The pursuit of knowledge is now a global enterprise. Scientific American and Nature have teamed up on this special report on how this trend is changing the way science is done, and how it informs the world.
A team of researchers has announced the discovery of Afrasia djijidae, a new fossil primate from Myanmar that illuminates a critical step in the evolution of early anthropoids — the group that includes humans, apes, and monkeys. The 37-million-year-old Afrasia closely resembles another early anthropoid, Afrotarsius libycus, recently discovered at a site of similar age…
Each organism is in pursuit of—that is, values—its own proper life, which is all that the (nonhuman) individual organism either can or ought to pursue. It turns out, however, that values can be held intrinsically only as they are inclusively distributed.
The four dimensions in the Great Matrix of Being give us four ways of measuring reality — by time, by scale, by energy density flow, and by thresholds of emergent complexity. All phenomena can be located within this Matrix.
The first drill sample ever collected on Mars will come from a rockbed shot through with unexpected veins of what appears to be the mineral gypsum. Delighted members of the Curiosity science team announced that the rover was now in a virtual “candy store” of scientific targets—the lowest point of Gale crater, called Yellowknife Bay,…
Cells linked to empathy and consciousness in primates may offer clues to human self-awareness
Despite lengthy discussions of tribal social organization as well as “archaic” societies like ancient Egypt, Religion in Human Evolution, the magnum opus that the sociologist Robert N. Bellah has just published, is primarily concerned with what, following the philosopher Karl Jaspers, can be called religion’s “axial age.” Author Metanexus Editors