Paleontologists who study earth’s ancient fossil record might not seem to be the obvious choice when asking about the prevalence of intelligent life in the cosmos. But paleontology, the study of ...

New theory proposes that humans — and analogous life beyond Earth — may represent the probable outcome of biological and planetary evolution UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Humanity may not be extraordinary ...

A new suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution. In 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico ...

Ten years ago, I would have turned my nose up at the idea that we already understood how to get machines to think. In the 2010s, my team at Google Research was working on a wide variety of ...

Humanity may not be extraordinary but rather the natural evolutionary outcome for our planet and likely others, according to a new model for how intelligent life developed on Earth. Humanity may not ...

Fossilized skeletons and shells clearly show how evolution and extinction unfolded over the past half a billion years, but a new analysis extends the chart of life to nearly 2 billion years ago. The ...

Yet modern biology has revealed that cells are preternaturally sophisticated assemblages — literally automated, miniaturized factories. How could the evidence have been overwhelming but now orthodoxy ...