ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 579
January 24, 2016
How Time Could Move Backwards In Parallel Universes
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If time doesn't exist, then you've never been late in your life. Think about that. lassedesignen/Shutterstock
Understanding time is one of the big open questions of physics, and it has puzzled philosophers throughout history. What is time? Why does it appear to have a direction? The concept is defined as the “arrow of time,” which is used to indicate that time is asymmetric – even though most laws of the universe are perfectly symmetric.
A potential explanation for this has now been put forward. Physicist Sean Carroll from CalTech and cosmologist Alan Guth from MIT created a simulation that shows that arrows of time can arise naturally from a perfectly symmetric system of equations.
Man Frozen Under Snow For Hours Is Brought Back To Life
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Justin Smith's case is a first in medical science. Lehigh Valley Health Network
A 25-year-old man, frozen within a snow drift, has been “brought back to life” by doctors after they initially thought he was dead. Justin Smith was ice-cold to the touch, and paramedics assumed he had succumbed to severe hypothermia. However, as reported by The Washington Post, after a last-ditch effort to restart his heart, he was saved against all odds in a first for medical science.
“Iron Giant” Spotted From An Airplane Window
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Nick O'Donoghue/Reddit
While passing the time, looking out of an airplane window, Nick O'Donoghue saw a pretty awesome sight – a part Michelin man, part Iron Giant, and part water vapor formation taking a lonely trek across the plains of clouds.
O'Donoghue, 30 from Ireland, captured the shot on a short-haul flight from Austria to London. After noticing the bizarre resemblance to a giant walking man, he got out his camera and took a photograph out of the window.
The Science Behind Why You Love A Weekend Lie-In
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Shutterstock
Sleeping in over the weekend is one of life’s great pleasures. Yet some of us are much better at it than others. A teenager is much more likely to emerge from their bed at midday than their middle-aged parents – but even within age groups, individual differences exist.
Unbelievably Cute Polar Bear Cub Takes Some Shaky Steps
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Toronto Zoo/YouTube
Polar bears are pretty ferocious creatures, sitting proudly among the biggest carnivores on Earth's surface. Standing on their hind legs, a fully grown male can reach over 3 meters (10 feet) tall and won’t hesitate to take a chunk out of a human.
These Spiders Create 50,000-Strong Armies In The Peruvian Rainforest
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Bernard DUPONT/Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0
You probably think of spiders as solitary creatures, sitting alone in their webs like a surly miser. But the arachnophobes among you won’t be pleased to learn there’s actually a species of spider that enjoys creeping around with tens of thousands of comrades.
Reed Warblers Form “Neighborhood Watch” To Spot Cuckoos
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A cuckoo chick ejecting a reed warbler egg from a warbler nest. Richard Nicoll
A common cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) female lays her egg in the nest of another bird, and after it hatches, the cuckoo chick typically pushes out the host bird’s own eggs. But now, communities of reed warblers (Acrocephalus scirpaceus) have developed a "neighborhood watch" in their marshlands to keep would-be victims up to date with the latest parasitic cuckoo threats.
Almost 4,000 Babies Born With Malformed Heads Amid Zika Epidemic
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Zika virus is now associated with the birth defect microcephaly. AuntSpray/Shutterstock
The growing evidence that the emerging Zika virus is linked with a rare developmental disorder is disturbing. In Brazil, the worst-hit country of the climbing epidemic, almost 4,000 babies have been born with abnormally small heads since investigations began in October, the Associated Press reports. That’s almost a 2,500 percent increase on the figure for all of 2014, which was 150 babies.
January 22, 2016
What We’re Reading
From flooding in Florida to digging into the evolution of dogs, this week’s reading contains plenty of big issues, so you may not really need the magnifying glass—although the glass of beer (or is it cola?) may still be welcome!
The Siege of Miami, The New Yorker, December 21 and 28, 2015 — A report from the field on current flooding problems due to the combination of high tides and sea level rise, from the author of The Sixth Extinction .
Noah’s Ark Rises in Kentucky, Dinosaurs and All, Newsweek, January 16, 2016 — The story that enraged Ken Ham! Bill Nye gets the last word: “it might not be so bad if the ark park goes the way of the Titanic.”
Cancer and Climate Change, The New York Times, January 16, 2016 — A moving op-ed by a climate scientist considering his final days, his devotion to his work, and his thoughts on our future in a warming world.
The Big Search to Find Out Where Dogs Come From, The New York Times, January 19, 2016 — James Gorman reports on the ambitious new project to make sense of the evolution of dogs, from their domestication fifteen thousand years ago.
American Homes Are Filled with Bugs, The Atlantic, January 19, 2016 — If you don’t share “an inordinate fondness for beetles,” don’t read Ed Yong’s report on new research on the arthropod diversity of your home.
When We’re Sixty Four (Thousand), Telliamed Revisited, January 21, 2016 — The E. coli of Richard Lenski’s long-term experimental evolution project channel the Beatles in their serenade to their researchers.
Why Big Blizzards in Winter Don’t Disprove Global Warming, ThinkProgress, January 22, 2016 — With input from Michael Mann and Kevin Trenberth, Joe Romm explains that climate change and “snowmageddons” go hand in hand.
Prehistoric Carnage Site Is Evidence of Earliest Warfare
In 2012 the remains of 27 hunter–gatherers were unearthed in a remote part of Kenya called Nataruk near Lake Turkana—many of whom, based on the startling state of their bony remnants, died horrifically violent deaths. Skulls were bashed in with blunt objects; knees and hands bound and broken. Razor-sharp obsidian spear tips were found lodged in two of the skeletons.
After exhuming and carbon-dating the skeletons, researchers from the University of Cambridge Leverhulme Center for Human Evolutionary Studies have published their findings in this week’s Nature, reporting that the remains are estimated to be from between 9,500 and 10,500 years ago, making it the earliest scientifically dated evidence of organized human violence among scavenging humans. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)
Whereas other recent evidence suggests that hunter–gatherer conflicts resulted in the men being slayed while women and children were assimilated to the victorious group, the winners of this conflict were considerably less discerning. At least eight of the victims were female—including one carrying a six- to nine-month-old fetus—five were children and one was a teenager.
Although the recent discovery is the oldest for hunter–gatherers, it is not the oldest find of large-scale human violence—currently that title goes to remains discovered in the 1960s at the Jebel Sahaba site in Sudan, which could be up to 13,000 years old. Researchers say, however, that although the Sudan site is probably older, the dating methods were not as reliable as the one used for this new study. Also, many of those remains were found in what appeared to be a cemetery and could have accumulated over many years. “The significance of Nataruk lies partly in its early age but particularly in the fact that it is evidence of a single event,” explains professor of human evolution Robert Foley, who co-authored the new paper with his Cambridge colleague evolutionary biologist Marta Mirazón Lahr.
This skeleton was that of a young woman, who was pregnant at the time of her death. She was found in a sitting position, with the hands crossed between her legs. The position of the body suggests that the hands and feet may have been bound.
Illustration by Marta Mirazon Lahr
Foley also points out that the new findings suggest that group violence occurred among people whose way of life was nomadic and often fought for resources as opposed to—as the Jebel Sahaba cemetery implies—an established community where territories and allotment of possessions and properties were more clearly identified “This shows that even under hunter–gatherer conditions, conflicts between groups became serious enough for this level of killing,” Foley says.
His point is significant, given that one school of anthropological thought holds that coordinated conflict, and eventually what we would call warfare, only arose with the settlement of land and a sense of proprietorship over resources. This thinking, as Foley points out, traces back to the idea of the “noble savage” being uncorrupted by civilization, a phrase which first appeared in English in John Dryden's 1672 play The Conquest of Granada and which is often misattributed to 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Yet violence predating advances like agriculture is more in line with a perhaps disheartening counterview in anthropology—one echoing English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s idea that war and violence toward one another is the natural state of mankind—positing that conflict among humans and our predecessors has deep evolutionary roots that exist independently of cultural advance. “This is an important discovery because it provides crucial data to answer a long-standing debate about whether warfare predates agriculture,” comments Luke Glowacki, a Harvard University anthropologist who studies the evolutionary roots of violence. “This new study shows that warfare can and did occur in the absence of agriculture and complex social organization. It fills in important gaps in our understanding of the human propensity for violence and suggests a continuum between chimpanzee raiding and full-blown human warfare.”
Although the recently discovered fallen Africans are thought to have lived a mobile existence, there is evidence that they were at least somewhat situated. Nataruk at the time abutted a fertile lagoon and would have been ripe with valuable resources like water and seafood. Also pottery was found at the site, which among early hunter–gatherers is, as Rutgers University anthropology professor Brian Ferguson points out, “usually associated with increased sedentism, food storage and heightened social complexity. It’s possible that the Lake Turkana victims were ensconced in a particularly productive locale, and those who massacred them came from somewhere much worse off.
“There is probably little doubt that settling down and giving up a nomadic way of life would have intensified the probability of violence between groups,” Foley says. “For most hunter–gatherers, mobility was a strategy for avoiding such conflicts. However, if one looks at chimpanzees we see similar levels of intergroup conflict, and that might be an indication that it has a deeper ancestry in our evolutionary past.”
To this point, Glowacki explains that studies looking at more modern hunter–gathers also suggest that humans probably have some deep-rooted tendency toward violence. “[Early] wars occur even in cases without resource competition,” he says. “In fact, resource abundance rather than competition sometimes contributes to increasing intensity of warfare because individuals are freed from worrying about providing for their basic subsistence needs.”
Foley feels that a contributor to this violent tendency in humans and our ancestors might be, ironically, the same development that allows for altruism and compassion—that is, cooperation. “I can see violent attacks as deriving from the ability of humans to form groups with high levels of solidarity—put simple, between-group rivalry may have come with group coordination and sociality.”
Unfortunately, as Nataruk and other instances of prehistoric group carnage suggest, friendship and ferocity seem to go hand in hand.
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