of intelligent agent has been specified, there is nothing more to say about that mind, apart from how it is implemented in hardware.

Kai Krause

Kai's Existential Dilemma

I think....
there....
4a.m.

Kai's Exactness Dilemma

93.8127 % of all statistics are useless.

Kai's Example Dilemma

A good analogy is like a diagonal frog.

Adam Bly

Bly's First Law

Science is culture.

Bly's Second Law

High public interest in science without growing public understanding of science is worse than low public interest in science.

Ray Kurzweil

Kurzweil's Law (aka "The Law of Accelerating Returns")

Evolution applies positive feedback in that the more capable methods resulting from one stage of evolutionary progress are used to create the next stage. Each epoch of evolution has progressed more rapidly by building on the products of the previous stage.

Evolution works through indirection: evolution created humans, humans created technology, humans are now working with increasingly advanced technology to create new generations of technology. As a result, the rate of progress of an evolutionary process increases exponentially over time.

Over time, the "order" of the information embedded in the evolutionary process (i.e., the measure of how well the information fits a purpose, which in evolution is survival) increases.

A comment on the nature of order.

The concept of the "order" of information is important here, as it is not the same as the opposite of disorder. If disorder represents a random sequence of events, then the opposite of disorder should imply "not random." Information is a sequence of data that is meaningful in a process, such as the DNA code of an organism, or the bits in a computer program. Noise, on the other hand, is a random sequence. Neither noise nor information is predictable. Noise is inherently unpredictable, but carries no information. Information, however, is also unpredictable. If we can predict future data from past data, then that future data stops being information. We might consider an alternating pattern ("0101010. . . .") to be orderly, but it carries no information (beyond the first couple of bits).

Thus orderliness does not constitute order because order requires information. However, order goes beyond mere information. A recording of radiation levels from space represents information, but if we double the size of this data file, we have increased the amount of data, but we have not achieved a deeper level of order.

Order is information that fits a purpose. The measure of order is the measure of how well the information fits the purpose. In the evolution of life-forms, the purpose is to survive. In an evolutionary algorithm (a computer program that simulates evolution to solve a problem) applied to, say, investing in the stock market, the purpose is to make money. Simply having more information does not necessarily result in a better fit. A superior solution for a purpose may very well involve less data.

The concept of "complexity" is often used to describe the nature of the information created by an evolutionary process. Complexity is a close fit to the concept of order that I am describing, but is also not sufficient. Sometimes, a deeper order—a better fit to a purpose—is achieved through simplification rather than further increases in complexity. For example, a new theory that ties together apparently disparate ideas into one broader more coherent theory reduces complexity but nonetheless may increase the "order for a purpose" that I am describing. Indeed, achieving simpler theories is a driving force in science. Evolution has shown, however, that the general trend towards greater order does generally result in greater complexity.

Thus improving a solution to a problem—which may increase or decrease complexity—increases order. Now that just leaves the issue of defining the problem. Indeed, the key to an evolution algorithm (and to biological and technological evolution) is exactly this: defining the problem.

We may note that this aspect of "Kurzweil’s Law" (the law of accelerating returns) appears to contradict the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which implies that entropy (randomness in a closed system) cannot decrease, and, therefore, generally increases. However, the law of accelerating returns pertains to evolution, and evolution is not a closed system. It takes place amidst great chaos, and indeed depends on the disorder in its midst, from which it draws its options for diversity. And from these options, an evolutionary process continually prunes its choices to create ever greater order. Even a crisis, such as the periodic large asteroids that have crashed into the Earth, although increasing chaos temporarily, end up increasing—deepening—the order created by an evolutionary process.

• A primary reason that evolution—of life-forms or of technology—speeds up is that it builds on its own increasing order, with ever more sophisticated means of recording and manipulating information. Innovations created by evolution encourage and enable faster evolution. In the case of the evolution of life forms, the most notable early example is DNA, which provides a recorded and protected transcription of life’s design from which to launch further experiments. In the case of the evolution of technology, ever improving human methods of recording information have fostered further technology. The first computers were designed on paper and assembled by hand. Today, they are designed on computer workstations with the computers themselves working out many details of the next generation’s design, and are then produced in fully-automated factories with human guidance but limited direct intervention.

• The evolutionary process of technology seeks to improve capabilities in an exponential fashion. Innovators seek to improve things by multiples. Innovation is multiplicative, not additive. Technology, like any evolutionary process, builds on itself. This aspect will continue to accelerate when the technology itself takes full control of its own progression.

• We can thus conclude the following with regard to the evolution of life-forms, and of technology: the law of accelerating returns as applied to an evolutionary process: An evolutionary process is not a closed system; therefore, evolution draws upon the chaos in the larger system in which it takes place for its options for diversity; and evolution builds on its own increasing order. Therefore, in an evolutionary process, order increases exponentially.

• A correlate of the above observation is that the "returns" of an evolutionary process (e.g., the speed, cost-effectiveness, or overall "power" of a process) increase exponentially over time. We see this in Moore’s law, in which each new generation of computer chip (now spaced about two years apart) provides twice as many components, each of which operates substantially faster (because of the smaller distances required for the electrons to travel, and other innovations). This exponential growth in the power and price-performance of information-based technologies—now roughly doubling every year—is not limited to computers, but is true for a wide range of technologies, measured many different ways.

• In another positive feedback loop, as a particular evolutionary process (e.g., computation) becomes more effective (e.g., cost effective), greater resources are deployed towards the further progress of that process. This results in a second level of exponential growth (i.e., the rate of exponential growth itself grows exponentially). For example, it took three years to double the price-performance of computation at the beginning of the twentieth century, two years around 1950, and is now doubling about once a year. Not only is each chip doubling in power each year for the same unit cost, but the number of chips being manufactured is growing exponentially.

• Biological evolution is one such evolutionary process. Indeed it is the quintessential evolutionary process. It took place in a completely open system (as opposed to the artificial constraints in an evolutionary algorithm). Thus many levels of the system evolved at the same time.

• Technological evolution is another such evolutionary process. Indeed, the emergence of the first technology-creating species resulted in the new evolutionary process of technology. Therefore, technological evolution is an outgrowth of—and a continuation of—biological evolution. Early stages of humanoid created technology were barely faster than the biological evolution that created our species. Homo sapiens evolved in a few hundred thousand years. Early stages of technology—the wheel, fire, stone tools—took tens of thousands of years to evolve and be widely deployed. A thousand years ago, a paradigm shift such as the printing press, took on the order of a century to be widely deployed. Today, major paradigm shifts, such as cell phones and the world wide web were widely adopted in only a few years time.

• A specific paradigm (a method or approach to solving a problem, e.g., shrinking transistors on an integrated circuit as an approach to making more powerful computers) provides exponential growth until the method exhausts its potential. When this happens, a paradigm shift (a fundamental change in the approach) occurs, which enables exponential growth to continue.

• Each paradigm follows an "S-curve," which consists of slow growth (the early phase of exponential growth), followed by rapid growth (the late, explosive phase of exponential growth), followed by a leveling off as the particular paradigm matures.

• During this third or maturing phase in the life cycle of a paradigm, pressure builds for the next paradigm shift, and research dollars are invested to create the next paradigm. We can see this in the enormous investments being made today in the next computing paradigm—three-dimensional molecular computing—despite the fact that we still have at least a decade left for the paradigm of shrinking transistors on a flat integrated circuit using photolithography (Moore’s Law). Generally, by the time a paradigm approaches its asymptote (limit) in price-performance, the next technical paradigm is already working in niche applications. For example, engineers were shrinking vacuum tubes in the 1950s to provide greater price-performance for computers, and reached a point where it was no longer feasible to shrink tubes and maintain a vacuum. At this point, around 1960, transistors had already achieved a strong niche market in portable radios.

• When a paradigm shift occurs for a particular type of technology, the process begins a new S-curve.

• Thus the acceleration of the overall evolutionary process proceeds as a sequence of S-curves, and the overall exponential growth consists of this cascade of S-curves.

• The resources underlying the exponential growth of an evolutionary process are relatively unbounded.

• One resource is the (ever-growing) order of the evolutionary process itself. Each stage of evolution provides more powerful tools for the next. In biological evolution, the advent of DNA allowed more powerful and faster evolutionary "experiments." Later, setting the "designs" of animal body plans during the Cambrian explosion allowed rapid evolutionary development of other body organs, such as the brain. Or to take a more recent example, the advent of computer-assisted design tools allows rapid development of the next generation of computers.

• The other required resource is the "chaos" of the environment in which the evolutionary process takes place and which provides the options for further diversity. In biological evolution, diversity enters the process in the form of mutations and ever- changing environmental conditions. In technological evolution, human ingenuity combined with ever-changing market conditions keep the process of innovation going.

• If we apply these principles at the highest level of evolution on Earth, the first step, the creation of cells, introduced the paradigm of biology. The subsequent emergence of DNA provided a digital method to record the results of evolutionary experiments. Then, the evolution of a species that combined rational thought with an opposable appendage (the thumb) caused a fundamental paradigm shift from biology to technology. The upcoming primary paradigm shift will be from biological thinking to a hybrid combining biological and nonbiological thinking. This hybrid will include "biologically inspired" processes resulting from the reverse engineering of biological brains.

• If we examine the timing of these steps, we see that the process has continuously accelerated. The evolution of life forms required billions of years for the first steps (e.g., primitive cells); later on progress accelerated. During the Cambrian explosion, major paradigm shifts took only tens of millions of years. Later on, Humanoids developed over a period of millions of years, and Homo sapiens over a period of only hundreds of thousands of years.

• With the advent of a technology-creating species, the exponential pace became too fast for evolution through DNA-guided protein synthesis and moved on to human-created technology. Technology goes beyond mere tool making; it is a process of creating ever more powerful technology using the tools from the previous round of innovation, and is, thereby, an evolutionary process. As I noted, the first technological took tens of thousands of years. For people living in this era, there was little noticeable technological change in even a thousand years. By 1000 AD, progress was much faster and a paradigm shift required only a century or two. In the nineteenth century, we saw more technological change than in the nine centuries preceding it. Then in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, we saw more advancement than in all of the nineteenth century. Now, paradigm shifts occur in only a few years time.

• The paradigm shift rate (i.e., the overall rate of technical progress) is currently doubling (approximately) every decade; that is, paradigm shift times are halving every decade (and the rate of acceleration is itself growing exponentially). So, the technological progress in the twenty-first century will be equivalent to what would require (in the linear view) on the order of 200 centuries. In contrast, the twentieth century saw only about 20 years of progress (again at today’s rate of progress) since we have been speeding up to current rates. So the twenty-first century will see about a thousand times greater technological change than its predecessor.

Jamshed Bharucha

Bharucha's Law

To understand what people are thinking and feeling, look beyond what they say. Language does not capture the full range and grain of thought and experience, and its unique power enables us as easily to mask our thoughts and feelings as it does to express them.

Samuel Barondes

Barondes' First Law

Science abhors contradictions; scientist's minds are replete with them.

Barondes' Second Law

Self-understanding is inherently inaccurate because most of our knowledge comes from specific behavioral experiences that are often inconsistent; and our mechanisms of learning are designed to store memories whether or or not their implications are formally contradictory.

W. Brian Arthur

Arthur's First Law

High-tech markets are dominated 70-80% by a single player—product, company, or country.

The reason: Such markets are subject to increasing returns or self-reinforcing mechanisms. Therefore an initial advantage—often bestowed by chance—leads to increasing advantage and eventually heavy market domination. (Absent government intervention, of course).

Arthur's Second Law

As technology advances it becomes ever more biological.

We are leaving an age of mechanistic, fixed-design technologies, and entering an age of metabolic, self-reorganizing technologies. In this sense, as technology becomes more advanced it becomes more organic—therefore more "biological." Further, as biological mechanisms at the cellular and DNA levels become better understood, they become harnessed and co-opted as technologies. In this century, biology and technology will therefore intertwine.

Arthur's Third Law

The modularization of technologies increases with the extent of the market.

Just as it pays to create a specialized worker if there is sufficient volume of throughput to occupy that specialty, it pays to create a standard prefabricated assembly, or module, if its function recurs in many instances. Modularity therefore is to a technological economy what the division of labor is to a manufacturing one—it increases as the economy expands.

Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett's Law of Needy Readers

is an extension of Schank's Law

On any important topic, we tend to have a dim idea of what we hope to be true, and when an author writes the words we want to read, we tend to fall for it, no matter how shoddy the arguments. Needy readers have an asymptote at illiteracy; if a text doesn't say the one thing they need to read, it might as well be in a foreign language. To be open-minded, you have to recognize, and counteract, your own doxastic hungers.

Haim Harari

Harari’s Law of Science Eucation

The faster Science and Technology advance—the more important it is to teach and to learn the basics of Math and Science and the less important it is to teach and to learn the latest developments.

Harari’s Law of Particle Physics

The electron, its replicas (muon and tau), the quarks and the neutrinos are all composed of the same set of more fundamental objects, which will become the newly accepted basic building blocks of all of nature.

Harari’s Law of Scientific Fads and Bandwagons

Every scientific discovery is first made by one person or by a few people. At the time of the discovery, they are the only ones aware of it. It follows logically that democratic votes, public opinion polls, majority views of scientists and scientific fads do not necessarily represent scientific truth. Only correct experimental results do.

George Lakoff

Lakoff's First Law

Frames trump facts.

All of our concepts are organized into conceptual structures called "frames" (which may include images and metaphors) and all words are defined relative to those frames. Conventional frames are pretty much fixed in the neural structures of our brains. In order for a fact to be comprehended, it must fit the relevant frames. If the facts contradict the frames, the frames, being fixed in the brain, will be kept and the facts ignored.

We see this in politics every day. Consider the expression "tax relief" which the White House introduced into common use on the day of George W. Bush's inauguration. A "relief" frame has an affliction, an afflicted party, a reliever who removes the affliction and is thereby a hero, and in the frame anyone who tries to stop the reliever from administering the relief is a bad guy, a villain. "Tax relief" imposes the additional metaphor that Taxation Is an Affliction, with the entailments that the president is a hero for attempting to remove this affliction and the Democrats are bad guys for opposing him. This frame trumps many facts: Most people wind up paying more in local taxes, payments for services cut, and debt servicing as a result of the Bush's tax cuts.

There is of course another way to think about taxes: Taxes are what you pay to live in America—to have democracy, opportunity, government services, and the vast infrastructure build by previous taxpayers—the highways, the internet, the schools, scientific research, the court system, etc. Taxes are membership fees used to maintain and expand services and the infrastructure. But however true this may be, it is not yet an established frame inscribed in the synapses of our brains.

This has an important consequence. Political liberals have inherited an assumption from the Enlightenment, that The facts will set us free, that if the public is just given the facts, they will, being rational beings, reach the right conclusion. It is simply false. It violates Lakoff's Law.

Lakoff's Second Law

Voters vote their identities, not their self-interest.

Because of the way they frame the world, voters vote in a way that best accords with their identities and not in accord with their self-interest. That is why it is of no use for Democrats to keep pointing out that Bush's tax cuts go to the top 1 percent, not to most voters. If they identify with Bush because they share his culture and his world view, they will vote against their self-interest.

We saw this in California in the recall election, when, for example, union members overwhelming favored Gray Davis' policies as being better for them, yet voted for Schwartzenegger.

Edward O. Laumann

Laumann's First Proposition

Moderation in levels of partnered sex activity is the mode for the bulk of humankind and is consistent with high levels of subjective well-being.

Laumann's Second Proposition

Low levels of subjective sexual well-being is associated with poor physical, emotional, and mental health.

These propositions (they are empirical associations and not established as causal) are based on my extensive international work on human sexuality. They are based on surveys I have conducted in the United States and China as well as the Pfizer-funded Global Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Behavior (N = 27,500) which interviewed equal numbers of men and women 40 to 80 years old in 29 countries world wide. The real question is the nature of the causal link between these variables.

Anton Zeilinger

Zeilinger's Fundamental Law

There is no Fundamental Law.

Zeilinger's Law on Reality, Space and Time

Information is the most Fundamental Concept, it's all we have.

Nancy Etcoff

Etcoff's Law

Be wary of scientific dualisms.

Approach them with caution, the way demolition experts regard bombs, likely to explode, in this case into unproductive argument and the obscuring of truth. "Opposing forces" are the scientific version of the original dualism—good vs evil and darkness vs. light. Instead, of acting in opposition, in nature two forces are likely to dependent, interactive and interwoven; sometimes they are merely two names for the same thing.

For example:

Brain vs Mind
Mind vs Body
Emotion vs Reason
Nature vs Nurture
Us vs Them

Seek unity.

Remember always that it is easy to be in possession of some facts, extraordinarily difficult to know the truth.

Lee Smolin

Smolin's First Law

Genuine advances are rarely made by accident; in fact, the outcome of a scientific investigation is usually less dramatic than originally hoped for. Therefore, if you want to do something really significant in science, you must aim high and you must take genuine risks.

Smolin's Second Law

In every period and every community there is something that everybody believes, but cannot justify. If you want to understand anything, you have to start by ignoring what everyone believes, and thinking for yourself.

This was advice given to me by my father when I was a child. Feynman said something very similar: "Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion."

Smolin's Third Law

Time does exist.

Smolin's Zeroth Law

A measure of our ignorance about nature is the extent to which our theories depend on background structures, which are entities necessary to define the quantities in the theory, that do not themselves refer to anything which evolves dynamically in time. Our understanding can always be deepened by bringing such fixed, background structures into the domain of dynamical law. By doing so, we convert absolute properties, defined with respect to background structures, into relational properties, defined in terms of relationships among dynamical degrees of freedom.

Mark Mirsky

Mirsky's Law

Imagination precedes reality.

To imagine the universe is to fear it, even as one feels the power and pleasure of trying to find its furthest boundaries. To meet that fear one has to seek consolation whether in scientific theory or intuitive vision.

As a corollary to that, the return of past time in the present, as death comes steadily closer, if not unique to the human mind, is certainly one of the consolations of consciousness, and of the shadow realm of dream. If there is hope it is in our ability as men and women to imagine ourselves not only in other worlds but as an "other," as an opposite. Robert Musil, Proust, Kafka, Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri together with the anonymous scribes of the religious epics, Gilgamesh, the Old Testament, were uncanny in their ability to imagine in this way.

Imagination precedes what we call reality. I would propose this as a law of daily life and suspect that it plays a large part in our evolution. Trying to preserve and recreate what was best in my past and the past of distant ancestors is part of what keeps me balanced before a future in which I want to hope.

To imagine is not just to exist, but to prolong existence. At the last moment Spinoza could not surrender the idea that somehow memory of what had happened would not be lost in the vastness of the universe. Spinoza needed that consolation. Whether it does or not, we need to believe that memory persists, and that we are capable of influencing just what memory will be valued and given predominance.

David Buss

Buss’s Laws of Human Mating

Buss’s Third Law of Human Mating

For every mating adaptation in one sex, there exists at least one co-evolved adaptation in the other sex designed to manipulate and exploit it.

Buss’s Fourth Law of Human Mating

For every co-evolved exploitative mating adaptation, there exists at least one co-co-evolved defensive adaptation designed to circumvent being manipulated and exploited.

Buss’s Seventh Law of Human Mating

Never reveal your first two laws of mating, lest they be used to manipulate and exploit you.

Zangger's First Law

Most scientific breakthroughs are nothing else than the discovery of the obvious.

Zangger's Second Law

Truly great science is always ahead of its time.

Although there seems to be a slight contradiction in my laws, historical evidence proves them right:

• The Hungarian surgeon Ignaz Semmelweiss in 1847 reduced the death rate in his hospital from twelve to two percent, simply by washing hands between operations -- a concept that today would be advocated by a four year old child. When Semmelweiss urged his colleagues to introduce hygiene to the operating rooms, they had him committed to a mental hospital where he eventually died.

• The German meteorologist Alfred Wegener discovered in 1913 what every ten year old looking at a globe will notice immediately: That the Atlantic coasts of the African and South American continents have matching contours and thus may have been locked together some time ago. The experts needed sixty more years to comprehend the concept.

• When Louis Pasteur stated that bacteria could cause disease, colleagues treated the idea as "an absurd fantasy'!

• The theories of the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud were called "a case for the police" during a neurologists’ congress in Hamburg in 1910.

• Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, only eight years before Orville and Wilbur Wright left the ground in an aeroplane, remarked: "Machines that are heavier than air will never be able to fly!"

• German physicists Erwin Schrödinger's PhD thesis, in which he first introduced his famous equation, was initially rejected.

• When the Spanish nobleman de Satuola discovered the Late Ice Age painted cave at Altamira, established scholars described him as a forger and a cheat.

• The decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs by Jean Francois Champollion in 1822 was still rejected by scholar twenty years after his death.

• And when Johann Karl Fuhlrott discovered the bones of a Neanderthal in a cave near Duesseldorf in 1856, the president of the German Society of Anthropology considered it a bow-legged, Mongolian Cossack with rickets, who had been lucky enough to survive multiple head injuries, but who, during a campaign by Russian forces against France in 1814, had been wounded, and (stark naked) had crawled into a cave, where he died.

• Heinrich Schliemann’s excavation of Bronze Age Mycenae and Tiryns in Greece was considered by English archaeologists in The Times’ as the remains of some obscure barbarian tribe’ from the Byzantine period. In particular, the so-called prehistoric palace in Tiryns was labelled "the most remarkable hallucination of an unscientific enthusiast that has ever appeared in literature."

Scientific breakthroughs will always be held hostage to the lag needed to overcome existing beliefs. Lucius Annaeus Seneca realized this already two thousand years ago, when he said: "The time will come, when our successors will be surprised that we did not know such obvious things."

Maria Spiropulu

Maria's 1st Law

The anthropic principle in cosmology is just a (silly) corollary of the anthropic principle in religion: We are, therefore god is.

Maria's 2nd Law

We are not the source of the laws of nature. Nature is, whether we are or not.

Maria's 3rd Law

A law at the time of its conception is the solution to a problem or the answer to a question; at that time both the solution and the problem, the question and the answer, are ill-posed.

Tor Nørretranders

Nørretranders' Law of Symmetrical Relief

If you find that most other people, upon closer inspection, seem to be somewhat comical or ludicrous, it is highly probable that most other people find that you are in fact comical or ludicrous. So you don't have to hide it, they already know.

Nørretranders' Law of Understanding Novelty

The difficulty in understanding new ideas originating from science or art is not intellectual, but emotional; good ideas are simple and clear, but if they are truly new, they will be hard to swallow. It is not difficult to understand that the Earth is not at the center of the Universe, but it is hard to believe it. Science is simple, simply strange.

Philip Campbell

Campbell's First Law

Whatever the science, the forces of nature will exploit any loophole in experimental or theoretical design and construction, any ambiguity in measurement and any unchecked or unrecognised assumption to lead a researcher to enticing but false conclusions.

Campbell's Second Law

Scientists are as vigorous in complaining about the incomprehensibility of others' scientific papers as they are lazy in clarifying their own.

Campbell's Third Law

The probability that a Powerpoint presentation will fail is proportional to the technical sophistication of the institution at which you are presenting it. (And by the way, where the failure is total, your talk will be all the better for it.)

Steve Quartz

Quartz's Law of The Primacy of Feeling

In everyday life, one's anticipated emotions regarding a decision is a better guide than rational deliberation. Brain science is increasingly appreciating the centrality of emotions as guides to life, and emotions are typically more in line with one's wishes than rational deliberation, which can be easily disconnected from one's desires and goals. The upshot: deliberation is cheap, emotions are honest.

Quartz's Law of Latent Plasticity

Failure to alter thought, mood, personality, or other facets of ourselves through environmental means is not a demonstration that these are hard-wired. Rather, such failure should be taken merely as an indication that we have not yet discovered the appropriate regime of experience. New experience-based approaches to brain change are rapidly emerging, and overturn the dogma of the inflexible brain. We can now utilize the brain's latent capacity for change to treat mood disorders through experience-based brain change. Learning how to utilize the brain's latent plasticity, or capacity for change, will produce revolutions in physical, cognitive, and mental health remediation.

J. Craig Venter

Venter's First Law

Discoveries made in a field by some one from another discipline will always be upsetting to the majority of those inside.

Venter's Second Law

The ability to directly read the genetic code will continue exponentially, with the cost per nucleotide (base pair) decreasing by one-half every two years.

Corollary to Law 2

While DNA sequencing has changed faster than Moore's Law for computer chips, it will become dependent on and therefore limited by Moore's Law. (Based on an exchange with Gordon Moore).

Venter's Third Law

We have the tools for the first time in the history of humanity to answer virtually any question about biology and our own evolution.

Venter's Fourth Law

The Earth's Oceans are the ultimate source of genetic/genomic diversity providing at least half of the more than 10 billion genes in the planet's gene pool.

Venter's Fifth Law

Life is like sailing: It is easy to run downwind but usually if you want to get somewhere worthwhile a long hard beat to weather is necessary.

Richard Dawkins

Dawkins's Law of the Conservation of Difficulty

Obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity.

Dawkins's Law of Divine Invulnerability

God cannot lose.

Lemma 1

When comprehension expands, gods contract—but then redefine themselves to restore the status quo.

Lemma 2

When things go right, God will be thanked. When things go wrong, he will be thanked that they are not worse.

Lemma 3

Belief in the afterlife can only be proved right, never wrong.

Lemma 4

The fury with which untenable beliefs are defended is inversely proportional to their defensibility

The following law, though probably older, is often attributed to me in various versions, and I am happy to formulate it here as

Dawkins's Law of Adversarial Debate

When two incompatible beliefs are advocated with equal intensity, the truth does not lie half way between them.

David Finkelstein

Finkelstein's First Law

Everything is relative.

Finkelstein's Second Law

Everything (which is relative).

Paul Davies

Davies' First Law

Time does not pass.

Davies' Second Law

Never let observation stand in the way of a good theory.

Steve Grand

Grand's First Law

Things that persist, persist; things that don't, don't.

This tautology underlies every single phenomenon we see around us, from
molecules to religions. The purpose of science is simply to discover how and
why any given class of pattern manages to persist. Life is best understood
as a group of patterns that are able to persist because they spontaneously
duplicate themselves and adapt to change. Equally, an electron is a pattern
that persists as a self-maintaining resonant mode in the electromagnetic
field. The universe is what is left over when all the non-self-maintaining
patterns have faded away.

Grand's Second Law

Cortex is cortex is cortex.

Our brains may end up as a collection of highly specialised 'modules', but
the functioning of these modules is not the key to intelligence. The key is
the deeper set of rules that enable a homogeneous pink goo to wire itself up
into such a collection of specialised machines in the first place, merely by
being exposed to the sensory world.

Grand's Third Law

The more carefully one makes contingency plans, the more bizarre the actual
circumstances will turn out to be.

David Deutsch

Deutsch's Law

Every problem that is interesting is also soluble.

Corollary #1

Inherently insoluble problems are inherently boring.

Corollary #2

In the long run, the distinction between what is interesting and what is boring is not a matter of subjective taste but an objective fact.

Corollary #3

The problem of why every problem that is interesting is also soluble, is soluble.

Rodney Brooks

Brooks' First Law

A good place to apply scientific leverage is on an implicit assumption that everyone makes and that is so implicit that no one would even think to mention it to students entering the field. Negating that assumption may lead to new and interesting ways of thinking.

Brooks' Second Law

If you don't have a solid example then your theory is not a good theory.

Gary Marcus

Marcus' First Law

Nature and nurture are not in opposition; nature is what makes nurture possible.

Marcus' Second Law

Nothing in evolution is without precedent; even the most wondrous adaptations are modifications of pre-existing systems.

Marcus' Third Law

What's good enough for the body is good enough for the brain. Brains, like any other organ, take their special character from the actions of individual cells that divide, differentiate, migrate, and die, according to genetic programs that are the product of evolution.

Verena Huber-Dyson

Verena's Law of Sane Reasoning

Hone your Hunches, Jump, then backtrack to blaze a reliable trail to your Conclusion.

But avoid reductios; they lead to mere counterfeits of truth.

Verena's Law of Constructive Proof

Every sound argument can and ought to be turned into a construction that embodies and explains its conclusion.

Scott Sampson

Sampson's Law of Interdependent Origination

Life's unfolding is a tapestry in which every new thread is contingent upon the nature, timing, and interweaving of virtually all previous threads.

This is an extension of the idea that the origin of new life forms is fundamentally contingent upon interactions among previous biotas. As Stephen J. Gould described it, if one could rewind the tape of life and let events play out again, the results would almost certainly differ dramatically. The point of distinction here is a deeper incorporation of the connections inherent in the web of life. Specifically, the origin of new species is inextricably linked both to evolutionary history and to intricate ecological relationships with other species. Thus, speciation might be aptly termed "interdependent origination." So, for example, it is often said that the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago cleared the way for the radiation of mammals and, ultimately, the origin of humans. Yet the degree of life's interconnectedness far exceeds that implied in this statement. Dinosaurs persisted for 160 million years prior to this mass dying, co-evolving in intricate organic webs with plants, bacteria, fungi, and algae, as well as other animals, including mammals. Together these Mesozoic life forms influenced the origins and fates of one another and all species that followed. Had the major extinction of the dinosaurs occurred earlier or later, or had dinosaurs never evolved, subsequent biotas would have been wholly different, and we almost certainly wouldn't be here to contemplate nature. An equivalent claim could be made for any major group at any point in the history of life.

Colin Blakemore

Blakemore's First Law

People are never more honest than you think they are.

Blakemore's Second Law

The only form of intelligence that really matters is the capacity to predict.

Michael Shermer

Shermer's Last Law

Any sufficiently advanced extra-terrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God.

Any ETI that we might encounter would not be at our level of culture, science, and technology, nor would they be behind us. How far ahead of us would they be? If they were only a little ahead of us on an evolutionary time scale, they would be light years ahead of us technologically, because cultural evolution is much more rapid than biological evolution. God is typically described by Western religions as omniscient and omnipotent. Since we are far from the mark on these traits, how could we possibly distinguish a God who has them absolutely, from an ETI who has them in relatively (to us) copious amounts? Thus, we would be unable to distinguish between absolute and relative omniscience and omnipotence. But if God were only relatively more knowing and powerful than us, then by definition it would be an ETI!

Shermer's Three Principles of Provisional Morality and Evolutionary Ethic

1. The ask-first principle: to find out whether an action is right or wrong, ask first.

2. The happiness principle: it is a higher moral principle to always seek happiness with someone else's happiness in mind, and never seek happiness when it leads to someone else's unhappiness.

3. The liberty principle: it is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone else's liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to someone else's loss of liberty.

0. The Zeroeth principle: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

(These principles were derived from a scientific analysis of the evolutionary origins of the moral sentiments and the historical development of evolutionary ethics. The Zeroeth Principle, which precedes the three principles, first evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago but was first codified in writing by the world's great religious leaders and has come down to us as the golden rule. The foundation of the Zeroeth Principle, and the three derivative principles is, in evolutionary theory, reciprocal altruism and the process of reciprocity.)

Ernst Pöppel

I refer to my "laws" as "Pöppel's Paradox", and "Pöppel's Universal". Actually the names have been invented by others.

Pöppel's Paradox

Not to see, but to see. Some years ago (1973) we described a phenomenon that patients with a certain brain injury show some residual vision although they do not have a conscious representation of their remained visual capacity. They can orient in space, or they can discriminate simple patterns, but they do not know that they can do it. This phenomenon became known as "blindsight". Apparently there is a lot of implicit processing going in our brain that lacks an explicit representation, but which usually is associated with conscious experience. Interestingly, the phenomenon of blindsight not only made a "career" in the neurosciences, but also in philosophy.

Pöppel's Universal

We take life 3 seconds at a time. Human experience and behaviour is characterized by temporal segmentation. Successive segments or "time windows" have a duration of approx. 3 seconds. Examples: Intentional movements are embedded within 3 s (like a handshake); the anticipation of a precise movement like hitting a golf ball does not go beyond 3 s; if we reproduce the duration of a stimulus, we can do so accurately up to 3 s but not beyond; if we look at ambiguous figures (like a vase vs. two faces) or if we listen to ambiguous phoneme sequences (like Cu-Ba-Cu-Ba-.., either hearing Cuba or Bacu) automatically after approx. 3 s the percept switches to the alternative; the working platform of our short term memory lasts only 3 s (being interrupted after 3 s most of the information is gone); spontaneous speech in all languages is temporally segmented, each segment lasting up to 3 s; this temporal segmentation of speech shows up again in poetry, as a verse of a poem is embedded within 3 s (Shakespeare: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day"); musical motives preferably last 3 s (remember Beethoven's Fifth Symphony); decisions are made within 3 s (like zapping between TV channels); and there are more examples. Thus, the brain provides a temporal stage that last approx. 3 s, which is used in perception, cognition, movement control, memory, speech, or music.

Robert Aunger

Aunger's Law of Human Evolution

Human life is unique in being the result of three coevolving information inheritance systems: genes, minds and technology.

Aunger's Law of Technological Evolution

As the rate of technological innovation increases, so too does the inertia from ancillary institutions, but not as much.

John Horgan

Horgan's First Law

If science has limits—and science tells us that it does—the only question is when, not if, it reaches them.

Horgan's Second Law

Every garbage-removal system—whether Zen, skepticism, or existentialism—generates garbage. If you want to clear your mind, the best you can hope for is to find a system, or anti-system, that removes more garbage than it generates.

Seth Lloyd

Lloyd's It From Qubit Law

The universe is a quantum computer: life, sex, the brain, and human society all arise out of the ability of the universe to process information at the level of atoms, photons and elementary particles.

Jaron Lanier

The following are Lanier's Laws for Putting Machines in their Place, distilled from comments I've posted on Edge over the years. They are all stolen from earlier laws that predate the appearance of computers by decades or centuries.

Lanier's First Law

Humans change themselves through technology.

Example: Lanier's Law of Eternal Improvement for Virtual Reality: Average human sensory perception will gain acuity over successive generations in tandem with the improving qualities of pervasive media technology.

Lanier's Second Law

Even though human nature is dynamic, you must find a way to think of it as being distinct from the rest of nature.

You can't have a categorical imperative without categories. Or, You can't have a golden rule without gold. You have to draw a Circle of Empathy around yourself and others in order to be moral. If you include too much in the circle, you become incompetent, while if you include too little you become cruel. This is the "Normal form" of the eternal liberal/conservative dichotomy.

Lanier's Third Law

You can't rely completely on the level of rationality humans are able to achieve to decide what to put inside the circle. People are demonstrably insane when it comes to attributing nonhuman sentience, as can be seen at any dog show.

Lanier's Fourth Law

Lanier's Law of AI Unrecognizability.

You can't rely on experiment alone to decide what to put in the circle. A Turing Test-like experiment can't be designed to distinguish whether a computer has gotten smarter or a person interacting with that computer has gotten stupider (usually by lowering or narrowing standards of human excellence in some way.)

Lanier's Fifth Law

If you're inclined to put machines inside your circle, you can't rely on metrics of technological sophistication to decide which machines to choose. These metrics have no objectivity.

For just one example, consider Lanier's retelling of Parkinson's Law for the Post-dot-com Era: Software inefficiency and inelegance will always expand to the level made tolerable by Moore's Law. Put another way, Lanier's corrolary to Brand's Laws: Whether Small Information wants to be free or expensive, Big Information wants to be meaningless.

Lanier's Sixth Law

When one must make a choice despite almost but not quite total uncertainty, work hard to make your best guess.

Best guess for Circle of Empathy: Danger of increasing human stupidity is probably greater than potential reality of machine sentience. Therefore choose not to place machines in Circle of Empathy.

Charles Seife

Seife's First Law

A scientific revolution is a complete surprise. Especially to its authors.

Seife's Second Law

Each generation's scientific neologisms adorn the labels of the next generation's quack cures.

Andy Clark

Clark's Law

Everything leaks.

There are no clear-cut level distinctions in nature. Neural software bleeds into neural firmware, neural firmware bleeds into neural hardware, psychology bleeds into biology and biology bleeds into physics. Body bleeds into mind and mind bleeds into world. Philosophy bleeds into science and science bleeds back.The idea of levels is a useful fiction, great for hygienic text-book writing and quick answers that defend our local turf but seldom advance scientific understanding).

Alan Alda

The following is written by a non-scientist who supposes it might be entertaining for scientists to see what passes through the head of a curious layman while trying to understand the people who try to understand Nature.

Alda's First Law of Laws

All laws are local.

In other words, something is always bound to come along and make you rethink what you know by forcing you to look at it in a broader context. I've arrived at this notion after interviewing hundreds of scientists, and also after being married for 46 years.

I don't mean that laws are not true and useful, especially when they have been verified by experiment. But they are likely to continue to be true only within a certain frame, once another frame is discovered.

Some scientists will probably find this idea heretical and others may find it obvious. According to this law, they'll both be right (depending on the frame they're working in).

Another way of saying this is that no matter how much we know about something, it is just the tip of the iceberg. And most disasters occur by coming in contact with the other part of the iceberg.

Alda's Second Law of Laws

A law does not know how local it is.

Citizens of Lawville do not realize there are city limits and are constantly surprised to find out they live in a county.

When you're operating within the frame of a law, you can't know where the edges of the frame are—where dragons begin showing up.

I've just been interviewing astronomers about dark matter and dark energy in the universe. These two things make up something like 96% of the universe. The part of the universe we can see or in some way observe is only about 4%. That leaves a lot of universe that needs to be rethought. And some people speculate that dark energy may be leaking in from a whole other universe; an even bigger change of frame, if that turns out to be the case.

It’s now known that vast stretches of DNA once thought to be Junk DNA because they don’t code for proteins actually regulate or even silence conventional genes. The conventional genes—what we used to think were responsible for everything we knew about heritability—account for only 2% of our DNA. Apparently, it’s not yet known how much of the other 98% is active, but I think the frame has just shifted here.

Welcome to Lawville; you are now leaving Lawville.

Stuart Pimm

Pimm's First Law

No language spoken by fewer than 100,000 people survives contact with the outside world, while no language spoken by more than one million people can be eliminated by such contact.

Pimm's Second Law

With every change in language (including first contact with humanity), a region's biodiversity shrinks by 20%.

Robert Provine

Provine's Motor Precocity Principle

Organisms spond before they respond (act before they react).

This principle of neurobehavioral development and evolution describes the tendency of the nervous system to produce motor output before it receives sensory input. Because motor systems often evolve and develop before sensory systems, sensory input cannot have the dominant influence on neural structure and function predicted by some psychological and neurological theories.

The evolutionary precocity of motor relative to sensory systems also argues against the classical reflex as a primal step in neurobehavioral evolution. Spontaneously active motor processes are adaptive and can emerge through natural selection unlike sensory processes that are not adaptive without a behavior to guide. Sensory systems evolved to control already existing movement.

Another argument against the primacy of reflexes is that they require the unlikely simultaneous evolution of a sensory and a motor process. The tendency of organisms to "spond before they respond" requires the re-evaluation of many other traditional neurobehavioral concepts and processes.

Provine's Self/Other Exclusionary Principle

The "self," the most basic sense of personhood, is defined as that which is not "other." "Other," the most primitive level of social entity, is defined as a non-self, animate stimulus on the surface of your skin.

Self is distinguished from other by a neurological cancellation process. These definitions are attractive because they permit a neurologically and computationally based approach to problems that are traditionally mired in personality and social theory. Although our sense of identity involves more than self/non-self discrimination, such a mechanism may be at its foundation and a first step toward the evolution of personhood and the neurological computation of its boundaries. For a demonstration of this mechanism, consider your inability to tickle yourself. Tickle requires stimulation by a non-self animate entity on the surface of your skin. Similar, self-produced stimulation is cancelled and is not ticklish.

Without such a self/non-self discriminator, we would be constantly be tickling ourselves by accident, and the world would be filled with goosey people lurching their way through life in a chain reaction filled with tactile false alarms. Developing a similar machine algorithm may lead to "ticklish" robots whose performance is enhanced by their capacity to distinguish touching from being touched, and, provocatively, a computationally based construct of machine personhood.

Art De Vany

De Vany's Law

The future is over-forecasted and underpredicted.

Alison Gopnik

Gopnik's Learning Curve

The ability to learn is inversely proportional to years of school, adjusted for hormones.

Gopnik's Gender Curves

The male curve is an abrupt rise followed by an equally abrupt fall. The female curve is a slow rise to an extended asymptote. The areas under the curves are roughly equal. These curves apply to all activities at all time scales (e.g. attention to TV programs, romantic love, career scientific productivity).

Raphael Kasper

Kasper's Law

One should never blindly accept things as they are.

Jose Saramago writes in The Cave with his usual quirky punctuation and sentence structure:

"... we often hear it said, or we say it ourselves, I'll get used to it, we say or they say, with what seems to be genuine acceptance ..., what no one asks is at what cost do we get used to things."

Kasper's Second Law

Try to know where and how your thoughts arise and always give credit to your teachers.

Susan Blackmore

Blackmore's First Law

People's desire to believe in the paranormal is stronger than all the evidence that it does not exist.

Blackmore's Second Law

Humans are not in control of the web; the memes are.

Stanislas Dehaene

Dehaene's First Law

Every successful human invention such as arithmetic or the alphabet has a "neuronal niche"—a set of cerebral processors that evolved for a distinct purpose, but can be recycled to implement the new function.

Two corollaries:

The difficulty of learning a new concept or technique is directly related to the amount of recycling needed—the distance between the evolutionary older function and the new one.

When the old and the new functions are closely related (isomorphic), an evolutionary old cerebral processor can provide a fast, unconscious and unexpected solution to a recent cultural problem—this is what we call
"intuition".

Dehaene's Second Law

The confusability of two ideas, however abstract, is a direct function of the overlap in their neuronal codes.

Richard Rabkin

Rabkin's Rule

Nothing is a simple as it seems.

Rabkin's Dictum

If you don't understand something, it's because you aren't aware of its context.

Donald Hoffman

Hoffman's First Law

A theory of everything starts with a theory of mind.

Quantum measurement hints that observers may create microphysical properties. Computational theories of perception hint that observers may create macrophysical properties. The history of science suggests that counterintuitive hints, if pursued, can lead to conceptual breakthroughs.

Hoffman's Second Law

Physical universes are user interfaces for minds.

Just as the virtual worlds experienced in VR arcades are interfaces that allow the arcade user to interact effectively with an unseen world of computers and software, so also the physical world one experiences daily is a species-specific user interface that allows one to survive while interacting with a world of which one may be substantially ignorant.

Nassim Taleb

Taleb's First Black Swan Law

The risk you know anything about today is not the one that matters. What will hurt you next has to look completely unplausible today. The more unplausible the event the more it will hurt you.

Consider that had the WTC attack been deemed a reasonable risk then we would have had tighter control of the skies and it would have not taken place. It happened because it was improbable. The awareness of a specific danger makes you protect yourself from its precise effect and may prevent the event itself from occurring.

Taleb's Second Black Swan Law (corollary)

We don't learn that we don't learn.

We don't learn the First Black Swan Law from experience, yet we think that we learn something from it. Abstract subject matters (and metarules) do not affect our risk avoidance mechanisms; only vivid images do. People did not learn from the WTC (and the succession of similar events in history such as the formation of financial bubbles) that we have a horrible track record in forecasting such occurrences. They just learned the specific task to avoid tall buildings and Islamic terrorists—after the fact.

Geoffrey Miller

Miller's Law of Strange Behavior

To understand any apparently baffling behavior by another human, ask: what status game is this individual playing, to show off which heritable traits, in which mating market?

Miller's Iron Law of Iniquity

In principle, there is an evolutionary trade-off between any two positive traits. But in practice, every good trait correlates positively with every other good trait.

Miller's First Law of Offspring Ingratitude

People who don't understand genetics attribute their personal failings to the inane role models offered by their parents.

Miller's Second Law of Offspring Ingratitude

People who do understand genetics attribute their personal failings to the inane mate-choice decisions made by their parents.