evolution
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No Reading Necessary
Literary history has two sides, I think. One is the normative side: deciding what is good and what is less good. The other is the explanatory side. It’s two very different modalities of thought, and I’ve always been inclined toward…
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Are Science and Literature at Odds?
What role can a knowledge of scientific concepts play in understanding literature? It comes as no surprise that “biological science remains more-or-less completely un-talked about in English seminar,” as M.M. Owen writes in a piece featured on The Millions, but…
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Blow Your Mind with These Timelines
Using a series of timelines that represent increasingly large amounts of time, this blog post puts everything in perspective. Everything. It starts out simple—timelines of the last 24 hours, the last week, and so on—and works its way up through recorded…
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Migrations Map
Here is a map to help you visualize human migration over the course of our 200,000 year existence. Using data based on mitochondrial DNA difference, the map models migratory patterns as humans “moved outward from Africa into Asia, and later…
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Family Tree Shake-Up
Fossils found in a South African cave may be “the most plausible known ancestor of archaic and modern humans,” argue the scientists who discovered the bones, citing the combination of apelike and human features in the newfound species—dubbed Australopithecus sediba.…
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Evolutionary Arguing
Next time you’re basking in the glory of your ability to reason, thinking that you’re closer to arriving at some sort of ultimate truth, consider this first. Apparently, our reasoning instincts come from a primordial impulse to win arguments, a…
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Sunday Politics
A new documentary paints Italy as “a democracy of boobs (in all senses).” How does one “explain the gay” in terms of evolution? (via The Daily Dish) “That’s not what countries think of when they go to war.” Why no…
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Morning Coffee
The Context Project is seeking to blur the line between industrial design and fine art. It is also totally rad. Yesterday marked the 31st anniversary of the first robot homicide and the 50th of bubble wrap. So watch out I…
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Science Saturday
Business Week suggests some ways in which the Apple Tablet, whatever it ends up being called, could change the world. Hyperbolic? Probably. But I suspect I’ll want one. Hominids might have taken to the oceans a lot earlier than once…
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Morning Coffee
Look, I know it’s been a long week and you still have one more day to go. Look at these pictures of waves. Everything is going to be ok. Women are evolving. Good Ol Gregor Brown. Cookie cup! Who says…
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Science Saturday
Lots of fascinating science news this week. Here we go. The IgNobel Prizes were given out last night, and the honored research included a bra that doubles as a gas mask, diamonds made from tequila, and the discovery that an…
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Yes, But Do They Have Anything To Say
Dr. Wolfgang Enard, head of a team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, announced that genetically engineered mice who have had their FOXP2 gene swapped out for a human one (this gene is…