Science on Google+ Bill O'Reilly vs. Richard Dawkins on 'The Magic of Reality' Encyclopedia of Life. Evolutionary Psychology and Biology Applied to Health, Business, and Relationships. The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online. The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science.
Illustration: Jonathon Rosen "A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point. " So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger (PDF), in a passage that might have been referring to climate change denial—the persistent rejection, on the part of so many Americans today, of what we know about global warming and its human causes. But it was too early for that—this was the 1950s—and Festinger was actually describing a famous case study in psychology.
Festinger and several of his colleagues had infiltrated the Seekers, a small Chicago-area cult whose members thought they were communicating with aliens—including one, "Sananda," who they believed was the astral incarnation of Jesus Christ. Through her, the aliens had given the precise date of an Earth-rending cataclysm: December 21, 1954. Why Did Consciousness Evolve, and How Can We Modify It? | Science Not Fiction. Update 5/24/11: The conversation continues in Part II here. I recently gave a talk at the Directors Guild of America as part of a panel on the “Science of Cyborgs” sponsored by the Science Entertainment Exchange. It was a fun time, and our moderators, Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant from the HowStuffWorks podcast, emceed the evening with just the right measure of humor and cultural insight. In my twelve minutes, I shared a theory of how consciousness evolved. My point was that if we understand the evolutionary basis of consciousness, maybe this will help us envision new ways our consciousness might evolve further in the future.
That could be fun in terms of dreaming up new stories. This idea is so simple that I’m surprised I’ve not yet been able to find it already in circulation. The idea is this: back in our watery days as fish, we lived in a medium that was inherently unfriendly to seeing things very far away. So what does this have to do with consciousness? Fast-Evolving Brains Helped Humans out of the Stone Age. Just like our animal skin–clad ancestors, we gather food with zeal, lust over the most capable mates, and have an aversion to scammers. And we do still wear plenty of animal skins. But does more separate us from our Stone Age forebears than cartoonists and popular psychologists might have us believe? At first blush, parsing the modern human in terms of behaviors apparently hardwired into the brain over eons of evolution seems like a tidy, straightforward exercise.
And 30 years ago, when the field of evolutionary psychology was gaining steam, some facile parallels between ancient and modern behaviors lodged themselves in the popular conceptions of human evolution. "It's very easy to slip into a very simplistic view of human nature," says Robert Kurzban, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, citing the classic Flintstones stereotype. "It seems implausible that all of that change has been going on without changing how the brain works," Laland says.
The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online. How sunlight, sex, and sneezes are all connected. How the Concept of “God” Influences Goal Pursuit. Does thinking about god help you in life? It’s a question whose answer will likely never be accepted by many, but that hasn’t stopped researchers from trying to find it. A new study examining self-regulation reveals that thinking about god does help you achieve your goal, but only if your goal is to successfully resist the urge to do something. Leveraging classic and recent theorizing on self-regulation and social cognition, we predict and test for 2 divergent effects of exposure to notions of God on self-regulatory processes. Specifically, we show that participants reminded of God (vs. neutral or positive concepts) demonstrate both decreased active goal pursuit (Studies 1, 2, and 5) and increased temptation resistance (Studies 3, 4, and 5). The researchers believe the findings are due to god’s reputation for omnipotence and omniscience.
From an evolutionary standpoint, the idea that God helps you resist temptation while decreasing your pursuit of other goals makes a lot of sense. 4 Evolutionary Explanations for Modern Annoyances. Soren Bowie is on assignment in the jungles of South America. Filling in for him today is Los Angeles based writer Joe Donatelli. At some point, your appendix was vital to your survival. Well, not yours in particular. Yours is useless. But humanity's collective appendix was an evolutionary advancement that kept the species alive. . #4. Let me preface this by saying that it comes from first-hand experience. Getty"Wait, there might be someone in the bathroom I haven't said goodbye to. " Women say goodbye to the host, to their friends, to people they've met that night and even to strangers. With her friends, it's not enough to say goodbye. Getty"My boyfriend is already in the car. For those of you keeping track, that's two goodbyes apiece for friends and strangers, plus more planning than took place before the Yalta Conference.
When I'm at a party with my friends, I do the polite thing: I thank the host and leave. I then drive home safely. In research published by Daniel Balliet, Norman P. . #3. Stephen Hawking at 70: Exclusive interview - 04 January 2012. Evolutionary Psychology and Biology Applied to Health, Business, and Relationships. Encyclopedia of Life. We do have bigger brains than Neanderthals - Technology & science - Science - LiveScience. Modern humans possess brain structures larger than their Neanderthal counterparts, suggesting we are distinguished from them by different mental capacities, scientists find. We are currently the only extant human lineage, but Neanderthals, our closest-known evolutionary relatives, still walked the Earth as recently as maybe 24,000 years ago. Neanderthals were close enough to the modern human lineage to interbreed, calling into question how different they really were from us and whether they comprise a different species.
To find out more, researchers used CT scanners to map the interiors of five Neanderthal skulls as well as four fossil and 75 contemporary human skulls to determine the shapes of their brains in 3-D. Like modern humans, Neanderthals had larger brains than both our living ape relatives and other extinct human lineages. The investigators discovered modern humans possess larger olfactory bulbs at the base of their brains. Late Bloomers: "New" Genes May Have Played a Role in Human Brain Evolution. Billions of years ago, organic chemicals in the primordial soup somehow organized themselves into the first organisms. A few years ago scientists found that something similar happens every once in awhile in the cells of all living things: bits of once-quiet stretches of DNA sometimes spontaneously assemble themselves into genes.
Such "de novo" genes may go on to play significant roles in the evolution of individual organisms—even humans. But how many are there? More than anyone thought, it turns out. The most prolific source of new genes in animals, plants, fungi and other life whose cells have nuclei involves the shuffling or duplication of bits of DNA from existing genes.
It was widely thought that de novo evolution of genes was quite rare, because the proteins they code for are often large and complex—most fail to function properly if a single key component is out of place, so randomly evolving a working gene seemed implausible. Daniel Wolpert: The real reason for brains. Cultural Transmission in Chimpanzees | The Primate Diaries. "Tradition" by Nathaniel Gold Culture defines who we are but few can explain where it comes from or why we adopt one tradition over another. In the classic musical The Fiddler on the Roof the family patriarch, Tevye, muses on this basic fact of human existence: Here in Anatevka we have traditions for everything… how to eat, how to sleep, even, how to wear clothes.
For instance, we always keep our heads covered and always wear a little prayer shawl… This shows our constant devotion to God. You may ask, how did this tradition start? I’ll tell you – I don’t know. The origin of particular cultural traits in human populations has long been a mystery to anthropologists. While nonhuman primates don’t have obvious cultural traditions the same way humans do, such as variation in their clothing or adding extra spice to their food, primatologists have nonetheless identified behavioral practices that vary between communities and which are transmitted through social learning. Figure 1. Reference: Confidence and Why It's Important to Our Evolution. A recent study published in the scientific journal Nature explains how confidence plays an important role in our evolution. According to the research, confidence motivates us to take action in the face of uncertainty.
The more confident we are, the more likely we are to fight for the resources we need to survive. The truth is life is filled with uncertainty. We never really know how the future is going to turn out. And sometimes due to this uncertainty we fear rejection or failure. We might be deathly afraid of being rejected by at a girl at a bar. So instead of taking the risk and starting a conversation, we just hang with our friends and never approach her. Or maybe we are afraid of starting a new career because we don’t think we will be any good at it. Lack of confidence can cause us to sabotage ourselves in all sorts of ways. Let me ask you a question. In the same way confidence can directly impact your life in a positive way. Reflect on your strengths. Most of these are commonsense. Autism in Another Ape. Fast-Evolving Brains Helped Humans out of the Stone Age. Jack Horner: Building a dinosaur from a chicken. The New Evolution Therapy. The biologist with the hippest name, Theodosius Dobzhansky, noted that 'Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.' The same can be said about the field of psychology.
Clinical concerns such as depression , anxiety, and personality disorders are deeply evolutionary--strategies that helped survival of the individual or their genes . Think about your most salient daily concerns. They may involve procrastination , overeating, shame , resentment, envy , short-term enjoyment. These emotions and behavior are tied to predictable triggers, often involving people's judgments. Some circumstances are evolutionarily novel (eNovel), like ingesting lots of calories with fats and sugars and scant interaction with neighbors, because for most of human history we were surrounded primarily by kin.
As many mismatches as exist in our supercharged world, far more circumstances are evolutionarily familiar (eFamiliar). Applied Evolutionary Psychology is a nascent field. Photo credit. DanDennett. New view of human evolution? 3.2 million-year-old fossil foot bone supports humanlike bipedalism in Lucy's species. A fossilized foot bone recovered from Hadar, Ethiopia, shows that by 3.2 million years ago human ancestors walked bipedally with a modern human-like foot, a report that appears Feb. 11 in the journal Science, concludes. The fossil, a fourth metatarsal, or midfoot bone, indicates that a permanently arched foot was present in the species Australopithecus afarensis, according to the report authors, Carol Ward of the University of Missouri, together with William Kimbel and Donald Johanson, of Arizona State University's Institute of Human Origins.
The research helps resolve a long-standing debate between paleoanthropologists who think A. afarensis walked essentially as modern humans do and those who think this species practiced a form of locomotion intermediate between the quadrupedal tree-climbing of chimpanzees and human terrestrial bipedalism. The question of whether A. afarensis had fully developed pedal, or foot, arches has been part of this debate. Monkeys Recognize Poor Grammar. July 8, 2009 Monkeys can form sentences and speak in accents—and now a new study shows that our genetic relatives can also recognize poor grammar. "We were really curious whether monkeys could even detect the common trend found in human language to add sounds to word edges, like adding 'ed' in English to create the past tense," said lead study author Ansgar Endress, a linguist at Harvard University.
Previous research in cotton-top tamarins had shown that the animals can understand basic grammar, for instance, identifying which words logically follow other words in a sentence. But that same study, published in the journal Science in 2004, found that monkeys did not understand complex grammar, such as when words in a sentence depend on each other but are separated. While that study suggested monkeys were deaf to complex communication, the new research shows that tamarins can grasp at least one advanced concept: prefixes and suffixes. Wordplay Mental Machinery.
Endangered Species: Humans Might Have Faced Extinction 1 Million Years Ago. What explains the ascendance of Homo sapiens? Start by looking at our pets. Who among us is invulnerable to the puppy in the pet store window? Not everyone is a dog person, of course; some people are cat people or horse people or parakeet people or albino ferret people. But human beings are a distinctly pet-loving bunch. In no other species do adults regularly and knowingly rear the young of other species and support them into old age; in our species it is commonplace.
In almost every human culture, people own pets. In the United States, there are more households with pets than with children. On the face of it, this doesn’t make sense: Pets take up resources that we would otherwise spend on ourselves or our own progeny. Some pets, it’s true, do work for their owners, or are eventually eaten by them, but many simply live with us, eating the food we give them, interrupting our sleep, dictating our schedules, occasionally soiling the carpet, and giving nothing in return but companionship and often desultory affection. Art in particular was animal-centered. 1. The Evolution of Human Biodiversity: Great Ape Biodiversity UCTV. Deeptime.swf (application/x-shockwave-flash Object) New Type of Ancient Human Found—Descendants Live Today? A previously unknown kind of human—the Denisovans—likely roamed Asia for thousands of years, probably interbreeding occasionally with humans like you and me, according to a new genetic study.
In fact, living Pacific islanders in Papua New Guinea may be distant descendants of these prehistoric pairings, according to new analysis of DNA from a girl's 40,000-year-old pinkie bone, found in Siberian Russia 's Denisova cave. This "new twist" in human evolution adds substantial new evidence that different types of humans—so-called modern humans and Neanderthals , modern humans and Denisovans, and perhaps even Denisovans and Neanderthals—mated and bore offspring, experts say. "We don't think the Denisovans went to Papua New Guinea," located at the northwestern edge of the Pacific region called Melanesia, explained study co-author Bence Viola , an anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
(See "Interspecies Sex: Evolution's Hidden Secret? " Our Family Tree: Chimps, Bonobos And Our Commonality : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture. Hide captionThis figure is adapted from The Demonic Male (Mariner Books, 1997) by Richard Wrangham. Mariner Books This figure is adapted from The Demonic Male (Mariner Books, 1997) by Richard Wrangham. As anticipated last week, I’m here at the Great Ape Trust in Iowa, where I’ve spent a fantastic afternoon with Sue-Savage Rumbaugh and seven bonobos. Since I’ll also be here tomorrow, I’ll blog about the full experience next week.
This week I’ll continue the great-ape theme by walking through the above image — Our Family Tree — and reflecting on some of its implications. Charles Darwin is best known for his recognition that Variation and Natural Selection serve as the drumbeat of biological evolution. But fully as important, to my mind, was his articulation of the concept of Common Ancestry: all modern beings share ancestry, via countless convergences, with an original cellular creature (as expanded here). Hide captionA young Bonobo enjoys a blade of grass.
Joachim S. Speculation? Wonderfest 2010: How Did Evolution Shape Human Behavior? | The Leakey Foundation. New Hypothesis for Human Evolution and Human Nature. Neandertal Brains Developed More Like Chimps' Neandertal Children Developed on the Fast Track. Denis Dutton: A Darwinian theory of beauty. What Makes Chimps And Humans Different? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture. Humans' Big Brains Tied To Chimps' Immunity? How We Are Evolving. How did life originate? Human Evolution Timeline Interactive. Te map. Human Evolution: Oldest Evidence Of Stone Tool Use. Evolution in Action: Lizard Moving From Eggs to Live Birth.
Laurie Santos: A monkey economy as irrational as ours. Timeline Interactive | Smithsonian Human Origins Program. BioMed Central | Full text | Reconstructing the ups and downs of primate brain evolution: implications for adaptive hypotheses and Homo floresiensis. Becoming Human. Evolution. Stephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution" "Lucy" Kin Pushes Back Evolution of Upright Walking?
Australopithecus afarensis | Smithsonian Human Origins Program. The Future of Human Evolution Website | HumansFuture.org. Evo_large.gif (GIF εικόνα, 2420x915 εικονοστοιχεία) - Σε κλίμακα.