Human Evolution
Category archives for Human Evolution
Great Moments in Human Evolution: The Invention of Chipped Stone Tools
Posted by Greg Laden on February 10, 2010 Or not.
Two chimps walked into a bar …
Posted by Greg Laden on February 10, 2010 … and made a real mess of the place when one of them spotted the jar of pickles on the counter. They fought over it until one of them had almost all the pickles and the other one had a number of bruises and a tiny fragment of one pickle that the other chimp dropped…
Nyamulagira Volcano and Human Evolution
Posted by Greg Laden on January 4, 2010 I had mentioned earlier that the volcanoes of the Virugna region in the Western Rift Valley (as well as other highland spots) have often been islands of rain forest separated from each other by different habitats, including grasslands and wooded savannas. this has produced an island effect that has been a laboratory for evolution, and…
Nova: Becoming Human Hour Three: I’m speechless.
Posted by Greg Laden on November 17, 2009 The first part of this documentary, including the preface and the first several minutes of the main body of the work, should be deleted. The writers and producers who put that part together should be captured, gutted, eviscerated, and their dried and salted remains staked to the front entrance of the Public Broadcasting System as…
Nova: Becoming Human Part II will air on most PBS stations tonight
Posted by Greg Laden on November 10, 2009 I watched a pre-release copy of tonights show, the second of three episodes, last week, and I have some comments to make about it. The short version: Do watch it! Then report back here and tell us what you thought.
Richard Dawkins defends theory of evolution
Posted by Greg Laden on October 22, 2009 He talks about his book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. The interviewer is not my favorite interviewer. A public radio interviewer should not even be asking questions about religion and creationism unless doing a story that is explicitly on fringe beliefs. She digs in just after 16 minutes with the meany…
Culture Shapes How We Look at Faces
Posted by Greg Laden on October 15, 2009 Constructivism. Determinism. It is all a bunch of hooey. A recent paper published by PLoS (Culture Shapes How We Look at Faces) throws a sopping wet blanket on widely held deterministic models of human behavior. In addition, the work underscores the sometimes spooky cultural differences that can emerge in how people see things, even how…
Human Brain Size: Does it matter? And has it decreased?
Posted by Greg Laden on September 23, 2009 Sometimes people walk around with only half a brain, or a large portion of their brain disconnected, or simply having never developed, or an extra large brain, and we usually take little notice. But when there is a five or ten or twenty percent difference between two groups of people we are quickly willing to…
Is the latest claim regarding “chimp-human” inbreeding a bunch of hooey?
Posted by Greg Laden on September 1, 2009 Yes, but not necessarily because it is wrong. Some time ago researchers proposed that the modern DNA signal indicated that chimps and humans continued to interbreed long after they split in evolutionary time. A new study refutes this, and as the author states, this new study is more correct because it “simpler and hence more…
Is it a Falsehood that Humans Evolve from Apes?
Posted by Greg Laden on August 28, 2009 This is another falsehood, but a tricky one. Remember the point of falsehoods: They are statements that are typically associated with meanings or implications that are misleading or incorrect, and in some cases downright damaging. “Humans evolved from apes” is an excellent example of a falsehood because it is technically correct, yet the implied meanings…
Humans are no longer subject to Natural Selection (A falsehood)
Posted by Greg Laden on August 24, 2009 Another look at falsehoods about evolution.
Falsehoods: Has evolution stopped for humans?
Posted by Greg Laden on August 21, 2009 In my initial
Size and Scaling in Hominid Evolution
Posted by Greg Laden on August 20, 2009 Stephen Jay Gould and David Pilbeam wrote a paper in 1974 that was shown ten years later to be so totally wrong in its conclusions that it has fallen into an obscurity not usually linked to either Gould or Pilbeam. However, they were actually right in ways that they could not have anticipated. And even…
My critique of Morgan’s Aquatic Ape TED talk
Posted by Greg Laden on August 5, 2009 This is a follow-up on the TED talk I just posed.
Elaine Morgan on the Aquatic Ape Theory
Posted by Greg Laden on August 5, 2009 Coincidentally, this appeared over night in my inbox. My critique of it is here.
Musings on the Aquatic Ape Theory
Posted by Greg Laden on August 4, 2009 The Aquatic Ape Theory is being discussed over at Pharyngula. As PZ points out, an excellent resource on this idea is Moore’s site on the topic. Here, I just want to make a few remarks about it.
The Synaptic Cleft Rap
Posted by Greg Laden on July 8, 2009 Ion channels, chica. Hat Tip: Virginia Hughes. Who also has something interesting on Coffee.
Palaeowomaen: Barbara Isaac, Women in The Field, and The Throwing Hypothesis
Posted by Greg Laden on March 12, 2009 
The following post has been slightly revised in response to commentary below and elsewhere. I thank all those who commented for the helpful critique. The question of diversity in science, and more specifically, success for women, is often discussed in relation to bench or lab oriented fields. If you read the blogs that cover this…
Understanding Michele Bachmann in the context of Human Evolution
Posted by Greg Laden on February 27, 2009 This barking dog is not very smart. But it could make a good Republican. The only thing harder to understand than Michele Bachmann is the Republican Party. Bachmann is hard to understand in this way: How can a person with her mind be an elected member of congress?!?!??? The Republican party is hard to understand…
What I Had for Dinner Last Night
Posted by Greg Laden on February 13, 2009 Last night I had some grapes, some artichoke dip on bread, some cheese and crackers, and some Merlot in a plastic cup. Which can only mean one thing: I was at a catered event! Indeed, it was the Darwin Day celebration at the Bell Museum. There was Darwin Cake and the opening of two exhibits,…
Two chimps walked into a bar …
Posted by Greg Laden on February 12, 2009 … and made a real mess of the place when one of them spotted the jar of pickles on the counter. They fought over it until one of them had almost all the pickles and the other one had a number of bruises and a tiny fragment of one pickle that the other chimp dropped…
Great Moments in Human Evolution: The Invention of Chipped Stone Tools
Posted by Greg Laden on February 12, 2009 Or not. Much is made of the early use of stone tools by human ancestors. Darwin saw the freeing of the hands ad co-evolving with the use of the hands to make and use tools which co-evolved with the big brain. And that would make the initial appearance of stone tools in the archaeological record…
How diverse were early hominoids?
Posted by Greg Laden on February 12, 2009 And hominids. We know the fossil record underestimates diversity at least a little, and we know that forested environments in Africa tend to be underrepresented. Given this, the diversity of Miocene apes may have been rather impressive, because there is a fairly high diversity in what we can assume is a biased record. But I’d…
Neanderthal Genome Will Be Released
Posted by Greg Laden on February 4, 2009 The complete genome of a Neanderthal dating to about 38,000 years ago has been sequenced by the team lead by Svante Paabo. The genome will be announced on Darwin’s Birthay, Feb 12. “We are working like crazy at the moment,” says Pääbo, adding that his Max Planck colleague, computational biologist Richard Green, is coordinating the…
The Greg Layer
Posted by Greg Laden on January 12, 2009 The previous story, about the Volcanic eruption of the Rwenzori Mountains a few kilometers from our camp (“Fire on the Mountain“), actually occurred AFTER the story I’m about to tell. But I’m telling them out of sequence as a matter of character development. (The complexity of the real life situation significantly exceeds the complexity of…
The Fantastic Mystery of the Younger Dryas
Posted by Greg Laden on January 11, 2009 One of the most interesting and exciting stories in science is that of the Younger Dryas. The Younger Dryas was a climate event that had important effects on human history, and that has been reasonably linked to some of our most important cultural changes, and ultimately some evolutionary changes as well. That is one reason…
Neanderthals at the end of their days
Posted by Greg Laden on December 13, 2008 What was Neanderthal-Modern Human interaction really like? Fifty four teeth (some of which are fragments) and nine other bones dating to about 40-43,000 years ago represent the “most recent, and largest, sample of southern Iberian late Neanderthals currently known.” These and some closely related remains may indicate that these Middle Paleolithic holdouts were kissing cousins…
Allen’s Rule, Phenotypic Plasticity, and The Nature of Evolution
Posted by Greg Laden on December 5, 2008 Allen’s Rule. One of those things you learn in graduate school along with Bergmann’s Rule and Cope’s Rule. It is all about body size. Cope’s Rule … which is a rule of thumb and not an absolute … says that over time the species in a given lineage tend to be larger and larger. Bergmann’s…
Cerebral activation patterns induced by inflection of regular and irregular verbs with positron emission tomography: A comparison between single subject and group analysis
Posted by Greg Laden on November 29, 2008 The raw material for Miriam Sach’s solo contemporary dance was her 2004 Ph.D. thesis at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany, titled “Cerebral activation patterns induced by inflection of regular and irregular verbs with positron emission tomography: A comparison between single subject and group analysis.” The question behind her research was whether different types of verbs…
Study Suggests Increased Rate of Human Adaptive Evolution
Posted by Greg Laden on October 24, 2008 There is a new paper, just coming out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that explores the idea that humans have undergone an increased rate of evolution over the last several tens of thousands of years. By an increased rate of evolution, the authors mean an increased rate of adaptive change in the…
, which is now available for the 
