From 50,000 years ago? We didn’t even know Denisovans existed before 2010.
Human evolution
What? New discoveries in human anatomy?
Sure, these are micro or distributed systems. But micro and distributed don’t mean unimportant. If we are still making new discoveries in human anatomy, many questions that we are told are settled are probably not settled. Many lecterns are splintered in vain. Much science education policy is Bad.
Researchers: Neanderthals really did bury their dead
Other researchers dispute it.
Expert contra Dawkins, why eugenics wouldn’t really work
David Curtis: We can now measure genetic potential directly from genetic markers and what we know from this is that these genetic predictors perform extremely badly. We can also tell that there are many important, very rare genetic variants which we will never be able to identify.
Mike Egnor vs. Jerry Coyne on how consciousness evolved
Egnor: The assertion that consciousness “evolved” is either empty (it doesn’t explain the arrival of consciousness, only its survival) or it presupposes panpsychism—the presence of consciousness in inanimate matter. Panpsychism is anathema to materialists like Coyne, who desperately try to eliminate Mind from nature.
The deplorable word has been spoken: Consciousness cannot have evolved
Wow. This will be interesting to watch. Remember when AI pioneer David Gelernter bid Darwin goodbye? So far as we know, nothing bad happened to Gelernter. If nothing awful happens to Kastrup, we might have more reasonable discussions in the future of what consciousness even is.
Jon Garvey’s new book argues that Adam was one among many early humans
Are these claims really being made to help the theology or to help theistic evolution?
At The Conversation: Have humans evolved beyond nature?
Sorry, Manuel. Evolutionary psychologists have “seen through” empathy, etc. It is all just a way to spread our selfish genes. If there is no Out There out there, there is no reason to prefer one morality over another except as a personal preference or political calculation.
Only FIVE Neanderthal extinction theories? But wait, one actually makes sense
We’ve certainly heard more than five around here. But one of them sounds like something that could really happen. For one thing, it has happened in historical time.
A study finds that the human body temperature is changing
It was determined to be 98.6 Fahrenheit back in 1851:
Researchers say that the body temperature (Fahrenheit) of men born in the 2000s is on average 1.06 degrees lower than men born in the early 1800s. Similarly, women born in the 2000s have an average body temperature that is 0.58 degrees lower than women born in the 1890s. All in all, these conclusions point to a decrease of 0.05 degrees among the U.S. population each and every decade.
John Anderer, “Human Body Temperature In The U.S. Has Decreased Over Time, Study Finds” at StudyFinds
In all 677,423 temperature readings were taken, dating back to the US Civil War era. The open-access paper was published in eLIFE.
From the discussion: “Our investigation indicates that humans in high-income countries have changed physiologically over the last 200 birth years with a mean body temperature 1.6% lower than in the pre-industrial era. The role that this physiologic ‘evolution’ plays in human anthropometrics and longevity is unknown.”
If “evolution” is going on all the time like that, and probably drifting back and forth, what becomes of the Facts of Evolution that are the Bedrock of Science and the Truths every schoolchild should be taught?
Roasted root veggies found at 170 000 years ago
Apparently the original paleo diet was big on starches. But where oh where is the subhuman who gorged on raw zebra flesh (or whatever) when you need him?
The “mysterious” Denisovans are ScienceNews’s top 2019 story
But their significance is understated. Traditional Darwinism requires that someone be the subhuman Now that we are talking about braided streams, who exactly is the subhuman? Can we play musical chairs if there is a chair for everybody?
One of the biggest science stories of the last decade: The Descent of Man gets crowdsourced
Those old Descent of Man charts were sometimes fun, showing a bacterium ending up as some poor slob hunched over a workstation. Some sort of moral was always pounded into us by these tales, usually not an uplifting one. But real history is always better and more interesting.
Researchers: Homo erectus survived longer than thought
At New Scientist: “But the age does open up the opportunity that there could have been potential overlap with the Denisovans,” says Westaway. The Denisovans are known from a handful of remains, which have yielded DNA. They roamed Asia and interbred with the ancestors of people in China and South-East Asia.
At the Smithsonian: “Humans in the Americas” story is always evolving
One problem is that some points of view are understood to arise from a philosophical position but others are thought to be “just science” when they also arise from a philosophical point of view.