(R)evolutionary aesthetics: Denis Dutton’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">The art instinct: beauty,pleasure and human evolution</Emphasis>

Denis Dutton’s “The Art Instinct” succeeds admirably in showing that it is possible to think about art from a biological point of view, and this is a significant achievement, given that resistance to the idea that cultural phenomena have biological underpinnings remains widespread in many academic disciplines. However, his account of the origins of our artistic impulses and the far-reaching conclusions he draws from that account are not persuasive. This article points out a number of problems: in particular, problems with Dutton’s appeal to sexual selection, with his discussion of the adaptation/by-product distinction and its significance, and with drawing normative conclusions from evolutionary hypotheses.     

Apes and Tricksters: The Evolution and Diversification of Humans’ Closest Relatives

The evolutionary history of humans comprises an important but small branch on the larger tree of ape evolution. Today’s hominoids—gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and humans—are a meager representation of the ape diversity that characterized the Old World from 23–5 million years ago. In this paper, I briefly review this evolutionary history focusing on features important for understanding modern ape and human origins. As the full complexity of ape evolution is beyond this review, I characterize major geographic, temporal, and phylogenetic groups using a few flagship taxa. Improving our knowledge of hominoid evolution both complicates and clarifies studies of human origins. On one hand, features thought to be unique to the human lineage find parallels in some fossil ape species, reducing their usefulness for identifying fossil humans. On the other hand, the Miocene record of fossil apes provides an important source for generating hypotheses about the ancestral human condition; this is particularly true given the dearth of fossils representing our closest living relatives: chimpanzees and gorillas.     

Neuroimaging Results Impose New Views on Alzheimer’s Disease—the Role of Amyloid Revised

Huge progress has been made in unraveling the mysteries of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but we still do not understand the basic mechanisms that set off the cascade of pathological events. In May 2011, the National Institute on Aging–Alzheimer’s Association published new diagnostic guidelines, expected to have huge impact on AD research and clinical practice. However, the new guidelines are already criticized for being biased in favor of a specific theory of the pathophysiological origins of AD—the amyloid cascade hypothesis. Shortly before publication of the guidelines, a hypothetical model of the dynamic biomarkers of the Alzheimer’s pathological cascade was published, taking as starting point that biomarkers reflecting brain levels of amyloid become deviant long before brain atrophy, cognitive dysfunction, or clinical symptoms are manifest. This model has already attracted substantial interest and arguably represents a dominating view within human research on AD. Here we critically review the evidence for the view of amyloid as an initiating event in the pathological cascade and discuss how central assumptions of this hypothesis affect how results from contemporary human AD research are understood. Interpretations of new results are greatly impacted by researchers’ view on the role of amyloid, and identical observations are sometimes taken to support radically opposing views on the amyloid hypothesis. We argue that the canonical view of the role of amyloid as the main causal factor in AD may not be correct and that evidence from recent neuroimaging studies indicates that amyloid is neither necessary nor sufficient, for the manifestation of AD-like brain atrophy.     

Up from the Ape: the Spitzer Hall of Human Origins at the American Museum of Natural History

The American Museum of Natural History in New York has a rich history of explaining evolution through its displays and educational programs. For much of this history, there has been a permanent hall dedicated to human evolution and its related disciplines. Different versions of these halls have informed tens of millions of visitors, and today’s offering is one of the world’s newest, opened in 2007 and named the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins. The hall’s design is radical in that it starts by giving molecular genetics and the fossil record equal billing and thus provides the visitor with two independent but highly complementary lines of evidence for our own evolution. Other parts of the hall are innovative in that they stress taxonomic diversity in the fossil record as much as the more traditional chronological “story” of human evolution that is usually found in museum exhibits. The hall is also unique in that it incorporates a fully operational teaching laboratory within its architectural footprint, which provides educators with the chance to seamlessly integrate hands-on lab sessions and the surrounding exhibits as teaching aids.     

Cancer,Viruses, and Mass Migration: Paul Berg’s Venture into Eukaryotic Biology and the Advent of Recombinant DNA Research and Technology, 1967–1980

The existing literature on the development of recombinant DNA technology and genetic engineering tends to focus on Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer’s recombinant DNA cloning technology and its commercialization starting in the mid-1970s. Historians of science, however, have pointedly noted that experimental procedures for making recombinant DNA molecules were initially developed by Stanford biochemist Paul Berg and his colleagues, Peter Lobban and A. Dale Kaiser in the early 1970s. This paper, recognizing the uneasy disjuncture between scientific authorship and legal invention in the history of recombinant DNA technology, investigates the development of recombinant DNA technology in its full scientific context. I do so by focusing on Stanford biochemist Berg’s research on the genetic regulation of higher organisms. As I hope to demonstrate, Berg’s new venture reflected a mass migration of biomedical researchers as they shifted from studying prokaryotic organisms like bacteria to studying eukaryotic organisms like mammalian and human cells. It was out of this boundary crossing from prokaryotic to eukaryotic systems through virus model systems that recombinant DNA technology and other significant new research techniques and agendas emerged. Indeed, in their attempt to reconstitute ‹life’ as a research technology, Stanford biochemists’ recombinant DNA research recast genes as a sequence that could be rewritten thorough biochemical operations. The last part of this paper shifts focus from recombinant DNA technology’s academic origins to its transformation into a genetic engineering technology by examining the wide range of experimental hybridizations which occurred as techniques and knowledge circulated between Stanford biochemists and the Bay Area’s experimentalists. Situating their interchange in a dense research network based at Stanford’s biochemistry department, this paper helps to revise the canonized history of genetic engineering’s origins that emerged during the patenting of Cohen–Boyer’s recombinant DNA cloning procedures.     

A theory of dihybrid origins for non-african human races

The physical differences between major non-African ethnic, groups can be explained as admixture of migrating African modernHomo sapiens with existing archaicHomo populations. Evidence from mitochondrial DNA claiming no admixture is dismissed as there is no confidence in claimed phylogenies. Racial characteristics can be explained by linking present day non-African humans with sympatric archaic populations. Neanderthals are linked with Caucasians, the Solo population with Australian Aborigines and ‘Peking Man’ with modern Mongoloids. Fossil, geographic and anthropometric evidence for dihybrid origins are considered. As a result, Asiatic Negritos are hypothesized to be remnant groups of ‘morphologically pure’ migrating modern Africans. It is suggested that paleoanthropologists attempting to reconstruct human origins should consider the dihybrid theory as a plausible alternative to the irreconcilable ‘complete replacement’ and ‘multiregional’ theories.     

Evolution and Religion: Attitudes of Scottish Bioscience Students to the Teaching of Evolutionary Biology

In a questionnaire-based survey, the proportion of Glasgow University first year biology students who rejected evolution in 2009–2011 was about 7%, similar to the previously reported average figure for 1987–1999. However, by final year, evolution rejection was absent in students who studied evolution beyond first year and 4% among those who did not. Evolution rejection was closely related to accepting a religion-based alternative, whereas acceptance was related to finding the evidence convincing. Although many religious students accepted evolution, 50% of Islamic students were rejecters, compared to 25% of Christians. A question testing acceptance of several scientific propositions showed no evidence that evolution rejecters were generally more skeptical of science than accepters. Rejecters were overall less secure than accepters in their identification of the correct definition for terms related to evolution and creationism, but, surprisingly, more than 10% of final year students chose a Lamarckian definition for Darwinian evolution. Accepters and rejecters responded equally poorly to a question on Darwin’s history, but level 4 was much better. A breakdown of evolution into three components (human origins, macroevolution, and microevolution) found that some evolution rejecters accepted some components, with microevolution having the highest acceptance and human origins the lowest. These findings are discussed in terms of strategies for evolution education and the phenomenon of evolution rejection worldwide.     

Pushing back frontiers: Towards a history of art in a global perspective

Traditionally, art history is a discipline focusing on the developments of Western art and architecture. It is time, however, to broaden our perspective. The world is changing, art is changing, somutatis mutandis is art history. This does not happen on its own accord. Art history needs rewriting and art historians have to do it. We need to take a critical look at our premises and points of departure, and we need to change the art historical curricula at universities and art schools. At Leiden University, the Netherlands, the Department of Art History has opted for a new orientation and decided to study the history of art from a global perspective. This means that students will meet with three lines of approach to the visual art and material culture from regions other than the West. Firstly, they are introduced to the art and material culture of Asian, African, and Amerindian civilizations by colleagues from those fields, which Leiden is so fortunate to have. The Faculty of Arts at Leiden University, houses a wide variety of language and culture studies of the world. The second approach focuses on interactions, mutual influences, and interculturalization processes in art and culture. And the third addresses methodical-theoretical reflection on art history in a global perspective. The aim here is to formulate a theoretical framework for the study of art worldwide, thereby pursuing ‘comparative art history’. In order to achieve these perspectives, exchanging ideas and concepts with anthropologists can be very productive.     

Brocchi’s Subapennine Fossil Conchology

The Italian geologist Giambattista Brocchi (1771–1826) is presented as a key figure in the historical period preceding young Charles Darwin’s first work on transmutational theory while on the Beagle. The brief biographical account focuses on Brocchi’s writings related to his analogy that species have births and deaths like individuals, and culminates in his most important work, Subapennine Fossil Conchology of 1814. Brocchi’s analogy as an original and fertile way to approach the fossil record was to influence Darwin’s first evolutionary thinking. Relevant passages of the book are presented for the first time in an English translation.     

Mate Choice Copying in Humans

There is substantial evidence that in human mate choice, females directly select males based on male display of both physical and behavioral traits. In non-humans, there is additionally a growing literature on indirect mate choice, such as choice through observing and subsequently copying the mating preferences of conspecifics (mate choice copying). Given that humans are a social species with a high degree of sharing information, long-term pair bonds, and high parental care, it is likely that human females could avoid substantial costs associated with directly searching for information about potential males by mate choice copying. The present study was a test of whether women perceived men to be more attractive when men were presented with a female date or consort than when they were presented alone, and whether the physical attractiveness of the female consort affected women’s copying decisions. The results suggested that women’s mate choice decision rule is to copy only if a man’s female consort is physically attractive. Further analyses implied that copying may be a conditional female mating tactic aimed at solving the problem of informational constraints on assessing male suitability for long-term sexual relationships, and that lack of mate choice experience, measured as reported lifetime number of sex partners, is also an important determinant of copying.     

Les origines de l’art et les théories sur l’évolution humaine : le cas français

In recent years, we have witnessed an international debate about the question of the origins of art. On the one hand, some specialists have suggested that art appeared for the first time at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic associated to the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens. From this point of view, Paleolithic art as well as other hallmarks of behavioral modernity were exclusive to anatomically modern humans. On the other hand, some scholars have put into question the traditional paradigm concerning the origins of art and have suggested that artistic objects arose over a long period of time among different species, including Neanderthals. In order to contextualize this debate, we analyze in this article the history of the different interpretations and controversies concerning the question of the origins of art. Taking as reference the French case, we examine the connections between the different theories about art's origins suggested by Pleistocene art specialists during the last century and the dominant paradigms in human paleontology during the same period. Informed by one another, the question of the origins of art and that of human evolution seems to be inextricable linked.     

Nucleotide Frequencies in Human Genome and Fibonacci Numbers

This work presents a mathematical model that establishes an interesting connection between nucleotide frequencies in human single-stranded DNA and the famous Fibonacci’s numbers. The model relies on two assumptions. First, Chargaff’s second parity rule should be valid, and second, the nucleotide frequencies should approach limit values when the number of bases is sufficiently large. Under these two hypotheses, it is possible to predict the human nucleotide frequencies with accuracy. This result may be used as evidence to the Fibonacci string model that was proposed to the sequence growth of DNA repetitive sequences. It is noteworthy that the predicted values are solutions of an optimization problem, which is commonplace in many of nature’s phenomena.     

A model of microbial contamination of a water reservoir

A three year record of daily fecal coliform counts in a Massachusetts water reservoir has the appearance of an irregular time series punctuated by outbursts of varying duration. The pattern is described in terms of a probabilistic model where the fluctuations in the ‘regular’ and ‘explosive’ regimes are governed by two sets of probabilities. It has been assumed that the random oscillations has a lognormal distribution, and that once an explosion threshold has been exceeded the increments or decrements in the population size have fixed probability distributions. The threshold for triggering an outburst was estimated by examining the randomness of the autocorrelation function of the record after it is filtered to eliminate peaks of progressively increasing magnitude. Once the threshold has been identified, the mean and standard deviation of the underlying lognormal distribution could be estimated directly from remains found in the record after all the peaks were removed. The probabilities of an increment and decrement during the outbursts and their relative magnitudes could also be estimated using simple formulas. These estimated parameter values were then used to generate realistic records with known threshold levels, which were subsequently used to assess the procedure’s feasibility and sensitivity.     

The expanded evolutionary synthesis—a response to Godfrey-Smith,Haig, and West-Eberhard

In responding to three reviews of Evolution in Four Dimensions (Jablonka and Lamb, 2005, MIT Press), we briefly consider the historical background to the present genecentred view of evolution, especially the way in which Weismann’s theories have influenced it, and discuss the origins of the notion of epigenetic inheritance. We reaffirm our belief that all types of hereditary information—genetic, epigenetic, behavioural and cultural—have contributed to evolutionary change, and outline recent evidence, mainly from epigenetic studies, that suggests that non-DNA heritable variations are not rare and can be quite stable. We describe ways in which such variations may have influenced evolution. The approach we take leads to broader definitions of terms such as ‘units of heredity’, ‘units of evolution’, and ‘units of selection’, and we maintain that ‘information’ can be a useful concept if it is defined in terms of its effects on the receiver. Although we agree that evolutionary theory is not undergoing a Kuhnian revolution, the incorporation of new data and ideas about hereditary variation, and about the role of development in generating it, is leading to a version of Darwinism that is very different from the gene-centred one that dominated evolutionary thinking in the second half of the twentieth century.     

Civic Biology and the Origin of the School Antievolution Movement

In discussing the origins of the antievolution movement in American high schools within the framework of science and religion, much is overlooked about the influence of educational trends in shaping this phenomenon. This was especially true in the years before the 1925 Scopes trial, the beginnings of the school antievolution movement. There was no sudden realization in the 1920’s – sixty years after the Origin of Species was published – that Darwinism conflicted with the Bible, but until evolution was being taught in the high schools, there was no impetus to outlaw it. The creation of “civic biology” curricula in the late 1910’s and early 20’s, spearheaded by a close-knit community of textbook authors, brought evolution into the high school classroom as part of a complete reshaping of “biology” as a school subject. It also incorporated progressive ideologies about the purposes of compulsory public education in shaping society, and civic biology was fundamentally focused on the applications of the life sciences to human life. Antievolution legislation was part of a broader response to the ideologies of the new biology field, and was a reaction not only to the content of the new subject, but to the increasingly centralized control and regulation of education. Viewing the early school antievolution movement through the science-religion conflict is an artifact of the Scopes trial’s re-creation of its origins. What largely caused support for␣the school antievolution movement in the South and particularly Tennessee were concerns over public education, which biology came to epitomize.     

Comparison of self-thinning models: an exercise in reasoning

Self-thinning of forest stands is one of the clearest and best-documented examples of natural selection. Besides their theoretical interest, understanding of self-thinning is important for forest practice because it produces estimates of stand density and stocking. There is a considerable diversity of views on the processes causing self-thinning, predicting variables, and analytical form of models. The most popular model was proposed by Reineke (J Agric Res 46(7):627–638, 1933) over 70 years ago. This study compares existing models of self-thinning and provides evidence that the virtually unknown model developed by Artur Nilson describes self-thinning more realistically than Reineke’s. While in the Reineke model the rate of mortality (the slope of self-thinning line) is assumed to be constant, it changes from 0 to −2 in Nilson’s model. As a result, Nilson’s model is slightly but consistently more accurate than Reineke’s. Although both models are empirical, their analysis suggests several general conclusions about self-thinning.     

Tantalizing Tortoises and the Darwin-Galápagos Legend

During his historic Galápagos visit in 1835, Darwin spent nine days making scientific observations and collecting specimens on Santiago (James Island). In the course of this visit, Darwin ascended twice to the Santiago highlands. There, near springs located close to the island’s summit, he conducted his most detailed observations of Galápagos tortoises. The precise location of these springs, which has not previously been established, is here identified using Darwin’s own writings, satellite maps, and GPS technology. Photographic evidence from excursions to the areas where Darwin climbed, including repeat photography over a period of four decades, offers striking evidence of the deleterious impact of feral mammals introduced after Darwin’s visit. Exploring the impact that Darwin’s Santiago visit had on his thinking – especially focusing on his activities in the highlands – raises intriguing questions about the depth of his understanding of the evolutionary evidence he encountered while in the Galápagos. These questions and related insights provide further evidence concerning the timing of Darwin’s conversion to the theory of evolution, which, despite recent claims to the contrary, occurred only after his return to England.     

Developing classification in action: I. Human infants

Human infants’ developing manipulatory transformations involved in classifying objects from ages 6 to 24 months were investigated. Infants’ manipulations develop from predominantly serial one-at-a-time acts with one object to predominantly parallel two-at-a-time acts with two objects. This shift is marked by increasingly overt transformational consequences for the objects manipulated. When infants construct parallel transformations they are initially different. With age they are increasingly identical or reciprocal. Also during this age period, as the number of objects manipulated at the same time increases, so does the frequency with which infants coordinate them. At the same time, the kind of objects infants manipulate simultaneously changes. Six-month-olds manipulate different objects when acting on more than one object at a time. By age 12 months, infants switch to manipulating identical objects at the same time, indicating that they are beginning to construct identity classes. Since this development occurs about a half year before human infants develop any substantial naming behavior, the origins of classification cannot depend on this linguistic development     

Separated at Birth: The Interlinked Origins of Darwin’s Unconscious Selection Concept and the Application of Sexual Selection to Race

This essay traces the interlinked origins of two concepts found in Charles Darwin’s writings: “unconscious selection,” and sexual selection as applied to humanity’s anatomical race distinctions. Unconscious selection constituted a significant elaboration of Darwin’s artificial selection analogy. As originally conceived in his theoretical notebooks, that analogy had focused exclusively on what Darwin later would call “methodical selection,” the calculated production of desired changes in domestic breeds. By contrast, unconscious selection produced its results unintentionally and at a much slower pace. Inspiration for this concept likely came from Darwin’s early reading of works on both animal breeding and physical ethnology. Texts in these fields described the slow and unplanned divergence of anatomical types, whether animal or human, under the guidance of contrasting ideals of physical perfection. These readings, it is argued, also led Darwin to his theory of sexual selection as applied to race, a theme he discussed mainly in his book The Descent of Man (1871). There Darwin described how the racial version of sexual selection operated on the same principle as unconscious selection. He thereby effectively reunited these kindred concepts.