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Every assumption has been called into question over the last fifteen years, Colin Barras tells us: Do you believe that human brains have been getting steadily bigger for millions of years, culminating in the extraordinary machine between your ears? Think again, because over the past 15 years, almost every part of our story, every assumption about who our ancestors were and where we came from, has been called into question. The new insights have some unsettling implications for how long we have walked the earth, and even who we really are. Once upon a time, the human story seemed relatively straightforward … It began roughly 5.5 to 6.5 million years ago, somewhere in an east African forest, with a chimpanzee-like ape. Read More ›

We’ll probably never know what dinos were really like inthe sense that we can know what horses are like but we learn from Will Tattersdill at H-Sci-Med-Tech about the different ways we have understood them. Reviewing Dinosaurs Ever Evolving: The Changing Face of Prehistoric Animals in Popular Culture by Allen A. Debus, (1926–2009), he writes If you are interested in the history of dinosaurs in popular culture, Debus is an author you simply cannot ignore. He has written copiously on the “imaginative impact” of dinosaurs, and he is clearly on to something when he proposes to offer “an alternate history” of their evolution (pp. 265, 3)—a history written not across the geological ages of the Mesozoic (Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous) but Read More ›

Like flaky therapists claim? If it is, then the embedded genes are not very evenly distributed among humans. From Josh Gabbatiss at Sapiens: The 2015 paper that resulted from Carrier’s research showed that a buttressed fist, one with the thumb closed against the index and middle fingers, provides a safer way to hit someone with force. Given that none of our primate cousins have the ability to make such a fist, Carrier and his co-authors propose that our hand proportions may have evolved specifically to turn our hands into more effective weapons. The research is just the latest in a string of studies Carrier has conducted to define “a suite of distinguishing characteristics that are consistent with the idea that Read More ›

Here: In Darwin’s scheme of things, the Victorian rich were the perfect expression of evolution. In perfecting itself, nature started with amoebas, and moved on through dinosaurs and flying lizards, fish, fowl and mammals until it came to the apes, so obviously like the poor savages of Tierra del Fuego or Papua New Guinea. Above the savages were the southern Europeans, above them the British and, at the top of the evolutionary pecking order, sat the great families of England, the Darwins, the Arnolds, the Huxleys and the Wedgwoods, who all intermarried and were obviously cleverer than anyone else. If these types of remarks had been made about any Victorian other than Darwin, the combox would not be Days of Read More ›

From Adam Hargreaves at The Conversation: DNA sequencing technology is helping scientists unravel questions that humans have been asking about animals for centuries. By mapping out animal genomes, we now have a better idea of how the giraffe got its huge neck and why snakes are so long. Genome sequencing allows us to compare and contrast the DNA of different animals and work out how they evolved in their own unique ways. But in some cases we’re faced with a mystery. Some animal genomes seem to be missing certain genes, ones that appear in other similar species and must be present to keep the animals alive. These apparently missing genes have been dubbed “dark DNA”. And its existence could change Read More ›

One way to boost your uni’s ranking: Ask faculty to cite each other This is elsewhere called a citation ring. Also from the same post: Of course, this isn’t the only technique universities use to boost their metrics. Recently, we ran a story in Science about institutions (including many in Western countries) who pay faculty for publications; a 2011 report in Science showed that universities in Saudi Arabia were giving tens of thousands of dollars to highly cited researchers to take a secondary position there, ensuring the institution gets listed on prominent papers. SAGE journal retracts three more papers after discovering faked reviews: This trio of retractions is the second batch of papers withdrawn by Technology in Cancer Research & Read More ›

From cognitive roboticist Murray Shanahan at Aeon: n 1984, the philosopher Aaron Sloman invited scholars to describe ‘the space of possible minds’. Sloman’s phrase alludes to the fact that human minds, in all their variety, are not the only sorts of minds. There are, for example, the minds of other animals, such as chimpanzees, crows and octopuses. But the space of possibilities must also include the minds of life-forms that have evolved elsewhere in the Universe, minds that could be very different from any product of terrestrial biology. The map of possibilities includes such theoretical creatures even if we are alone in the Cosmos, just as it also includes life-forms that could have evolved on Earth under different conditions. We Read More ›

From Mic, via AP: Bill Nye, the Science Guy, has been in the news a lot. From Bruce Haring and Erik Pedersen at Deadline: Bill Nye Hits Disney With $37 Million Fraud Suit Over ‘Science Guy’ Profits Bill Nye the Science Guy ran on PBS from 1994 to 1999 and also was syndicated to local stations. The show aired for 100 half-hour episodes spanning five seasons and was nominated for 23 Emmy Awards, winning 19 The suit that Nye and his lawyers put before the court contends that “the disturbing size of the supposed ‘accounting error,’ coupled with the seeming indifference of both BVT and WDC, left Nye suspicious of the veracity of the accounting.” More. See also: Bill Nye Read More ›

Supporting documentation See also: The second advent of the Royal Society’s evolution rethink last November?

From John S. Torday at Royal Society on the special issue edition on the (failures of) current Darwinism (aka the Modern Synthesis): The Modern Synthesis, merging population genetics and Darwinian evolutionary gradualism, was formulated in 1942. That was long before biologists learned about the Double Helix, the role of epigenetics in embryonic development, or the molecular bases for cell and developmental biology. All these developments are missing from neo-Darwinism. Even those who practice EvoDevo do not utilize cell biology to understand evolutionary mechanisms, defaulting to random mutation and natural selection. Much in evolutionary history can be understood by introducing knowledge of cell-cell signaling for pattern formation in the combined short-term ontogeny of the individual organism and the long-term phylogenetic history of Read More ›

Says neuroscientist Anil K. Seth at Aeon: Let’s begin with David Chalmers’s influential distinction, inherited from Descartes, between the ‘easy problem’ and the ‘hard problem’. The ‘easy problem’ is to understand how the brain (and body) gives rise to perception, cognition, learning and behaviour. The ‘hard’ problem is to understand why and how any of this should be associated with consciousness at all: why aren’t we just robots, or philosophical zombies, without any inner universe? It’s tempting to think that solving the easy problem (whatever this might mean) would get us nowhere in solving the hard problem, leaving the brain basis of consciousness a total mystery. But there is an alternative, which I like to call the real problem: how Read More ›

And it’s only August. A special issue of Interface Focus on New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives, organized by Denis Noble, Nancy Cartwright, Patrick Bateson, John Dupré and Kevin Laland is now available. The Royal Society journal is “devoted to a particular subject at the interface of the physical and life sciences.” Some of the articles in this edition are open access. One open access article is theoretical biologist Gerd B. Müller’s piece, Why an extended evolutionary synthesis is necessary: As can be noted from the listed principles, current evolutionary theory is predominantly oriented towards a genetic explanation of variation, and, except for some minor semantic modifications, this has not changed over the past seven Read More ›

Could two early life forms unite and pool information (endosymbiosis)? Lynn Margulis championed the idea but recently some have raised doubts. From Suzan Mazur at HuffPost: Kurland and Harish lay out their case in the current Journal of Theoretical Biology in a paper titled, “Mitochondria are not captive bacteria.” In it they note that “97% of modern mitochondrial protein domains as well as their homologues in bacteria and archaea were present in the universal common ancestor. . . . and were distributed by vertical inheritance.” But a big problem is that the subject has been surprisingly little researched. Mazur notes that endosymbiosis  champion Lynn Margulis told her, A fine scientific literature on this theme (symbiosis) actually exists and grows every Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Mammalian perineal structure derived from septation of the cloaca is an important evolutionary innovation that allows myriad anatomical configurations, diverse reproductive strategies, and precise excretory control available only to mammals. The researchers were surprised to discover that, despite the perineum’s structural complexity, the muscles of the mammalian perineum show a reemergence of a simple pattern of body wall layering that dates back more than 360 million years ago — during the origin of tetrapods, the first vertebrates to move out of the water onto land. [color emphasis added] Basal vertebrates, such as fish, organize their body wall into two muscular layers that are important for swimming. However, with the transition from water to land, the body wall of Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A type of mouse widely used to assess how the human immune system responds to transplanted stem cells does not reflect what is likely to occur in patients, according to a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The researchers urge further optimization of this animal model before making decisions about whether and when to begin wide-scale stem cell transplants in humans. Known as “humanized” mice, the animals have been engineered to have a human, rather than a murine, immune system. Researchers have relied upon the animals for decades to study, among other things, the immune response to the transplantation of pancreatic islet cells for diabetes and skin grafts for burn victims. However, the Stanford Read More ›