Human Evolution
emjohnson | September 23, 2009Author's Note: This piece is a continuation of my article "Survival of the Kindest" that appeared in Seed magazine.
As an undergraduate in biology and anthropology I read every one of Dawkins' books voraciously and would get into heated debates with my close friends about the Dawkins-Gould rivalry. He was one of the primary voices that taught me to love science and want to devote my life to the pursuit of natural knowledge. So before you read anything else, go out and read Dawkins' work. It's worth your time. This post will still be here when you come back.
The problem that I've found as…
gregladen | September 23, 2009Sometimes 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 use that to decide (as in the Bell Curve) that those people with the (on average) smaller brain are inferior. The fact that all the well known studies comparing groups of living people that show such differences have been shown to be bogus (i.e. made up or doctored data) is often…
emjohnson | September 21, 2009Heracles battles Death for generosity's sake / Frederic Lord Leighton (1869-71)
Whereas great scientific theories stand the test of time when they accurately predict the natural world through repeated empirical trials, great literature transcends the ages when it speaks to universal qualities of human experience. Such inspirational works can also, without the authors realizing at the time, reveal the sublime beauty and tragedy of our evolutionary drama. Few classical authors have tapped into this zeitgeist of biological experience as the Greek tragedian Euripides. The conflict between…
emjohnson | September 19, 2009Bonobos often adopt a "missionary" posture during copulation (photograph by Frans de Waal).
As part of the series of reposts leading up to my review of Frans de Waal's newest book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society I present the second of three pieces that appeared after Ian Parker's 2007 article "Swingers" appeared in The New Yorker.
As I wrote earlier in Bonobo (Re)Visions, Ian Parker's "exposé" in The New Yorker was beautifully written but wrong on many levels. Now the straw man who Parker claims to have torn down, primatologist Frans de Waal, answers his…
emjohnson | September 17, 2009
Darwin evicts a Social Darwinist and Eugenicist from his house / Northwestern Univ.
Primatologist Frans de Waal, author of such classic works as Chimpanzee Politics, Peacemaking Among Primates, Good Natured: The Origin of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, and Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape is now coming out with his new book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. My review of this work will be out early next week to mark the book's national release on September 22. Today and in the next few days I will be reposting pieces I've written over the years on the…
razib | September 12, 2009The Evolutionary Origin of Man Can Be Traced in the Layers of Defunct Ancestral Alpha Satellites Flanking the Active Centromeres of Human Chromosomes. The authors are Russian, so I think the somewhat grand and archaic first portion of the title can be explained as a mater of translation. Here's the author summary:
The primate centromere evolves by amplification of alpha satellite sequences in its inner core, which expands and moves the peripheral sequences sideways, forming layers of different age in the "pericentromeric" area. The expanding centromere model poses two main questions: (1)…
gregladen | September 1, 2009Yes, 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 likely".
Wow.
Let us begin at the beginning: There was no interbreeding between chimps and humans. not even "early humans," because they did not exist yet, so when Elie Dolgin (or a Nature editor? Henry?) makes this statement: "A genetic analysis has called into…
gregladen | August 28, 2009This 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 that arise from it are potentially wrong. Even more importantly, you can't really analyze the statement "Humans evolved from apes" without getting into an extended analysis and discussion of what an ape is and what a human is.
When…
gregladen | August 24, 2009Another look at falsehoods about evolution.
We previously addressed the falsehood "Evolution has stopped for humans" and concluded that background change in allele frequency independent of natural selection does not just stop for any viable, continuing population. So, no, saying that "evolution has stopped for humans" is tantamount to saying that "gravity has stopped for my coffee cup" (which is sitting here on my desk minding its own business).
But this question is a falsehood at another level. In reality, there are two additional questions that are actually being asked when this…
gregladen | August 21, 2009In my initial list of Falsehoods, I included these two closely related items:
Evolution has stopped for humans; and
Serious scientists often entertain the question: "Has evolution stopped for humans?"
I'll make the distinction between them clear eventually. For now, let's focus on the first: Has evolution stopped for humans or not?
The reason we bring up these falsehoods to begin with is because examining them exposes assumptions or requires the investigation of knowledge that is worth talking about. In this case, the deeper question is this: What is evolution exactly? So, this is a…
gregladen | August 20, 2009Stephen 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 if they were not right, this paper still has much to contribute, including the opening words of that publication in Science, which are very much worthy of consideration for many reasons:
A repost
It is no longer true that there are more practitioners than pieces. In fact, when I encountered…
emjohnson | August 17, 2009Benjamin Franklin once quipped, "Where there's marriage without love there will be love without marriage." His affairs are well known in American history, however this founding father may have been stating a truth extending to evolutionary history as well.
Christopher Ryan (author of the forthcoming Sex at Dawn) offers some thoughts on the role of novelty in the sex lives of our favorite primate. He suggests that men are drawn to variety in sexual partners while women are drawn to variety in technique:
When researchers decided to look at this issue to develop a Sexual Boredom Scale, they…
emjohnson | August 11, 2009The Daily Show's Jon Oliver investigates the question of whether humans are more closely related to orangutans or chimpanzees. The answer shouldn't surprise you in the slightest (though it will be quite funny).
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Human's Closest Relative
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes
Political Humor
Spinal Tap Performance
Orangutans aren't the only ones who engage in face to face sex. Bonobos do it as one of their many inventive positions. Leaving the genetic evidence aside, behaviorally the likelihood that humans are more closely…
gregladen | August 5, 2009This is a follow-up on the TED talk I just posed.
These are my reactions in real time as I watched the video:
We start off with a very inaccurate statement that we are not interested in the chimp-human differences. It is, in fact, all we palaeoanthropologists think about.
She overemphasizes the difference to say that they are total, but yes, there are differences.
She makes the error of implying that "something" happened (when it would well have been a lot of things that happened over time, or some other pattern of change)
She correctly identifies the "coming out of the trees" and…
gregladen | August 5, 2009Coincidentally, this appeared over night in my inbox. My critique of it is here.
gregladen | August 4, 2009The 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 Aquatic Ape Theory (AAT) is a human evolution Theory of Everything (TOE) and thus explains, as it should, everything. That is a dangerous way for a theory to act, because if it tries to explain everything then it is going to be wrong in a number of places, and it is going to seem (or even be) right in a number of places but only by chance. (Unless, of course, the TOE is totally rad and really…
gregladen | July 26, 2009"Human nature" is an interesting topic. People will argue over the definition of human nature, but regardless of what people think or say, it is reasonable to assume that all humans share a psychological and developmental framework to the extent that any two people raised in the same background will 'turn out' similar with respect to several behavioral traits or tendencies. Also, a pair of twins separated at birth and raised up in very different cultures are likely to exhibit more differences than similarities owing to the different cultures but perhaps some set of seemingly uncanny…
razib | July 20, 2009Shanidar 3 Neandertal rib puncture wound and paleolithic weaponry:
Since its discovery and initial description in the 1960s, the penetrating lesion to the left ninth rib of the Shanidar 3 Neandertal has been a focus for discussion about interpersonal violence and weapon technology in the Middle Paleolithic. Recent experimental studies using lithic points on animal targets suggest that aspects of weapon system dynamics can be inferred from the form of the bony lesions they produce. Thus, to better understand the circumstances surrounding the traumatic injury suffered by Shanidar 3, we…
razib | July 17, 2009There's a new paper on ancient DNA out, Targeted Retrieval and Analysis of Five Neandertal mtDNA Genomes:
Analysis of Neandertal DNA holds great potential for investigating the population history of this group of hominins, but progress has been limited due to the rarity of samples and damaged state of the DNA. We present a method of targeted ancient DNA sequence retrieval that greatly reduces sample destruction and sequencing demands and use this method to reconstruct the complete mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genomes of five Neandertals from across their geographic range. We find that mtDNA…
emjohnson | June 29, 2009
Sunrise on the Maasai Mara, Kenya. Vearl Brown / Creative Commons
From the beginning our human family has been on a journey. Born together, in eastern Africa about 100,000 years ago, our ancestors migrated to distant points around the globe. Our family scattered, communication was cut off and, in most cases, we forgot about them all together. We went our separate ways and lived our separate lives. Like siblings each adopted by different parents in distant lands, we came to identify with where we were raised instead of where we were from. Now, after accumulating so many years of…