Mind

From human evolution specialists Bernard Wood and Michael Westaway at The Conversation: The question of where we humans come from is one many people ask, and the answer is getting more complicated as new evidence is emerging all the time. … We now realise that modern humans are just one of the African great apes. Bl21So when and how did this radically changed perception come about? More. That’s nonsense and it will doom great apes. But we can be pretty sure post-moderns won’t care as long as they can blame someone else for whatever happens and their therapists give them something to make them feel better. Non-post-modern reality: Great apes are not “entering the Stone Age;” they risk extinction. IQ Read More ›

From Stephanie Hertzenberg at Beliefnet:  Are Islam and Evolution Compatible? The question is controversial and hotly debated. Helpful information but some well-meaning misdirection: Some Muslims hold that evolution is partially compatible with Islam. At “Have Muslims Misunderstood Evolution,” a London event organized by the Deen Institute in 2013, Shaykh Yasir Qadhi argued that Islam is compatible with all of Darwin’s theory of evolution except in the case of humans. He claimed that, from an Islamic theological perspective, a Muslim can say that Allah inserted a created Adam into the natural order. This would be, he explained, as if Adam were the last domino placed in a line by Allah. Non-believers would see Adam’s domino as a casual connection or continuation from all Read More ›

From Evolution News & Views: Here we are in 2018, and we still don’t know who, when, or why ancient people left their marks in the Arabian desert in the form of large stone structures, some of them hundreds of meters long. But as we observed back in November, “All we know is that they were designed.” It’s a good example of intelligent design in action — the design science of archaeology. It’s one of many active areas of design-based research that clearly are propelling science forward. … What’s interesting is that there are very stunning natural structures in the same area: perfectly round volcanic craters that stand out vividly from their surroundings. So what’s the difference? We all know Read More ›

From Will Storr at the Guardian, on how the obviously false “self-esteem” bunkum in education received the status of “science”: In the 1980s, Californian politician John Vasconcellos set up a task force to promote high self-esteem as the answer to all social ills. But was his science based on a lie? The flawed yet infectious notion that, in order to thrive, people need to be treated with unconditional positivity first gained traction in the late 80s. Since then, the self-esteem movement has helped transform the way we raise our children – prioritising their feelings of self-worth, telling them they are special and amazing, and cocooning them from everyday consequences. One manifestation of this has been grade inflation. In 2012, the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Biologists from the University of Tübingen have demonstrated that plants can choose between alternative competitive responses according to the stature and densities of their opponents. A new study by researchers from the Institute of Evolution and Ecology reveals that plants can evaluate the competitive ability of their neighbors and optimally match their responses to them. The results were published in Nature Communications. Animals facing competition have been shown to optimally choose between different behaviors, including confrontation, avoidance and tolerance, depending on the competitive ability of their opponents relative to their own. For example, if their competitors are bigger or stronger, animals are expected to “give up the fight” and choose avoidance or tolerance over confrontation. Plants can detect Read More ›

From Sapiens: PARALLEL SOCIAL COGNITION IN HUMANS AND DOGS This research raises new questions about what brought dogs and humans together in prehistory and how they might influence each other’s development. More than 550 domestic dogs, Canis familiaris, were put through a series of tests based on studies of humans and nonhuman apes. Comparison of the data from all three species revealed patterns of individual differences in cooperative communication between human infants and dogs that were similar—and were not observed in chimpanzees. The researchers conclude that social cognition is better developed in dogs and humans. This raises as many questions as it answers because it is unknown whether the mental processes of dogs and humans work in the same way. Read More ›

But why not? From Rod Kackley at PJMedia: The “AI Index” released by Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, SRI International, and other research organizations shows artificial intelligence produced in the United States is no smarter than a five-year-old. And Yann LeCun, the head of AI for Facebook, said even the most advanced artificial intelligence systems are no sharper on the uptake than vermin. The term “artificial intelligence” has been around since the mid-1950s when science fiction writers fantasized about automobiles that drove themselves, computers that could see, and even phones smart enough to respond to spoken commands. However, the Stanford-led group that produced the AI index is the first to attempt to create a baseline to measure the Read More ›

Abstract: Neuroscientists typically assume that human mental functions are generated by the brain and that its structural elements, including the different cell layers and tissues that form the neocortex, play specific roles in this complex process. Different functional units are thought to complement one another to create an integrated self-awareness or episodic memory. Still, findings that pertain to brain dysplasia and brain lesions indicate that in some individuals there is a considerable discrepancy between the cerebral structures and cognitive functioning. This seems to question the seemingly well-defined role of these brain structures. This article provides a review of such remarkable cases. It contains overviews of noteworthy aspects of hydrocephalus, hemihydranencephaly, hemispherectomy, and certain abilities of “savants.” We add considerations on Read More ›

From Steve Twomey at the Smithsonian Magazine (2010), presumably a vintage article recycled this morning or so, without context, about the catastrophic brain injuries that supposedly greatly changed a man’s personality (psych lecture room staple): Gage’s initial survival would have ensured him a measure of celebrity, but his name was etched into history by observations made by John Martyn Harlow, the doctor who treated him for a few months afterward. Gage’s friends found him“no longer Gage,” Harlow wrote. The balance between his “intellectual faculties and animal propensities” seemed gone. He could not stick to plans, uttered “the grossest profanity” and showed “little deference for his fellows.” The railroad-construction company that employed him, which had thought him a model foreman, refused to Read More ›

He puts it down to genetic predisposition, need for control, and identifying with a group. From Andy Tix at Psychology Today: Genetics, control, and groups. Like every other behavior psychologists have studied, religious behavior is influenced by an interaction between nature and nurture, in other words. Still, there’s a lot we don’t understand. One tentative answer generates five additional questions. Mystery remains and, I suspect, always will.More. His approach, well-meaning and friendly, is just the sort of schlock that discredits psychology. The problem is, he is throwing around terms and concepts from studies that are rarely worth the space they take up on a hard drive. Once you get past: Mother Theresa was religious and so were Torquemada and Pat Read More ›

It’s a tougher question than at first appears. Just because a fossil human is found with a bashed-in skull doesn’t strictly prove violence or lethality of weapons. So, following in the footsteps of the once-proud maxim of journalism, “If your mother says she loves you check it out,” some researchers wanted to know if Stone Age clubs (in this case, 5500 BC) can really kill. From Megan Gannon at LiveScience: Archaeologists have found ample evidence of violence in Western and Central Europe during the Neolithic period, through burials of people who had skull fractures—some healed, some were fatal —from an intentional blow to the head. But it was often unclear where these injuries came from. … So, Dyer and her Read More ›

From philosopher Laura Ruggles at Aeon: What does it even mean to say that a mallow can learn and remember the location of the sunrise? The idea that plants can behave intelligently, let alone learn or form memories, was a fringe notion until quite recently. Memories are thought to be so fundamentally cognitive that some theorists argue that they’re a necessary and sufficient marker of whether an organism can do the most basic kinds of thinking. Surely memory requires a brain, and plants lack even the rudimentary nervous systems of bugs and worms. However, over the past decade or so this view has been forcefully challenged. The mallow isn’t an anomaly. Plants are not simply organic, passive automata. We now Read More ›

Last year it was… oh, never mind. From Harriet Hall at Science-Based Medicine, a review of Frederick Crews’s Freud: The Making of an Illusion: He treated pampered, rich socialites. His attitude towards them was cynical; they provided a steady source of income by not being cured, and in one case he rushed back to see a patient in the fear that he might get well in his absence. He had little sympathy for his patients; he actively despised most people, especially those of the lower social orders. He was a misogynist who believed women were biologically inferior. He treated his wife abominably. Few of his ideas were original. He plagiarized. He borrowed ideas from rivals but then backdated them and Read More ›

From Les Hatton and Gregory Warr at Times Higher: First, peer review is self-evidently useful in protecting established paradigms and disadvantaging challenges to entrenched scientific authority. Second, peer review, by controlling access to publication in the most prestigious journals helps to maintain the clearly recognised hierarchies of journals, of researchers, and of universities and research institutes. Peer reviewers should be experts in their field and will therefore have allegiances to leaders in their field and to their shared scientific consensus; conversely, there will be a natural hostility to challenges to the consensus, and peer reviewers have substantial power of influence (extending virtually to censorship) over publication in elite (and even not-so-elite) journals. … However, for any innovations in scientific publication Read More ›

A friend unearthed this: From evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller of NYU at the Edge (a response to their 2013 question): 2013 : What *Should* We Be Worried About? China has been running the world’s largest and most successful eugenics program for more than thirty years, driving China’s ever-faster rise as the global superpower. I worry that this poses some existential threat to Western civilization. Yet the most likely result is that America and Europe linger around a few hundred more years as also-rans on the world-historical stage, nursing our anti-hereditarian political correctness to the bitter end. … For generations, Chinese intellectuals have emphasized close ties between the state (guojia), the nation (minzu), the population (renkou), the Han race (zhongzu), and, Read More ›