Killer quote: “Realising evolution doesn’t only happen by natural selection makes it clear the process isn’t likely to ever stop.” So says an evolutionary geneticist: We measure the speed of gene evolution by comparing human DNA with that of other species, which also allows us to determine which genes are fast-evolving in humans alone. One fast-evolving gene is human accelerated region 1 (HAR1), which is needed during brain development. A random section of human DNA is on average more than 98% identical to the chimp comparator, but HAR1 is so fast evolving that it’s only around 85% similar. Though scientists can see these changes are happening – and how quickly – we still don’t fully understand why fast evolution happens Read More ›

Post World War II, scientists studying origins, sensed a moral mission to tell the story in order to encourage us to be better people. The close-knit hunter-gatherer clans that represented all humanity co-operated for survival and were chock full of moral lessons for us all. But was it true?: Readers and reviewers lumped Morris, Ardrey and Lorenz together as promoting a powerful new vision of humans as animals. (To be fair, each author saw different moral systems and imperatives emerging from their research, but these nuances mattered less to readers than their shared zoomorphic vision.) The view of humans as specialised animals carried implications for who among the scientists could truly judge what it meant to be human. If our Read More ›

But how would we know? What is the reference population? “Similarly, rapid expansion of brain size and cognitive abilities in humans has been key to our evolutionary success,” says study senior author David Kingsley, a developmental geneticist at Stanford University. However, at the same time, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia impact more than 3 percent of the world population. Kingsley reasoned this vulnerability to mental disorders might also stem from recent evolutionary changes controlling human brain size and structure. – Charles Choi, “Could Human Evolutionary Changes Be Behind Mental Disorders?” at Discover Do we know that life forms with far more limited intelligence do not suffer in the same way? If a bear had bipolar disorder or a cat had schizophrenia, how Read More ›

From Hannah Devlin at The Guardian Researchers say it is time to drop the idea that modern humans originated from a single population in a single location ??? Readers, please wear eye protection due to splinters flying from Human Evolution lecterns: The origins of our species have long been traced to east Africa, where the world’s oldest undisputed Homo sapiens fossils were discovered. About 300,000 years ago, the story went, a group of primitive humans there underwent a series of genetic and cultural shifts that set them on a unique evolutionary path that resulted in everyone alive today. However, a team of prominent scientists is now calling for a rewriting of this traditional narrative, based on a comprehensive survey of Read More ›

From evolutionary biologist Mauricio Gonzalez Forero at The Conversation: Most animals have brains in proportion to their body size – species with larger bodies often have larger brains. But the human brain is almost six times bigger than expected for our bodies. This is puzzling, as the brain is very costly – burning 20% of the body’s energy while accounting for only 4% of its mass. As evolution tends to remove waste, how come we evolved such large, energy-consuming brains? There are many different ideas out there, with the dominant hypothesis suggesting that challenging social interactions were the driving force. But our new study, published today in Nature, finds evidence against this idea and shows that human brain expansion was Read More ›