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Early humans gained energy budget by increasing rate of energy acquisition, not energy-saving adaptation
Early humans gained energy budget by increasing rate of energy acquisition, not energy-saving adaptation
A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in the U.S., the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany has found evidence that suggests early humans gained an energy budget by increasing their rate of energy acquisition, not by taking advantage of adaptive strategies. In their paper published in the journal Science, they describe their study of energy expenditure versus energy intake in early humans.
In this new effort, the researchers noted that humans long ago diverged in significant ways from the other great apes. They wondered how this happened and decided to look at energy intake and expenditure. People and other animals have to put in a certain amount of work (expenditure) to receive an energy intake. Climbing a tree to fetch a banana is a simple example. The amount of energy required to climb a tree far outweighs the potential benefit of eating a single banana. But if a single person is able to throw down multiple bananas, then the overall energy intake may surpass the effort of climbing a tree a single time…
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Climate Change & How It Has Made Us Who We Are Today
All we ever hear is how Climate Change is caused by humans and it will destroy the world. They have been yelling that New Orleans and Miami will be UNDER WATERwithin the next century as rising sea levels put more than 400 US cities ‘past the point of no return’ unless we suddenly raise taxes and hand the power to government to change the climate. In Princeton, New Jersey, the actual construction of the Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library was set in motion at the University. Excavation begun January 2, 1946, and the building opened for use on September 7, 1949. This was where I conducted my research that produced the Economic Confidence Model.
The excavation for the underground floors of the Firestone Library was difficult. In the spring of 1946, a group of Princeton geologists found fossils from fish of the late Triassic Age in a section of shale. The fossils, which had been buried there for 175 million years, were amazingly well-preserved and revealed new details about the prehistoric fish. This site proved one of the richest grounds for finding Triassic fish fossils in the world. The fossils were sent to museums. Clearly, most of New Jersey was under water before. The Global Warming crowd made it seem that we are responsible for everything – not nature. New Jersey was once below sea-level.
An interesting book Climate Change in Prehistory: The End of the Reign of Chaos, is documenting how humankind dealt with the extreme challenges of the last Ice Age and climate change the Global Warming people ignore. Climate change has affected the evolution of humankind and is responsible for spreading humanity across the globe. Our genetic history in the context of climate change during prehistory, reveals another dimension to the argument.
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Wisdom: Re-Tuning for a Sustainable Future
Mankind achieved civilization by developing and learning to follow rules that often forbade to do what his instincts demanded…Man is not born wise, rational and good, but has to be taught to become so. Man became intelligent because there was tradition (habits) between instinct and reason…
Friedrich Hayek
The Fatal Conceit, 1988
Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate, or the integrity of our public officials.
Robert Kennedy
Speech, University of Kansas, March 18, 1968
Below is a slightly adapted excerpt from The Well-Tuned Brain: Neuroscience and the Life Well Lived by Peter C. Whybrow, MD.
It is abundantly clear that humanity must shift its modern view of progress and relationship with nature if we are to have any hope of living sustainably on this planet. But in completing the jigsaw essential to reimagining progress, and regaining balance within the natural ecology, it is necessary to understand the roles that biological and cultural evolution play. In our social evolution as a species, biology and culture run on parallel tracks, but they do so at different speeds. Thus biology, quickly and disruptively, can be outpaced by cultural change. As I have detailed in The Well-Tuned Brain, a significant number of the challenges that we face in the developed world are rooted in this mismatch.
To better grasp how this puzzle comes together, I take you back to a primary source of knowledge about evolution. In the Pacific Ocean, straddling the Equator approximately 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador is found the Galápagos archipelago. This remote collection of volcanic islands, as Charles Darwin described them when he traveled there, is “a little world within itself.”
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Darwin’s Casino
Darwin’s Casino
Our age has no shortage of curious features, but for me, at least, one of the oddest is the way that so many people these days don’t seem to be able to think through the consequences of their own beliefs. Pick an ideology, any ideology, straight across the spectrum from the most devoutly religious to the most stridently secular, and you can count on finding a bumper crop of people who claim to hold that set of beliefs, and recite them with all the uncomprehending enthusiasm of a well-trained mynah bird, but haven’t noticed that those beliefs contradict other beliefs they claim to hold with equal devotion.
I’m not talking here about ordinary hypocrisy. The hypocrites we have with us always; our species being what it is, plenty of people have always seen the advantages of saying one thing and doing another. No, what I have in mind is saying one thing and saying another, without ever noticing that if one of those statements is true, the other by definition has to be false. My readers may recall the way that cowboy-hatted heavies in old Westerns used to say to each other, “This town ain’t big enough for the two of us;” there are plenty of ideas and beliefs that are like that, but too many modern minds resemble nothing so much as an OK Corral where the gunfight never happens.
An example that I’ve satirized in an earlier post here is the bizarre way that so many people on the rightward end of the US political landscape these days claim to be, at one and the same time, devout Christians and fervid adherents of Ayn Rand’s violently atheist and anti-Christian ideology. The difficulty here, of course, is that Jesus tells his followers to humble themselves before God and help the poor, while Rand told hers to hate God, wallow in fantasies of their own superiority, and kick the poor into the nearest available gutter.
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