The Current State of Evolutionary Theory (Omnivore)

From Bookforum's Omnivore blog, this collection of links looks at current thinking in the world of evolutionary theory.

One addition from today's news: 300,000-Year-Old Hearth Uncovered in Israel, via Live Science. 

It's not entirely clear who was cooking at Qesem Cave. A study published about three years ago in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology described teeth found in the cave dating to between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago. The authors speculated the teeth might have belonged to modern humans (Homo sapiens), Neanderthals or perhaps a different species, though they noted they couldn't draw a solid conclusion from their evidence.

Cool . . . .


The current state of evolutionary theory

Jan 27 2014
9:00AM

• Richard Bankoff (Penn State): The Current State of Evolutionary Theory: A Historical Perspective. 
• From the new Princeton Guide to Evolution, here are samples entries “What is Evolution”, “Human Evolution”, “Evolutionary Limits and Constraints”, and “Ancient DNA”. 
• DNA from a 400,000-year-old fossil in Spain most closely matches another extinct human lineage, Denisovans, whose remains have been found thousands of miles away in Siberia. 
• This skull may have just rewritten the book on human evolution. 
• Razib Khan on the long First Age of mankind. 
• Light skin in Europeans stems from one 10,000-year-old ancestor who lived between India and the Middle East, claims study. 
• Research suggests natural selection can favor “irrational” behavior. 
• Does modern life make us less rational? Isolated hunter-gatherers act more rational than western consumer. 
• Annalee Newitz on how evolution is steered by aggressive competition between females. 
• A new study finds Finnish men who suffered long periods of unemployment were more likely to possess a genetic marker indicating premature aging. 
• Are we still evolving? Yep, but there's a catch: Our identities might be too fluid for any advantageous mutations to take hold. 
• There’s a gene for that: Pankaj Mehta on how history is littered with horrifying examples of the misuse of evolutionary theory to justify power and inequality — welcome to a new age of biological determinism. 
• Kristi McGuire interviews Henry Gee, author of The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution. 
• Karl W. Gibers on how 2013 was a terrible year for evolution.

From the Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA), a joint project of UC San Diego and the Salk Institute, this is an excellent series of videos (each about 20 minutes) on Theory of Mind (the understanding that what you think and feel is different from what I think and feel, and to make inferences based on that awareness).

The Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny* (CARTA) began as a collaboration between faculty at UC San Diego and at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, along with interested scientists at other institutions. CARTA became a UC San Diego recognized Organized Research Unit (ORU) in January 2008. 

As the word anthropogeny implies, the primary goal of CARTA is to “explore and explain the origins of the human phenomenon.” In other words, finding the answers to the two age-old questions regarding humans:

• Where did we come from?

• How did we get here?

CARTA is a virtual organization formed in order to promote transdisciplinary research into human origins, drawing on methods from a number of traditional disciplines spanning the humanities, social, biomedical, biological, computational & engineering and physical & chemical sciences. 

*Anthropogeny: The investigation of the origin of man (humans) Oxford English Dictionary, 2006. First used in 1839 edition of Hooper's Med. Dict. and defined as "the study of the generation of man."

I'm not sure I have the order correct, but they are order (and listed below) in what seems a logical progression.

Mind Reading: Human Origins and Theory of Mind

Part One:
CARTA Co-Director Ajit Varki welcomes the public and researchers to the CARTA symposium on Mind Reading: Human Origins and Theory of Mind. Recorded on 10/18/2013. Series: "CARTA: Mind Reading: Human Origins and Theory of Mind"

Part Two:
Ralph Adolphs (Caltech) provides an overview on how best to define Theory of Mind, how to relate it to other similar terms, and how to study it. He closes by speculating on what aspects of mindreading might be unique to humans.

Part Three:
For many years, Tetsuro Matsuzawa (Kyoto Univ) has studied chimpanzees both in the laboratory and in the wild. In this talk he presents several examples of "mind reading" in chimpanzees based on his research in the lab and observations in the field.

Part Four:
A key feature of human social interactions is the ability to make inferences about other individuals' mental states (e.g. others' knowledge, beliefs and desires). Juliane Kaminski (Univ of Portsmouth, UK) reviews studies which investigate whether the cognitive capacities underlying these skills are uniquely human or shared, at least to some degree, with other species.

Part Five:
Jessica Sommerville (Univ of Washington) reviews evidence to suggest that, within the first year of life, infants develop an understanding of transient mental states (such as goals and desires), enduring personal dispositions (such as preferences), and socio-moral norms (such as fairness norms), that is driven by their own actions on the world, as well as their interactions with other people.

Part Six:
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (Univ College London) discusses how the social brain, that is, the network of brain regions involved in understanding others, develops during adolescence. Adolescence is a time characterized by change -- hormonally, physically, psychologically and socially. Yet until fairly recently, this period of life was neglected by neuroscience.

Part Seven:
Over the past two decades, research investigating the neural basis of social abilities suggests that the human brain has dedicated systems for understanding other minds. Jason Mitchell (Harvard Univ) reviews this brain imaging work and discusses the implications for the unique aspects of human social cognition.

Part Eight:
Wrap-Up: Terry Sejnowski

Bookforum Omnivore - Evolution in the Human Lineage

This is an excellent collection of links from the Omnivore blog. I especially was intrigued by How Culture Drove Human Evolution - A Conversation with Joseph Henrich from Edge.

Think back to when humans first got the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution—and by this I mean the ability for ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it's so complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it. This was a really important line in human evolution, and we've begun to pursue this idea called the cultural brain hypothesis—this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information.

 It's an excellent article/talk.

Several of the other links are also quite good. Enjoy.

Evolution in the human lineage

Sep 25 2012  

9:00AM

• From Edge, an interview with Joseph Henrich on how culture drove human evolution; and Ryan Phelan is on a mission to provide deep ecological enrichment through extinct species revival. 
• Across the sea of grass: how Northern Europeans got to be 10% Northeast Asian. 
• A review of Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame by Christopher Boehm.
• Tracing the world's ancestor: How many generations does it take before someone alive today is the ancestor of everyone on the planet? 
• The largest genomic study finds the Khoe-San peoples are unique, special. 
• What explains the extraordinarily fast rate of evolution in the human lineage over the past two million years? Paul Rincon investigates. 
• Why selfishness still doesn’t pay: A recent finding that undermines conventional thinking on the evolution of cooperation doesn’t, after all, prevent altruistic behaviour from emerging. 
• Here are ten educational facts about the Palaeolithic. 
• Sedeer El-Showk on debating our ancestor’s sex life. 
• Will humans eventually all look like Brazilians? 
• The evolution of fairness: Can examining how inequality began in a hunter-gatherer society teach us how to fairly share the costs and consequences of how we use diminishing natural resources?

Culture-Gene Interactions in Human Origins - 3 Talks

From the University of California at San Diego and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, this is another installment in the CARTA (the Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny) series of talks that have been held for the past few years. I could be biased, but this sounds like another take on E.O. Wilson's sociobiology.

The Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny* (CARTA) was established in a collaboration between faculty at UC San Diego and at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, along with interested scientists at other institutions. CARTA became a UC San Diego recognized Organized Research Unit (ORU) in January 2008.

As the word anthropogeny implies, the primary goal of CARTA is to “explore and explain the origins of the human phenomenon.” In other words, finding the answers to the two age-old questions regarding humans:

• Where did we come from?
• How did we get here?

CARTA is a virtual organization formed in order to promote transdisciplinary research into human origins, drawing on methods from a number of traditional disciplines spanning the humanities, social, biomedical, biological, computational & engineering and physical & chemical sciences.

*Anthropogeny: The investigation of the origin of man (humans); Oxford English Dictionary, 2006. (1839 HOOPER Med. Dict., Anthropogeny, the study of the generation of man.)

Interested in learning more about CARTA? We invite you to download the CARTA brochure, which provides a concise overview of CARTA's mission and activities.

This series of short lectures looks at how cultural traditions have shaped, and continue to shape, our genomes with the following presentations:

• Origins of Modern Human Behavior (Alison Brooks)
• Culture-led Gene-culture Coevolution (Peter Richerson)
• Human Adaptations to Diverse Environments (Anna Di Rienzo) 

(Visit: http://www.uctv.tv/carta for more video)