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POPSDinosaur find linked to giant plant eaters The Aardonyx celestae species dates back to the early Jurassic period. Dr. Yates said the creature found in South Africa stood nearly 6 feet high at the hip and weighed about 1,100 pounds. It was about 10 years old when it died, and its death may have been caused by drought. The species shares many characteristics with the plant-eating herbivores that walked on two legs, Dr. Yates said. But the new species also has similar attributes to dinosaurs that grew to massive sizes and went about on all fours with long necks and whip-like tails. Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09316/1012833-115.stm#ixzz0Wf3ge1Qc Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09316/1012833-115.stm#ixzz0Wf3ge1Qc
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POPSGrading Obama "After U.S. President Barack Obama's first 100 days in office, Foreign Policy asked a group of experts to grade him on everything from North Korea to nukes. On the anniversary of his historic election, we've reprised the experiment -- and found out that the White House isn't doing so well." - FP
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POPSUC Berkeley scientists unveil skeleton that shares chimp, human features More: she is not "the missing link," a transitional creature between today's chimps and humans. This concept has been abandoned: We did not evolve from living champs or apes, but shared a common ancestor. Nor is she this long-sought "last common ancestor." That's because she's too young; chimps and humans are thought to have diverged between 5 million and 10 million years ago. Then we went our separate ways, each taking different evolutionary trajectories. But she's important because she is the closest we have come to this unfound "last common ancestor." She belonged to a new type of early hominid that was neither chimpanzee nor fully human.
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POPSThe Possibility of Impossible cultures Heuser suggests that only humans have evolved four computational capacities, constituting a phylogenetic mind gap between humans and other animals. An important perspective, go read all of it
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POPSRichard Feynman on Social Science Brilliant. I've often said that fields like Sociology in particular ARE NOT sciences. They are crap. Exercises of statistical manipulation and propaganda. They are created to manipulate and control. It is time to recognize that sociology is nothing but an easy "A" for subjecting oneself to putrid materialist propaganda. The newest bovine scatology is..."evolutionary psychology". All a waste of time.
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POPSConvergent evolution
The huge fossil teeth of megalodon had been known for centuries and were once believed to be the fossilized tongues of dragons. Agassiz, noting that great white shark teeth and the fossil megalodon teeth were both serrated, lumped megalodon into the same genus, Carcharodon, (from the Greek karcharos, meaning sharp or jagged, and odous, meaning tooth). Agassiz was not, however, making an evolutionary judgment. In 1835, a young Charles Darwin was just then visiting the Galapagos Islands. There would be no theory of evolutionary descent for nearly 25 years. In fact, the brilliant Agassiz, who later became a professor at Harvard and the leading figure of natural history in the United States, forever resisted Darwin’s revolutionary ideas. Rejecting biological evolution, Agassiz defined species as a “thought of God.” His classification scheme signified nothing about shark origins. But over the next century, the idea that great whites evolved from megalodon took hold. << more at the
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POPSTrustworthy vs lustworthy: the psychology of attraction more (at source): But because we are programmed to avoid finding close relatives sexually attractive, this means those we trust are not necessarily the ones we find attractive. Dr DeBruine’s team found that even when looking at members of the opposite sex, subjects found those who looked like them trustworthy — but they did not want to sleep with them. “When the players were judging the faces for physical attractiveness they thought similar faces less attractive,” she said. “So we believe resemblance is trustworthy — but not lustworthy.”
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POPSSuper Sperm more (at source): The researcher said: 'Sometimes, during the fine-tuning process, high rates of infertility can be seen. That's probably the reason for the very high rates of unexplained infertility in the last decades.' Dr Hasson, of Tel Aviv University in Israel, says women's bodies have gradually evolved extra 'defences' to force sperm to become more competitive to reach the egg at all. Men have responded by making more of the aggressive super-sperm. Once the first sperm fertilises an egg, a woman's body throws up a further range of biochemical defences to stop all the others reaching it. Dr Hasson said: 'To avoid the fatal consequences of polyspermy, female reproductive tracts have evolved to become formidable barriers to sperm.
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POPSAd Campaign Fights Back I didn't miss the irony inherent in this story. The opening paragraph tags Dawkins as a "firebrand" yet the message struck me as a bit tepid, While definitionally correct (and some might even argue that point) the claim that there "probably" is no god struck me as a comment carefully chosen to cast the least amount of controversy. Tomato/tomahto...
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