"evolution" archive
Tuesday 8 February
- Idiotic design - Michael Behe, one of the "scientific" leaders of the intelligent design movement [as opposed to one of the overtly religious leaders who push Behe's ideas], wrote a really just quite stupid op-ed in the NYTimes. The first problem is that... Posted in evolution
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Monday 17 January
- Eugenics! Nature versus nurture! [More] regression! - Interesting New Yorker review of a new book on Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin and inventor of eugenics. Galton, who had a remarkably wide-ranging curiosity and intellect, did actually make significant scientific contributions, including discovering the idea that data... Posted in damn lies
, evolution
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| 91 Comments
Thursday 12 August
- Lefty blindy men - New research saying that left- or right-handedness develops in the womb reminds me of this talk I saw given by Leonard Shlain, author of The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. Shlain has a bunch of often odd, often insightful observations about... Posted in evolution
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Wednesday 21 July
- Modern evolution - This sort of reads like physics for poets, but there are a couple ideas of note about evolution still going on for us humans.... Posted in evolution
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Thursday 1 July
- Big gay animal science - Apparently, there's lots of homosexuality in other animals and it's not entirely dissimilar from our human homosexuality. Some brain-chemistry hoo-ha may at least partially explain male gay-ness both in humans and rams, for instance. And there's this: "Sometimes the females... Posted in evolution
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| 114 Comments
Thursday 15 April
- Nature of the beast - Former Harvard Professor Christian Schwabe has a whole different idea about how evolution works, though he can't get any folks in the mainstream science world to even give it a look. His "genomic potential hypothesis" is "the idea that life... Posted in evolution
, monkey vs robot
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| 106 Comments
Thursday 8 April
- Cat is man's second-best friend - Cats were buried along with humans in Cyprus almost 10k years ago, seeming to push back the amicable relationship between the two species significantly further than previously known. (Human-dog relations seem to go back around 12k years.) I've talked a... Posted in evolution
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| 77 Comments
Friday 26 March
- Smell is the biggest and best - People overlook the importance of smell at their own risk. We may be predominantly visual/verbal creatures, but smell connects our big cortexes with our most animalistic insides. Never forget... Oh, and I have specifics for you, kind reader. Fear not!... Posted in evolution
, monkey vs robot
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| 233 Comments
Wednesday 24 March
- Nibbling humans - New research suggests that part of what makes humans human was a mutation that decreased the size of our ancestors' jaw muscles, which allowed the skull to get bigger. The mutation came around 2.4M years ago, right around the time... Posted in evolution
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Saturday 13 March
- It takes a grandma to raise lots of children - Having grandmothers around increases the reproductive success of a family. Not terribly surprising, but interesting backup to the idea that strong extended-familial bonds are important for human survival. May also explain why human females are some of the only mammals... Posted in evolution
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| 275 Comments
Wednesday 21 January
- Where do men come from? - This geneticist Spencer Wells, profiled recently in National Geographic, is popping up in a lot of places now. He does pretty interesting research looking at the Y chromosome, finding out when people went to different parts of the world. I... Posted in evolution
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| 182 Comments
Tuesday 30 December
- Red Queen clean-up - Quick hits on Red Queen: - I think an interesting point about human neoteny is that it seems that humans' extremely early birth [humans are born way before we 'should' be -- we're helpless for years] is that this coincides... Posted in evolution
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| 149 Comments
Monday 29 December
- Trumping The Red Queen - So The Red Queen ends up basically as one long essay, with Ridley advancing his hypothesis that human intelligence -- the primary factor that makes us us -- is mostly a result of sexual selection: Humans are smart today because... Posted in evolution
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Sunday 28 December
- Ridley's response - I earlier criticized the section of The Red Queen in which Ridley seemed to claim that every major thing people do, even contemporary humans' choices not to maximize their numerical reproductive success -- 'the emancipation from evolution' -- was actually... Posted in evolution
| 8 Trackbacks
| 224 Comments
Friday 12 December
- Evolution did not kill evolution - I just started reading The Red Queen, by Matt Ridley, a book about how sex is the dominant force in human evolution and human nature. It's a pretty interesting book, and Ridley's a pretty smart theorist/writer -- although I've not... Posted in evolution
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| 1889 Comments
Monday 6 October
- Husbandry makes a husband's world - Interesting New Scientist article about how societies seem to become patrilineal [and patriarchal and male-dominated] when the people start holding cattle. It has to do with when wealth comes in a form in which it can be concentrated highly in... Posted in evolution
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| 110 Comments
Thursday 24 July
- The dope on humans - The question of what makes humanity is one that I'm thinking about frequently. All the friggin' time. And this letter to New Scientist is good input. So good that I'll retype the whole fargin' thing: Technohominids From Dennis White Now... Posted in evolution
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| 104 Comments