Tag: evolution
-
The Most Important Century
The next 50 years will bring technological, social and geopolitical change greater than we can imagine, says Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, but the emerging problems of population growth and climate change make this century arguably the most important in Earth’s 4.5 billion year history, even from the perspective of an astronomer. It’s sometimes wrongly imagined that…
-
The Evolutionary Role of Cooking
Cooking is “the evolutionary change that underpins all others” and is what makes us human, according to Richard Wrangham, Harvard University. The theory: the process of cooking makes our food more digestible, freeing up a huge amount of calories that are then expended on other, more important, activities. And with Homo sapiens, what makes the species unique…
-
The Evolution of Art Appreciation
The appreciation of art is not culturally learned, but is in fact an evolved trait, or at least that’s the view of Denis Dutton as elaborated in his latest book, The Art Instinct. In a generally positive review of the book, Newsweek points out the many limitations of Dutton’s conjecture as well as summarizing it’s main…
-
A Short History of Fingerprints
Cabinet of Wonders provides us with everything you’ve ever wanted to know about fingerprints, but were afraid to ask. I particularly enjoyed this tidbit: Spider monkeys, whose prehensile tail-tips are so sensitive and flexible that they can pick a dime up off a floor, also have prints on the bare spot at the end of…
-
Ethical Impulses & The Moral Instinct
Evolution has endowed us with ethical impulses. Do we know what to do with them? In Steven Pinker’s New York Times article, The Moral Instinct, this question is raised and discussed as he takes us on a guided tour of ‘moral psychology‘ – a recently invigorated field. The starting point for appreciating that there is…