From Carl Zimmer’s The More We Know About Genes, the Less We Understand: “The source of their strength lies not in a single molecule — DNA — but in a complicated web of relationships. The network itself is the mystery for biologists in the 21st century.”
February 13, 2008 – 12:24 pm
From Wired’s Complexity Theory Takes Evolution to Another Level: “A growing number of scientists do say that neo-Darwinian evolution doesn’t explain certain jumps in biological complexity: from single-celled to multicellular organisms, from single organisms to entire communities. The jumps…appear to be non-linear emergent phenomena, the result of networked interactions that produce self-organization at ever higher [...]
October 9, 2007 – 12:18 pm
From the NY Times’ article, How Baboons Think (Yes, Think): “As Darwin jotted down in a notebook of 1838, “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.’”
In Breaking the Spell: Religion as Natural Phenomenon, Daniel Dennett summarizes his process of evolutionary investigation with the “stock Latin phrase, ‘cui bono?,’ which means ‘Who benefits from this?’” (62). The basic idea is that one can best approach an evolutionary mystery by first determining who or what is the beneficiary of the equipment or [...]
I’m currently reading “Breaking the Spell: Religion as Natural Phenomenon,” by Daniel Dennett. In one of the opening chapters, he notes the results of a recent survey that showed that only a quarter of Americans understand “that evolution is about as well-established as the fact that water is H2O.”
It would surprise me if any of [...]
April 19, 2007 – 01:53 pm
From Chimps ‘more evolved’ than humans: “It is time to stop thinking we are the pinnacle of evolutionary success – chimpanzees are the more highly evolved species, according to new research.”
March 22, 2007 – 05:17 pm
From Queens of the Stone Age:
“‘Women are the only primates in which the baby is born facing the rear,’ the authors [of The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory] explain, and this in turn makes them the only animals that ’seek and get assistance in the birth process.’ Other primates, whose [...]
September 11, 2006 – 01:49 pm
In Modern humans, not Neandertals, may be evolution’s ‘odd man out’, Erik Trinkaus, professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, writes, “In the broader sweep of human evolution, the more unusual group is not Neandertals, whom we tend to look at as strange, weird and unusual, but it’s us - Modern Humans. The [...]
March 15, 2006 – 02:51 pm
An evolutionary psychologist at the University of Arkansas has a goal, which, according to a Broward-Palm Beach New Times artitlce, entitled, “The God Fossil,” “is nothing less than to prove to the world, once and for all, that God is a “cognitive illusion” — a figment of our imaginations.” He says, “My meaning in life [...]
The Chicago Tribune reports that Genes show humans are still evolving: “Providing the strongest evidence yet that human beings are still evolving, researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years.”
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