The artwork accompanying a recent essay makes them look positively human. Just where Ooga! Ooga! has got himself to now, we are not sure.
Human evolution
Will AI merge with evolution to shatter human exceptionalism?
The advantage of adding talk of evolution to transhumanism is that it turns a perennial tale of immortality just out of reach into a chronicle of inevitable ascent, like the fabled “Ascent of Man.”
Evolutionary biologists still puzzled over human breasts
How about this: Breasts and bipedalism both evolved to create a market for theories.
Latest from Daytime Soaps 120,000 BC season: Inbreeding may have caused Neanderthal extinction
Well, now that our writer mentions it, we don’t really have thousands of Neanderthals for a big sociological study. It’s interesting, of course, and the main thing is, we can probably get more information as we continue to dig.
The “purely evolutionary perspective” is a waste of time
Only a “purely evolutionary perspective” would fail to see that the primary reasons for the survival of old women are intelligence and culture. Some old women are useful; some are not. But intelligence causes most of them not to avoid stupid situations where they just get killed (the way an animal might). And cultural values, carefully nurtured by the old women themselves, cause their survival to be valued. Treat this sort of evolutionary biology the way you would treat grievance studies. Be polite.
“Humans still marry Neanderthals?” This is what some people call science
So may we now blame Neanderthals for our own bad choices? Wow.
How Neanderthals got the role of The Subhumans
The “shock value” of officially scientific concepts of the subhuman was a harbinger of things to come.
Darwinian grandmother hypothesis takes another hit
“Evolutionarily,” one might almost say, Darwinism dies hard. It rolls off the tongue of a TED talk type. One can construct any kind of story about nature without the benefit of having ever lived with very much of it because it is a laid-on, one-size-fits-all theory. For example, there is the “grandmother” hypothesis, which attempts […]
Our spinal cords are smarter than previously thought
Intelligent spine? Intelligent design? It’s getting to the point that everything in the system of life is intelligent except the system itself—which is supposed to have come about randomly. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Taming the silver fox, taming ourselves…? Oh, please…
The idea that we humans “tamed ourselves” over the generations, on the face of it, it fails a logical test. Who decided that that was a good idea? Who created the benchmark? Why? Why didn’t the bonobos do it?
Endangered languages: Efforts to save them sometimes involve questionable claims
On major human issues, there are many personal histories and philosophies but no distinct rational mode of thinking that absolutely prevents conversion to another language.
This time it was a taste for fat that made us human
None of these explanations can explain what they set out to: How did the capacity for reason develop? Many life forms wish to hunt large animals but do not develop sophisticated tools and throwing skills as a result. Naturalism (nature is all there is), often called “materialism,” will—one senses—always be stuck in this rut and never recognize it as a rut.
The “dumb Neanderthal” myth dies hard
Prediction: Neanderthals will suddenly become just like us if a different set of putative “less than human” bones turns up. So long as there is no other “not quite human” in easy view, it really doesn’t matter what Neanderthals actually did. They’ll still have to be cast that way to appear in the approved drama of human evolution.
Cultural evolution theories “challenged” by multiple dwelling cave
This kind of find is treated as problematic because it means that the missing link is still missing. Nobody is the subhuman. That’s not good news for a Darwinian approach to human evolution, in which someone must be the subhuman.
Neanderthals were way smarter hunters than we used to think
From ScienceDaily: Neanderthals have been imagined as the inferior cousins of modern humans, but a new study by archaeologists at UCL reveals for the first time that they produced weaponry advanced enough to kill at a distance. The study, published in Scientific Reports, examined the performance of replicas of the 300,000 year old Schöningen spears […]