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Evolving Thoughs, The evolution of morality:

“Morality is an “acquired dialect”, which is a very useful metaphor. Like a dialect, it is conventional, and varies by geography. It is not inborn (although the capacity to acquire it, like that of language, is), and it doesn’t correlate with biology (a Sicilian raised in Japan would speak Japanese, not Sicilian). This is what Sayre-McCord refers to as social conventions. And these things evolve at the social level, not (in general) at the biological. So to explain why, for example, it is regarded as moral to marry a first cousin in Louisiana, but not in London, while marrying within “seven degrees of kinship” in Orthodox society, or marrying anyone with the same family name in Korea (but a first cousin of a different name is acceptable) are considered taboo; these things are best explained in terms of the historical process at the level of social institutions, conventions, economic and cultural factors, rather than biology.

But explaining why it is that humans are disposed to learn and accommodate themselves to these cultural rules is another matter. Moreover, it may be that some moral rules are in fact biologically based, or biased, or at least agreeable. (…)”

‘Bushmen, or San, wearing skins and carrying bows and arrows cross a salt pan in Namibia’s Nyae Nyae Conservancy.’

National Geography News, After Near Extinction, Humans Split Into Isolated Bands:

“After nearly going extinct 150,000 years ago, humankind split into small groups – living in isolation for nearly a hundred thousand years before “reuniting” and migrating out of Africa, a new gene study says.

At one point our species may have been down to as few as 2,000 individuals, probably due to climate change – a longstanding theory bolstered by the new findings.

The research fills a gap in our understanding of what was happening in Africa before humans first left the continent.

“The assumption has always been that the original population [in sub-Saharan Africa] was very small but probably a single population,” said Spencer Wells, head of the Genographic Project, which oversaw the study.

“Turns out, that is not the case.”"

Link: sevenload.com

Edge 235, Life a Gene-Centric View. Craig Venter & Richard Dawkins: A Conversation in Munich:

“It’s not everyday you have Richard Dawkins and Craig Venter on a stage talking for an hour about “Life: A Gene-Centric View”. That it occured in Germany, where the culture has been resistant to open discussion of genetics, and at DLD, the Digital, Life, Design conference organized by Hubert Burda Media in Munich, a high-level event for the digital elite — the movers and shakers of the Internet — was particularly interesting. This event was a continuation of the Edge “Life: What a Concept!” meeting in August, 2008.”

Eurozine, Watching David Attenborough:

“We are looking at something that probably not one of us has ever seen before. We are staring in perfect colour close-up at the slow, rhythmic uncoiling of a slimy proboscis. But what are we to make of the strange and oddly beautiful sight before our eyes? The camera pulls back a fraction. The answer is revealed. We are looking at a snail. A familiar garden snail. And as our recognition dawns, the background music, a gently impelling blend of harps and violins, fades slightly, and we hear the characteristic hushed intensity of one of the most famous voices in the world. “We don’t often see a snail that way”, says David Attenborough. “And that’s because we’ve only recently had the tiny lenses and electronic cameras we need to explain this miniature world.”

We are entering, burrowing into, the first part of Attenborough’s most recent BBC series, Life in the Undergrowth: by the time the five episodes are over another four hours of screen time will have been added to the ninety or so hours of extraordinary television footage that he and his various teams have compiled for television viewers over the last 30 years.”

TIR, What Cooking Did For Human Evolution:

“Could primates have evolved into humans without knowing how to cook? For 10 years, Harvard University primatologist Richard Wrangham has gathered data that he says show that the discovery of cooking allowed humans to evolve. The only snag, according to Scientific American: He has yet to prove that humans’ ancestors could control fire, a missing link that some scientists say casts doubt on the cooking hypothesis.”

Zie: Cooking Up Bigger Brains.

Scientific American, Culture Speeds Up Human Evolution:

“Homo sapiens sapiens has spread across the globe and increased vastly in numbers over the past 50,000 years or so—from an estimated five million in 9000 B.C. to roughly 6.5 billion today. More people means more opportunity for mutations to creep into the basic human genome and new research confirms that in the past 10,000 years a host of changes to everything from digestion to bones has been taking place.

“We found very many human genes undergoing selection,” says anthropologist Gregory Cochran of the University of Utah, a member of the team that analyzed the 3.9 million genes showing the most variation. “Most are very recent, so much so that the rate of human evolution over the past few thousand years is far greater than it has been over the past few million years.”

“We believe that this can be explained by an increase in the strength of selection as people became agriculturalists—a major ecological change—and a vast increase in the number of favorable mutations as agriculture led to increased population size,” he adds.”

Benjamin N. Friedman, Industrial Evolution:

“(…) Why do some countries have an economically helpful culture while others don’t? And, since no society got very far in economic terms before the Industrial Revolution, what caused the culture of the recently successful ones to change?

In “A Farewell to Alms,” Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, suggests an intriguing, even startling answer: natural selection. Focusing on England, where the Industrial Revolution began, Clark argues that persistently different rates of childbearing and survival, across differently situated families, changed human nature in ways that finally allowed human beings to escape from the Malthusian trap in which they had been locked since the dawn of settled agriculture, 10,000 years before. Specifically, the families that propagated themselves were the rich, while those that died out were the poor. Over time, the “survival of the richest” propagated within the population the traits that had allowed these people to be more economically successful in the first place: rational thought, frugality, a capacity for hard work — in short the familiar list of Calvinist, bourgeois virtues. The greater prevalence of those traits in turn made possible the Industrial Revolution and all that it has brought.”

Sir David Attenborough on God

Earth and Moon from Galileo probe, 1990 januari 02. (NASA)

Bernard Foing, If We Had No Moon:

“The Earth has a large moon, making it unique in the inner solar system. Mercury and Venus have no moons, and Mars has only two small asteroid-sized objects orbiting it. In this essay, the father of the SMART-1 lunar mission, Bernard Foing of the European Space Agency, looks at the effect the Moon has had on the Earth, and explores how different our world would be if we had no planetary companion. Would life have evolved differently, or even appeared on Earth without the Moon?”

(Via BoingBoing.)

TierneyLab: “No, it’s not 50 percent, as I’ll explain shortly.” (via)

NRC: ‘Hoe lang zwemt de walvis al rond? Tweegesprek over evolutie tussen atheïst Philipse en EO’er Hagoort’

Op YouTube staan deze twee knippen in de EO DVD ten opzichte van de BBC DVD uit de eerste 6 minuten van episode 2 / aflevering 2. (Filmpje 3). Verdere voorbeelden zijn aanwezig maar overbodig. De verschillen zijn duidelijk. Op de EO DVD’s is elke verwijzing naar miljoenen jaren en evolutie verdwenen. De vertaling verandert de tekst. En niet alleen dat: Attenborough in beeld met een tekst met fossielen, of miljoenen jaren, of continental drift, of de afstamming van de zoogdieren: ALLES GEKNIPT.

Evolution Blog: EO: Vals getuigen

“A population of butterflies has evolved in a flash on a South Pacific island to fend off a deadly parasite.

The proportion of male Blue Moon butterflies dropped to a precarious 1 percent as the parasite targeted males. Then, within the span of a mere 10 generations, the males evolved an immunity that allowed their population share to soar to nearly 40 percent—all in less than a year.”

Live Science: Evolution Occurs in the Blink of an Eye

Noorderlicht Magazine: “Waarom heeft bijna de helft van de Amerikanen een afkeer van wetenschap?”

Live Science: “The long childhoods and delayed maturity common in modern humans are traits that date back to at least the early members of our own species in Africa.”

BBC: “The tiny skeletal remains of human “Hobbits” found on an Indonesian island belong to a completely new branch of our family tree, a study has found.”

Elsevier: “Hét argument waarmee gelovigen darwinisten altijd om de oren slaan is: ik heb nog nooit een aap in een mens zien veranderen. Van dat argument wordt in de Scientific American van december echter weinig heel gelaten. Er staat een artikel in over Selam, het oudste mensachtige fossiel.”

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