Humans are evolving more rapidly than in the distant past,
according to a new study published in PNAS. "The massive growth of human populations has led to far more genetic mutations, and every mutation that is advantageous to people has a chance of being selected and driven toward fixation.
We are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals", says lead author John Hawks.
[more inside]
posted by stbalbach
on Dec 10, 2007 -
136 comments
Darwin's Surprise. "There may be no biological process more complicated than the relationships that viruses have with their hosts. Could it be that their persistence made it possible for humans to thrive?"
[Via Disinformation.]
posted by homunculus
on Nov 27, 2007 -
63 comments
Be a Music Faun Yourself. A sign of the popularity of this operation is that in big cities so-called Faun-Clubs are founded one after another, where entrance is only allowed with pointed ears. The reverberating success of this new look is supported by more and more celebrities with pointed ears, amongst whom we can find not only musicians, but, for example, models, as well. via
posted by squalor
on Oct 25, 2007 -
33 comments
Darwin's Deadly Legacy illustrates how Charles Darwin caused the Holocaust. This documentary, from
the late Dr. James Kennedy and his Coral Ridge Ministries, features not only rare, Bigfoot-esque glimpses of the notoriously camera-shy
Ann Coulter, but also Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project. Of course,
Dr. Collins hates everything about the documentary and claims that his footage was simply spliced in under false pretenses, and even
Michael Behe distances himself from the entire production, disagreeing as he does with its central tenets. Oh, and the ADL is pissed, but when aren't they? Anyway, not even arch-conservative websites with "We Need Alan Keyes For President" interstitial ads
think the documentary is worth very much.
And it seems that Hitler himself had a grand old time pimping out Christianity and denying that we came from apes. (
More,
more.) So
watch the fucking trailer and
learn yourself some history.
posted by Sticherbeast
on Sep 10, 2007 -
69 comments
Can't ever find what you are looking for at the bookstore? Tired of seeing pseudoscience or pop psychology books in the science section? Join a grassroots effort to re-shelve books to the appropriate section of the store:
Biologists Helping Bookstores.
posted by corpse
on Jul 28, 2007 -
31 comments
Darwin wrote to 2000 people during his life; 14,500 of these letters still survive.
The Darwin Correspondence Project is putting annotated transcriptions of these online, and they've covered about 5,000 so far, including a letter written when he was 12 after he had got into trouble with his sister for
not washing regularly while at school. There's an intro
here. See also
Darwin Online, discussed
here. And the prolific network theorist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi has co-authored a paper on statistical similarities between Darwin's and Einstein's correspondence (
#51 on the list).
posted by carter
on May 16, 2007 -
11 comments
Are you a Highly Sensitive Person? This trait ... is inherited by 15 to 20% of the population, and ... seems to be present in all higher animals. Being an HSP means your nervous system is more sensitive to subtleties. Your sight, hearing, and sense of smell are not necessarily keener .... But your brain processes information and reflects on it more deeply. Being an HSP also means, necessarily, that you are more easily overstimulated, stressed out, overwhelmed. This trait ... has been mislabeled as shyness (not an inherited trait), introversion (30% of HSPs are actually extraverts), inhibitedness, fearfulness, and the like. HSPs can be these, but none of these are the fundamental trait they have inherited
...
yahoo group |
latest research (fascinating!) |
newsletter |
wikipedia |
blog |
via
posted by grumblebee
on Apr 8, 2007 -
150 comments
Hacking the Senses: The brain is far more plastic than we commonly realize. Presenting new 'senses' via the old inputs works extremely well, to the point that long-term volunteers are a little lost without their new abilities to feel magnetic north or absolute orientation. Tasting direction; feeling pictures. Fascinating stuff. In a loosely related article,
genetically modified mice are able to see the full color range visible to humans, even though the last natural mouse able to see this way died out a hundred million years ago. Add the new sensors, and the brain reconfigures.
[via]
posted by Malor
on Apr 5, 2007 -
68 comments
The significance of the dinosaurs' death has been greatly
exaggerated. This article in Nature discusses how mammalian evolution accelerated independent from the death of dinosaurs. The theory was derived from a "
supertree" [pdf ~ 1mb] of mammals and how common ancestors have branched out. Coolest info-graphic ever.
posted by phyrewerx
on Mar 28, 2007 -
33 comments
Darwin's God. "A scientific exploration of how we have come to believe in God."
This article tracks the possibility that belief in a higher power is the product of evolution.
posted by inconsequentialist
on Mar 3, 2007 -
50 comments
Understanding Human Prehistory. Mike Munford (
who???) summarises the results of his "limited study of human prehistory for the benefit of others who may have found most of the available books on it as baffling as [he] did."
posted by Effigy2000
on Mar 2, 2007 -
21 comments
Rep. Ben Bridges (R-Cleveland, GA) is in trouble. A recent
memo from his office -- one
circulated this week by
Warren Chisum, a ranking member of the Texas state legislature -- has caught the attention of the
Anti-Defamation League.
They are not pleased.
And they're not alone. Why? Because in his memo,
Rep. Bridges --
sponsor of a perennial
anti-evolution education bill in the Georgia State House -- claims that
"so-called ’secular evolution science’ is the Big Bang, 15-billion-year, alternate ‘creation scenario’ of the Pharisee Religion." And that's not all. It would appear that Rep. Bridges is getting his information (and
templates for
his legislation) from
www.fixedearth.com -- a website dedicated not only to the removal of pro-evolution education from schools, but to the idea that "[t]he Earth is not rotating...nor is it going around the sun." Because you see, it's all part of
the Copernican Deception, a massive conspiracy propagated by
Christian Zionists,
NASA and ...
Madonna?
posted by grabbingsand
on Feb 16, 2007 -
116 comments
Is blood plasma salinity the same as seawater? No, but that proves evolution.
"The answer is most definitely NOT that oceans were 1/3 as salty back then. It most definitely IS that the earliest vertebrates did evolve in salt water and then moved into fresh water....They have devised an extremely clever trick in kidney structure to allow salt transport pumps which really take salt back INTO the body from the urine but still manage to use them to produce urine much more concentrated that their body fluids and so excrete salt FROM the body."
posted by Brian B.
on Feb 10, 2007 -
66 comments
Robert Krulwich tells the tale of Dr. Alan Rabinowitz and his friend...
"Dawi told Alan the terrible secret that explained why there were so few Taron (left in the world). And then Alan told Dawi a secret of his own..." (includes audio link)
posted by ZachsMind
on Feb 3, 2007 -
12 comments
Peter Watts on Vampire Domestication (embedded Flash video, must click to start). The mythical corporation FizerPharm ("Trust. Profit. Deniability.") share their detailed research into the evolution and possible commercial applications of
Homo sapiens whedonum. You will learn: How and why the "crucifix glitch" came about. Why you should run from a blushing vampire. How many kilograms of human are needed to make one kilogram of vampire. How vampires resemble two year old humans, domestic shorthaired cats, and lungfish. And why "survival of the fittest" should be reconceptualized as "survival of the least inadequate". [more inside]
posted by maudlin
on Dec 24, 2006 -
19 comments
