Monicks: Unleashed

Tag: Evolution

  • The Empathic Civilization

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g]

    Bestselling author, political adviser and social and ethical prophet Jeremy Rifkin investigates the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and our society.

  • Stephen Hawking: Physics Leaves No Room For God

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQvnQD9_l1c]
    Channel 4 News 02 September 2010
    From The Times:
    Modern physics leaves no place for God in the creation of the Universe, Stephen Hawking has concluded.
    Just as Darwinism removed the need for a creator in the sphere of biology, Britain’s most eminent scientist argues that a new series of theories have rendered redundant the role of a creator for the Universe.
    In his forthcoming book, an extract from which is published exclusively in Eureka, published today with The Times, Professor Hawking sets out to answer the question: “Did the Universe need a creator?” The answer he gives is a resounding “no”.
    Far from being a once-in-a-million event that could only be accounted for by extraordinary serendipity or a divine hand, the Big Bang was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, Hawking says.
    “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist,” he writes.
    “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going,” he finds.

  • Human Evolution: Oldest Evidence Of Stone Tool Use

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2YMfzhm8ao]

    California Academy of Sciences: Human Evolution — Tool use by early humans started much earlier. The Academy’s Zeray Alemseged reveals his latest discovery: human stone tool use dating back to 3.4 million years ago. Small-brained human ancestors used stone tools to whack into large mammals some 800,000 years earlier than previously thought.

    – The earliest known evidence for stone tool use and meat eating among early humans is found.

    – The evidence — butchered, fossilized bones — dates to roughly 3.4 million years ago.
    – It’s believed the ancestor Australopithecus afarensis (to which “Lucy” belongs) used the tools.

    • http://news.discovery.com/archaeology…

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    BBC News: Tool-making and meat-eating began 3.5 million years ago

    Researchers have found evidence that hominins – early human ancestors – used stone tools to cleave meat from animal bones more than 3.2 million years ago. That pushes back the earliest known tool use and meat-eating in such hominins by more than 800,000 years.

    Bones found in Ethiopia show cuts from stone and indications that the bones were forcibly broken to remove marrow. The research, in the journal Nature, challenges several notions about our ancestors’ behaviour.

    Previously the oldest-known use of stone tools came from the nearby Gona region of Ethiopia, dating back to about 2.5 million years ago. That suggests that it was our more direct ancestors, members of our own genus Homo, that were the first to use tools.

    But the marked bones were found in the Dikika region, with their age determined by dating the nearby volcanic rock — to between 3.2 million and 3.4 million years ago.

    A battery of tests showed that the cuts, scrapes and scratches were made before the bones fossilised, and detailed analysis even showed that there were bits of stone lodged in one of the cuts.

    • http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-env…

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