Dissecting the origins and evolution of langauges, a presentation from last week’s Ignite Sydney event, by Google developer Pamela Fox.
English is particularly well known for borrowing words, with about 75% of our words coming from other languages – though mostly in the same indo european family. You could almost think of English as a language [...]

Bacteria and microbes don’t just make life unpleasant for their human and animal victims, they are also struggling among themselves for dominance.
In 1928, when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, the antibiotic produced by the bacteria of genus Penicillium, it seemed that a “miracle cure” for many diseases had been found. But rather than being a [...]

Positive selection may have boosted human evolution far more markedly than is realised in the last 5,000 years.
A team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks estimates that positive selection just in the past 5,000 years alone – dating back to the Stone Age – has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times [...]

A comparison of award winning design concepts in 2009 with that of 2000.
If designers are truly cultural shape-makers, why are we awarding the same thing we awarded almost ten years ago? Gladwell might suggest that we are suffering from an “illusion of control” where be believe so stridently in our past decisions, that “we overestimate [...]

From the New Scientist “Ten mysteries of you” series, some thoughts on the evolutionary function of creating artwork.
Another idea is that art is a social adaptation. Ellen Dissanayake at the University of Washington in Seattle suspects that it is all about making an object or event “special” by appealing to the emotions through, [...]

Stephen Hawking says humanity is rapidly approaching the point where we will be able to take control of our own evolution.
But we are now entering a new phase, of what Hawking calls “self designed evolution,” in which we will be able to change and improve our DNA. “At first,” he continues “these changes will be [...]

Dreams are the sub-conscious processes of our minds at work, and – if you ask me – those sub-conscious processes can be surprisingly perceptive… however I’m neither a psychologist or an evolutionary biologist, so my take on dreams probably isn’t all that scientific.
Harvard University psychologist Deirdre Barrett might have some answers for us. In a [...]

Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, looks at Earth’s future – particularly the next 100 years – which he regards as a crucial time period for humanity, while speculating about what may happen in the very distant future.
Ever since Darwin, we’ve been familiar with the stupendous timespans of the evolutionary past. But most people still somehow [...]

In the not too distant future artificial intelligence (AI) will enhance biological intelligence (in short, our brains) rather than, as per various science fiction scenarios, attempting to subdue or destroy humanity.
In a few decades, the average human brain will host billions of blood-cell-sized computers that will effectively multiply our biological intelligence a billion fold. This [...]

A review of “On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, cognition and fiction”, a book written by by Brian Boyd, professor of English at the University of Auckland, which examines the role of creating and telling stories or legends, and how they shaped “human cognition, cooperation and creativity”.
Elsewhere, though, Boyd does acknowledge that stories need both [...]