Human evolution

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 exists beyond Earth. The story goes that during a lunchtime chat with colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the issue of flying saucers came up. The conversation was lighthearted, and it doesn’t appear that any of the scientists at that particular gathering believed in aliens. But Fermi merely wanted to know: “Where is everybody?” Indeed. It’s not as though the aliens Read More ›

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 Four on June 13, 2018. … The Perfect Human Body would also have legs like ostriches. Ostrich legs are “digitigrade” — they rest on their toes. They are also very fast, enabling ostriches to run very quickly on the plains of Africa. And ostrich legs have proven to be a good model for making prosthetics to help people whose legs have been amputated above the Read More ›

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 the Sterkfontein Caves, about 40km North-West of Johannesburg in South Africa. … “Our study revealed that the cranium of the Jacovec specimen and of the Ausralopithecus specimens from Sterkfontein in general was thick and essentially composed of spongy bone,” says Beaudet. “This large portion of spongy bone, also found in our own cranium, may indicate that blood flow in the brain of Australopithecus may Read More ›

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 others distorting the fossil record to suit a racist worldview. To “get past” the fact that Darwin was a racist, we must be willing to undo science that begins by assuming that non-European features are sub-human. But the “hierarchy of man” is rooted in the fundamental assumptions of the “Descent of Man,” the idea that Darwin popularized. Rooting it out would call so many things Read More ›

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 of being human?” And he has proposed a provocative answer. In a recent paper in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Kolodny argues that early humans—while teaching their kin how to make complex tools—hijacked the capacity for language from themselves. That is provocative: hijacking a capability from “themselves”…? Kolodny’s arguments build off the groundbreaking experiments of Dietrich Stout, an anthropologist at Emory Read More ›

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 came to be called “Java Man.” Dubois immediately assumed—in the tradition of many men before him—that these non-Europon features were indicative of the non-human ancestor to Homo sapiens. Based on later fossil finds this “missing link” was classified as a pre-human species Homo erectus (upright man). In the book, Contested Bones, authors Rupe and Sanford (R&S) make the case that based on the phenotypical distinctives Read More ›

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 span days, months, or even years. They integrate information systems with human activities, often across multiple organizations. These systems have a lot of moving parts. It turns out that a number of key design principles are essential for building and modifying complex systems of systems. Get the design principles right, and everything works better. Mess up the design principles, and everything is harder — and Read More ›

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 with genetic scientists, I’ve found that there is enormous confusion about this question today. Popularizers have misrepresented the arguments, thereby inviting misguided responses. The issues are very technical and difficult to understand. I’m just beginning to get my feet wet and don’t want to misrepresent the science. I want to know how firm the evidence is and what it would cost intellectually to maintain the Read More ›

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 humans had skeletal features remotely like these [Neanderthals], but King was under the impression that the skulls of contemporary African and Australian aboriginals resembled the Neanderthals’ more than “ordinary” white-people skulls. So extrapolating from his low opinion of what he called these “savage” races, he explained that the Neanderthal’s skull alone was proof of its moral “darkness” and stupidity. “The thoughts and desires which once Read More ›

Based on Fermi’s Paradox (where are all the space aliens, if they exist?). From RT: A Russian theoretical physicist has predicted a grim future for our civilization that “is even worse than extinction.” Alexander Berezin, a highly-cited scientist from Russia’s National University of Electronic Technology Research, outlined his bleak prediction in an article entitled ‘First to enter, last to leave: a solution to Fermi’s paradox’. He thinks that the aliens will try to eradicate all competition, including us, to fuel their own expansion and be the power in the universe. While that dog-eat-dog theory may seem harsh, Berezin says total destruction of other life forms likely won’t be a conscious obliteration. “They simply [will] not realize, in the same way Read More ›

From Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, world’s richest man, at Fellowship of the Minds: From Fox News: The recently anointed richest person in the world, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, says we need to colonize the moon — and time is of the essence. … “We will have to leave this planet,” he said, according to Geek Wire. “We’re going to leave it, and it’s going to make this planet better. We’ll come and go, and the people who want to stay, will stay.” … Mr. Bezos believes it will happen in our lifetime because the human race has little alternative. “The alternative is stasis,” he said, adding that without space settlements, societies around the globe “will have to stop growing” Read More ›

From Stanford University at Eurekalert: Starting about 7,000 years ago, something weird seems to have happened to men: Over the next two millennia, recent studies suggest, their genetic diversity -specifically, the diversity of their Y chromosomes – collapsed. So extreme was that collapse that it was as if there was only one man left to mate for every 17 women. Anthropologists and biologists were perplexed, but Stanford researchers now believe they’ve found a simple – if revealing – explanation. The collapse, they argue, was the result of generations of war between patrilineal clans, whose membership is determined by male ancestors. … It’s not unprecedented for human genetic diversity to take a nosedive once in a while, but the Y-chromosome bottleneck, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Agustin Fuentes explores the common ancestry between humans and apes by examining characteristics that the two share. Conversely, Fuentes draws upon anthropological evidence to examine the ways in which the hominin lineage underwent changes during the Pleistocene that led to the emergence of a distinct human niche. Fuentes concludes that these divergent traits — along with the distinctive space humans inhabit — give humans the ability to drastically change the environment, other animals, and themselves. Initially featured as the XLIV Journal of Anthropological Research Distinguished Lecture, the article explains why these evolutionary differences are still relevant today. Throughout the article, Fuentes asserts that humans are distinctive, not unique. No. Humans are unique. Get over it. Humans are classified Read More ›

Further to the claim that ecology, not social challenges drove the huge increase in human brain size, Ashley Yeager offers some alternative views at The Scientist: “González-Forero and Gardner are on the right track,” David Geary of the University of Missouri in Columbia tells New Scientist. But he questions whether the model accurately calculated just how challenging it is to live in groups. “Their conclusion that human brain evolution was largely driven by ecological pressures, and only minimally by social pressures, is surprising and likely premature.” Language is another missing link in the model, Dean Falk, a brain-evolution expert at Florida State University, tells The Washington Post. González-Forero admits that the model falls short in addressing the influence cultural factors, such Read More ›

From evolutionary biologist Mauricio Gonzalez Forero at The Conversation: Most animals have brains in proportion to their body size – species with larger bodies often have larger brains. But the human brain is almost six times bigger than expected for our bodies. This is puzzling, as the brain is very costly – burning 20% of the body’s energy while accounting for only 4% of its mass. As evolution tends to remove waste, how come we evolved such large, energy-consuming brains? There are many different ideas out there, with the dominant hypothesis suggesting that challenging social interactions were the driving force. But our new study, published today in Nature, finds evidence against this idea and shows that human brain expansion was Read More ›