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Articles written for the GLP list the source as Genes and Science. All other articles were written for the sources noted with excerpts provided by the GLP.
What caused anatomically modern Homo sapiens to evolve into behaviorally modern people?
At some point, from around 40,000 years ago in Europe, we see evidence of these behaviourally modern humans in a ...
What physicists get wrong about free will
It might seem that everything that’s happening at the higher, ‘emergent’ levels should be uniquely determined by the physics operating ...
Were the mythical ‘ebu gogo’ creatures of New Zealand distant human relatives?
An ancient legend from the Indonesian island of Flores speaks of a mysterious, wild grandmother of the forest who eats ...
Deconstructing the idea that consciousness is a ‘spooky’ illusion
These days it is highly fashionable to label consciousness an ‘illusion’. This in turn fosters the impression, especially among the ...
Viewpoint: Neurodiversity movement hurts people with autism by ‘romanticizing’ the disorder
In the past decade, neurodiversity’s popularity has grown enormously, largely because of the buzz surrounding Steve Silberman’s book NeuroTribes (2015). Today, the ...
‘Homo gluttonous’: Could the history of our meat-eating, over-consuming species threaten the planet?
During our hunter-gatherer past, which constitutes 99 per cent of our history as a species, ... omnivorous tastes served us ...
Is the world facing ecological collapse? Not if we ‘engineer our environment’ more productively
In a recent Nature Sustainability paper, a team of scientists concluded that the Earth can sustain, at most, only 7 billion ...
Revising human history: Asian paleoanthropology reveals human, Neanderthal relationships
[T]he first analyses of Neanderthal DNA seemed to indicate that Neanderthals and modern humans did not interbreed. But this popular ...
Searching for life in 3-billion-year-old fossils: Will we know it when we see it?
Geologists examining fossils in rocks help us to gain purchase on the conundrum of what constitutes life by identifying its ...
How plants learn and use memories for prediction and decision-making
[Editor's note: Laura Ruggles is a philosophy PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide in Australia.] The idea that plants can ...
Viewpoint: Is having children immoral?
[Editor's note: David Benatar is a professor of philosophy and head of the department of philosophy at the University of Cape Town, ...
Is scientific neutrality being lost to commercialism?
In the past few decades, the life sciences have been transformed into gigantic bio-technosciences, blurring the boundaries between science and ...
Does human life have meaning in an unfathomably vast universe?
Humanity is nothing more than a microscopic blip in the universe. But does that mean we are insignificant? … The ...
‘All natural fetish’ fuels ‘counter-rationalist mindset’ on GMOs in Vermont
Immersed as we are in these exquisite pastoral gifts, Vermonters tend to forget that Mother Nature might be lovely, but ...
Evolutionary survival mechanism ‘gone-awry’ likely source of sleep walking
Recent research from Stanford University shows that up to 4 per cent of adults might have [walked in their sleep] ...
Races mingling, mixing faster than ever, and that makes us genetically stronger
Recent insights from the sequencing of hundreds of thousands of human genomes in the past decade have revealed that our ...
Precision medicine: Over promising genetic breakthroughs offers patients false hope
Science has always issued medical promissory notes. In the 17th century, Francis Bacon promised that an understanding of the true ...
As the age of mother’s has increased, twin births have skyrocketed
Twins are very much in our consciousness at the moment...because we are living through a twin boom. A higher proportion ...
Neither good ‘microbes’ nor ‘bad microbes’ truly exist
[For centuries,] [m]icrobes became synonymous with squalor and sickness. They became foes for us to annihilate and repel. Today, we ...
Should we treat human-pig chimeras as people?
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Scientists in the United ...
Do certain genes determine someone’s “criminal” nature?
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. [The year 1871 brought ...
Childhood experiences have long-lasting impact on brain
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. New findings in neuroscience, ...
Gene-editing, gene drives demand new regulatory approach
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Gene editing and gene ...
Genetic evidence reveals extensive inbreeding between humans, other hominids
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Until recently, anthropologists drew ...
Should we praise or demonize artificial foods?
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Artificial food. That’s what ...
Early eugenics movement first introduced biology to politics
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. For centuries, human hereditary ...
Fresh, local and organic may not equal sustainable
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Are the organic hand-picked ...
Epigenetics: Why there’s no such thing as a ‘perfect’ human body
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Epigenetics is a burgeoning ...
