Richard Bankoff (Penn State): The Current State of Evolutionary Theory: A Historical Perspective. From the new Princeton Guide to Evolution, here are samples entries “What is Evolution”, “Human Evolution”, “Evolutionary Limits and Constraints”, and “Ancient DNA”. DNA from a 400,000-year-old fossil in Spain most closely matches another extinct human lineage, Denisovans, whose remains have been found thousands of miles away in Siberia. This skull may have just rewritten the book on human evolution. Razib Khan on the long First Age of mankind. Light skin in Europeans stems from one 10,000-year-old ancestor who lived between India and the Middle East, claims study. Research suggests natural selection can favor “irrational” behavior. Does modern life make us less rational? Isolated hunter-gatherers act more rational than western consumer. Annalee Newitz on how evolution is steered by aggressive competition between females. A new study finds Finnish men who suffered long periods of unemployment were more likely to possess a genetic marker indicating premature aging. Are we still evolving? Yep, but there's a catch: Our identities might be too fluid for any advantageous mutations to take hold. There’s a gene for that: Pankaj Mehta on how history is littered with horrifying examples of the misuse of evolutionary theory to justify power and inequality — welcome to a new age of biological determinism. Kristi McGuire interviews Henry Gee, author of The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution. Karl W. Gibers on how 2013 was a terrible year for evolution.
