The ID Report
Archives for: March 2011, 16
03/16/11
Coffee!!: You co-operate with unrelated individuals because you are a hunter-gatherer
Here Michael Marshall, (New Scientist 10 March 2011) we are told, “Fluid societies powered human evolutionâ€:
Human hunter-gatherer societies swap members more flexibly than groups of other animals do. That could help explain why humans developed such powerful brains and advanced technology, while chimpanzees didn't.Big surprise. From what I have heard from the "Apes r' Us" crowd about chimp "societies", most females would be better off in an animal shelter run by caring, 'intelligent people. At the shelter, at least, abuse is labelled as such, and may even be actionable.People have been hunter-gatherers for almost all our 200,000-year history, so modern hunter-gatherer societies are a window on our past, argues Kim Hill of Arizona State University in Tempe.
Hill and colleagues gathered census information on 32 hunter-gatherer societies around the world. In all of them, both males and females could leave the group into which they were born for another, or could remain. In typical animal societies, only one sex disperses like this; in chimps it is normally the females.
Because of the mixed dispersal, many members of a hunter-gatherer society are unrelated. Hill says this could explain our willingness to cooperate with unrelated individuals.
However, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy of the University of California, Davis, is not convinced that human societies are as unique as Hill claims. Some other species may extend cooperation to non-kin, she says. And humans are not the only species, nor the only primate, in which either sex may sometimes disperse. Howler monkeys are one example of a primate that behaves this way, she says – but their societies are less well-studied.Hmmm. I think any human would disperse pretty quickly, given an opportunity, whether the species is well-studied or not.
See what happens? In the frenzy to deny human exceptionalism, people sail gloriously past common sense about how we all behave, based on the use of reason, into uncharted, unchartable waters. Most is paywalled, but for once, that is just as well.
Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.
The ID Report
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| << < | > >> | |||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
| 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
| 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 |
| 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |||
Search
Categories
Archives
- January 2012 (1)
- December 2011 (20)
- November 2011 (29)
- October 2011 (36)
- September 2011 (29)
- August 2011 (35)
- July 2011 (28)
- June 2011 (26)
- May 2011 (23)
- April 2011 (23)
- March 2011 (25)
- February 2011 (26)
- more...
Linkblog
Links - Groups and Organizations
- Access Research Network
- Discovery Institute
- Evolution News Blog
Evolution has become a favorite topic of the news media recently, but for some reason, they never seem to get the story straight. The staff at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture started this Blog to set the record straight and make sure you knew "the rest of the story".
- Intelligent Design Network (IDNet)
- Intelligent Design Undergraduate Research Center
- Intelligent Reasoning
A blogger from New England offers his intelligent reasoning.
- International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID)
- Telic Thoughts
We are a group of individuals, coming from diverse backgrounds and not speaking for any organization, who have found common ground around teleological concepts, including intelligent design. We think these concepts have real potential to generate insights about our reality that are being drowned out by political advocacy from both sides. We hope this blog will provide a small voice that helps rectify this situation.
- The Design Inference - The Writings of William A. Dembski
- The Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center (IDEA)
- www.themonkeytrial.com
Website dedicated to comparing scenes from the "Inherit the Wind" movie with factual information from actual Scopes Trial. View 37 clips from the movie and decide for yourself if this movie is more fact or fiction.
Links - Of General Interest
- A Brief View of Time and Those That Live There
Don Cicchetti blogs on: Culture, Music, Faith, Intelligent Design, Guitar, Audio
- A Quick Guide to Sequenced Genomes
- ARN Related Web Links
- Creation/Evolution Quotes
Australian biologist Stephen E. Jones maintains one of the best origins "quote" databases around. He is meticulous about accuracy and working from original sources.
- CreationEvolutionDesign
Most guys going through midlife crisis buy a convertible. Austrialian Stephen E. Jones went back to college to get a biology degree and is now a proponent of ID and common ancestry.
- Darwinian Fairytales by David Stove
Complete zipped downloadable pdf copy of David Stove's devastating, and yet hard-to-find, critique of neo-Darwinism entitled "Darwinian Fairytales"
- ID The Future
Intelligent Design The Future is a multiple contributor weblog whose participants include the nation's leading design scientists and theorists: biochemist Michael Behe, mathematician William Dembski, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, philosophers of science Stephen Meyer, and Jay Richards, philosopher of biology Paul Nelson, molecular biologist Jonathan Wells, and science writer Jonathan Witt. Posts will focus primarily on the intellectual issues at stake in the debate over intelligent design, rather than its implications for education or public policy.
- John Mark Reynolds Blog
A Philosopher's Journey: Political and cultural reflections of John Mark N. Reynolds. Dr. Reynolds is Director of the Torrey Honors Institute at
Biola University.
- NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
Misc
Syndicate this blog 
What is RSS?
powered by
Original template design by François PLANQUE.
