Blogs / Discoblog

The second episode of NOVA’s big evolution special “Becoming Human” premieres tomorrow night at 8 PM ET/PT on PBS.  Tuesday night’s show focuses on Homo erectus, the ancestor who became “basically us” almost 2 million years ago, developing the first human societies.

Much of what we know about Homo erectus comes from “Turkana Boy,” the famous skeleton found by the Leakey team in Kenya in the early 1980’s.  An important part of what we know, though, comes from the genetic study of lice.  And not just head lice.

Using “paleoartists,” digital filmmaking and the work done with Turkana Boy over the past two decades, the NOVA producers are able to paint a vivid portrait of  Homo erectus’s role in key innovations – like using fire and developing social bonds – that make us human.

The real action in the documentary starts about halfway through, when scientists tackle the question of how Homo erectus was able to obtain the protein necessary to support brain growth.   Of course, stone tools played a huge role in making sure that the humans “went home for dinner and weren’t the meal.”

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As medicine becomes super advanced, and super expensive, the super rich may evolve into a completely different species from everyone else, according to American futurologist Paul Saffo. He thinks medical technology such as replacement organs, specially tailored drugs, and genetic research tools to alert the moneybags of any possible hereditary health dangers, could all lead to a new class of rich, elite, and longer-living humans.

Here are Saffo’s thoughts on the advantages this would give the rich, as reported in the Guardian:

“I sometimes wonder if the very rich can live, on average, 20 years longer than the poor. That’s 20 more years of earning and saving. Think about wealth and power and the advantages that you pass on to your children.”

At the very least, they’ll be able to afford health care—and keep opposing it for the rest of is.

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Image: iStockphoto

It seems people can’t get enough of songs about science. Scientists can’t stop making them, and we can’t stop watching them. David Haines loves science and he loves songs, so he’s putting on a concert called Tremendous Journey to celebrate his love.

Haines gives the deets to New Scientist:

The concert will feature 15 songs about the science of life and evolution. It’s a shorter version of my “science oratorio”, Lifetime. We open with a song called Mr Darwin, which tells the story of his historic voyage aboard the Beagle. Then there is Selfish Gene, a song referring to Richard Dawkins’s work, and Living Light, Queen Bee, Bacteria and Taxonomy.

Check out his song, Mister Darwin, below:

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Video: YouTube / greatplanthunt

In 2007, Canadian researchers amazed us with the discovery that plants can distinguish whether nearby plants are their siblings —in other words, if they’ve grown from seeds from the same source.

Now, University of Delaware professor Harsh Bais has identified just how plants do this: by secreting chemical signals to other plants.

Plants grow more horizontal roots when they’re in the presence of “strangers,” better enabling them to compete for necessary nutrients. However, when plants are near their “siblings,” they grew fewer roots—leaving researchers to think that plants don’t need to grow as many roots to survive when they know they’re among “kin.”

In a series of experiments, the researchers exposed young seedlings of Arabidopsis thaliana to the root secretions from their “siblings” as well as to those of “strangers.” When exposed to unfamiliar root secretions, the test plants grew more roots. However, when the plants were around kin, they “knew” that they would be competing for nutrients, so their roots didn’t grow as much. Additionally, when the researchers treated the first group of plants (the ones next to strangers) with sodium orthovanadate—a chemical that stops secretion but doesn’t stop roots from growing—the plants seemed to loose their sense of  “strangers.”

Physorg reports:

“Plants have no visible sensory markers, and they can’t run away from where they are planted,” Bais says. “It then becomes a search for more complex patterns of recognition…”

Bais says he and his colleagues also have noticed that as sibling plants grow next to each other, their leaves often will touch and intertwine compared to strangers that grow rigidly upright and avoid touching.

The study leaves a lot of unanswered questions that Bais hopes to explore further. How might sibling plants grown in large “monocultures,” such as corn or other major crop plants, be affected?

In a related study, when plants were planted next to “strangers,” their growth was stunted—because all their energy was spent growing more roots, the rest of the plant suffered. Siblings, on the other hand, fared better overall. So like humans, plants often do best when they’re among family.

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Images: flickr/ BlueRidgeKitties

Forgive them, Darwin, for they know not what they do. Former child star Kirk Cameron, known for his role on the incurably bubbly ’80s sitcom Growing Pains, has announced via Youtube a plan to subvert the 150th anniversary of the publishing of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. His brilliant plan? He wants to deliver 50,000 copies of an “altered version” of the book to students at dozens of U.S. universities. In other words, he wants to commit mass vandalism.

According to the Huffington Post:

Cameron explains that this “very special” edition of the “Origin of Species” will include an introduction explaining “Adolf Hitler’s undeniable connection” to the theory of evolution, and highlighting “Darwin’s racism” and “his disdain for women.” Cameron’s edition also exposes the “many hoaxes” of evolutionary theory, while presenting a “balanced view of Creationism.”

Watch the video here:

And for an excellent play-by-play response, watch this:

For more of the story, see HuffPo.

So size does matter: Taller men are happier than shorter men. They’re also blessed with fewer worries and don’t get as sad or angry.

If this upsets you, don’t blame the messenger: These results are based on a study out of Princeton University published in the journal of Economics and Human Biology. Angus Deaton, a professor of economics and international affairs, interviewed 454,000 people on the phone and asked them to judge their life on a scale of one to ten, with one being the “worst possible life for you” and ten the “best possible life for you.” Wouldn’t you know it, the researchers also noted each person’s height.

Based on the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale,  the team found that the taller respondents were happier, more educated, and richer. BBC reports:

Men who were above average height 5ft 10in (177.8cm) reported that they were standing higher on the ladder than men who were below average height.

They had an average ladder score of 6.55 compared to the shorter men who scored 6.41.

Women scored higher overall than men on the ladder scale and there was less difference between the taller and shorter women.

But psychologist Colin Gill makes a good point: While “there does appear to be a correlation between height and happiness and height and income,” being rich won’t make you happy on its own. It’s more complicated than that. Plus, the people who were happiest weren’t necessarily the tallest. So there’s that.

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Image: flickr/ netsoftdesign

Breaking news! Men become less intelligent when they’re trying to impress women they’d like to sleep with! A new study in the Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology found that “men who spend even a few minutes in the company of an attractive woman perform less well in tests designed to measure brain function” than men who talked to women they didn’t want to, er, mate with.

The Telegraph reports that the study, which consisted of 40 male heterosexual students, proceeded as follows:

Each one performed a standard memory test where they had to observe a stream of letters and say, as fast as possible, if each one was the same as the one before last.

The volunteers then spent seven minutes chatting to male or female members of the research team before repeating the test.

The results showed men were slower and less accurate after trying to impress the women. The more they fancied them, the worse their score.

And how did the other sex fare? When the test was repeated with a group of female volunteers, their memory scores stayed the same regardless of whether they’d chatted with a man or a woman.

The researchers even managed to come up with a somewhat scientific theory for why this occurred:

Researchers who carried out the study…think the reason may be that men use up so much of their brain function or “cognitive resources” trying to impress beautiful women, they have little left for other tasks.

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Image: iStockphoto

Are you religious, but find yourself with no time to pray? Then Information Age Prayer has the solution you need. For just $4.95 a month, this online service will have your prayers said for you.

The program uses text-to-speech synthesizers to say prayers in a voice designed to emulate the volume and speed of an average praying person. Choose from Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and if you’re unaffiliated, no problem! They’ve got options for you as well.

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David DeWitt takes his educational duties seriously. Each year, the biology “professor” and director of the Center for Creation Studies at Liberty University takes his class on a field trip.  Their destination is the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, where the students in his Advanced Creation Studies course can bolster their “biblical view of natural history” by viewing a “temple of evolution.” In other words, they’re going to check out the enemy.

Adding to the ludicrous quotient even more, DeWitt’s trips are part of a recent trend: Plenty of adult creationists are reportedly taking these so-called “creation vacations” too. While scientists and science-lovers everywhere were celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday, creationists saw the event as a chance to visit natural history museums, aquariums, geologic sites, and dinosaur parks to challenge evolution.

So what’s a trip to a museum like with a creationist? First, DeWitt’s class went through the fossil exhibit. His only complaint was that one of the films shown failed to discuss DNA, and only talked about amoeba. He bashed the film for being too ’80s, and called it “embarrassing” [ed. note: Oh the rich irony in that word choice].

When the class headed to the dinosaur exhibit, they had no objections—they don’t deny the existence of dinosaurs, they just believe that God created all animals on the sixth day. Never mind the fact that dinos first appeared 215 million years ago, and were wiped out about 65 million years ago. Or the plethora of fossil records  proving that birds descended from dinos.

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Though some believe humans have reached the dead-end of our evolutionary journey, small skink lizards (Lerista) seem to still be in the thick of it. Skink lizards already have elongated, snake-like bodies with relatively small, shrunken legs. Now, new research [pdf] finds that the lizards are giving up walking for good, and have been rapidly evolving away their limbs.

Adam Skinner of the University of Adelaide performed a genetic analysis on several species of skink lizards with different sized limbs. He found that there have been at least ten independent reductions in limbs throughout the lizards’ evolution, without any signs of reversal. Some species now have fewer digits (lizard fingers) while others have lost whole limbs. Complete loss of limbs could have occurred in as little as 3.6 millions years—a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.

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