Human evolution

Yes, righties predominated overwhelmingly even back then. Or longer? (ScienceDaily, Apr. 19, 2011):

Now, David Frayer, professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas, has used markings on fossilized front teeth to show that right-handedness goes back more than 500,000 years. He is the lead author (with colleagues in Croatia, Italy and Spain) of a paper published this month in the British journal Laterality. His research shows that distinctive markings on fossilized teeth correlate to the right or left-handedness of individual prehistoric humans.

“The patterns seen on the fossil teeth are directly and consistently produced by right or left hand manipulation in experimental work,” Frayer said.

There are some issues around handedness, especially the putative problems of left-handed or ambidextrous people. One difficulty is that because most human are right-handed, “right” tends to mean good or dexterous but “left” tends to mean bad or sinister. And “ambidextrous” easily translates to: ambivalent. Read More ›

We were all taught to look up to E. O. Wilson as the eminent, gentlemanly, Dear Pastor … Darwinist, not the “secular bigot” kind. And some were duly grateful.

So Wilson disowning his own kin selection theory was an almost incredible development. That theory – that caring for others can be explained by a desire to pass on our selfish genes – is the heart and soul of the “evolutionary” psychology he founded.* Which in turn is the heart and soul of pop science coverage of human psychology.

Leon Neyfakh  offers a look at what happened:

What Wilson is trying to do, late in his influential career, is nothing less than overturn a central plank of established evolutionary theory: the origins of altruism. His position is provoking ferocious criticism from other scientists. Last month, the leading scientific journal Nature published five strongly worded letters saying, more or less, that Wilson has misunderstood the theory of evolution and generally doesn’t know what he’s talking about. One of these carried the signatures of an eye-popping 137 scientists, including two of Wilson’s colleagues at Harvard.

– “Where does good come from?: Harvard’s Edward O. Wilson tries to upend biology, again”  (Boston Globe, April 17, 2011)

The cause of their dismay and anger is spelled out:

The puzzle of altruism is more than just a technical curiosity for evolutionary theorists. It amounts to a high-stakes inquiry into the nature of good. By identifying the mechanisms through which altruism and other advanced social behaviors have evolved in all kinds of living creatures — like ants, wasps, termites, and mole rats — we stand to gain a better understanding of the human race, and the evolutionary processes that helped us develop the capacity for collaboration, loyalty, and even morality. Figure out where altruism comes from, you might say, and you’ve figured out the magic ingredient that makes human civilization the wondrous, complex thing that it is. And perhaps this is the reason that the debate between Wilson and his critics, actually somewhat esoteric in substance, has become so heated.

It’s heated because the commander of the beachhead of materialist atheism into human psychology has abandoned the battle … Read More ›

Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, 2 Volume Set

Bernard Wood (Editor)
ISBN: 978-1-4051-5510-6
Hardcover
1264 pages
June 2011, Wiley-Blackwell

Price: US$ 560.00

This comprehensive A to Z encyclopedia provides extensive coverage of important scientific terms related to improving our understanding of how we evolved. Specifically, the 5,000 entries cover evidence and methods used to investigate the relationships among the living great apes, evidence about what makes the behavior of modern humans distinctive, and evidence about the evolutionary history of that distinctiveness, as well as information about modern methods used to trace the recent evolutionary history of modern human populations. This text provides a resource for everyone studying the emergence of Homo sapiens.

The Foreword by Francisco J. Ayala introduces this: Read More ›

In “Neanderthals: Bad luck and its part in their downfall” (New Scientist, 07 April 2011), Mark Buchanantells us, The popular theory has it that humans soon displaced Neanderthals thanks to their superior skills and adaptations. But mathematicians Armando Neves at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Maurizio Serva at the University of Aquila, Italy, now say that the extinction of Neanderthals may have been down to a genetic lottery. The theory is that intermarriage with modern humans did the ‘thals in. We also learn, A strong point of the analysis, says anthropologist Luke Premo of the University of Washington in Pullman, is that it makes few assumptions about unknown factors, including the relative sizes of Read More ›

In “Stone Tools Influenced Hand Evolution in Human Ancestors, Anthropologists Say,” (ScienceDaily (Mar. 8, 2011), we learn (repeated twice more in a single short piece), that

New research from anthropologists at the University of Kent has confirmed Charles Darwin’s speculation that the evolution of unique features in the human hand was influenced by increased tool use in our ancestors.

The fact that Darwin speculated this adds greatly to the idea’s credibility, in a way that evidence wouldn’t.

Research over the last century has certainly confirmed the existence of a suite of features in the bones and musculature of the human hand and wrist associated with specific gripping and manipulatory capabilities that are different from those of other extant great apes. These features have fuelled suggestions that, at some point since humans split from the last common ancestor of living apes, the human hand evolved away from features adapted for locomotion toward alternative functions.

The release does not feature the routine searching question format of science stories: Read More ›

A most interesting discussion has got started here at “But ‘Lucy’ herself is mostly an artifact”. Commenter KL got it going, I suspect, by observing that

I certainly don’t consider you hicks. However, my spouse and associates are primate researchers, physical anthropologists, geologists and archeologists. It’s strange to come here and see their work dismissed as a just so story. Some of them have been in the field extensively and have published many, many papers. Are you guys saying that somehow all these people are simply mistaken?

Yes, it  is quite possible.

My question is, is there anything fronted by “evolution researchers” that KL wouldn’t believe? How about the Big Bazooms theory of human evolution? Or Marc “Well, the monkeys talk to me!” Hauser? How about any single item on this list? Is there nothing that KL would even wonder about? Does he know that E. O. Wilson has retracted his own kin selection theory?

Two things: Read More ›

Gil Dodgen offers below a comparison between Mozart and “Lucy”, noting “I can’t think of anything in my wildest imagination that could be more absurd or preposterous.”

Good point. My question is, how much is “Lucy”* an artifact of the imagination?

With Mozart (1756-1791), we are looking at a portrait of a young man about whom we know a good deal, in historical time – the word of contemporaries and the documentary records, as well as his corpus of work and the well-documented circumstances of his time (18th century Vienna).

The worst we can say of the portrait painter of old is that he tended to flatter. If that painting didn’t look like Mozart at all, he wouldn’t get paid.

With Lucy, we are looking at an artist’s rendering of a reconstruction of a few bones, with details about Lucy’s life that are, beyond the most obvious (eat, sleep, etc.), almost entirely a work of someone’s imagination. The more letters that person can put after their name and the greater the number of years “in the field” and shazzam!! Imagination converts to fact, via the assured results of modern science: “Shed’ve … done this.”

For now. Until someone else comes along, with the same or more attributes, makes bigger shazzam!! and behold: “Shed’ve … done that!”

And as for the rest of us: Shut up, you morons, and believe.

Then, faced with this stuff, Read More ›

In “Q&A: Who is H. sapiens really, and how do we know?” (BMC Biology 2011, 9:20doi:10.1186/1741-7007-9-20), Mason Liang and Rasmus Neilsen explain reasons for thinking that humans and Neanderthals interbred: Is it true that modern humans have Neanderthals and other archaic species in their direct ancestry?  According to two recently published papers by Green et al. and Reich et al., the answer to this question is yes. Human genomes are in part composed of DNA from other archaic hominin species that traditionally have not been counted among our ancestors, although the proportion of archaic DNA in the genome depends on your ethnicity. On the basis of analyses of ancient DNA, Green et al. report that, on average, 1 to 5% Read More ›

(Or, why human evolution should not be taught in school) Jessica Hamzelou tells us, “Fire did not spark human colonisation of cold Europe” (New Scientist, 14 March 2011): To try to pin down the earliest evidence of controlled fire use, Paola Villa at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and Wil Roebroeks at Leiden University in the Netherlands re-examined the data from over 100 European sites. They were looking for evidence of fires that were unlikely to have occurred naturally – those in caves, for example – and for clues that fire had been used in a controlled way. These include activities such as making pitch: some early hominins made this sticky substance by burning birch bark and using it Read More ›

Massively. In “Fire did not spark human colonisation of cold Europe”, we learn that one particular treasured Darwin myth – humans accidentally discovered fire, and then everything happens – might not be so. “The European evidence strongly suggests that the habitual and controlled use of fire was a late phenomenon,” Villa and Roebroeks conclude.  The findings controversially suggest that people migrated from Africa to the below-freezing winter temperatures of Europe without fire. These early hominins might have combined a high-protein diet with a highly active lifestyle to survive, the researchers speculate. The conclusion also questions Wrangham’s hypothesis that an increase in human brain size was tied to the invention of cooking. Wrangham remains to be convinced. He points out that Read More ›

While preparing a lecture, paleoanthropologist John Hawks considers the following division of opinion on the origin of language, grammar, etc: Whether language evolved as an accidental by-product of tool use, etc. or how the rules of grammar evolved, and the way in which language originated as a byproduct of tool use and how the rules of grammar evolved by natural selection (discussing Chomsky, Pinker, and Ramachandran. He is not satisfied with what he hears:

I still don’t believe it. Some archaeologists fetishize stone tools in this way, making them the end-all of human cognitive evolution. But let’s face it: chimpanzees and even capuchin monkeys perform multistep tool operations using the brains they have. Hafting a point on a stick seems like the pinnacle of progress only when points are all the ground yields up.Consider how many times a child will witness tools being crafted. Now consider how many times the same child hears spoken communication. The second is at least two or three orders of magnitude greater than the first. It’s not statistically credible for toolmaking to provide a cognitive basis for language. The opposite is vastly more likely.

Ironically, my current view is that much of language cognition really may be a spandrel – at least, in the broad sense promoted by Gould. (March 11, 2011)

Essentially, the spandrel is a supposed accidental byproduct of evolution by natural selection.

Now, in the face of a subject as momentous as language, just what project engages Hawks and his lecture subjects: Not to discover the origin of language but to develop a theory that follows with utter regularity from Darwinian evolution. That, of course, is precisely where the trouble begins.

As a lifetime professional communicator, I would say we know a few truths about human language: Read More ›

I just couldn’t. From ScienceDaily (Mar. 9, 2011), we learn “Missing DNA Helps Make Us Human”: Tracing the expression of the protein through development, Kingsley and his colleagues concluded that the sequence contributes to the development of sensory whiskers found on the faces of many mammals, and prickly surface spines found on the penises of mice and many non-human primates. Previous studies show that complete inactivation of the androgen receptor gene lead to defects in whiskers and failure to form penile spines. Although humans still retain the androgen receptor gene, the loss of regulatory information for expression in whiskers and spines could help explain two human-specific anatomical traits: absence of sensory whiskers and lack of spines on human penises. Loss Read More ›

Or maybe not. From Britain’s Independent (Olly Bootle, 28 February 2011), we learn, “Our species is still evolving, but future humans might be more like Danny DeVito than Stuart Broad”: The realisation that differing fertility levels might be driving change in our species has led evolutionary biologist Stephen Stearns, from Yale University, to look at evolution in a radical way. By analysing data gathered in an otherwise unremarkable town, Framingham in Massachusetts, he can tell how the people of the town will evolve in the coming generations. His calculations have convinced him that people are still evolving, and in a surprising direction. “What we have found with height and weight basically is that natural selection appears to be operating to Read More ›

Ardi is a 4.4-million-year-old fossil female, considered a common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, was bipedal but reported to have lived in woodlands. That threw into doubt the great savannah myth of human origins. Not long after, came the “backlash”, as writer Jill Neimark puts it, when other authorities contended that she did live on the savannah, but in the meantime, Terry Harrison, a paleoanthropologist at New York University, questioned in Nature whether Ardi was even a member of the human lineage or just an ape “among the tangled branches” of a much larger bush. And University of Toronto paleoanthropologist David Begun also had doubts. “Ardi may be an early side branch of hominids that is not directly related to humans,” Read More ›

This from the Onion to start your day: Anthropologists Trace Human Origins Back To One Large Goat ‘Wait, That Can’t Be Right,’ Scientists Say FEBRUARY 17, 2011 | ISSUE 47•07 As their colleagues huddled together and whispered behind them, researchers from Australia and Japan explained how one 6-foot-tall goat with a hominid skeletal structure spawned numerous goat-human hybrids over a period of 1.8 million years. In a series of PowerPoint slides, they then showed that our ancestors used their prehensile upper lips to perform basic agricultural tasks and stomped out crude pottery with their cloven feet, theories that team members stopped reading aloud to the assembled audience almost immediately after reaching the words “cloven feet.” “Okay, so I’m reading this Read More ›