Human evolution

From ScienceDaily (August 3, 2011) we learn: “Six Million Years of Savanna: Grasslands, Wooded Grasslands Accompanied Human Evolution”:

Scientists have spent a century debating the significance of savanna landscape in human evolution, including the development of upright walking, increased brain size and tool use.

Why?

Part of the problem has been a fuzzy definition of “savanna,” which has been used to describe “virtually everything between completely open grasslands and anything except a dense forest,” Cerling says. He adds the most common definition is a fairly open, grassy environment with a lot of scattered trees — a grassland or wooded grassland.

Here’s the main thing you need to know: Read More ›

From “Collaboration Encourages Equal Sharing in Children but Not in Chimpanzees
ScienceDaily (July 22, 2011)” (ScienceDaily, July 22, 2011) we learn:

Adult humans produce a vast majority of their resources in cooperative work with others. Moreover, they generally try to distribute them based on norms of fairness and equity. With regard to children, previous studies have shown that when adults provide rewards as a windfall and ask children to share, 3-year-olds behave rather selfishly.

However, the present studies show that even 3-year-olds do take note of whether or not rewards were produced collaboratively, which in turn affects their tendency to allocate the toys equally.

Chimpanzees, however,

Read More ›

In “For Moral Guidance, Look to Religion — Not Neuroscience” (Huffington Post, 7/21/11) Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie advises ,

The current star in the neuroscience firmament is Patricia Churchland, a retired professor at UC San Diego. Churchland has written on the subject for years, but her recent book, “Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tell Us About Morality,” has garnered considerable attention. Christopher Shea, drawing on interviews with Churchland and others, has written a fascinating article on her ideas in the June 12 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The article is worth reading because Churchland’s thinking is a moral mess. It reminds us why religion is the best and indispensable guide to moral behavior. Read More ›

At ScienceDaily (July 17, 2011), we learn, “Non-Africans Are Part Neanderthal, Genetic Research Shows”: Dr. Labuda and his team almost a decade ago had identified a piece of DNA (called a haplotype) in the human X chromosome that seemed different and whose origins they questioned. When the Neanderthal genome was sequenced in 2010, they quickly compared 6000 chromosomes from all parts of the world to the Neanderthal haplotype. The Neanderthal sequence was present in peoples across all continents, except for sub-Saharan Africa, and including Australia. “There is little doubt that this haplotype is present because of mating with our ancestors and Neanderthals. This is a very nice result, and further analysis may help determine more details,” says Dr. Nick Patterson, Read More ›

Science Daily reports “A three-year international research project, directed by two academics at the University of Oxford, finds that humans have natural tendencies to believe in gods and an afterlife.” As my friend added, “This research was quite costly – they could have saved money by reading the Bible!” Link here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110714103828.htm I wonder how the New Atheists will take this research. There are two possible logical spins on it I can see, if you take the research’s conclusions at face value. You could say, “Belief is hard-wired – that’s why it’s so hard to reprogram people to think rationally!” But this avoids the key issue of why it would be hard-wired. That leads to the second possible response: “Belief Read More ›

From (ScienceDaily, July 13, 2011), we learn: “African and Non-African Populations Intermixed Well After Migration out of Africa 60,000 Years Ago, Genome Studies Show”:

Researchers have probed deeper into human evolution by developing an elegant new technique to analyse whole genomes from different populations. One key finding from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute’s study is that African and non-African populations continued to exchange genetic material well after migration out-of-Africa 60,000 years ago. This shows that interbreeding between these groups continued long after the original exodus.

Good to know. But surely no surprise? Isn’t “non-exchange” almost always enforced by law, custom, or taboo? Read More ›

And didn’t star Ronald Reagan opposite a chimp.

On July 8, a documentary on the fate of Nim opens in U.S. theatres (trailer). In “Project Nim: A chimp raised like a human” (New Scientist 4 July 2011), Rowan Hooper tackles the question of why:

What on earth were they thinking of? Nim was put in diapers and dressed in clothes. He was breastfed by his human surrogate mother, Stephanie Lafarge. “It seemed natural,” she says.Lafarge’s daughter, Jenny Lee, has a better explanation: “It was the seventies”. Jenny was 10-years-old when Nim came to live with her family. Read More ›