Wandering Wim's Blog

Autocatalytic sets are self-sustaining chemical reaction networks which are believed to have played an important role in the origin of life, and to be an underlying principle of living systems in general. They have been studied in great[…]

Standard economic theory assumes that humans behave fully rationally and are able to objectively calculate the value (or cost) of the different choices they are presented with. In fact, we pride ourselves on our rationality. Different from the[…]

Schumann resonances (SR) are global electromagnetic resonances generated by lightning in the cavity between the Earth’s surface and the ionosphere. Their existence was predicted mathematically in 1952. However, it took another decade before they could be reliably measured[…]

The theory of evolution has helped biologists and ecologists to understand more about the natural world in general, and psychologists and social scientists to understand more about ourselves in particular. However, it has also taught a thing or two to[…]

Some problems are fundamentally hard, not only for humans, but even for computers. We may know how to solve these hard problems in theory, but in practice it might take billions of years to actually do so, even[…]

Around 1620 the Flemish chemist Jan Baptist van Helmont, often considered the father of pneumatic chemistry (the chemistry of gases), wrote the following: “If you press a piece of underwear soiled with sweat together with some wheat in an[…]

Earlier this year, the inaugural workshop of the EES Project was held at the Konrad Lorenz Institute (KLI) in Austria. The KLI is a private and independent research institute with a focus on the development and evolution of biological and[…]