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Entries in the ' books ' category
Written June 25, 2008 in anthropology, art, books
& in P.N.A.S. - Is an eclipse described in the Odyssey?
Plutarch and Heraclitus believed a certain passage in the 20th book of the Odyssey (”Theoclymenus’s prophecy”) to be a poetic description of a total solar eclipse. In the late 1920s, Schoch and Neugebauer computed that the solar eclipse of 16 April 1178 B.C.E. was total [...]
Robin McKee in The Guardian talks about “How Darwin won the evolution race”:
In early 1858, on Ternate in Malaysia, a young specimen collector was tracking the island’s elusive birds of paradise when he was struck by malaria. ‘Every day, during the cold and succeeding hot fits, I had to lie down during which time I [...]
Written May 21, 2008 in books, chimpanzees, language, non-human, ook!, primates, psychology
Back in the 1970s, a chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky took part in a Columbia University research study called “Project Nim.”
Project Nim was led by Herbert Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia who was attempting to find out if a chimpanzee could learn to communicate using American Sign Language.
“Everyone knows that words are learned one at [...]
Written March 31, 2008 in africa, anthropology, books, evolution, fossils, genetics, human prehistory, people, stupidity
No doubt you’ve all seen some of the hype surrounding the new book, Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger. The book argues that a long-extinct hominin species, the “Boskops”, were much smarter then we are:
Our big brains, our language ability, and our intelligence make us uniquely [...]
Alexander Small reviews On Deep History and the Brain by Daniel Lord Smail in the New York Times:
Taking Paleolithic man seriously, Smail argues, requires us to understand that history and biology always shape each other — there is no ascent from the tyranny of brute instinct to the freedoms of civilization. Some evolutionary theorists stress that cultural innovation allows human beings to overcome the blind stumblings of natural selection: we deliberately solve a problem and pass on that solution to our descendants, who improve on it in turn. Smail takes a different tack. The imperfect copying of past behavior and small, often unconscious preferences can push a society in a new direction, even without anyone aiming toward a particular goal. It’s possible, for instance, that early men decided to make sharper spear points with the intent of drawing more blood from their prey; Smail would rather suppose that these spear points were created by accident, and then spread because the hunters who used them proved to be better hunters, even if they didn’t know why. Cultural evolution can be rapid and it can help human beings adapt to their environment, but it needn’t be intended or progressive.
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Colin McGinn reviews Oliver Sack’s new book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
Sacks opens his book with a striking case, rather literally striking. Tony Cicoria, a forty-two-year-old orthopedic surgeon, was making a phone call to his mother when he was struck in the face by lightning. He thought he was dead immediately following the [...]
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