biologiayevolucion
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Why Early Human Ancestors Took to Two Feet
May 24, 2013 — A new study by archaeologists at the University of York challenges evolutionary theories behind the development of our earliest ancestors from tree dwelling quadrupeds to upright bipeds capable of walking and scrambling.
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(via daxterdd)
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Is our universe the only universe? - Brian Greene
Is there more than one universe? In this visually rich, action-packed talk, Brian Greene shows how the unanswered questions of physics (starting with a big one: What caused the Big Bang?) have led to the theory that our own universe is just one of many in the “multiverse.”
via TED Education.
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Turtle Genome Analysis Sheds Light On Turtle Ancestry and Shell Evolution
Apr. 28, 2013 — From which ancestors have turtles evolved? How did they get their shell? New data provided by the Joint International Turtle Genome Consortium, led by researchers from RIKEN in Japan, BGI in China, and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK provides evidence that turtles are not primitive reptiles but belong to a sister group of birds and crocodiles. The work also sheds light on the evolution of the turtle’s intriguing morphology and reveals that the turtle’s shell evolved by recruiting genetic information encoding for the limbs.
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Fish’s DNA May Explain How Fins Turned to Feet
In the hope of reconstructing a pivotal step in evolution — the colonization of land by fish that learned to walk and breathe air — researchers have decoded the genome of the coelacanth, a prehistoric-looking fish whose form closely resembles those seen in the fossils of 400 million years ago.
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“The whole conception of “Sin” is one which I find very puzzling, doubtless owing to my sinful nature. If “Sin” consisted in causing needless suffering, I could understand; but on the contrary, sin often consists in avoiding needless suffering. Some years ago, in the English House of Lords, a bill was introduced to legalize euthanasia in cases of painful and incurable disease. The patient’s consent was to be necessary, as well as several medical certificates. To me, in my simplicity, it would seem natural to require the patient’s consent, but the late Archbishop of Canterbury, the English official expert on Sin, explained the erroneousness of such a view. The patient’s consent turns euthanasia into suicide, and suicide is sin. Their Lordships listened to the voice of authority, and rejected the bill. Consequently, to please the Archbishop—and his God, if he reports truly—victims of cancer still have to endure months of wholly useless agony, unless their doctors or nurses are sufficiently humane to risk a charge of murder. I find difficulty in the conception of a God who gets pleasure from contemplating such tortures; and if there were a God capable of such wanton cruelty, I should certainly not think Him worthy of worship. But that only proves how sunk I am in moral depravity.” —Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish, 1943
(via secularsociety)
(via deconversionmovement)
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Moore’s Law predicts life originated billions of years before Earth
A new study co-authored by a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health concludes that life originated elsewhere in the Universe around 9.8 billion years ago – roughly five-billion years before the Earth was even formed. But how did the study arrive at this conclusion, and does it make any sense?
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Hints of Human Language Heard in Lip-Smacking Monkey Talk
Sounds made by a little-known monkey living in Ethiopia’s mountain grasslands may hint at the origins of human speech. Unlike most other primates, which communicate in strings of short, relatively flat-toned syllables, geladas possess uncannily human-like vocal tempos and undulations.
“When we first started working with geladas in 2006, we noticed sounds like people were talking around you,” said evolutionary biologist Thore Bergman of the University of Michigan. “Most primates only make a few sounds, but geladas produce a complex stream with a rhythm similar to language.”
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Do We Need God to be Moral?
One of the world’s leading primatologists believes his decades of research with apes answers a question that has plagued humans since the beginning of time.
Are we moral because we believe in God, or do we believe in God because we are moral?
