Not a bad documentary*.  “Teach the controversy” isn’t the worst principle – though legislating that it be taught in science classrooms is a slippery-slope nightmare. Has a tendency to take the dumbest arguments of the intelligent design movement and say they represent the whole.  I don’t know all the criticisms of the Intelligent Design movement, [...]

The first sign that humans are on the verge of evolving into another species

What Carlson’s work suggests is that species whose brains are evolving fairly rapidly – hello, Homo sapiens – are likely candidates for speciation under the right circumstances. The key with the elephantfish seemed to be rapid evolution in the brain’s ability to [...]

Interesting article about the evolutionary role of depression (via Philip Heying):
For Darwin, depression was a clarifying force, focusing the mind on its most essential problems. In his autobiography, he speculated on the purpose of such misery; his evolutionary theory was shadowed by his own life story. “Pain or suffering of any kind,” [...]

I haven’t read this book, but it looks interesting:
Costa pulls headline for today’s news to demonstrate how accelerating complexity quickly outpaces that rate at which the human brain can develop new capabilities. With compelling evidenced based on research in the rise and fall of Mayan, Khmer, and Roman empires, Costa shows how the tendency to [...]

This study about 9-11 and the brain is fascinating with some pretty serious implications:
In one of her recent studies on reactions to 9/11, Ganzel and colleagues scanned the brains of people in this resilient group, between three and four years after they had experienced the attacks up close. When those people looked [...]