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Top 10 Mysteries of the First Humans | LiveScience
Humans are unique among life on this planet, and much remains a mystery as to how we evolved. What steps came first? Why did we evolve this way and not that direction? Why are we the only human species left? What other paths might we have gone down in our evolution? And what directions might we go from here?
Top 10 Things that Make Humans Special | LiveScience
Humans are unusual animals by any stretch of the imagination, ones that have changed the face of the world around us. What makes us so special when compared to the rest of the animal kingdom? Some things we take completely for granted might surprise you.
Human Evolution: Our Closest Living Relatives, the Chimps | LiveScience
As scientists try and solve and mystery of how we originated, an invaluable source of clues is the chimpanzee.
Sharpening the Focus On Human Evolution
The identification of "Ardi" is a major breakthrough because her species was an early step in the process of human evolution. Scientists do not claim to know whether that Ardi's species evolved directly into modern humans, but it is an important branch on the family tree.
Deric Bownds' MindBlog: Prosociality in large human groups more likely due to culture than to genetics.
Bell et al. think about whether human prosocial behaviors such as food sharing, taxation, and warfare - nearly completely absent in other vertebrates - are more plausibly explained as arising from to cultural or genetic selection during competition among large groups.
How Did Evolution Begin?
Life's ability to replicate itself is essential for evolution, yet even the simplest kind of replication requires a relatively complex system. So what kind of non-replicating system might have served as the predecessor of evolution, paving the way for life as we know it? The answer, according to a recent study, is a kind of "prelife" -- a chemical system that can lead to information and diversity, and that is capable of selection and mutation, but does not yet have the ability to self-replicate.
Richard Lewontin-Genetic Determination and Adaptation: Two Bad Metaphors : Pharyngula
He was there to talk about the importance and danger of metaphors, and addressed two of them. The New Testament metaphor of genes make organisms, and the Old Testament metaphor that organisms adapt to the environment.
Genetically Modifying Songbirds to Study Human Brain Growth | Wired Science | Wired.com
vocal learning, is believed to rely on a version of the same neurological systems that eventually allowed a clever branch of the primate tree to acquire language and become human. It makes the birds an important model of human learning, language and neural development.
Darwin's Robots | h+ Magazine
This experiment in swarm robotics shows both the coordination of multi-robot systems consisting of large numbers of simple physical robots and the evolution of collective communication behaviors. The study of artificial swarm intelligence as well as the biological studies of insects, ants, and other swarms in nature provides insight into the nature of intelligence in general, and offers an interesting perspective on the nature of Darwinian selection, competition, and cooperation.
Moral in Tooth and Claw
Philosophical and scientific convention, of course, has pulled toward a more conservative account of morality: Morality is a capacity unique to human beings. But the more we study the behavior of animals, the more we find that different groups of animals have their own moral codes. That raises both scientific and philosophic questions.
Evolution details revealed through 21-year E. coli experiment
In 1988, an associate professor started growing cultures of Escherichia coli. Twenty-one years and 40,000 generations of bacteria later, Richard Lenski, who is now a professor of microbial ecology at Michigan State University, reveals new details about the differences between adaptive and random genetic changes during evolution.
Fun and Games in Fantasyland
Daniel Dennett commentary on Fodor, “Against Darwinism” January 29, 2007
Neuroscience: Small, furry … and smart
Tsien, based at Princeton University in New Jersey at the time, named his creation Doogie after the teenage genius in the television programme Doogie Howser, MD. The work was one of the earliest examples of neuroscientists using genetic engineering to generate cognitively enhanced animals in a bid to understand memory and learning.
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neuroscientists using genetic engineering to generate cognitively enhanced animals in a bid to understand memory and learning.
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Much of the work involves making an adult brain behave more like a younger, more flexible version of itself by increasing the organ's plasticity.
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The World Without Technology
The problem with this line of questioning is that technology predated our humanness. Many other animals used tools millions of years before humans. Chimpanzees made (and of course still make) hunting tools from thin sticks to extract termites from mounds, or slam rocks to break nuts. Even termites themselves construct vast towering shells of mud for their homes. Ants herd aphids and farm fungi in gardens. Birds weave elaborate twiggy fabrics for their nests. The strategy of bending the environment to use as if it were part of your body is a billion year old trick at least.
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