2009 - Darwin's Year

[Ian Carmichael]

Charles Darwin would be 200 next year. His book (Origin of Species), 150.
Any plans for your classroom? The background of excitement with science? (see Uglow's The Lunar Men.) The place of geological ideas in Darwin's thinking? (The Sedgwick museum in Cambridge, England is mounting an exhibition "Charles Darwin, Geologist" since that was his scientific beginning).
An opportunity for exploring wonderful life? Science? The care of Darwin himself to stay within his chosen bounds? The radical misuse and abuse of ideas of natural selection?
An interesting article on the floodgates to be opened is here, from the Guardian.
I get a natural start, given my (short) science and religion option at senior college. My challenge is not how to begin, but how to limit!

[Ian Carmichael]

Thanks Anna,
I'll investigate!

[Skip Zilla]

Tomorrow's the bicentennial of Darwin's birth. I read a review in my copy of the Economist which arrived yesterday of an appealing book of poems, Darwin: A Life in Poems, by Ruth Padel. Here's a link to the review co-published online.

[Connie Weber]

"Darwin 200: Human nature: the remix"

"People's mindsets are neither fixed by evolution nor infinitely malleable by culture. Dan Jones looks for the similarities that underlie the diversity of human nature."

[Connie Weber]

Just a reminder to be careful, be as conscious as we can of hidden biases in the way we frame evolutionary investigations...

"In The Descent of Man, Darwin proposed that there is "no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties" on the basis of his belief that all living species were descended from a common ancestor. He also suggested that "there is a much wider interval in mental power between one of the lowest fishes ... and one of the higher apes, than between an ape and man". To support his argument, he outlined cases in which forerunners of human intelligence could be found in "higher mammals", including "similar passions, affections, and emotions, ... [such as] ... jealousy, suspicion, emulation, gratitude, and magnanimity".Darwin's reports of "a sense of humour ... wonder and curiosity" or "the association of ideas, and reason" in animals may seem far-fetched, but many contemporary researchers do not shy away from using similar anthropomorphic language in their interpretation of animal behaviour. Over the past two decades, researchers have reported that chimpanzees can empathize with other members of their species, and that they reconcile and even console each other after conflicts. Monkeys and apes have been credited with a sense of fairness and aversion to inequity and, in the case of apes, an awareness of the mental states of others — in other words, a theory of mind."

"A closer look at many of these studies reveals, however, that appropriate control conditions have often been lacking, and simpler explanations overlooked in a flurry of anthropomorphic overinterpretation. For instance, capuchin monkeys were thought to have a sense of fairness because they reject a slice of cucumber if they see another monkey in an adjacent cage, performing the same task, rewarded with a more-sought-after grape. Researchers interpreted a monkey's refusal to eat the cucumber as evidence of 'inequity aversion' prompted by seeing another monkey being more generously rewarded. Yet, closer analysis1 has revealed that a monkey will still refuse cucumber when a grape is placed in a nearby empty cage. This suggests that the monkeys simply reject lesser rewards when better ones are available."

"The appearance of similar abilities in distantly related species, but not necessarily in closely related ones, illustrates that cognitive traits cannot be neatly arranged on an evolutionary scale of relatedness."

A very interesting article from Nature Magazine: "Can evolution explain how minds work?"

[Connie Weber]

an article on the possible origin of laughter...

"Tickling Apes Reveals Laughter's Origins" --Susan Milius in Science News

"Don’t try this at home, but tickling a gorilla, orangutan, bonobo or chimp can inspire bursts of grunting sounds.

Yes, that’s laughter, says Marina Davila Ross of the University of Portsmouth in England. She and her colleagues analyzed sounds of ticklish great apes as well as human babies and traced a shared family tree of laugh sounds. Laughter’s roots go back at least 10 to 16 million years, Davila Ross and her colleagues suggest online June 4 in Current Biology..."

[Connie Weber]

Two more books on evolution--wondered if anyone's reading them:

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham

and The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins.