If it does. What do readers/viewers think? Happy New Year to you too.

A recent paper prompts the question: Emerging evidence of plant domestication as a landscape-level process The evidence from ancient crops over the past decade challenges some of our most basic assumptions about the process of domestication. The emergence of crops has been viewed as a technologically progressive process in which single or multiple localized populations adapt to human environments in response to cultivation. By contrast, new genetic and archaeological evidence reveals a slow process that involved large populations over wide areas with unexpectedly sustained cultural connections in deep time. We review evidence that calls for a new landscape framework of crop origins. Evolutionary processes operate across vast distances of landscape and time, and the origins of domesticates are complex. The Read More ›

We are told, “Data from 329 aerospace engineers and 72 neurosurgeons suggests they are not necessarily cleverer than general population”: Researchers examined data from an international cohort of 329 aerospace engineers and 72 neurosurgeons who completed 12 tasks online using the Great British Intelligence Test (GBIT) from the Cognitron platform, as well as answering questions around their age, sex and levels of experience in their speciality. The tasks examined various aspects of cognition, including planning and reasoning, working memory, attention, and emotion processing abilities. The researchers then compared the results against those previously gathered from more than 18,000 members of the British public. The findings, which were published in the festive edition of the BMJ, reveal that only neurosurgeons showed Read More ›

A professor sums up a lecture on the evolutionary explanation for why religion has been ubiquitous in every human culture: Professor:  So, in summary, every human culture going back thousands of years has been religious because religion is either itself an adaptive behavior or it is a spandrel, a byproduct of the evolution of some other trait upon which natural selection acted.  Under the first view, religion itself was adaptive, perhaps because it enhances cooperation and cohesion within groups, and group membership in turn provides benefits which can enhance an individual’s chances for survival and reproduction.  Under the second view, perhaps religion evolved as a byproduct of adaptive selection of some other trait, although it is not clear what that Read More ›