Sciencespeaking topic
A slime mold, a single-celled yellow blob with no brain, finds the shortest path through a maze and even draws networks as efficient as a city's subway map. Is a brain really necessary for intelligence?
— emergence / distributed intelligence
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
- Money is really nothing; you can't eat it or drink it. The only reason it's valuable is that everyone believes it's valuable. So it works because we all believe together in a shared illusion. How does such a fragile 'shared belief' stay standing more firmly than bridges and armies?
- If everyone starts saving so the economy will grow, the economy collapses because no one is spending, and everyone ends up poorer. Behavior that is wise one by one becomes catastrophic all together. Why can individual virtue turn into a collective trap?
- Regression to the mean: after a very bad performance, a better one usually follows even with no intervention at all. When we credit an improvement to what we did, are we misreading nature?
- Maybe the reason we have never encountered intelligent aliens is that intelligence is not actually a winning evolutionary strategy.
- Mendel discovered the laws of heredity through his pea experiments but went unnoticed for years; how does this show what it means to be ahead of one's time in science?