The annual Human Behavior and Evolution Society meeting is on next week in Kyoto, Japan. Anyone going? Looks like there’s going to be a lot of interesting primatology talks…
Shown here is the phylogeny of biscuits (or maybe the cladogram of cookies). From the ground-breaking work of Smith (2005) The Affinities of Jaffa Cakes: Using Cladistics to Classify Biscuits. Note the controversial basal subgrouping of the pseudobiscuits clade.
Edit: I wasn’t particularly convinced by the treelike-ness of these biscuitoids, so [...]
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmLYo8zQOVs]
Emma Marris in today’s Nature reviews my field of research, and chats to a number of my friends and colleagues:
In the past five to ten years, more and more non-linguists such as Pagel have used the computational tools with which they model evolution to take a crack at languages. And one can see [...]
Concerned that evidence of human settlement and migration may be lost under the sea, researchers are finding new ways of tracking ancient mariners. By combining archaeological studies on remote islands with computer simulations of founding populations and detailed examinations of seafloor topography and ancient sea level, they are amassing crucial new data on voyages [...]
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 [...]
Despite a court-ordered ban on the teaching of creationism in US schools, about one in eight high-school biology teachers still teach it as valid science, a survey reveals. And, although almost all teachers also taught evolution, those with less training in science – and especially evolutionary biology – tend to devote less class [...]
Congratulations to ScienceDaily for this, um, baffling introduction:
“Cornell researchers are studying bacterium big enough to see — the Shaquille O’Neal of bacteria. Well, perhaps not quite Shaquille O’Neal. But it is Shaq-teria.“
Uh. ok. Anyway, they’re reporting on this paper: “Extreme polyploidy in a large bacterium“, which does sound interesting, and really [...]
Stoclet-Fries: Lebensbaum (Werkvorlage), (1905/09) by Gustav Klimt. (Full image)
