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...
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Posted on August 14, 2008 1:45 PM • 2 Comments •
Fallback foods are the foods that an organism eats when it can't find the good stuff. It has been suggested that adaptive changes in fallback food strategies can leave a more distinct mark on the morphology of an organism, including in the fossil record,...
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Posted on February 19, 2008 8:14 AM • 7 Comments •
Evolution: The Mind's Big Bang I've known Shea for years ... since before grad school. Going out drinking with this guy was a little dangerous. Almost as dangerous as going out drinking with me....
Posted on February 15, 2008 5:48 PM • 2 Comments •
Can you believe this guy? Check it out: The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once proposed that humanity began with cooking. [a Twin Cities anthropologist] says love may have begun with cooking, as well. ... The earliest human ancestors, some kind of chimp-like apes, were living...
Posted on February 13, 2008 3:43 PM • 5 Comments •
From Scientific American, a piece on the "Cooking Hypothesis" (which yours truly helped develop some years back). Our hominid ancestors could never have eaten enough raw food to support our large, calorie-hungry brains, Richard Wrangham claims. The secret to our evolution, he says, is cooking...
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Posted on December 18, 2007 5:53 PM • 1 Comments •
New research published in Current Biology falsifies a widely held idea about the early evolution of birds.
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Posted on November 16, 2007 8:36 AM • 0 Comments •
Many years ago a couple of researchers (Hatley and Kappleman) suggested omnivory, including eating of roots, to be a common theme in the adaptations we see in bears, humans, and pigs. Some years later, Richard Wrangham and I independently and for different reasons came to...
Posted on November 12, 2007 8:09 PM • 1 Comments •
I find it absolutely fascinating that scientists often bother to estimate the effects of diet by feeding controlled quantities of food, especially plant food, to rats to see what happens. For example, there is a common substance in cooked food that, if fed in even...
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Posted on November 12, 2007 6:11 PM • 5 Comments •
