archive

Consequences of having evolved

Lori Marino (Emory): A Trans-Species Perspective on Nature. A review of The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth by Richard Conniff. Are humans special?: Since humans are animals, aren't they both deserving of the same rights? Stuart A. West, Claire El Mouden and Andy Gardner (Oxford): 16 Common Misconceptions About the Evolution of Cooperation in Humans. Who's correct about human nature, the left or the right? Most conservatives see it as "common sense" that humans are selfishly competitive, but things looked different pre-capitalism. The teens of this century are going to be very exciting when it comes to reconstructing human evolutionary history — you’d be a fool to put bets on any horse at this time. The top ten daily consequences of having evolved: From hiccups to wisdom teeth, the evolution of homo sapiens has left behind some glaring, yet innately human, imperfections. On the adaptive origins and maladaptive consequences of human inbreeding: Parasite prevalence, immune functioning, and consanguineous marriage. Like sexual selection and genetic drift, perhaps more so, epigenetics has made the leap from the pages of Science, Nature, and Cell, to the more humane domains. What does NASA's new life-form discovery mean — a big deal, or not quite what we expected? (and more and more) Why life is physics, not chemistry: The idea that life boils down to chemistry is being usurped by a much more ambitious idea.