Category: Human evolution
Ancient teeth don’t rewrite human history after all
| October 21, 2017 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From Michael Greshko at National Geographic: Despite claims of a new origin story for humans, the fossils more likely belonged to a very distant branch on the primate family tree. … Study leader Herbert Lutz, the deputy museum director at the Mainz Natural History Museum, says that he and his colleagues have been dumbfounded by […]
Writing fiction about extinct peoples 34kya is definitely okay. But hey, why call it science?
| October 17, 2017 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Early humans seem to have recognised the dangers of inbreeding at least 34,000 years ago, and developed surprisingly sophisticated social and mating networks to avoid it, new research has found. The study, reported in the journal Science, examined genetic information from the remains of anatomically modern humans who lived during the Upper Palaeolithic, […]
Atheist immortality: Uploading one’s mind to a computer
| October 15, 2017 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Human evolution, Mind |
From Shivali Best at Daily Mail: Professor Cox said that he found ‘no reason at all’ why human intelligence couldn’t be simulated by computers – although he did not express a timeline for this to happen. Classic. Last we heard, the mind doesn’t really exist and our perceptions are hallucinations. funny, all that stuff disappears when […]
Dan Brown: AI Collective consciousness will replace God
| October 15, 2017 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind, Religion |
Yes, that Dan Brown, of da Vinci code fame, on the book tour circuit. From Reuters via Daily Mail: Brown said technological change and the development of artificial intelligence would transform the concept of the divine. ‘We will start to find our spiritual experiences through our interconnections with each other,’ he said, forecasting the emergence […]
Shock! Darwinism does not explain why old women exist
| October 13, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
Not even the “Grandma looks after the kids” pop sci filler buys this one. From Steve Fleischfresser at Cosmos: Jacob Moorad and Craig Walling from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Edinburgh in the UK drew on one of the world’s most extensive sources of genealogical information: the Utah Population Database (UPDB), housed at the […]
Neanderthal genes promote daytime napping and smoking… ?
| October 7, 2017 | Posted by News under Human evolution |
A take on getting to know our inner Neanderthal from Ruth Williams at The Scientist, For example, being a self-described night owl and being prone to daytime napping were both traits positively influenced by Neanderthal variants, as were loneliness, low mood, and smoking. Genetic loci associated with having red hair were found to be devoid of […]
Getting to know our inner Neanderthal
| October 7, 2017 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Because Neanderthal alleles are relatively rare, the researchers needed data representing a really large number of people. They found what they were looking for in data representing more than 112,000 participants in the UK Biobank pilot study. The Biobank includes genetic data along with information on many traits related to physical appearance, diet, […]
The “Grand Challenge” for evolutionary psychology is that it is bunk
| October 6, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolutionary psychology, Human evolution, Naturalism |
Identifying the “Grand Challenge” in a Specialty Grand Challenge Article, Peter K. Jonason, School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Western Sydney University, explains: If one assumes, like evolutionary psychologists do, that psychological systems are biological and physical (i.e., no ethereal concept of mind) in nature, evolutionary models must apply to the brain and its sequalae. […]
“Darwin’s point”: A common ancestry myth that can’t just die
| October 6, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From Günter Bechly at Evolution News & Views: In a recent post for Evolution News, we discussed vestigial structures as alleged evidence for evolution (Chaffee 2017). As an illustration, the article featured an image of the auricular tubercles or “Darwin’s ear points,” a bump-like thickening on the helix of the auricle (exterior ear) of many […]
Geneticist: Adam and Eve could have existed
| October 4, 2017 | Posted by News under Human evolution, theistic evolution |
Adam and Eve have certainly been in the news a lot lately. Recently, Joshua Swamidass distanced himself from Christian evolution group BioLogos over their insistence that Adam and Eve could not possibly have existed. Meanwhile, British plant geneticist Richard Buggs posted a letter he had sent in May to BioLogos’ Dennis Venema, taking issue with […]
Anthropologist: Intelligence tests are unfair to apes
| October 2, 2017 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Naturalism |
From Barbara J. King at NPR: Now, psychologists David A. Leavens of the University of Sussex, Kim A. Bard of the University of Portsmouth, and William D. Hopkins of Georgia State University have framed their new Animal Cognition article, “The mismeasure of ape social cognition,” around Gould’s book. Ape (especially chimpanzee) social intelligence, the authors […]
Swamidass distances himself from Christian evolution group
| October 2, 2017 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, theistic evolution |
A friend who watches these things notes that genomic medicine prof (and ID foe) Joshua Swamidass hasn’t been active at BioLogos recently and doesn’t seem to be on their speakers’ list. The flies on the wall whisper that it relates to his willingness to entertain the idea of separate creation of Adam and Eve. Recently, […]
Humans 250k years older than thought? Arose in multiple places?
| September 29, 2017 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, stasis |
From Will Dunham at Reuters, Genetic data from the skeletal remains of seven people who lived centuries ago in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal Province is offering intriguing new evidence that our species, Homo sapiens, is older than previously believed. Scientists said on Thursday they sequenced the genomes of the seven individuals including a boy who lived […]
New findings overturn the widely held model of human visual attention
| September 27, 2017 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind |
From ScienceDaily: Our visual attention is drawn to parts of a scene that have meaning, rather than to those that are salient or “stick out,” according to new research from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. The findings, published Sept. 25 in the journal Nature Human Behavior, overturn the […]
Everything we can know about ourselves before we were born
| September 26, 2017 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From the Virtual Embryo Project: This $3.2 million, 11-year initiative engaged a team led by Dr. Raymond F. Gasser—one of the leading embryologists of the last half century. His team created thousands of restored, digitized, and labeled serial sections from the world’s largest collection of preserved human embryos. They used these serial sections to create […]
Genetics helps trace Neanderthals’ lost history
| September 26, 2017 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta: Now, however, researchers led by Alan Rogers, an anthropologist and population geneticist at the University of Utah, have proposed a new genetic model that may reconcile those differences. It concludes that Neanderthals were more numerous than previous genetic studies often supposed, perhaps finally aligning genomic findings with the larger populations […]
Papua-New Guinea people isolated for 50,000 years, still people like all the rest of us
| September 19, 2017 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: The first large-scale genetic study of people in Papua New Guinea has shown that different groups within the country are genetically highly different from each other. Scientists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and their colleagues at the University of Oxford and the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research reveal that the […]
Have we found the fingerprints of ongoing human evolution?
| September 9, 2017 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Genetics, Human evolution |
From Shawna Williams at The Scientist: Genetic variants linked to a predisposition for Alzheimer’s disease and heavy smoking are less common in older people than in younger people, researchers report today (September 5) in PLOS Biology. Their study analyzed genetic alleles in two large genomic databases to find those associated with longevity, which they used […]
Researchers: Dairy products changed human skull shape
| September 6, 2017 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: The advent of farming, especially dairy products, had a small but significant effect on the shape of human skulls, according to a recently published study from anthropologists at UC Davis. … Graduate student David Katz, with Professor Tim Weaver and statistician Mark Grote, used a worldwide collection of 559 crania and 534 lower […]
Humans roamed Crete 6 million years ago?
| September 4, 2017 | Posted by News under Human evolution |
So a controversial footprint suggests. From Per Ahlberg & Matthew Robert Bennett at RealClearScience: If – and for many it is a big if – the tracks of Trachilos [current apparent ancestor] were indeed made by an early human ancestor, then the biogeographical range of our early ancestors would increase to encompass the eastern Mediterranean. […]
