Science Writing Tries to Smash Human Exceptionalism

Africa, Amanda Richardson, animal behavior, antiquity, BBC News, Bronze Age, chimpanzees, Claire Asher, Côte D’Ivoire, Culture & Ethics, England, Homo sapiens, human exceptionalism, human mind, humans, Ice Age, Merlin, metal tools, monkeys, Neuroscience & Mind, New Stone Age, paleontology, polar bears, Royal BC Museum, Salisbury, Stone Age, stone tools, vultures, walruses
Stone tool use among animals versus the Stone Age provides a useful illustration of the tendency. Source
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Getting Stoned: Did It Shape Human Origins?

abstract thinking, anthropology, Aristotle, behavior, Big Think, Bobby Azarian, consciousness, Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Evolution, evolutionary psychology, Food of the Gods, human mind, Human Origins, magic mushrooms, Neuroscience & Mind, neuroscientists, New Stoned Ape Theory, panpsychism, psilocybin, Roger Penrose, Stone Age, Stoned Ape Theory, Terence McKenna
For a really wild excursion, nothing beats efforts to explain the evolution of the human mind. Source
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The Joy of (Neanderthal) Cooking

archaeologists, birds, bison, Casey Luskin, cave bears, cave lions, cooking, Darwinian theory, Evolution, flint flake, food processing, Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, horses, hot coals, human mind, Human Origins, Mariana Nabais, Neanderthals, Neuroscience & Mind, Portugal, reindeer, roasting, The Descent of Man, wolves, ZME Science
The Darwinian account of the human race would be much easier to believe in good faith if scientists could point to a clearly inferior and clearly human being. Source
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Is Darwinian Philosopher Daniel Dennett the End of an Era?

atheists, Christof Koch, Commentary, Consciousness Explained, Dan Falk, Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Darwinians, David Berlinski, David Chalmers, Evolution, human mind, John Horgan, materialists, Nautilus, Neuroscience & Mind, Richard Dawkins, The Deniable Darwin, Uncommon Dissent, William Dembski
Dennett’s image of the human mind as a user-illusion was very fashionable but it never made any sense. Source
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Brain as a Quantum System: Theory Gets New Traction

Al Gore, anesthesiologists, Astonishing Hypothesis, behavior, Bill Clinton, birds, brain tissue, consciousness, Dorje C. Brody, Francis Crick, George Musser, human mind, internal compass, materialism, Medicine, neurons, Neuroscience & Mind, New Scientist, Orch Or Theory, organoids, proteins, Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, quantum computation, Roger Penrose, Stuart Hameroff, Trinity College Dublin, University of Surrey
Hameroff and Penrose’s Orch Or Theory sees consciousness as the outcome of a quantum collapse of a wave function. Source
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Science, Scripture, and the Image of God

A. R. Hall, Bible, Christianity, Christopher Kaiser, Creation and the History of Science, creator, Culture & Ethics, Faith & Science, history, How the West Won, human mind, humans, image of God, Intelligent Design, intelligent designer, intelligible order, lawgiver, logos, Museum of the Bible, natural world, Rodney Stark, The Scientific Revolution 1500-1800
"The proposition that the universe had an Intelligent Designer is the most fundamental of all scientific theories." Source
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Much Ado About Lactase Persistence

adulthood, Bethlehem, cattle, Darwin Devolves, Darwinian mechanism, devolution, elephants, eukaryotic cells, Evolution, genetic code, human mind, Isaac Newton, lactase, lactase persistence, lactose, loss-of-FCT, loss-of-functional-coded-element, metabolism, milk, molecular machines, mutations, nucleotides, Pennsylvania, physics, science, sugar, weaning, weather, worms
Nothing shows the feebleness of Darwinism quite so much as breathless stories about brand new results. This week the topic was “lactase persistence.” Source
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