Rattling

A physicist's approach to Origins of Life

I spent the 6 years in my Ph.D. thinking of the broad topic of origins of life, or “abiogenesis”: how does non-living matter turn into...

Designing environments to select designs

In the last few posts we reasoned that “growing cars” would mean somehow creating them without a human planning out all the details of...

Darwinian designs

What is the difference between the amazing designs of biology, and those built by humans? Well, as we’ve discussed in the last couple...

Building cars we don't understand

Alright, so in the last post we were talking about growing cars (yes, I’m pretending this is a talk-show). I tried to argue that the...

Can we grow cars instead of building them?

Well that sounds like an exciting idea — imagine a car tree that grows on its own, and we need not do anything other than pick the...