This would be a great murder mystery film, so long as someone other than Hollywood made it.
Human evolution
Gunter Bechly: Farewell, says the apeman
Why wave goodbye? Because if this skull is a guide, the transition from not-really-Lucy to a-bit-like-Lucy to almost-Lucy to Hi, Lucy!! never really happened.
Jonathan Bartlett: Does evolution mean computers will take over?
Elon Musk sees technology as taking over the human world and we’d best consider our options. Ma points out that humans build computers but no computer has ever built a human: For Musk, technology is not a tool to promote humanity. Rather, technology will take humanity’s place of leadership in the world. Humans will have […]
Three scholars of “biodiversity and biology” suggest ditching the Darwinian descent of man graphic
If these biodiversity profs really need to muddy the history as much as this, maybe things are even worse than we knew. Stay tuned.
What difference does Neanderthal ancestry make?
Researchers are not sure but the fact that we are even wondering shows how much has changed and helps us understand why doubts about textbook Darwinism are becoming respectable.
Lovelock (now 100 years old): Cyborgs will replace us and treat us like houseplants
Like Darwin’s Ascent of Man, Lovelock’s Ascent of the Cyborgs has no ladder and he doesn’t sense the need for one.
Rare hominin skull upsets tidy human origins theory
If this new hominin was a contemporary as well as an ancestor of Lucy, another “textbook example” of straightforward Darwinism is scrubbed.
Parasites as “invisible designers” of the human brain
Apparently, design is okay if microbes do it: It seems so obvious that someone should have thought of it decades ago: Since parasites have plagued eukaryotic life for millions of years, their prevalence likely affected evolution. Psychologist Marco Del Giudice of the University of New Mexico is not the first researcher to suggest that the […]
Researchers: Original animals were all carnivores
The researchers think the original animals preyed on protists or one-celled animals (a shell eat cell world?).
Huh? Stone Age tools developed locally 325 kya?
Researcher: “The combination of these different technologies in one place suggests to us that, about 325,000 years ago, people at the site were innovative.”
What Neanderthal jewelry means
It’s not just that the ornaments did not have a practical use. They probably expressed something. Eagle talons, for example, might imply something about the person who wore them, in the same way that a peace sign implies something about the wearer today. But it may have implied the opposite thing.
Paper claiming kids’ religiosity decreased altruism retracted
But what was the paper doing in a biology journal anyway? Maybe the underlying assumptions should be unpacked.
Our brains did not evolve to know facts about science?
For those who take Darwinism seriously, that’s not good news for science. Of course, believing it requires that you buy into Hoffman’s computer sim as well.
Michael Egnor: Why human-ape similarity argues for human exceptionality
When everything is the same except the one thing that matters most, we can be sure we are onto a real difference.
New book from Harvard U Press: Childhood, not evolution makes us human
Two things: If the significant changes happen to humans between birth and seven years of age, it is not q theory of evolution at all, but of intellectual and cultural development. Also, Tomasello seems not be following the party line that apes are just like us but we refuse to recognize the fact. That’s borderline heresy.