Here's the truth about AI. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into.

ServiceNow puts AI to work for people across your business, removing friction and frustration

for your employees, supercharging productivity for your developers, providing intelligent

tools for your service agents to make customers happier, all built into a single platform you can

use right now. That's why the world works with ServiceNow. Visit ServiceNow.com

slash UK slash AI for people. Welcome to Scientific American Science Talk posted on November 15th,

2016. I'm Steve Murerski. On this episode,

myth and organism are formed by discrete ageable units, which evolve with time.

Myth and organism are formed by discrete heritable units which evolve over time.

That's Julian DeHuy. He is a doctoral candidate in history at Pantheon

Sorbonne University in Paris, and he uses evolutionary theory and computer modeling in the comparative

analysis of myths and folk tales. It's very interesting stuff, and he has an article about it

in the December issue of Scientific American.

Julian Dewey was kind enough to provide about 20 minutes worth of audio.

Unfortunately, my ear is not good enough to catch everything that he was saying.

So what I did was go through the audio and pick out a few sections that I thought were clear enough for my American ear to follow.

And I'll try to fill in some of the rest with the idea here.

But the basic idea that he explocates in the article is that we can track the evolution of myths and folk tales with the same techniques that we use

to establish evolutionary relationships and evolutionary history. And it's very interesting stuff.

Imagine a giant game of telephone.

We probably all play telephone in school when we were kids and maybe there were 20 people and you start at one end and they whisper in each other's ear and it comes out the other end

and you see what happened to it.

...