The Scariest Thing About Life Insurance

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If you believe that the history of our universe for the last 14 billion years has been a history of increasing entropy then it's perfectly okay to wonder how complicated organized structures like you and me or the biosphere came into existence. This october take the scariest out of buying life insurance with policy genius go to policy genius dot com get the quotes and you can apply in minutes. The net effect of the earth on the entropy of the universe is certainly to increase it in complete accord with the second law of thermodynamics.

Our observable universe started out in a highly non-generic state, one of very low entropy, and disorderliness has been growing ever since. How, then, can we account for the appearance of complex systems such as organisms and biospheres? The answer is that very low-entropy states typically appear simple, and high-entropy states also appear simple, and complexity can emerge along the road in between. Today’s podcast is more of a discussion than an interview, in which behavioral neuroscientist Kate Jeffery and I discuss how complexity emerges through cosmological and biological evolution. As someone on the biological side of things, Kate is especially interested in how complexity can build up and then catastrophically disappear, as in mass extinction events.

There were some audio-quality issues with the remote recording of this episode, but loyal listeners David Gennaro and Ben Cordell were able to help repair it. I think it sounds pretty good!

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Kate Jeffery received her Ph.D. in behavioural neuroscience from the University of Edinburgh. She is currently a professor in the Department of Behavioural Neuroscience at University College, London. She is the founder and Director of the Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience at UCL.

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