A discovery engine for meaningful knowledge, fueled by cross-disciplinary curiosity. A Brain Pickings project edited by Maria Popova in partnership with Noodle. Twitter: @explorer
Evolution … is the central, enabling process not only of life but also of knowledge and learning and understanding. If you attempt to make sense of the world of ideas and meanings, free will and morality, art and science and even philosophy itself without a sound and quite detailed knowledge of evolution, you have one hand tied behind your back.
The universal truths about vultures are, as every schoolchild knows, as follows: they have a bare head, a hooked beak, and long, broad wings, and they eat things they find dead. … So when, in the 1980s, the newly developed techniques for hybridizing strands of DNA revealed that the New World vultures may not be vultures at all but close relatives of the storks, it created something of a sensation.
[…]
What is perhaps most remarkable, however, is not that New and Old World vultures may not be related but that two possibly unrelated groups of birds have come to look so alike.
[…]
This similarity is the result of a process called convergent evolution. It’s the selective pressures of the lifestyle that shape an animal, not the shape of an animal that dictates the lifestyle — given sufficient time, that is. So when different animal groups share the same ecological niche independently of one another there is a tendency for them to reinvent the wheel, finding the same solutions to the same challenges and ultimately coming to look very much alike.
The Unfeathered Bird– remarkable anatomical illustrations of avians, contextualizing their equally remarkable evolution.
It makes sense because some researchers … speculate that wolves first became domesticated when people settled down and started farming.
The hungry wolves would have been attracted by their garbage dumps full of food scraps. But…to take advantage of this convenient new food supply, the wolves would have to adapt not just to being near people, but also to eating their food, which now included starchy grains and vegetables.
So any wolves who could digest starch would have had an advantage [and] today’s domesticated dogs are probably descended from them.
Fascinating NPR Morning Edition episode on how dogs evolved to love carbs in order to live with people. In the research paper published in this month’s Nature, the team behind the study notes:
…novel adaptations allowing the early ancestors of modern dogs to thrive on a diet rich in starch, relative to the carnivorous diet of wolves, constituted a crucial step in the early domestication of dogs.
More on the fascinating history of how dogs became domesticated here, and more on what they mean to us humans here.
When a human being runs, we have a tiny, little neck that emerges from the center of the base of our skull, and it’s very short in the middle. We’re basically like pogo sticks. We’ve lost, by becoming bipeds, all those mechanisms available to quadrupeds to keep their heads still. It turns out that we’ve evolved other special mechanisms to keep our heads still. One of them, the semicircular canals (the vestibular system in our heads) are especially enlarged, and give us enormous sensitivity to pitching forces, to pitching motions. The semicircular canals, the vestibular system are organs of balance that essentially function as an accelerometer. As your head pitches forward, as it does every time you hit the ground when you run, your head wants to pitch forward. As it pitches forward, the enlarged semicircular canals - these are the anterior and posterior ones, for anybody who actually cares - are especially large. That gives them greater gain in their sensitivity to angular accelerations. Which then, through a three-neuron circuit to our brain activates, without any conscious effort, the eye muscles that actually then stabilize the gaze. So even when your eyes are closed and you move your head, your eyes, the semicircular canals, through that three-neuron system operates those muscles, keeping your gaze stabilized. It’s that fundamental a system.
A team of Yale evolutionary ornithologists has drawn the first complete family tree for all known modern bird species, demonstrating an important and controversial new idea about biodiversity. Joe Hanson explains:
It was thought that any given species would expand and diversify quickly into subspecies (like the many different kinds of honeybees), soon maxing out its environment and filling all the ecological “niches”. Then, competition over limited resources would thin that down to the few most adaptable species. This tree says the opposite, that birds are continuing to diversify even today, and fast.
The center of this tree, anchoring branches built using fossil and DNA sequence data, reaches back nearly 50 million years, to the earliest days of birds branching off of dinosaurs.
Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. It is you get to something you don’t understand, and then you stop. You say, ‘God did it,’ and you no longer progress beyond that point.
You got an operation that enables you to take mental objects … already constructed … and make bigger mental objects out of them.
We Got Merge– Noam Chomsky on how a cognitive function called Merge sparked the evolution of language, plus how this parallels the origin of creativity.
“Your 185-millionth great-grandfather was a fish.”
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, originator of the world “meme,”explains why there was no such thing as a first human being in a short but mind-bending interview about his children’s book on evolution, The Magic of Reality.
![The universal truths about vultures are, as every schoolchild knows, as follows: they have a bare head, a hooked beak, and long, broad wings, and they eat things they find dead. … So when, in the 1980s, the newly developed techniques for hybridizing strands of DNA revealed that the New World vultures may not be vultures at all but close relatives of the storks, it created something of a sensation.
[…]
What is perhaps most remarkable, however, is not that New and Old World vultures may not be related but that two possibly unrelated groups of birds have come to look so alike.
[…]
This similarity is the result of a process called convergent evolution. It’s the selective pressures of the lifestyle that shape an animal, not the shape of an animal that dictates the lifestyle — given sufficient time, that is. So when different animal groups share the same ecological niche independently of one another there is a tendency for them to reinvent the wheel, finding the same solutions to the same challenges and ultimately coming to look very much alike.
The Unfeathered Bird – remarkable anatomical illustrations of avians, contextualizing their equally remarkable evolution.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/bcf067e852948781ead04e930d873e12/tumblr_mhp6ygYkbQ1rqpa8po1_500.jpg)
