John Mortell’s blog

Or so this Discovery magazine article suggests may be the case. Certainly the idea that we’re here and the ‘dominant species’ because of random chance is not particularly surprising (for some of us anyway) but the idea that the ‘inferior’ humans ‘won the evolutionary war’ is striking nevertheless;

But people do not easily escape from the idea of progress. We’re drawn to the idea that we are the end point, the pinnacle not only of the hominids but of all animal life. Boskops argue otherwise. They say that humans with big brains, and perhaps great intelligence, occupied a substantial piece of southern Africa in the not very distant past, and that they eventually gave way to smaller-brained, possibly less advanced Homo sapiens—that is, ourselves.

It’s a moot point really, but interesting nevertheless. And there’s definitely a science-fiction novel in it one imagines.

(Oh, wait. There is.) (Kinda, as it’s about Neanderthal’s rather than Boksops but…)

Apparently, in our day-to-day lives, about 75% of us wouldn’t notice if the person serving us at a counter changed in mid-order… I really want to try this to see if it works. Know blogging has been quite light as of late, partly as a result of looking for work, and party because I’ve been doing a lot of other things frankly. Hopefully, I’ll get back into it soon.

Really interesting piece from Ken MacLeod about how Christian denial of evolution responded to the movement of evolutionary theory from a ‘moral’ idea to one that was purely ‘amoral’

Christian anti-evolutionism, at that time, wasn’t like modern creationism. It wasn’t joined at the hip to insanities about a six-thousand-year-old Earth. It was a protest – valid enough in its own terms – against quite specious conclusions about the inevitability of human progress drawn from evolutionary thinking. (In the hands of, say, C. S. Lewis, this protest was quite compatible with public acceptance of – and private reservations about – evolution as a fact.) Even young-earthism started out (to stretch the principle of charity a little too far) at least presenting itself as as an alternate hypothesis, which could in principle be accepted even by atheists. (One can idly imagine a planet populated by all the organisms in the fossil record, devastated by a catastrophe in the recent past, leaving a spurious record of succession in the rocks, and with the actual evolution having occurred on another planet or in the deep pre-Cambrian.) But the evidence just didn’t stack up, and the creation/catastrophe argument has moved from claims of hard facts on the table to waffle about ‘presuppositions’ and ‘world-views’, in an involuntary admission of evidential bankruptcy. The creationist style of thought, preeningly self-blinkered and paranoid, has become a watering-can for the tree of crazy. Of course the outright denialist strand of thinking was there all along, but why did it become dominant, and widespread, after the 1960s?

Essentially, MacLeod points to the move away of evolutionary thinking from ‘evolution as a moral force’ to our current ‘amoral’ understanding of evolution as the reason for this change and the blow-back from religious/creationist groups. Its an interesting article anyway so have a look.

Al Gore speaking in DC at an environment conference 7.17.08:

Some guy called Duncan did it apparently:

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Another really cool video from the TED lecture series.. I love her definition of serendipity! Tho I am really starting to get annoyed with the video player on TED. I don’t know why, but it seems like it takes me going away from the page as an excuse to reset the video..

From Warren Ellis, a temendously interesting talk on ‘Web 2.0′, time and social development:

I guess logic suggests that it has to be the case but I was still rather surprised to read this:

This suggests the early human population was tiny (so the opportunities for new matrilines to evolve in the first place were limited) and reinforces the idea that Homo sapiens may have come close to extinction (eliminating some matrilines that did previously exist). Indeed, there may, at one point, have been as few as 2,000 people left to carry humanity forward.

The BBC has an article covering a lot of the same things but lacks that rather entertaining statistic. Still though, that’s an idea that will probably keep me entertained for a while to come…

Update: Here’s another BBC article