Egnor: Although ape brains do differ somewhat from human brains in cortical anatomy, it is the similarity between the brains of apes and men, rather than the differences, that provides striking evidence of human exceptionalism.
Human evolution
Ancient human lineages as tangled trees
Those people probably didn’t know that they were supposed to organize their lives for the convenience of future researchers. 😉
COVID-19 pandemic and zoonotic diseases (via animals)
The bad news, as you will learn, among other things, when you read the non-panic news, is that precisely because COVID-19 is much less lethal than SARS, it is apt to be around longer.
Homo erectus from nearly 1.5 million years ago was “more behaviourally flexible” than thought
But why did we think they wouldn’t be? Isn’t there an underlying story here that is slowly being confuted (but no one wants to really discuss the history in those terms so everything must be treated as a big surprise)?
Did Stone Age beads found at 33 kya function as a “social safety net”?
However the beads were used, the concept of beads as a medium of exchange, a record of treaties, or a social status marker involves abstraction. They represent an idea. Ideas surely became much more powerful when they were portable. They have a much longer and wider reach when they can be shared and embodied in something other than a given person’s brain.
At Justin Brierley’s Unbelievable: The scientific case for Adam and Eve
“He [Swamidass] is joined by atheist biologist Nathan Lents who has given his support to the book, believing that it may help Christians who hold to a traditional understanding of the Adam and Eve story, to also accept evolutionary science. “
Adam and Eve and Swamidass and science — a review
The really remarkable thing is that after all this time and all that rhetoric, Adam and Eve remain a defensible idea.
A note on Freeman Dyson and evolution
He was a “thoroughgoing evolutionist,” a reader writes to say but he made one exception…
A just-so story about the origin of religious beliefs
Some of us would be more impressed if the authors of this type of work attributed their OWN beliefs to these types of sources. How about this: Belief that there is no design in nature comes from spending a lot of time reading and writing boring, useless papers and sitting in boring, useless meetings, Eventually, homo academicus evolved to believe that all nature is like that.
Thousands of Denisovan tools found, also bracelets and tiaras?
From 50,000 years ago? We didn’t even know Denisovans existed before 2010.
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.