The ability to engage in a culture jump started human animals

What gives human animals such an advantage over so many other animals? Culture is the answer according to Susan Okie at TruthDig, commenting on a new book by Mark Pagel:

About 45,000 years ago, members of our species, Homo sapiens, reached Europe after earlier migrations out of Africa via the Middle East. The newcomers’ arrival must have come as a shock to the Neanderthals, a separate human species who had inhabited Europe for some 300,000 years. As Pagel notes, the new arrivals “would have carried a baffling and frightening array of technologies”—not only new kinds of weapons and tools, but also perhaps sewn clothes, musical instruments and carved figures. “It would have been like a scene from a science fiction story of a people confronted by a superior alien race.” The aliens likely didn’t owe their advantages to dramatically superior genes, but to a development, some 40,000 years prior to their arrival in Europe. Something happened that had immensely speeded up their ability to learn, adapt and acquire new strategies for taking over the planet: Homo sapiens had acquired culture.

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Looking at galaxies

You could spend many hours at the Hubble site, viewing the photos of distant places--places that are so far away that you become an extraordinary space and time traveler whenever you view these images. The photo below is that of M51 - "The Whirlpool Galaxy." Out of This Whirl: the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) and Companion Galaxy Source: Hubblesite.org How many sentient beings living in M51 are currently viewing the Milky Way Galaxy and wondering how many people there are viewing them? That thought motivated the SETI movement and the Drake equation.

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Morality without religion

In this TED talk, primatologist Frans de Waal asserts that human morality has evolved, and that the existence of morality doesn’t depend on religion. He observes that “humans are far more cooperative and empathic than they are given credit for,” and that they are, in many ways similar to other primates. From de Waal’s experiments, one can learn that chimpanzees (who have no religion) often reconcile with one another after fights. The principle “is that you have a valuable relationship that is damaged by conflict so you need to do something about it.” What are the “pillars of morality,” that which morality is based on? Reciprocity (fairness) and Empathy (compassion) are two constants. He indicates that human morality includes more than these two factors, but not much more. Check out the beautiful 1935 video of chimpanzees at the 3:35 min mark; they cooperate in synchronized fashion to pull in a heavy box of fruit. Then check out at 4:20 what happens when one of the two chimps is not hungry, thus not motivated to work hard. This is incredible footage that will remind you of a species you often see in the mirror. What makes the uninterested chimp to work at all, according to de Waal, is receipt of a past or a future favor, i.e., reciprocity. [More . . . ]

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Laughing at silly old record album covers.

Have you ever seen this collection of record album covers that are no longer cool ... No longer hip ... Or are they no longer funky, rakish, chic, ultracool or spiffy? You see, even the words for fashionable go out of fashion. And as we chuckle at these album covers, there is something a bit uneasy about what we're doing. Yes, some of these covers were failures from Day One, but others have that high school yearbook thing going on--they look silly to us because they have elements of oldness to them that should remind us that no matter how fashion-tuned we are, some of the photos of us will someday be snidely chuckled at. If not our clothes, it will be our phone or our food or our method of transportation or the type of gadget we use for playing our music. The only constant is that everything is social.

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A new generation of batteries as the missing link to robust renewable energy

Donald Sadoway, a professor at MIT, has helped develop a new type of battery, and he proposes that such a device is critically needed for America to make use of sustainable energy technologies such as wind and solar:

If we're going to get this country out of its current energy situation, we can't just conserve our way out. we can't just drill our way out. We can't bomb our way out. We're going to do it the old fashioned American way: we're going to invent our way out working together.
He starts the talk discussing the history of the battery. The problem is that there is no battery yet available to meet today's main needs: "uncommonly high power, long service lifetime and super low cost." (min 4). He indicates that it needs to be made out of abundant elements--"dirt cheap." His proposed liquid-metal battery consists of magnesium, antimony and salt (min 10). He adds that prototypes have worked well, and they have "no moving parts . . . minimum regulation . . . no thermal runaway . . . designed to work at elevated temperature that come from current surges . . . reduced cost by producing fewer larger units . . . "

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