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17 Dec 09
Lithic Assemblage Dated to 1.57 Million Years Found at Lézignan-la-Cébe, Southern France « Anthropology.net
Physorg are reporting an exciting find of what are described as 30 ‘pebble culture’ lithic tools, dating back over 1.5 million years, at a site which has been dated argon dated to 1.57 million years old, thanks to an ancient volcanic eruption whose lava flow preserved the ancient ground surfaces.
French find puts humans in Europe 200,000 years earlier
Experts on prehistoric man are rethinking their dates after a find in a southern French valley suggested our ancestors may have reached Europe 1.57 million years ago: 200,000 years earlier than we thought.
One gene stops ovaries from turning into testes : Not Exactly Rocket Science
In science, we don't often get to talk about male repression, but a new discovery gives us just such a chance. It turns out that ovaries can only remain ovaries by constantly suppressing their ability to become male. Silence a single gene, and adult ovaries turn into testes. That adult tissues can be transformed in this way would be surprising enough, but doing so by changing a single gene is truly astonishing.
16 Dec 09
Atheist Charities
I've been asked often why there aren't any atheist charities. Of course, as usual, people are just presuming or parroting things they heard. Of course there are atheist charities. And like in my videos post, I am considering charities that do not promote a specific religion to be an atheist charity.
13 Dec 09
Michael Gazzaniga - The Gifford Lectures
Our own Michael Gazzaniga was recently honored with the opportunity to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures--joining the ranks of renowned thinkers ranging from William James and John Dewey to Hannah Arendt and Carl Sagan. Fortunately, his series of talks have been posted on-line.
11 Dec 09
Monkey calls give clues to language origins
Two studies suggest that the ability to combine sounds and words to alter meaning may be rooted in a species of monkey.
08 Dec 09
Some Biologists Find an Urge in Human Nature to Help - review of Tomasello
biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind. Their conclusions are derived in part from testing very young children, and partly from comparing human children with those of chimpanzees, hoping that the differences will point to what is distinctively human.
Rethinking artificial intelligence
The new project, launched with an initial $5 million grant and a five-year timetable, is called the Mind Machine Project, or MMP, a loosely bound collaboration of about two dozen professors, researchers, students and postdocs. According to Neil Gershenfeld, one of the leaders of MMP and director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, one of the project’s goals is to create intelligent machines — “whatever that means.”
06 Dec 09
IT SEEMS BIOLOGY (NOT RELIGION) EQUALS MORALITY by Marc D. Hauser
None of my comments so far are meant to be divisive with respect to the meaning and sense of community that many derive from religion. Where I intend to be divisive is with respect to the argument that religion, and moral education more generally, represent the only — or perhaps even the ultimate — source of moral reasoning. If anything, moral education is often motivated by self-interest, to do what's best for those within a moral community, preaching singularity, not plurality. Blame nurture, not nature, for our moral atrocities against humanity. And blame educated partiality more generally, as this allows us to lump into one category all those who fail to acknowledge our shared humanity and fail to use secular reasoning to practise compassion.
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Where I intend to be divisive is with respect to the argument that religion, and moral education more generally, represent the only — or perhaps even the ultimate — source of moral reasoning.
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a biological code for living a moral life
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04 Dec 09
On the Origin of the Future
As the world celebrates the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species this year, scientists continue to think deeply about what comes next. But the complexity of evolution still makes forecasting hard. "As Yogi Berra once said, ‘Prediction is very difficult. Especially about the future,’" says Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University. (Carl Zimmer)
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A background mutation rate guarantees this process. Each baby's DNA carries about 130 new mutations.
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xactly which mutations natural selection will favor, however, depends on the environment in which we live. And over the past 10,000 years, we humans have dramatically changed that environment.
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03 Dec 09
How our brains build social worlds
The problem is that these hidden social interactions remain out of focus in the experiment. Our aim at the Interacting Minds project at the Danish Neuroscience Centre in Aarhus is to develop a new kind of experiment that is focused on such interactions. 02 December 2009 - New Scientist
28 Nov 09
3-D Renderings Bring Ancient Hominids to Life | Wired.com
Computers allow a level of detail and control that isn’t possible with other media. Their creations can come closer than ever to bringing our ancestors to life.
Can a Shot of Dopamine Make Your Future Look Brighter? - TIME
The answer to the latter question is, yes. Although dopamine may be crucial to making decisions about future pleasure, too much of it might distort those decisions. A surplus of dopamine is at the root of addiction, for instance: Cocaine, for one, works in part by preventing brain cells from reabsorbing dopamine that the brain has released in connection with pleasurable sensations. And once the brain has learned to like cocaine, it causes all kinds of self-destructive behavior to satisfy its cravings.
Interdisciplinary Hype - The Chronicle of Higher Education
Will the disciplines soon be seen as anachronisms, holdovers from an outdated 20th-century model? In my view, efforts to reorganize academe based on interdisciplinary principles would have disastrous consequences in the short term—and would end up reproducing our disciplinary or departmental structure in the long term.
27 Nov 09
Inverted qualia | Psychology Today
The problem of inverted qualia goes back to John Locke, who asked us to imagine a situation in which we wake up one day and — without any physical change having occurred in the world or in our brain — we suddenly perceive colors in a different way: what used to be red now gives the sensation formerly known as green (and vice versa). Ok, one might say, cute little thought experiment, but who cares? We are supposed to care because the inverted qualia argument allegedly shows that secondary qualities (like colors), and particularly first person “phenomenological” experiences of said qualities, do not depend on a particular physical substrate in the brain, i.e. they have no physical basis.
Monitoring Live Brains Reveals Plasticity: Scientific American
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The idea that the adult brain changes with experience was once a radical idea, but it is now well accepted that certain areas—say, the motor cortex, when learning a new physical skill—can grow new neurons or create stronger connections.
Protolanguage Was Symbolic
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Deacon favors a “prolonged co-evolution” of vocal-motor adaptations, cognitive adaptations, and social adaptations.
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robustness of language. If language came from a big mutational leap 100 to 150 thousand years ago, we should see only a small number of genes involved in its production.
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