Meet future woman

The future evolution of women (10 generations): Women will be shorter, plumper, and more fertile.

The team studied 2238 women who had passed menopause and so completed their reproductive lives. For this group, Stearns’s team tested whether a woman’s height, weight, blood pressure, cholesterol or other traits correlated with the number of children she had borne. They controlled for changes due to social and cultural factors to calculate how strongly natural selection is shaping these traits.

Quite a lot, it turns out. Shorter, heavier women tended to have more children, on average, than taller, lighter ones. Women with lower blood pressure and lower cholesterol levels likewise reared more children, and – not surprisingly – so did women who had their first child at a younger age or who entered menopause later. Strikingly, these traits were passed on to their daughters, who in turn also had more children.

If these trends continue for 10 generations, Stearns calculates, the average woman in 2409 will be 2 centimetres shorter and 1 kilogram heavier than she is today. She will bear her first child about 5 months earlier and enter menopause 10 months later (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0906199106).

via Meet future woman: shorter, plumper, more fertile – health – 19 October 2009 – New Scientist.

Right to bear arms… but why do they swing?

Biomedical researchers on Wednesday said they could explain why we swing our arms when we walk, a practice that has long piqued scientific curiosity.

New branch on the human evolution tree

Anthropologists who believed the fossils represented a new species named it after its home island of Flores, where local folk tales described a race of diminutive jungle dwellers. They hypothesized a direct-line descent from H. erectus, the last common ancestor of all human species, who left Africa 2.5 million years ago.

But other researchers were unconvinced…

…This suggests that H. floresiensis may belong to an as-yet-unknown branch of the human family tree, possibly even an evolutionary brother of Homo erectus. “These new findings raise the possiblity that the ancestor of H. floresiensis was not Homo erectus but instead some other, more primitive hominin whose dispersal into southeast Asia is still undocumented,” wrote Jungers’ team.

via Hobbits May Belong on New Branch of Our Family Tree

Science teachers violate the constitution by not respecting Creationism

It’s the last line that gets me… if talking about creationism means that you are crossing the line into religion, then doesn’t this prove that creationism is not science but hocus-pocus?

What evolution is not

This is a nice list of what Evolution is NOT

Evolution of video games and violence… but not what you are thinking!

And there you have it. Because of human evolution, you start out with a video game and end up with violence by use of a simple syllogism…