Posts that refer to biological evolution, especially as it helps explain why people’s minds are the way they are today.
Apparently the historical size of horses is inversely proportional to the temperature — in other words, when temperatures were hotter, the ancestors of modern horses were smaller, and vice versa. It makes sense, since smaller bodies are easier to cool. Unfortunately it’s also well-known that reptiles have just the opposite response, getting larger as temperatures …
Continue reading ‘“Global warming COULD SHRINK THE HUMAN RACE”’ »
You don’t find an article whose title includes the phrase “Lesbian Necrophiliacs” too often. And it’s safe-for-work (and for my more prudish readers) too! 😉 Even without the title, the article is pretty interesting. Cloning has apparently evolved lots of times over the history of Earth, but it’s almost always a death sentence: if every …
When I was a kid, I went to school with a girl with dyslexia. She tried to explain it to me once, but I wasn’t really able to figure it out. After reading this article, it makes a lot more sense. It also makes sense of the condition from an evolutionary perspective, for me — …
The synopsis: Religion and brute force failed to quash the idea of Darwinian evolution. Creationists and their Bible verses just irritated nonbelievers. Now Intelligent Design (ID) tries to topple Darwin again, not by offering a viable alternative, but by trying to co-opt the same concepts that have raised science to its current strength. Unfortunately for …
Continue reading ‘“The Other Intelligent Design Theories”’ »
Ridiculous. The belief that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old is about on par with the heliocentric geocentric model of the solar system — the evidence is pretty damning against both. However, as I suggested recently to a voluble evolution denier, they’re welcome to try. The discipline of science is self-correcting, and will …
Continue reading ‘“Creationists are infiltrating US geology circles”’ »
A very long article, but the basic gist of it can be summed up by this paragraph from the middle: […] To put this in context: Out of more than 150,000 murders in the United States since 9/11 — currently more than 14,000 each year — Islamist terrorists accounted for fewer than three dozen deaths …
Continue reading ‘“Why Is It So Hard to Find a Suicide Bomber These Days?”’ »
This week, on the Colbert Report, I heard something that shocked me: some evangelical Christian scientists were beginning to publicly doubt that humanity could be descended from one man and one woman, as described in the book of Genesis. The reason it shocked me is that I couldn’t believe that someone who identified himself as …
Continue reading ‘“Are Some Evangelicals Beginning to Question the Existence of Adam and Eve?”’ »
This article suggests that acne is simply an unfortunate byproduct of going hairless. While that’s a good explanation for why it originally developed, it’s not a good reason why we still have it. It’s maladaptive, in that people with visible acne are seen as less desirable mates. But fifteen percent of people rarely if ever …
Continue reading ‘“Acne Science: What Makes Pimples So Peculiar To People?”’ »
Wow… I always thought of bugs as little more than self-reproducing low-level biological robots, but I didn’t realize they had bugs of their own. 😉 If this happened in practically any other species, the entire group affected by it (and the genes responsible for it) would essentially cease to exist, because once locked into it …
Interesting book, and interesting interview with the author. He says that Darwin “was wrong in seeing human evolution as a result of the same processes that account for other evolution in the biological world”, then goes on to offer some pretty good evidence for how technology and the human brain set up a constant feedback …
Continue reading ‘“Artificial Ape Man: How Technology Created Humans”’ »