Category: Contingency

The sons of Adam: spirit, not blood

Hominin increase in cranial capacity, courtesy of Luke Jostins A few years ago a statistical geneticist at Cambridge’s Sanger Institute, Luke Jostins, posted the chart above using data from fossils on cranial capacity of hominins (the human lineage). As you can see there was a gradual increase in cranial capacity until ~250,000 years before the present,…

December 26, 2011
Evolution in higher dimensions

Ornithomimosaurian dinosaur & ostrich, image credit Nobu Tamura & James G. Howes The Pith: This post explores evolution at two different scales: the broad philosophical and the close in genetic. Philosophically, is evolution a highly conti…

April 17, 2011
The inevitable social brain

One of the most persistent debates about the process of evolution is whether it exhibits directionality or inevitability. This is not limited to a biological context; Marxist thinkers long promoted a model of long-term social determinism whereby human groups progressed through a sequence of modes of production. Such an assumption is not limited to […]

November 24, 2010