Salon.com > Darwin

Happy birthday, Charles Darwin

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 18:56:00 +0000

Did you know that today is Charles Darwin Day? In honor of the evolutionary biologist's birthday, people around the world hold lectures, share research and generally make merry about one of history's greatest thinkers.

But not everyone feels like celebrating on Feb. 12. Who? Glad you asked!

[slide_show id=13198742]

Can evolution explain the human mind?

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 18:42:00 +0000

In the September 17th issue of The New Yorker, Anthony Gottlieb analyzes "Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature," a new book by David Barash, a psychology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. Gottlieb’s article is more than just a book review—it’s also the latest in a long line of critiques of evolutionary psychology, the study of the brain, mind and behavior in the context of evolution.

Was ancient man a vegetarian?

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 23:23:00 +0000

Right now, one half of all Americans are on a diet. The other half just gave up on their diets and are on a binge. Collectively, we are overweight, sick and struggling. Our modern choices about what and how much to eat have gone terribly wrong. The time has come to return to a more sensible way of eating and living, but which way? An entire class of self-help books recommends a return to the diets of our ancestors. Paleolithic diets, caveman diets, primal diets and the like, urge us to eat like the ancients. Taken too literally, such diets are ridiculous. After all, sometimes our ancestors starved to death and the starving to death diet, well, it ends badly. The past was no panacea; each generation we made do with the bodies and foods available, imperfect bodies and imperfect foods. Yet, the idea that we might take our ancestral diet into consideration when evaluating the foods on which our organs, cells and existence thrive, makes sense. But what did our ancestors eat?

Sharing is in our nature

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 11:45:00 +0000

You have turned to evolutionary biology and anthropology to help understand the development of economic institutions and behaviour. Why are they important in helping us get to grips with today’s complex and fast-moving world?

They are important because we are a species like any other and have this wonderful construction, which is the society we’ve built. It’s as wonderful, or more so even, as the extraordinary nests built by ants and termites or the incredible song and other behavioural patterns of birds. I’ve always thought that if we take animals seriously as producing behaviour and not just bodies, then we should do the same for ourselves. We should see our behaviour as coming out of the constraints of our environment and the adaptations that have developed in the history of our species.

It used to be fashionable to think that genes, and indeed the process of natural selection, affected our bodies but not our minds. We’ve come to realise that that’s untrue and that our minds are profoundly shaped by natural selection – even if the environment we now live in is massively different from the one in which most of that evolution took place. So you can learn a lot from the fact that our minds are not just any old general purpose computer. They are actually shaped by evolution, though we have to remember that the circumstances in which we evolved are startlingly different from the circumstances in which we now have to navigate.