Bloggingheads.tv: How Long Have Humans Been So Darn Smart? [Science Saturday]

Maybe not nearly as long as many anthropologists believe. That's the thesis of Gregory Cochran's controversial book, The 10,000 Year Explosion, which Gregory discusses with ScienceBlogger Razib Khan of Gene Expression in this week's Science Saturday. They also talk about how the evolution of lactose tolerance might explain why Indo-European languages are widespread, whether the invention of helmets changed our skulls, and the way in which survivors of the Black Plague were doubly lucky.

More like this

According to a report in the New York Times, frequently-used words evolve more slowly than rarely used ones: Some words evolve rapidly, with a result that there are many different word forms, what linguists call cognates, for meanings across languages. "Bird," for example, takes many disparate…
I recently posted about the work by Pagel and colleagues regarding ancient lexicons. That work, recently revived in the press for whatever reasons such things happen, is the same project reported a while back in Nature. And, as I recall, I read that paper and promised to blog about it but did not…
The t-shirts which depict the "ascent of man" from hairy semi-ape to upright Homo sapiens might make you think that human evolution has been trivial since the emergence of our own species. Modern genomics suggests this isn't so, selection coefficients on the order of 1-10% are probably rather…
A new paper came out in Science this week, Worldwide Human Relationships Inferred from Genome-Wide Patterns of Variation, that's getting some media play. The second-to-last author is L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, and the general combination of means and ends on display in The History and Geography of…

By this logic this economic downturn will only make us smarter. Global warming and the resulting crop destruction will elevate us to Nirvana.