Monkeys reason about their own thoughts, know self-doubt

Via HuffPo’s Joanna Zelman: Apparently humans aren’t the only ones filled with self-doubt and uncertainty. A recent study found that certain monkeys question their own thinking as well. Professor John David Smith and Michael Beran trained macaques, which are of the Old World group (native to Africa, Asia, and Europe), to play a computer game [...]

Out of Africa–a lot earlier than expected

Via NY Times: A cache of stone tools found on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula has reopened the critical question of when and how modern humans escaped from their ancestral homeland in eastern Africa. The present view, based on both archaeological and genetic evidence, holds that modern humans, although they first emerged in [...]

A new (which is to say very old, but recently discovered) human ancestor?

Ewen Callaway writing in Nature News: The ice-age world is starting to look cosmopolitan. While Neanderthals held sway in Europe and modern humans were beginning to populate the globe, another ancient human relative lived in Asia, according to a genome sequence recovered from a finger bone in a cave in southern Siberia. A comparative analysis [...]

Is the As-bacterium overhyped?

Obnoxious-even-when-he’s-right atheist and University of Minnesota Morris biologist PZ Myers says “yes.”  The Weiner sequence, it appears, has played out again. My own speculation that the bacterium might represent the trunk of a new evolutionary tree does now seem, as I expected, reckless. The piece is long, but non-technical, so bear with us. Here’s the [...]

Newly discovered bacteria redefines possibilities of biochemistry

What can life be made of? Stanislaw Lem imagined beings made of ice, of uranium, and of precious gems. Now, NASA scientists have discovered organisms made of arsenic. Via Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz: NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. [...]

Reverse-engineering beauty

Denis Dutton theorizes on the Pleistocene origin of our aesthetic sense at TED; illustrations by Andrew Park:    Here is a brief interview Dutton conducted with Jorge Louis Borges, unrelated to anything discussed in the lecture. Why link it, then? Because of rational beings, one sort is divine, one is human, and another is such [...]