Born To Run | Human Evolution | DISCOVER Magazine

More research into the evolution of running:

Unlike many mammals, not to mention primates, people are astonishingly successful endurance runners, "and I don't think it's just a fluke," Lieberman says. He and Bramble argue that not only can humans outlast horses, but over long distances and under the right conditions, they can also outrun just about any other animal on the planet—including dogs, wolves, hyenas, and antelope, the other great endurance runners. From our abundant sweat glands to our Achilles tendons, from our big knee joints to our muscular glutei maximi, human bodies are beautifully tuned running machines. "We're loaded top to bottom with all these features, many of which don't have any role in walking," Lieberman says. Our anatomy suggests that running down prey was once a way of life that ensured hominid survival millions of years ago on the African savanna.

Ewwwwwwwww! - The Boston Globe

This is interesting:

a significant slice of morality can be explained by our innate feelings of disgust. A growing number of provocative and clever studies appear to show that disgust has the power to shape our moral judgments. Research has shown that people who are more easily disgusted by bugs are more likely to see gay marriage and abortion as wrong. Putting people in a foul-smelling room makes them stricter judges of a controversial film or of a person who doesn’t return a lost wallet. Washing their hands makes people feel less guilty about their own moral transgressions, and hypnotically priming them to feel disgust reliably induces them to see wrongdoing in utterly innocuous stories.

It is interesting to think of morality as an evolved reaction to the unfamiliar, a survival instinct, and a social cue. It could very well be something that predates language and agriculture rather than coming to us directly from God. In other words, the notion that someone without strong religious beliefs would automatically become a mass murderer is bunk. Our religions, ethics, and social institutions are all abstractions founded on the human experience of hunter-gatherer disgust. It's just like instructions for a toddler: don't eat that, don't touch that, it's nasty.

The Valve - A Literary Organ | Rant: Theory of Mind, NOT!

This is potentially interesting. I just wish it included an actual persuasive argument. This is funny though:

Theory of mind (aka TOM) is all the rage in (some quarters of) cognitive science and evolutionary science. It’s driving me batshit crazy. And its use by literary critics makes me super-mega batshit crazy.

Cavemen

An interesting take on the prehistoric war between neanderthals and modern homo sapiens:

"That modern humans got to Australia before they penetrated Europe suggests that Neanderthals held them off for millennia. That suggests they weren't that backward."

Instead, moderns were very, very lucky—so lucky that Finlayson calls what happened "survival of the weakest." About 30,000 years ago, the vast forests of Eurasia began to retreat, leaving treeless steppes and tundra and forcing forest animals to disperse over vast distances. Because they evolved in the warm climate of Africa before spreading into Europe, modern humans had a body like marathon runners, adapted to track prey over such distances. But Neanderthals were built like wrestlers. That was great for ambush hunting, which they practiced in the once ubiquitous forests, but a handicap on the steppes, where endurance mattered more. This is the luck part: the open, African type of terrain in which modern humans evolved their less-muscled, more-slender body type "subsequently expanded so greatly" in Europe, writes Finlayson. And that was "pure chance."

Two points: First neanderthals probably had the same intellectual capacity we have today; Second, modern humans evolved to run.

Evolution of the Story Mind

I think the evolutionary psychology view of art is one of those ideas that seems glaringly obvious once it is pointed out to you:

To take the next step to fiction would seem to give early humans a simulation machine, useful for war-gaming their options in survival choices. But Dutton refuses this adaptive explanation for fiction, advanced by Stephen Pinker and others, pointing out that our fictional library extends into realms far beyond anything humans would encounter. It is instead, he argues, an enhancement and extension of counterfactual reasoning - the ability to step beyond mere reproduction of facts in the imagination to hypothetical states of affairs.

Fiction, it has been argued, also serves as an efficient archive of cultural knowledge; Eric Havelock famously argued that for nonliterate peoples, epics like the "Iliad" constitute a kind of oral encyclopedia. Perhaps more than its tactical or archival capacities, however, fiction provides a unique platform for social and psychological reasoning. "The inner psychological experience of one's fellows, the shared emotional and intellectual world of the tribe," Dutton writes, is the final field upon which fiction plays - and perhaps its ultimate evolutionary raison d'etre as well.

You don't even have to dive very deeply into the evolutionary advantages of what in Dramatica they call the "story mind" to see that human beings are keen observers of other human beings and that the stories we tell are really arguments and descriptions of how we think, understand, behave, and solve problems. Because we are complex beings, story telling is a complex activity, not merely instrumental in telling us what something is or what we should do in certain situations, but exploring emotional terrain, the tragedy of death, the comedy of life, the possible, the improbable, and the fantastic.

And just like the human mind, it is even large enough and flexible enough to reflect upon its own creation, methods, and ends. It can tell a story about itself.

Thanks Evolution!

Good list of 10 features of human beings that demonstrate evolution. Kind of gives me goosebumps.

[Via Andrew Sullivan]