Category: Human evolution
Tiny pieces of bread found from 14,500 years ago, predating known agriculture
| July 20, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution |
From Tobias Richter and Amaia Arranz-Otaegui at Sapiens: The Natufian, dated to 11,700–15,000 years ago, is often described as an important cultural precursor to the Neolithic era. During the Natufian, the world’s earliest stone houses, grinding tools, and sickle blades appear in large numbers in the Levant, suggesting that the hunter-gatherers here included plants, cereals […]
Is aging a “disease” or does it have an “evolutionary purpose”?
| July 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution |
From Chuck Dinerstein at American Council for Science and Health, Many of us feel aging is a natural process, after all, everyone “gets it,” and disease is more of a deviation or aberration of nature. The proponents of aging as disease point out that aging is related to the apparent random degradation of our DNA, […]
Texas inhabited several thousand years earlier than thought
| July 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From Bruce Bower at Science News: Excavations at the Gault site, about 64 kilometers north of Austin, produced a range of stone artifacts that date to between around 16,700 and 21,700 years ago, reports a team led by archaeologist Thomas Williams of Texas State University in San Marcos. An analysis of 184 of those finds […]
Rewriting human evolution story: No single human origin
| July 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From Hannah Devlin at The Guardian Researchers say it is time to drop the idea that modern humans originated from a single population in a single location ??? Readers, please wear eye protection due to splinters flying from Human Evolution lecterns: The origins of our species have long been traced to east Africa, where the […]
Miller: The evidence shows that Lucy is an ape species, not a human ancestor
| July 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From The Case for Lucy as Ape: Part 5 of 6 by J. R. Miller at More than Cake: Lucy was the nickname for an incomplete Ethiopian skeleton found by the American paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson in 1974. Named for the 1967 Beatles song, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”. Despite being only 20% complete—missing hands, […]
“Bad design” of the human mouth enables us to speak
| July 6, 2018 | Posted by News under Design inference, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From Philip Lieberman at The Scientist: In On the Origin of Species, Darwin noted “the strange fact that every particle of food and drink which we swallow has to pass over the orifice of the trachea, with some risk of falling into the lungs.” Because of this odd anatomy, which differs from that of all […]
At Science News: Hominid kids were upright walkers 3 million years ago
| July 5, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From Bruce Bawer at Science News:: A largely complete, 3.3-million-year-old child’s foot from Australopithecus afarensis shows that the appendage would have aligned the ankle and knee under the body’s center of mass, a crucial design feature for upright walking, scientists report July 4 in Science Advances. “The overall anatomy of this child’s foot is strikingly […]
Alert! Common sense has invaded anthropology. Researcher claims: Chimps ‘r NOT us…
| July 5, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From Agustín Fuentes at Sapiens: Researchers have observed multiple chimpanzee societies for more than 50 years, so we know a lot about what these primates do and what they don’t do. Chimpanzees have a fascinating array of social traditions (using stone tools to crack open nuts, drinking from leaf cups, “fishing” for termites) and capacities […]
Do all genes affect every complex trait?
| July 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Genetics, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
The more closely geneticists look at complex traits and diseases, the harder it gets to find active genes that don’t influence them. From Veronique Greenwood at Quanta: Mutations of a single gene are behind sickle cell anemia, for instance, and mutations in another are behind cystic fibrosis. But unfortunately for those who like things simple, […]
Evolutionary psychology: A promising new strategy for anti-Semites?
| July 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolutionary psychology, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
At Undark, Michael Schulson asks, Why are ostensibly respectable, peer-reviewed journals now publishing discussions of what has long been dismissed as bigoted psychological research? IN THE 20 years since the publication of his best-known book, “The Culture of Critique,” Kevin MacDonald, an emeritus professor of psychology at California State University, Long Beach, has complained that […]
Anomaly: Human mortality hits a plateau after 105 years of age
| June 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From Mark Barna at Discover: A study published today in Science indicates that people are indeed living longer and that the maximum lifespan for humans has not yet been reached. … And what they found was that after the age of 105, human mortality seems to hit a plateau. That is, you aren’t any more […]
Physicist: It’s good news that aliens likely don’t exist. And a space entrepreneur’s surprising reaction…
| June 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
Further to researchers announcing that they have dissolved the Fermi Paradox (They can’t be Out There), physicist and science commentator Jim Al-Khalili at the Guardian: In 1950 Enrico Fermi, an Italian-born American Nobel prize-winning physicist, posed a very simple question with profound implications for one of the most important scientific puzzles: whether or not life […]
Anatomist: The perfect human body would have legs like an ostrich
| June 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From Jonathan Wells at ENST: For English anatomist Alice Roberts, however, the human body is a “hodge-podge” of parts assembled in an “untidy” fashion “with no foresight” by evolution. So, like many evolutionary biologists before her, she set out with some colleagues to “design and build the Perfect Body.” Her results were aired on BBC […]
Cranium of extinct Australopithecus “shows similarities to” our own
| June 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: A cranium of a four-million-year-old fossil, that, in 1995 was described as the oldest evidence of human evolution in South Africa, has shown similarities to that of our own, when scanned through high resolution imaging systems. The cranium of the extinct Australopithecus genus was found in the lower-lying deposits of the Jacovec Cavern […]
In any Darwinian scheme, someone must be the subhuman. Otherwise, there is no beginning to human history.
| June 24, 2018 | Posted by Denyse OLeary under Creationism, Culture, Darwinism, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
In response to the recent story “Do racial assumptions prevent recognizing Homo erectus as fully human?”, a friend wrote to say that many Darwin defenders miss the point, as follows: The problem is not merely that Darwin, a man of his age, was a racist. The problem is that his bias resulted in him and […]
Linguists skeptical of Darwinian theory that toolmaking “paved the way” for human language
| June 23, 2018 | Posted by Denyse OLeary under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, language, Mind, Neuroscience |
Should young ID theorists study language origins, as retired linguist suggests below? From Ben James at The Atlantic: Oren Kolodny, a biologist at Stanford University, puts the question in more scientific terms: “What kind of evolutionary pressures could have given rise to this really weird and surprising phenomenon that is so critical to the essence […]
Do racial assumptions prevent recognizing Homo erectus as fully human?
| June 22, 2018 | Posted by Denyse OLeary under Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From J. R. Miller at More Than Cake: Inspired by Darwin, the Dutch anatomist Eugene Dubois set sail in 1891 for Indonesia in search of the missing link between humans and apes. On the island of Java, he discovered a tooth, a femur bone, and a skull with a low forehead and enlarged brow which […]
A systems architect looks at claims about the “botched” human body
| June 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Medicine |
From Steve Laufmann at ENST, on Nathan Lents’s book Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes. As a systems architect, I’ve spent decades designing and implementing large and complex systems of information systems — often involving thousands of individual systems. Such systems are normally embedded in complex processes that may […]
William Lane Craig takes on Adam and Eve
| June 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Design inference, Genetics, Human evolution, Intelligent Design, theistic evolution |
It’s risky. The church splitter (fundamentalism) vs. the church closer (theistic evolution). William Lane Craig writes: Two challenges to this doctrine arise from modern science, one fairly old and the other very recent. … I am currently exploring the genetic evidence that is said to rule out an original pair of modern humans. In talking […]
Was Neanderthal man fully human? The role racism played in assessing the evidence
| June 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From J. R. Miller at More than Cake: Sadly, the record shows that the strongest advocates of UCD were racists in the guise of scientists who set-out to prove that the non-white features of blacks and aboriginal tribes were markers of an inferior pre-human species. As Jon Mooallem wrote in the NY Times: No living […]
