HENRY - The human evolution news relay
Entries written in July 2007
Written July 31, 2007 in misc, psychology
Susan Cook in ScienceDaily says, about the paper “Gesturing makes learning last“:
“We’ve known for a while that we use gestures to add information to a conversation even when we’re not entirely clear how that information relates to what we’re saying,” (…) “We asked if the reverse could be true; if actively employing gestures when learning [...]
Why Barbie feels heavier than Ken: The influence of size-based expectancies and social cues on the illusory perception of weight (doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2007.05.009):
In order to examine the relative influence of size-based expectancies and social cues on the perceived weight of objects, two studies were performed, using equally weighing dolls differing in sex-related and age-related vulnerability or physical [...]
One of the big debates in evolution has been about the diversification of life on earth and how rapidly this occured. Around 580 million years ago, organisms tended to be quite simple and single-celled. However, shortly afterwards, we start to see a rapid burst of diversification leading to precursors of all the complex organisms we [...]
How did Pterosaurs feed? (doi)
Just because a component of an extinct animal resembles that of a living one does not necessarily imply that both were used for the same task. The lifestyles of pterosaurs, long-extinct flying reptiles that soared ancient skies above the dinosaurs, have long been the subject of debate among palaeontologists. Similarities between [...]
Written July 21, 2007 in anthropology, austronesian, human prehistory, language, linguistics
The long-range linguists have a promo piece in the Christian Science Monitor, where they argue for all sorts of deep linguistic history stuff, including the “Borean” language family:
Very tentatively, EHL has grouped the world’s languages into three super-superfamilies corresponding to these migrations: those that correspond with the coastal route, which include Papuan languages; those [...]
PNAS has a new paper by the always-interesting Masatoshi Nei, even if you disagree with him, The new mutation theory of phenotypic evolution (doi:10.1073/pnas.0703349104):
Recent studies of developmental biology have shown that the genes controlling phenotypic characters expressed in the early stage of development are highly conserved and that recent evolutionary changes have occurred primarily in [...]
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