What science actually says about human evolution
Claims about scientific rigour require rigour
Nature Human Behaviour - Claims about scientific rigour require rigour
The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter
How our collective intelligence has helped us to evolve and prosperHumans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? This book shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains—on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations.Drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, mobile hunter-gatherers, neuroscientific findings, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species' genetic evolution and shaped our biology. Our early capacities for learning from others produced many cultural innovations, such as fire, cooking, water containers, plant knowledge, and projectile weapons, which in turn drove the expansion of our brains and altered our physiology, anatomy, and psychology in crucial ways. Later on, some collective brains generated and recombined powerful concepts, such as the lever, wheel, screw, and writing, while also creating the institutions that continue to alter our motivations and perceptions. Henrich shows how our genetics and biology are inextricably interwoven with cultural evolution, and how culture-gene interactions launched our species on an extraordinary evolutionary trajectory.Tracking clues from our ancient past to the present, The Secret of Our Success explores how the evolution of both our cultural and social natures produce a collective intelligence that explains both our species' immense success and the origins of human uniqueness.
Guest post: If you’re going to critique science, be scientific about it
Loren K. Mell Editor’s note: This post responds to a Feb. 13 article in The Atlantic, “The Scientific Literature Can’t Save Us Now,” written by Retraction Watch cofounders Adam Marcus and Ivan Oran…
Ramin Saadat, Reasoning: From Biological Foundations to the Hidden Thread of Shared Understanding - PhilArchive
This paper investigates the nature and origins of human reasoning by synthesizing insights from classical philosophy, evolutionary biology, and contemporary neuroscience. Moving beyond the Aristotelian definition of zoon logon echon, which ...
Sapiens [Tenth Anniversary Edition]: A Brief History of Humankind
New York Times Readers’ Pick: Top 100 Books of the 21st CenturyThe tenth anniversary edition of the internationally bestselling phenomenon that cemented Yuval Noah Harari as one of the most prominent historians of our time—featuring a new afterword from the author.One hundred thousand years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations, and human rights; to trust money, books, and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables, and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?In Sapiens, Professor Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical—and sometimes devastating—breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural, and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, paleontology, and economics, and incorporating full-color illustrations throughout the text, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Can we ever free our behavior from the legacy of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come?Bold, wide-ranging, and provocative, Sapiens integrates history and science to challenge everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our heritage...and our future.
RJ Moreau 🇧🇹 on Twitter / X
Teilhard de Chardin saw Julian Huxley as an important ally: as head of UNESCO, Huxley could institutionalize their vision. His founding plan called for global eugenic education to unify consciousness & guide mankind's biological and cultural evolution toward a transhuman future. https://t.co/VtsejosxAz pic.twitter.com/WTQ5EPKS3W— RJ Moreau 🇧🇹 (@toxictiramisu) March 17, 2026
Speculations on the Future of the Scientific Method
The following essay was published 20 years ago (January, 2006) on my blog The Technium. I edited the intro here, but the speculations are basically unchanged.
Prof. Lee Cronin on Twitter / X
It is easy to see that biology does things that cannot be computed in advanced because the future is not controlled by statistics, it is controlled by creative actions. This means today’s statistically-driven GenAI is fundamentally unintelligent.— Prof. Lee Cronin (@leecronin) March 28, 2026
Links between the discovery of primates and anatomical comparisons with humans, the chain of being, our place in nature, and racism
- For more than a millennium humans knew more about the internal anatomy of a single monkey species than about that of their own bodies, because Galen used monkeys to infer human anatomy, in line wit...
Richard McElreath Director Department of Human Behavior, Ecology, and Culture [link] Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology [link]
He Was Right About AI. Is He Right About the Fate of Humans?
Hans Moravec predicted human-level AI by 2028. Now he contemplates our species’ end—and his own.
Andreas De Block on Twitter / X
It took Nature three years to publish this rebuttal, which clearly demonstrates the fundamental flaws in the original paper. In the meantime, the paper's conclusions influenced scientific debate and policy decisions. Such delays in correcting flawed research do real damage. https://t.co/QI3Ei3PE70— Andreas De Block (@DeblockBlock) August 13, 2026
Evolution
Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. It occurs when evolutionary processes such as genetic drift and natural selection act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. The process of evolution has given rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organisation.
Genetic Information: A Metaphor In Search of a Theory
John Maynard Smith has defended against philosophical criticism the view that developmental biology is the study of the expression of information encoded in the genes by natural selection. However, like other naturalistic concepts of information, this “teleosemantic” concept is equally applicable to many non-genetic factors in development. Maynard Smith also fails to show that developmental biology is concerned with teleosemantic information. Some other ways to support Maynard Smith's conclusion are considered. It is argued that on any definition of information the view that development is the expression of genetic information is misleading. Some reasons for the popularity of that view are suggested.