Our newest board member and recent Seminar speaker David Eagleman has published his very Long Now Mothers Day essay over at Slate.  Happy Mothers Day to the long line of Mothers who brought us all here!

In honor of Mother’s Day, I’m going to spend five seconds thinking about each woman in the. . .   Read More

History of Innovation

The development of human mental ability can be tracked through the
progressive crafting of stone tools, Van der Leeuw explained. First
we learned to shape an edge—a line—then the surface, then the
whole volume of the tool, then the sophisticated sequence required to
make a superb spear point. It took. . .   Read More

Video by Claire Evans
As part of SEED Magazine’s Darwin anniversary articles here is “a video experiment in scale, condensing 4.6 billion years of history into a minute.” I thought it a worthy entry into our “Long Shorts” category.
The Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds is an experiment in scale: By condensing. . .   Read More

Scientific American has a nice piece on how humans may still be evolving over the next millennium.  Since we can now adapt our environment to ourselves, we often assume that evolution has basically ended.  However the article points out:
“But DNA techniques, which probe genomes both present and past, have unleashed a revolution in studying. . .   Read More

Image from Perroquet (02008) by Sølve Sundsbø, at SHOWstudio

Inspired by science photography and nature documentaries, Norwegian fashion photographer Sølve Sundsbø produced an art exhibition called Perroquet, comprising a stunning series of photographs and slow-motion videos showing the spectacular plumage and graceful movement of a slender, long-tailed parrot in flight.

This. . .   Read More

Becoming a benign dominant

To track how humans became Earth’s dominant animal, Ehrlich began with a photo of a tarsier in a tree. The little primate had a predator’s binocular vision and an insect-grabber’s fingers. When (possibly) climate change drove some primates out of the trees, they developed a two-legged. . .   Read More

 Nice animated time line of human migration sent to me by Paul Saffo (via Jim Warren).  The coolest thing I learned was the very exciting day about 80,000 years ago when a massive volcanic eruption caused a 6 year darkening of the skies. . .   Read More

Wired and Reuters are reporting on the latest work by Craig Venter published in Science this week. Venter’s synthetic life program completed the second of three steps in creating a synthetic organism.
“We consider this the second in our three-step process to create the first synthetic organism,” said J. Craig Venter, president of. . .   Read More

The Human Exemptionalism (or sometimes ‘Exceptionalism’) Paradigm is the idea that humans are somehow separate from nature or that we have transcended it in some way through spirituality, technology or consciousness. It is a paradigm that is shared between many of the religious ideologies of the world as well as many devotees of science and. . .   Read More

Mapping Life

“All life is imperfectly transmitted code,” Enriquez began, “and it is promiscuous.” Thus discoveries like the one last month of an entire bacterial genome inside the DNA of a fruitfly is exploding the old tree-of-life models of evolution. The emerging map replaces gene lineages with gene webs.

“There is a whole. . .   Read More