Scientists have found the oldest DNA evidence yet of humans’ biological history. But instead of neatly clarifying human evolution, the finding is adding new mysteries.
NASA reconstructs five billiion years of the history of Mars in a breathtaking animation. There were once lakes and blue skies.
Life is powerful, and in order to understand how living systems work, you first have to understand how they originated, developed and diversified over the past 4.5 billion years of Earth's history.
Eugenie C. Scott fights the teaching of creationism in schools.
The myth: Darwin's friends cooked up a scheme to rob the working-class Wallace of his priority and instead put their friend Darwin first. The fact: every substantive claim in the popular narrative about Wallace turns out to be incorrect. As Wallace himself wrote: "this vast, this totally unprecedented change in public opinion has been the result of the work of one man, and was brought about in the short space of twenty years!"
Reader Comments- Wisconsin Crackdown; Labor Collective Bargaining; Detroit & Pensions; Early Human Settlements show War has Deep Evolutionary Roots; Honduras;
Shorts: Child of Disappeared Political Prisoners Found in Argentina; Murder of Philippines Labor Leaders;
Announcements - Call Mr. Robeson - Berkeley-Aug 11; Conference Honoring Jerry Tucker - St.Louis Oct 11-13; Organizing 2.0 Fall Internship - NYC
Portside announcements about Quote & Toon of the Day, REWIND
“War is very, very old. “But we can still see its beginnings, and there is no basis for concluding that a) humans have always fought because we are innately inclined to it, or b) that war could act as a selection mechanism over evolutionary time.”
In evolutionary theory, we have this thing we tend to look for, called parsimony. What fits the data best? Fertility into old age is part of our ancestral history if menopause is to eventually evolve, yes? Then probably our closest living relatives, like say chimpanzees, don’t have menopause, unless it independently evolved more than once of course. Right.
Baseball players reveal how humans evolved to throw so well. A catapult-like mechanism allows energy to be stored in shoulder and torso, a video study of pitchers reveals.
Although some primates occasionally throw objects, and with a fair degree of accuracy, only humans can routinely hurl projectiles with both speed and accuracy. Adult male chimpanzees can throw objects at speeds of around 30 kilometres per hour, but even a 12-year-old human can pitch a baseball three times faster than that
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