Today’s social-media aficionados take a lot of personality tests that we know are pure rot, like “what your birth crystal says about the way you treat your pets” or “what your quarantine eating habits reveal about your financial investment patterns.” The bust pictured here reflects similarly outlandish claims from a century and a half ago, […]
The Racial Undertones of Phrenology Read More »
Dreams are universally experienced, but take on different meanings across time. In the Aboriginal cultures of Australia, “the Dreamtime” or “Alcheringa” in the Arandic central Australian language, refers not to an individual’s dreams, nor even to the images or narrations that come in sleep. Rather, it signifies an eternal space out of which comes creation,
Dreams in the Aboriginal Cultures of Australia Read More »
Ever hear of the philosophical puzzle called “the trolley problem”? It’s a famous way to make you realize that your instincts might not match up with your ideas about morality. Namely, most people would elect to throw a trolley switch that would take it off its course if it would kill only one person instead
Philippa Foot and “The Trolley Problem” Read More »
This picture is neither a coffee stain nor a bad tattoo, but rather a fossil from one of the most important places that evolutionary scientists study the emergence of complex life: the fossils of Burgess Shale in British Columbia.Burgess Shale fossils date from the period of the Cambrian Explosion (525-505 million years ago), when “all
Burgess Shale Fossil in British Columbia Read More »
Evolution brings a sense of humility like nothing else can. Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce you to our ancestors? Featured on the first slide is “Kimberella,” probably the oldest of the “protostome” fossils, dating 255 million years ago – from before the pre-Cambrian explosion.“Aha,” you might be thinking. “That doesn’t look like even the
Kimberella – the Oldest Protostome Fossil Read More »
Here is a picture of two of the most famous hands in art history, and they go along with a not-very-famous but super important story about how human hands evolved.“Nature does not invent very often completely from scratch,” writes evolutionary biologist Sean B. Carroll, “rather, it remodels its existing structures with took kit genes that
Hand Evolution From Progenitors Read More »
“The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is one of degree and not of kind,” wrote Charles Darwin, in his famous _The Descent of Man_ in 1871. And evolutionary biologists still agree. So then what makes the mental capacities of Homo Sapiens and other hominid apes so different?Two
Brain Size in Homo Sapiens Read More »
Wanna know the difference between this kid and a chimpanzee? So do evolutionary biologists . . . And with the use of genetic studies, scientists recently have figured out two additional ways that we Homo Sapiens differ from our common primate chimp ancestors from six to eight million years ago. They have to do with
Genetic Differences Between Children and Chimpanzee’s Read More »
Historians are frequently enchanted by things discarded as useless by the general public. But I think anyone interested in evolution would find the study of non-gene coding DNA fascinating, including the scientist featured here. This is Susumu Ohno, one of the United States’ foremost geneticists and evolutionary biologists, and he came up with the term
Susumu Ohno’s “Junk DNA” Read More »
“The Persistence of Memory” is one of artist Salvador Dali’s most recognizable paintings. The surrealist style is perfectly adapted to depicting the ways our minds preserve our memories — they are suggestive, dreamlike, warpable. For however imperfect or relativistic our memories might be, we owe them for much of our sense of identity.How we humans
Salvador Dali and the Arc Gene Read More »
In the early 20th century, science was trendy. Unfortunately, so was bigotry, and the eugenics movement took advantage of the scientific-sounding language of genetics to promote the idea that certain types of people (pretty much white, native-born, able-bodied, and Protestant) needed to propagate for the greater good of humanity. Enter the “Fitter Family Contests” held
“Fitter Family Contests” of the Early 20th-Century Read More »
The Scientific Revolution that developed in Europe did not always lead to the embracing of rationality. This engraving by William Hogarth from 1751 is a case in point. You see in this image a grand display of the dissection of a corpse at the hands of professional anatomists. Yet even though the endeavour might have
Europe’s Murder Act of 1751 Read More »
Oh those crazy Ancient Maya . . . They sure knew how to have a good time. In these two photos we see a terracotta figurine and a sculpture in relief, respectively, showing people happily getting enemas. The first statuette shows a woman giving herself one: she twists her face upwards, smiling in delight. The
Ancient Mayans Love of Enemas Read More »
So much about human nature can seem depressing: we unthinkingly follow orders, allow confirmation bias to skew our views, and commit horrible acts of violence against people we don’t even know. However, the opposite is also true, and history has many examples of people who have disobeyed authority and risked their lives for total strangers.
Hugh Thompson’s Fight Against the My Lai Massacre Read More »
We are inseparable from our environment, and we change with our surroundings whether we are aware of it or not. You are looking at a photo of some of the skulls of the approximately 800,000 Tutsis killed by their Hutu neighbors in the 1994 genocide. It is easy to pretend that the inner workings of
The Propaganda of the Rwandan Genocide Read More »
These two images reflect the ancient Colorado peoples, who lived as the earliest nomads of the region. Some exciting research from this area is challenging entrenched ideas about how our human ancestors lived.The mammoth skeleton is from the very first peoples, known as the Paleoindians. Dating as far back as 13,000 years ago, archaeologists have
Ancient Colorado Peoples Read More »
Everything has a history, including menstruation. Shown here is rock art from Western Australia’s indigenous peoples depicting two women dancing and menstruating.The cultural history of how societies have dealt with women’s menses is fascinating, but so too is the research done by evolutionary biologists. We have not all experienced periods in the same way throughout
Ancient Menstruation History Read More »
This sweet painting by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller from 1854 is called _Grandmother with Three Grandchildren_. In it , three cheery young girls surround a seated older woman, eyes gazing on some scrap of paper she is holding. All four females are comfortable with each other, and wear relaxed and happy expressions. The image of
The Grandmother Thesis Read More »
This is Ilya Ivanov, sometime known as the “Red Frankenstein” because of his experiments with inter-species breeding.In the early days of communist Russia, Ivanov earned a reputation for developing artificial insemination techniques that allowed him to develop hybrids of closely-related species: “zeedonks” (zebra with donkey), “zubrons” (European bison with cows) and sundry blends of rabbits,
The “Red Frankenstein” Read More »
Here’s a reconstruction of the oldest European mummy, called Ötzi, named for a region where he was found in the Alps back in 1991. His body had been preserved by his glacial environment for 5,300 years, and has been extensively studied by scientists who have put together a fascinating picture of the Iceman and his
