The Future History of Uplift

The active pursuit of uplift really took hold as a scientific field during the great flowering of transhuman culture, an era that also gave us the widespread settlement of space, extensive human genetic modification, nanotech, cognitive science, and the digital emulation of consciousness. It is in fact the convergence of these fields, and the feedback loops spawned between them, that enabled the uplift project to make so much headway so quickly. It’s easy to see uplift as a breathtaking cult...

 "Natural" Classification of Species as Evidence for Evolu...

Actually, the nested arrangement of life was recognized long before Darwin. Starting with the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in ????, biologists began classifying animals and plants, discovering that they consistently fell into what was called a “natural” classification. Strikingly, different biologists came up with nearly identical groupings. This means that these groupings are not subjective artifacts of a human need to classify, but that they tell us something real and fundamental about na...