Or maybe not. The internet is a wondrous place: a source of information, of amusement, and – alarmingly often – of material that elicits a combination of ‘say what?’ and <head-desk>. And a hat-tip to PZ Myers for this particular example…
Continue readingCategory: human evolution
ancient jewelry
I don’t own much jewelry – probably because I’m not often inclined to wear it. And what I do have is mostly old, passed down from my mother & her mother before her. Old, but not anywhere near the age of the find reported in PLoS ONE by Marco Peresani and his colleagues (2013). The […]
Continue readingaquatic apes & custard elephants
The ‘aquatic ape’ hypothesis (it can’t be described as a theory) has been around for quite a while, & in fact I’ve blogged about it before. So I was sorry to hear that Sir David Attenborough, who’s done so much to promote conservation issues and enhance our understanding of the natural world, appeared to have […]
Continue readingare humans still evolving (a repeat visit)
What follows is a piece I wrote (quite a while ago now) for students planning on sitting Scholarship Biology. It was intended to start them thinking 🙂 I’ve just been asked to contribute to a panel discussion on RNZ around this subject, so thought it might be timely to re-post this article (I think time […]
Continue readingcloning neandertals – can we? should we? is it true?
The Telegraph has a story on the possibility of cloning Neanderthals, with the fetching headline: ‘I can create Neanderthal baby, I just need willing woman.’ (You can read the NZ version on Stuff.) My first thought was ‘eeewww’. (And, as a friend commented, it’s stories like this that get science a bad name.) Once past that […]
Continue readinga cute little piggy (but why do we find it so?)
On Facebook yesterday, Science Alert posted a picture of a cute little piggy. Why, they asked, do humans feel such love for baby animals? Assuredly, this is a psychology experiment waiting to happen! Not so. For one of my favourite science writers beat them to it, by about 30 years. And in a rather entertaining manner. […]
Continue reading‘a newly discovered species of little people’
When the news first came out that Prof Mike Morwood & Thomas Sutikna were going to be giving a public lecture about Homo floresiensis, I was first excited & then seriously annoyed: yay! great topic, but rats! can’t get down to it. So I was absolutely delighted to see the following in this week’s Royal […]
Continue readingkissing cousins with kennewick man?
While away on holiday (gloat!) I got the opportunity for uninterrupted listening to podcasts 🙂 One of these was a July episode of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, which included a discussion of the (in)famous Kennewick Man remains. These 9,000-years-old bones have been the focus of considerable controversy in the US, where they were […]
Continue readingletting a good story get in the way of a few facts?
Today in the Herald I learned that eye colour can reflect personality. Apparently [r]esearchers from the University of Queensland and the University of NSW analysed the eye colour of 336 Australians – most with a northern European background. They answered a series of questionnaires measuring aspects of their personality like agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism. The […]
Continue readinga good old debunking – flatulent dinosaurs & aquatic apes
I took a little time over lunch to catch up with the work of various science communicators, most notably that of Brian Switek, whose blog Laelaps is carried by the Wired website & who also writes Dinosaur Tracking on Smithsonian.com. I’m now regretting my long absence, for not only is Brian an excellent communicator of […]
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