Nice summary piece on the state of research into human nature and morality by Agustín Fuentes
Posted 24 Jun 2012 / 0Psychology Today “Busting Myths About Human Nature“
A Minor Post, Human Nature, Social NormsTurtles caught in the act provide new paleontological insights
Posted 24 Jun 2012 / 0Science Now “Turtle Sex—Preserved for the Ages“
A Minor Post, Fossil Data, Sex and ReproductionTim Birkenhead on anthropomorphism and animal emotion
Posted 23 Jun 2012 / 0The Chronicle of Higher Education “Do Birds Have Emotions?” Very interesting animal stories here, so grisly and some inspiring. I never knew about the cooperation between guillemots, but the emotional signs that Birkenhead describes make sense in the context of cooperation: the real purpose of emotions, it seems, is to balance out the costs and Read More
A Minor Post, Adaptation, Articles, Cooperation, EmotionDavid Barash illuminates the “EvoPolitics” of Darwin’s time
Posted 23 Jun 2012 / 0The Chronicle of Higher Education “EvoPolitics” I really appreciate Barash’s reinforcement of the “is-ought” distinction: it is amazing to me how many people still commit the naturalistic fallacy. This is a really enlightening historical review, but I think that it gets the present-day implications wrong. The defining question about the political implications of evolutionary theory Read More
A Minor Post, Articles, Multilevel Selection, PhilosophyA pharma-agricultural tragedy of the commons?
Posted 23 Jun 2012 / 0The Chronicle of Higher Education “As Beef Cattle Become Behemoths, Who Are Animal Scientists Serving?” This is a scary story of corporate tainting of science.
A Minor Post, Ethics, Grants & Funding, Scientific FraudAre there genetic markers for ethnicity?
Posted 23 Jun 2012 / 0The Chronicle of Higher Education “The story of Jewish origins, once the province of historians and religion scholars, is now being told by DNA” There are fascinating implications of the research described in this piece for Isreal’s “right of return” policy.
A Minor Post, Gene-Culture Coevolution, Genetics, Human EvolutionGreat Michael Ruse piece on the politics of resisting religious encroachment on evolutionary biology
Posted 23 Jun 2012 / 0The Chronicle of Higher Education “Evolution in the Classroom: Here We Go Again!” Classic and entire appropriate commentary on Richard Dawkins here!!
A Minor Post, Articles, Creationism, Evolution Education, ReligionTed Kaczynski as a scholar of resistance to technology
Posted 23 Jun 2012 / 0The Chronicle of Higher Education “The Unabomber’s Pen Pal” What I think is really interesting about Kaczynski’s critique is that he is fearlessly pointing out the problems with technology, challenging others to provide a counter-narrative. For the most part, there is no counter-narrative. You are either “with us or against us” when it comes to Read More
A Minor Post, Activism, Articles, Belief, Cultural Evolution, EthicsPreschoolers cooperatively rock chimps in puzzle tournament
Posted 22 Jun 2012 / 0The New York Times “With Teamwork, Humans Best Other Primates“
A Minor Post, Articles, Cooperation, Human Uniqueness, Primates, PrimatologyProminent evolutionary biologists weigh in on whether humans can evolve into a ‘superorganism’
Posted 22 Jun 2012 / 0io9 “Could Humans Evolve into a Giant Hive Mind?” What I find fascinating about this nice journalistic piece is the biases in particular scientists that it exposes once it asks for uninformed speculation. Most prominently, Joan Strassman betrays her biases about relatedness (we have to be highly related to be a superorganism, period) and the Read More
A Minor Post, Adaptation, Cooperation, Human Uniqueness, Prediction, Superorganisms, Web