Wieland believed that egg-eating must have been rampant during the age of the dinosaurs. In fact, he thought that a diet of eggs may have even led to the evolution of some of the largest of all predatory dinosaurs. Considering the giant Tyrannosaurus, Wieland wrote, “What more likely than the immediate ancestors of this dinosaur got their first impulse toward gigantism on a diet of sauropod eggs, and that, aside from the varanids, the theropod dinosaurs were the great egg-eaters of all time?” The cruel irony of this idea was that the immense predatory dinosaurs also reproduced by laying eggs, and Wieland considered it “quite inferable” that their nests, in turn, would have been raided by smaller monitor lizards and snakes.

According to new research on body language out of the University of British Columbia, women find happy men—in this study, men who were smiling in photos—significantly less attractive than men portraying other emotions. In a survey of 1,000 adults, women generally preferred men who looked strong and proud, arms raised into the sky, or sullen and ashamed—in that order. Happy men were rated the least attractive. Interestingly, when it came to male preferences, things were reversed: Men rated happy women the most attractive and proud, strong women least attractive.

When elephants began to die out, Homo erectus "needed to hunt many smaller, more evasive animals. Energy requirements increased, but with plant and protein intake limited, the source had to come from fat. He had to become calculated about hunting," Ben-Dor says, noting that this change is evident in the physical appearance of modern humans, lighter than Homo erectus and with larger brains.

Evangelical Christians have long suspected there are allegorical components to the Genesis story—a talking snake, for example—but as to whether Adam and Eve were not real people, there has been much more hesitancy--and for theologically important reasons. The science itself is silent—the most it can say is that there were never just two individuals who were the sole genetic progenitors of the entire human race. Several independent lines of genetic evidence unambiguously point to this conclusion. Science also make it very clear that humans developed through an evolutionary process. As Christians, we interpret all this in light of our belief in God as Creator.

It’s a negative focus. How about if we look at this differently: what if dyslexia is an advanced form of evolution?”

That was more than 20 years ago.

Meanwhile, later this month on August 18, Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide will release their latest book, The Dyslexic Advantage: Unlocking the Hidden Potential of the Dyslexic Brain. They write, “Some of the most successful people in the world have dyslexia and it’s no accident. There’s a remarkable strength-producing aspect to dyslexic processing and some of the latest brain research tells us why.”

"The possibility that empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats should give pause to anyone comparing politicians with those poor, underestimated creatures."[3]
"I've argued that many of what philosophers call moral sentiments can be seen in other species. In chimpanzees and other animals, you see examples of sympathy, empathy, reciprocity, a willingness to follow social rules. Dogs are a good example of a species that have and obey social rules; that's why we like them so much, even though they're large carnivores."[4]
"To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us."[5]
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While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

...

One answer boils down to the adage "Might makes right." Farming could support many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population densities of hunter-gatherers are rarely over on person per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 times that.) Partly, this is because a field planted entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more mouths than a forest with scattered edible plants. Partly, too, it's because nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until it's old enough to keep up with the adults. Because farm women don't have that burden, they can and often do bear a child every two years.

The editors of Christianity Today strike an appropriate balance between caution (steadfastly keeping core biblical doctrines) and openness (conceding that our understanding of the Book of Scripture may need to undergo adjustment in light of what we discover from the Book of Nature). The editorial concludes: “At this juncture, we counsel patience. We don’t need another fundamentalist reaction against science. We need instead a positive interdisciplinary engagement that recognizes the good will of all involved and that creative thinking takes time.”

Miss USA on Should Evolution Be Taught in Schools?

But Mr. Fogel said that he remained an optimist at heart. The human body is enormously flexible and responsive, he said, a fact that fills him with confidence that “the trend of larger bodies and longer lives will continue into the future.”

Anthropologists have tended to imagine warfare as something that existed in some form through all the millions of years of human evolution. But “imagine” is the key word. Wounded Australopithecine bones thought to show war injuries actually show the tooth marks of leopards. The Walls of Jericho were apparently built to protect against flooding, not warfare. There is, in fact, no evidence of warfare older than 10,000 years, and there would be, because war leaves its mark in wounds and weapons. This suggests that of the 50,000 years modern Homo sapiens have existed, 40,000 saw no warfare, and that millions of years of prior ancestry were also war-free. Or, as an anthropologist put it, “People have lived in hunter-gatherer bands for 99.87 percent of human existence.” War arises in some, but not all, complex, sedentary societies, and tends to grow along with their complexity. This fact makes it unlikely war could be found more than 12,500 years ago.

imagine elephants were the size of cows. would we raise them like cattle? would we make elephant burgers? an idea from

Imagine that life develops on Theia as it spins out into the universe, describe this world.


We are now in the Cenozoic era of the Phanerozoic eon. The Holocene era has just ended, and the Anthropocene has begun, characterized by significant human impact on ecoystems and climate. By demolishing natural habitats, humans have set into motion a mass extinction event that may rank with the end of the Cretaceous 65 million years ago. We are also boosting atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at an incredible rate. If the temperature rises one more degree, the Earth’s temperature will be the hottest it’s been in 1.35 million years, before the current cycle of ice ages began. Where are we headed? Nobody knows.

Glasswing Butterfly
This butterfly with transparent wings has a Spanish name, "espejitos," which means "little mirrors." If it wasn't for the opaque outline around the wings, the average observer might not see one perched on a leaf or flower.

Adult glasswing butterflies will often migrate great distances, and males of the species are known to lek, or gather in large groups for the purpose of competitive mating displays.

ECCO, the Evolution, Complexity and COgnition group, is a multidisciplinary research group, directed by Francis Heylighen. We are localized at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), although our members are distributed across four continents. While founded under the present name in 2004, our informal history goes back many years earlier.

“I look forward to the day where studying biology is a prerequisite for a PhD in Classics, and biblical criticism can help round out your doctorate in evolutionary biology.”

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, or VHEMT (pronounced “vehement”), is a movement which calls for the voluntary gradual self-extinction of the human species through abstaining from reproduction. VHEMT’s motto is May we live long and die out. Proponents of its philosophy call themselves extinctionists.

As a 400,000 year old species, In the past 50 years, the exercise we’ve gotten has migrated from our arms and legs to our fingers.

I started World History this year with a brief tour of the 4.5 billion year age of earth, then slowed down to trace the miracles of standing up, grasping with thumbs, making tools, mastering fire, making words, inventing gods and afterlifes, making music and art, and so forth, all over between 5 million and 40,000 years ago. Then I told my new students their job was to make these and many future “dead history” stories interesting, because “boring is a average and average means ‘C’.” Many still struggle to find the fuse to detonate this mental bomb in their own minds, and I and the angels weep. (Others, bless them, are risking finding history interesting quite well.)

Kin selection made sense of this by targeting evolution at shared genes, and portraying individuals and groups as mere vessels for those genes. Before long, kin selection was a cornerstone of evolutionary biology. It was invoked to explain social and cooperative behavior across the animal kingdom, even in humans.

But according to Wilson, Nowak and Tarnita, the great limitation of kin selection is that it simply doesn’t fit the data.

The discovery in Gabon of more than 250 fossils in an excellent state of conservation has provided proof, for the first time, of the existence of multicellular organisms 2.1 billion years ago. This finding represents a major breakthrough: until now, the first complex life forms (made up of several cells) dated from around 600 million years ago.

Mischel’s study points to the need to teach our children self-control, to give them the tools to resist the temptations of consumer culture and the notion that all wants must be immediately satiated. According to Mischel, the daily rituals and activities that go on in the home can be a training ground where we teach our children how to think so they can outsmart desire. Simple things – not snacking before dinner, saving up allowance, not opening gifts until Christmas morning – are actually important exercises in cognitive training that equip children to resist.

“Science is the way we surprise God,” said Kelly. “That’s what we’re here for.” Our moral obligation is to generate possibilities, to discover the infinite ways, however complex and high-dimension, to play the infinite game. It will take all possible species of intelligence in order for the universe to understand itself. Science, in this way, is holy. It is a divine trip.

An astonishing mist-shrouded “lost world” of previously unknown and rare animals and plants high in the mountain rainforests of New Guinea has been uncovered by an international team of scientists… The scientists are the first outsiders to see it. They could only reach the remote mountainous area by helicopter, which they described it as akin to finding a “Garden of Eden”… In a jungle camp site, surrounded by giant flowers and unknown plants, the researchers watched rare bowerbirds perform elaborate courtship rituals. The surrounding forest was full of strange mammals, such as tree kangaroos and spiny anteaters, which appeared totally unafraid, suggesting no previous contact with humans.

Hopeful Monster
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Hopeful Monster is the colloquial term used in evolutionary biology to describe an event of instantaneous speciation, saltation, or systemic mutation, which contributes positively to the production of new major evolutionary groups. The memorable phrase was coined by the geneticist Richard Goldschmidt, who thought that small gradual changes could not bridge the hypothetical divide between microevolution and macroevolution.

In Goldschmidt's seminal work The Material Basis of Evolution, he wrote "the change from species to species is not a change involving more and more additional atomistic changes, but a complete change of the primary pattern or reaction system into a new one, which afterwards may again produce intraspecific variation by micromutation."[1]

Goldschmidt's thesis however was universally rejected and widely ridiculed within the biological community, which favored the neo-Darwinian explanatio

The researchers speculate that Leviathan was able to feed on very large prey up to 8m long. It would catch the prey in its huge jaws and tear it apart quickly and effectively with its giant teeth.

Recent evidence of horizontal gene transfer -- in which genes are exchanged from other organisms, not from ancestors -- has some scientists thinking that the dominant form of evolution for most of the Earth's history was between non-related organisms and not among ancestors.

In the past few years, a host of genome studies have demonstrated that DNA flows readily between the chromosomes of microbes and the external world. Typically around 10 per cent of the genes in many bacterial genomes seem to have been acquired from other organisms in this way, though the proportion can be several times that. So an individual microbe may have access to the genes found in the entire microbial population around it, including those of other microbe species. "It's natural to wonder if the very concept of an organism in isolation is still valid at this level," says Goldenfeld.

David Dobbs tells us about a new theory in genetics called the orchid hypothesis that suggests that the genes that underlie some of the most troubling human behaviors -- violence, depression, anxiety -- can, in combination with the right environment, also be responsible for our best behaviors.

Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind's phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail -- but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society's most cr

““Cooked food does many familiar things,” [Richard Wrangham] observes. “It makes our food safer, creates rich and delicious tastes and reduces spoilage. Heating can allow us to open, cut or mash tough foods. But none of these advantages is as important as a little-appreciated aspect: cooking increases the amount of energy our bodies obtain from food… . The extra energy gave the first cooks biological advantages. They survived and reproduced better than before. Their genes spread. Their bodies responded by biologically adapting to cooked food, shaped by natural selection to take maximum advantage of the new diet. There were changes in anatomy, physiology, ecology, life history, psychology and society.” Put simply, Mr. Wrangham writes that eating cooked food — whether meat or plants or both —made digestion easier, and thus our guts could grow smaller. The energy that we formerly spent on digestion (and digestion requires far more energy than you might imagine) was freed up, enabling our

Scientists who reviewed hobbit research at a symposium here last week said that a consensus had emerged among experts in support of the initial interpretation that H. floresiensis is a distinct hominid species much more primitive than H. sapiens. On display for the first time at the meeting was a cast of the skull and bones of a H. floresiensis, probably an adult female.

Scientists who reviewed hobbit research at a symposium here last week said that a consensus had emerged among experts in support of the initial interpretation that H. floresiensis is a distinct hominid species much more primitive than H. sapiens. On display for the first time at the meeting was a cast of the skull and bones of a H. floresiensis, probably an adult female.

A leading official declared yesterday that Darwin’s theory of evolution was compatible with Christian faith, and could even be traced to St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. “In fact, what we mean by evolution is the world as created by God,” said Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture. The Vatican also dealt the final blow to speculation that Pope Benedict XVI might be prepared to endorse the theory of Intelligent Design, whose advocates credit a “higher power” for the complexities of life.

We are not the same folks who marched out of Africa. Our genes have co-evolved with our inventions. In the past 10,000 years alone, in fact, our genes have evolved 100 times faster than the average rate for the previous 6 million years. This should not be a surprise. In the same period we domesticated the dog (all those breeds) from wolves, and cows and corn and more from their unrecognizable ancestors. We, too, have been domesticated. We have domesticated ourselves. Our teeth continue to shrink, our muscles thin out, our hair disappear, our molecular digestion adjust to new foods. Technology has domesticated us. As fast as we remake our tools, we remake ourselves. We are co-evolving with our technology, so that we have become deeply co-dependent on it. Sapiens can no longer survive biologically without some kind of tools. Nor can our humanity continue without the technium.

But genomes don't just speed up their evolution willy-nilly. So what happened, the authors ask, to keep human evolution going in the "recent" past? Two crucial events, they contend, had to do with food production. As humans learned the techniques of agriculture, they abandoned their diffuse hunter-gatherer ways and established cities and governments. The resulting population density made humans ripe for infectious diseases like smallpox and malaria. Alleles that helped protect against disease proved useful and won out. The domestication of cattle for milk production also led to genetic change. Among people of northern European descent, lactose intolerance -- the inability to digest milk in adulthood -- is unusual today. But it was universal before a genetic mutation arose about 8,000 years ago that made lactose tolerance continue beyond childhood. Since you can get milk over and over from a cow, but can get meat from it only once, you can harvest a lot more calories over time for the s

Complaining about the preponderance of liberals and leftists in the arts and humanities and social sciences has so far allowed the right to dodge the question of how many young conservatives are actually interested enough in education in arts, humanities, and social sciences to devote six or eight years of graduate study to these subjects. The really curious thing, however, is that there is also a preponderance of liberals and leftists in the sciences, and no one can plausibly suggest that this is due to selection bias—as if physicists are looking for new Ph.D.s who bring a multicultural approach to superstring theory and biologists are subtly biased in favor of geneticists whose work criticizes Western imperialism. The problem here—the elephant in the room, if you will—is that there is now an entire wing of the conservative moment that is opposed to science, be it the science of climate change or the science of stem cell research or the science of evolutionary theory.

3) They demonstrate that, when you really stretch it, the same data can be interpreted in very different ways.

The Turritopsis Nutricula is able to revert back to a juvenile form once it mates after becoming sexually mature.

Marine biologists say the jellyfish numbers are rocketing because they need not die.

Dr Maria Miglietta of the Smithsonian Tropical Marine Institute said: "We are looking at a worldwide silent invasion."

The jellyfish are originally from the Caribbean but have spread all over the world.

Turritopsis Nutricula is technically known as a hydrozoan and is the only known animal that is capable of reverting completely to its younger self.

It does this through the cell development process of transdifferentiation.

Scientists believe the cycle can repeat indefinitely, rendering it potentially immortal.