A little while ago now I wrote about the creationist take on a recent paper looking at chimp/human genetics – more specifically, copy-number variations in particular gene sequences. I intended to read the original paper & blog about it, because the Sensuous Curmudgeon made it sound so interesting. So you may imagine that I was just […]
Continue readingTag: human evolution
an interesting post on the dmanisi fossils
A while ago now I wrote something on the Dmanisi fossils – the remains of a few individuals that suggest that Homo erectus spread relatively quickly through Eurasia after leaving Africa. I’ve just come across an interesting post on the Panda’s Thumb that I thought makes a good follow-up. Read it & see what you think.
Continue readingthe natural history of the eye
Well, here I am back in the office again. The conference was great – but it was on assessment in the tertiary education system: not something you want to hear about here 🙂 But during a break in the proceedings I slipped out & investigated the Lambton Quay bookshops… (Dangerous things, bookshops; I could easily […]
Continue readinghuman-chimp similarities – evolution? or design?
(Another link-&-comment today – I’m at a conference & a bit short of time for longer posts.) The Sensuous Curmudgeon offers a dry commentary on a web-post by the Discovery Institute oops Institute for Creation Research (thanks to the Curmudgeon). The DI post is itself a commentary on a recent research paper looking at the […]
Continue readingancient shaman’s burial site
This one’s really hot off the press – & even then lots of people have beaten me to it! Oh well. In the latest issue of PNAS, Leore Grosman & her colleagues describe the ornate & unusual burial of an elderly woman who lived 12,000 years ago in what is now Israel.
Continue readingvolcanic eruptions & human bottlenecks
We know, from looking at the amount of genetic variation in the global human population, that it went through a fairly pronounced bottleneck around 70,000 years ago. This has been variously attributed to the founder effect, with only small populations moving out of Africa into Europe & Eurasia, and to the devastating consequences of the […]
Continue readingare humans evolving faster? a counter to steve jones
A little while back I put up a brief post about Steve Jones’ hypothesis that human evolution is slowing. At the time this proposal was on the receiving end of a fair bit of critical discussion on various science blogs. Now here’s an article by Benjamin Phelan, in Seed magazine, that suggests that the reverse is true […]
Continue readinghas human evolution stopped?
The other day I mentioned I was reading Steve Jones’ book, Coral. He’s a good writer & I’ve enjoyed Coral, just as I’ve enjoyed most of his other books (although The single helix didn’t quite work so well for me). Anyway, yesterday a friend sent me a link to a report about a talk Jones had given – […]
Continue readingx-rays & age
In the LA Times there’s a story about using X-rays of bones to estimate people’s age. The reporter’s talking about the potential for this technique to obtain fairly accurate ages for those tiny, brilliant, and possibly under-age Chinese gymnasts from the 2008 Olympics. But the underlying anatomical and developmental data have been applied to some equally problematic, but […]
Continue readingbrain food
Your brain is an energy-hungry organ – even when you’re resting, it can use up to 25% of available energy (chimp brains use about 8%: Gibbons, 2007). In other words, the running costs of a large brain are quite high. And yet humans, with their large brains, take in about the same number of calories […]
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