History of evolutionary thought. Evolutionary thought, the conception that species change over time, has roots in antiquity, in the ideas of the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Chinese as well as in medieval Islamic science.
With the beginnings of biological taxonomy in the late 17th century, Western biological thinking was influenced by two opposed ideas. One was essentialism, the belief that every species has essential characteristics that are unalterable, a concept which had developed from medieval Aristotelian metaphysics, and that fit well with natural theology. The other one was the development of the new anti-Aristotelian approach to modern science: as the Enlightenment progressed, evolutionary cosmology and the mechanical philosophy spread from the physical sciences to natural history. Naturalists began to focus on the variability of species; the emergence of paleontology with the concept of extinction further undermined the static view of nature.
Antiquity[edit] Greeks[edit] Chinese[edit] Romans[edit] The Cognitive Science of Rationality. (The post is written for beginners.
Send the link to your friends! Regular Less Wrong readers may want to jump to the Stanovich material .) A brief history of the brain. Read full article.
Probing the Unconscious Mind. Making Sense of the World, Several Senses at a Time. Our five senses–sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell–seem to operate independently, as five distinct modes of perceiving the world.
In reality, however, they collaborate closely to enable the mind to better understand its surroundings. We can become aware of this collaboration under special circumstances. Emotion Selectively Distorts Our Recollections. On September 11, 2001, Elizabeth A.
Phelps stepped outside her apartment in lower Manhattan and noticed a man staring toward the World Trade Center, about two miles away. Looking up, “I just saw this big, burning hole,” Phelps recalls. The Limits of Intelligence. 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. 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. Becoming Human. Human Evolution. Cookies on the New Scientist website close Our website uses cookies, which are small text files that are widely used in order to make websites work more effectively.
To continue using our website and consent to the use of cookies, click away from this box or click 'Close' Find out about our cookies and how to change them Log in. Human evolution. Daniel Wolpert: The real reason for brains. Introduction to Human Evolution. Human evolution Human evolution is the lengthy process of change by which people originated from apelike ancestors.
Scientific evidence shows that the physical and behavioral traits shared by all people originated from apelike ancestors and evolved over a period of approximately six million years. One of the earliest defining human traits, bipedalism -- the ability to walk on two legs -- evolved over 4 million years ago. Other important human characteristics -- such as a large and complex brain, the ability to make and use tools, and the capacity for language -- developed more recently.
Many advanced traits -- including complex symbolic expression, art, and elaborate cultural diversity -- emerged mainly during the past 100,000 years. Humans are primates. Most scientists currently recognize some 15 to 20 different species of early humans. Early humans first migrated out of Africa into Asia probably between 2 million and 1.8 million years ago.
Sociocultural evolution. Sociocultural evolution, sociocultural evolutionism or cultural evolution are umbrella terms for theories of cultural and social evolution that describe how cultures and societies change over time. Whereas sociocultural development traces processes that tend to increase the complexity of a society or culture, sociocultural evolution also considers process that can lead to decreases in complexity (degeneration) or that can produce variation or proliferation without any seemingly significant changes in complexity (cladogenesis).[1] Sociocultural evolution can be defined as "the process by which structural reorganization is affected through time, eventually producing a form or structure which is qualitatively different from the ancestral form. " Most 19th-century and some 20th-century approaches to socioculture aimed to provide models for the evolution of humankind as a whole, arguing that different societies are at different stages of social development.
Introduction[edit] Evolutionary Psychology and Biology Applied to Health, Business, and Relationships. Hunters of Myths: Why Our Brains Love Origins. A stylized apple with a bite taken out of its right side: chances are, even if you don’t own a single Apple product, you would still recognize the ubiquitous logo. But have you ever paused to consider the symbol’s origin? The logo's rainbow represents color bars on a screen. Image credit: Marcin Wichary, Creative Commons. Why Does Beauty Exist? Over at the always excellent Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong summarizes a new investigation into the neural substrate of beauty: Tomohiro Ishizu and Semir Zeki from University College London watched the brains of 21 volunteers as they looked at 30 paintings and listened to 30 musical excerpts.
All the while, they were lying inside an fMRI scanner, a machine that measures blood flow to different parts of the brain and shows which are most active. DanDennett. Are we the teachable species? We know that our species is unique, but it can be surprisingly hard to pinpoint what exactly makes us so. The fact that we have DNA is not much of a mark of distinction.
Several million other species have it too. Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D.: The Dark Side Of Creativity. The evolution of death. Biologist E.O. Wilson on Why Humans, Like Ants, Need a Tribe. Why We Help: The Evolution of Cooperation. Last april, as reactors at japan's fukushima daiichi nuclear power plant were melting down following a lethal earthquake and tsunami, a maintenance worker in his 20s was among those who volunteered to reenter the plant to try to help bring things back under control. He knew the air was poisoned and expected the choice would keep him from ever marrying or having children for fear of burdening them with health consequences. Vanishing Languages. Steven Pinker on language and thought. Do some cultures have their own ways of going mad? Thinking in a Foreign Language Makes Decisions More Rational.
To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language.