In his most recent column in The New York Times, David Brooks laments the results of a study led by Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, which demonstrate an “inequality of opportunity” between rich and poor children in America. The children of the rich and poor, we’re told, are raised “in starkly different ways and…
New research shows that people who behave more altruistically have more gray matter at the junction between the parietal and temporal lobes. This shows, for the first time, a connection between brain anatomy, brain activity and altruistic behavior, say the researchers from the University of Zurich. “These are exciting results for us,” said lead researcher…
Prominent scientists are in a bitter struggle over the origins of kindness. But the root of this conflict may be the most ironic part of all.
Mummies found off the coast of Scotland are Frankenstein-like composites of several corpses, researchers say. This mixing of remains was perhaps designed to combine different ancestries into a single lineage, archaeologists speculated. The bodies were first unearthed in 2001 during excavations beneath the foundations of an approximately 3,000-year-old house on South Uist, an island in…
It is often assumed that processes such as visual perception work in the same ways in all people, but research now suggests that how we see things may be influenced by our expectations and opinions. Cognitive neuroscientist Yair Pinto and his colleagues asked 45 white Dutch people to perform a binocular rivalry task — a…
Being the top dog – or, in this case, the top gelada monkey – is even better if the alpha male is willing to concede at times to subordinates, according to a study by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan and Duke University. Alpha male geladas who allowed subordinate competitors into…
As nonconventional medical treatments become increasingly mainstream, we take a look at the science behind some of the most popular.
Until about 8500 years ago, Europe was populated by nomadic hunter-gatherers who hunted, fished, and ate wild plants. Then, the farming way of life swept into the continent from its origins in the Near East, including modern-day Turkey. Within 3000 years most of the hunter-gatherers had disappeared. Little is known about these early Europeans. But…
Chimpanzees have made headlines in recent years for several unprovoked attacks against humans, the latest just recently at the Jane Goodall Institute Chimpanzee Eden in South Africa. The severely injured victim, University of Texas graduate student Andrew Oberle was mauled by chimpanzees as he gave a lecture to about a dozen tourists. Oberle remains in…
From David Barash at The Chronicle’s Brainstorm blog: When it comes to evolution and human beings, what we don’t know is if anything more interesting than what we do. Among these mysteries, of course, is religion, and among the reasonable hypotheses thus far adduced, there are several based on what I call “overshoot.” The basic…