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 .) The last 40 years of cognitive science have taught us a great deal about how our brains produce errors in thinking and decision making, and about how we can overcome those errors. These methods can help us form more accurate beliefs and make better decisions. Long before the first Concorde supersonic jet was completed, the British and French governments developing it realized it would lose money. John tested positive for an extremely rare but fatal disease, using a test that is accurate 80% of the time. Mary gave money to a charity to save lives in the developing world.
During the last four decades, cognitive scientists have discovered a long list of common thinking errors like these. How are these errors produced, and how can we overcome them? Rationality First, what is rationality ? Cognitive scientists recognize two kinds of rationality: Notes. A brief history of the brain. Read full article Continue reading page |1|2|3|4 New Scientist tracks the evolution of our brain from its origin in ancient seas to its dramatic expansion in one ape – and asks why it is now shrinking See gallery: Your brain's family album, from hydra to human IT IS 30,000 years ago. A man enters a narrow cave in what is now the south of France. By the flickering light of a tallow lamp, he eases his way through to the furthest chamber. On one of the stone overhangs, he sketches in charcoal a picture of the head of a bison looming above a woman's naked body. In 1933, Pablo Picasso creates a strikingly similar image, called Minotaur Assaulting Girl.
That two artists, separated by 30 millennia, should produce such similar work seems astonishing. How did we acquire our beautiful brains? The story of the brain begins in the ancient oceans, long before the first animals appeared. This is possible because all living cells generate an electrical potential across their membranes by pumping out ions. Probing the Unconscious Mind. SIGMUND FREUD popularized the idea of the unconscious, a sector of the mind that harbors thoughts and memories actively removed from conscious deliberation. Because this aspect of mind is, by definition, not accessible to introspection, it has proved difficult to investigate. Today the domain of the unconscious—described more generally in the realm of cognitive neuroscience as any processing that does not give rise to conscious awareness—is routinely studied in hundreds of laboratories using objective psychophysical techniques amenable to statistical analysis.
Let me tell you about two experiments that reveal some of the capabilities of the unconscious mind. Both depend on “masking,” as it is called in the jargon, or hiding things from view. Subjects look but don’t see. A quartet of single-digit Arabic numbers (1 through 9, excluding the numeral 5) are projected onto a screen. Yet the cue still influenced the subject’s reaction to the main response. What’s Wrong with this Picture? 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. In some cases, a sense may covertly influence the one we think is dominant. When visual information clashes with that from sound, sensory crosstalk can cause what we see to alter what we hear. When one sense drops out, another can pick up the slack. Our senses must also regularly meet and greet in the brain to provide accurate impressions of the world. Seeing What You Hear We can usually differentiate the sights we see and the sounds we hear. Beep Baseball Blind baseball seems almost an oxymoron. Calling What You See Bats and whales, among other animals, emit sounds into their surroundings—not to communicate with other bats and whales—but to “see” what is around them.
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 man told her that he had just seen a large airplane crash into one of the skyscrapers. Thinking it was a horrible accident, Phelps started walking to work, a few blocks away, for a 9 A.M. telephone meeting.
By the time she reached her eighth-floor office at New York University, a second jet had struck the other tower, which collapsed after an hour. Like Phelps, many Americans have searing memories of that day. Select an option below: Customer Sign In *You must have purchased this issue or have a qualifying subscription to access this content. The Limits of Intelligence. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the Spanish Nobel-winning biologist who mapped the neural anatomy of insects in the decades before World War I, likened the minute circuitry of their vision-processing neurons to an exquisite pocket watch.
He likened that of mammals, by comparison, to a hollow-chested grandfather clock. Indeed, it is humbling to think that a honeybee, with its milligram-size brain, can perform tasks such as navigating mazes and landscapes on a par with mammals. A honeybee may be limited by having comparatively few neurons, but it surely seems to squeeze everything it can out of them. At the other extreme, an elephant, with its five-million-fold larger brain, suffers the inefficiencies of a sprawling Mesopotamian empire. Signals take more than 100 times longer to travel between opposite sides of its brain—and also from its brain to its foot, forcing the beast to rely less on reflexes, to move more slowly, and to squander precious brain resources on planning each step. 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. If god is always watching, you better not do that bad thing, but if god controls everything, it’s less important to fervently pursue your goals. 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. 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 Your login is case sensitive I have forgotten my password close My New Scientist Look for Science Jobs Human evolution Introduction: Human evolution The incredible story of our evolution from ape ancestors spans 6 million years or more. Human 'missing link' fossils may be jumble of species THIS WEEK: 19:00 09 April 2014 The extinct Australopithecus sediba is hailed as a transitional form between ape-like australopithecines and early humans, but it may actually be two species Denisovans: The lost humans who shared our world FEATURE: 20:00 03 April 2014 They lived on the planet with us for most of our history, yet until six years ago we didn't know they existed.
Most read Subscribe. 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. Physical and genetic similarities show that the modern human species, Homo sapiens, has a very close relationship to another group of primate species, the apes. Paleoanthropology The process of evolution.
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 | Literally Psyched. 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. Perhaps it’s Adam and Eve and the quest for knowledge, the apple a symbol of new discovery, with subtle undertones of lust for ever-growing innovation. Or maybe, Isaac Newton, sitting under an apple tree when the apocryphal falling fruit prompted his theory of gravity. Or maybe, it’s another story entirely: that of Alan Turing, the shy British mathematician who is embraced as the founding father of computer science and artificial intelligence both. Turing was a brilliant man. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t hold up.
But that’s not the interesting part. Did Turing inspire Jobs's logo? Why did Jobs choose to keep silent, when it would have been so easy to respond? Why Does Beauty Exist? | Wired Science 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.
The recruits rated each piece as “beautiful”, “indifferent” or “ugly”.The scans showed that one part of their brains lit up more strongly when they experienced beautiful images or music than when they experienced ugly or indifferent ones – the medial orbitofrontal cortex or mOFC.Several studies have linked the mOFC to beauty, but this is a sizeable part of the brain with many roles. It’s also involved in our emotions, our feelings of reward and pleasure, and our ability to make decisions. But why does beauty exist? DanDennett. Are we the teachable species? | The Loom. 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. Hair sets us apart from plants and mushrooms and reptiles, but several thousand other mammals are hairy, too. Walking upright is certainly unusual, but it doesn’t sever us from the animal kingdom.
Birds can walk on two legs, after all, and their dinosaur ancestors were walking bipedally 200 million years ago. Our own bipedalism–like much of the rest of our biology–has deep roots. If looking for human uniqueness on the outside is difficult, is it any easier to look on the inside–in particular, at our mental lives? Yet even as scientists find more links between our own faculties and those of other animals, some continue to stand out. Another reason that teaching may not seem very remarkable is that it seems easy. Last year, two British researchers, Alex Thornton and Nichola J. 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. 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 | Wired Science.