Yes, sorry, been ages.

Much has occured.

Well, perhaps not much, but at least one big thing and that thing was HBES 2007 . Yes, this year’s annual meeting of the Human Behaviour and Evolution Society has been and gone and those of you who were there know what those of you who were not have missed.

A good time, I think was had by all. I certainly passed my time in glorious flux between the illuminative heights of Intellectual Excitement and the darkest abyss of Hangover, stopping off at the bus stop of Too Much Beer en route. From what I could see, I was not the only one to repeat this journey. Rude not to really.

The conference itself was brilliantly organised. Not a single downside to the whole event. I succeeded in attending most talks I wanted to and in eating my own body weight at lunch. One of the most memorable talks for me (apart from my own, obviously) was the plenary given by Hod Lipson (of Cornell University) on the evolution of sense of self in robots. Yes, that’s “sense of self” in “robots”. I was enthralled. He took us through the various uses of evolutionary algorithms to generate robots that can move, a process which involved computer simulations followed by three-dimensional printing of successful machines. I decided I very much want a 3D printer at that point. He then went on to discuss the interplay between evolving a machine in a virtual environment and evolving a virtual environment around the experience of a machine. Through this process, a robot with no information about its configuration can learn (very quickly) how to move about and, crucially, can generate internal models of itself with no other reference than its own experience. The most astounding extension of this process lead to some robots which spontaneously learned to self replicate . I’d read about that in New Scientist when it first hit the news wires last year, but I had never appreciated the most dramatic point: these things weren’t told to replicate. They had no objective at all. The self replication emerged out of an evolutionary process.

What fun.

So I left the conference, as one often does, feeling intellectually invigorated and full of academic vim and vigour. Nothing could stop me; I was going to finish my thesis! Publish papers! Find a postdoc! Bourn up on a cloud of conference-success and validation from my peers I spent a small eternity on some planes, a pleasant stint at home in London at the British Library, a hillariously drunken time at a wedding and then returned to Scotland to discover that my paper on testosterone and puberty has been rejected. Dammit.

It was the first paper I’d submitted for publication, so I am not entirely surprised, although one of the reviewers was a bit harsh, I think. So I am currently trying to remotivate myself. The editor recommends submission to other journals, so all is not lost, I say.

Anyway, I have other papers in preparation, not to mention a thesis to write and a job to get. More than enough to keep me busy.