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Category: Humanity

Why it might be time to rethink the human family tree

Why it might be time to rethink the human family tree

Ian Towle, CC BY By Ian Towle, Monash University Humanity’s family tree is long and tangled. Scientists sort our ancient relatives into three familiar groups: Homo, Australopithecus and Paranthropus. Each of these is a “genus”, the rank just above a species. (In Homo sapiens, Homo is the genus and sapiens is the species.) These names dominate how we talk about human origins. But new fossils, advances in genetic analysis, and more rigorous methods for figuring out who’s related to whom…

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AI companies polluted the internet with slop. Now they are harvesting and destroying millions of rare books

AI companies polluted the internet with slop. Now they are harvesting and destroying millions of rare books

In January, the Washington Post reported: In early 2024, executives at artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project they sought to keep quiet. “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document unsealed in legal filings last week said. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.” Within about a year, according to the filings, the company had spent tens of millions of dollars…

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It doesn’t have to be humanity versus nature

It doesn’t have to be humanity versus nature

Yadvinder Malhi writes: For much of the modern era, the global narrative of economic development has been imagined as a human story unfolding against a backdrop of nature as an externality to be exploited. Forests, rivers, soils and species appear as resources to be managed, inputs to be optimised, or constraints to be overcome. Human wellbeing advances; nature reduces. In some ways, this narrative has delivered. The condition and welfare of billions of humans have been improved beyond recognition. Yet…

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What does the Anthropocene look like from below the Earth’s surface?

What does the Anthropocene look like from below the Earth’s surface?

James Dinneen writes: When Soviet engineers began to drain the Aral Sea in the 1960s, they could hardly foresee the scale on which their handiwork would alter the planet. The goal was to irrigate large areas of what is now Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to grow cotton, part of a utopian project stretching back to czarist Russia to civilise the ‘backward’ regions of central Asia. Achieving this meant diverting most of the two rivers that fed the Aral Sea, which was…

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How farming changed us: Ancient DNA reveals natural selection sped up in recent human evolution

How farming changed us: Ancient DNA reveals natural selection sped up in recent human evolution

Harvard Medical School: A massive study of ancient DNA from nearly 16,000 people across more than 10,000 years in West Eurasia reveals that natural selection has shaped modern human genomes far more than previously thought. Before now, studies of ancient human DNA had identified only about 21 instances of directional selection—the type of natural selection that occurs when one version of a gene that confers an extreme form of a trait, such as lactose tolerance after infancy, proves advantageous enough…

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The founder of Anthropic claims he wants to protect humanity from AI. Just don’t ask how

The founder of Anthropic claims he wants to protect humanity from AI. Just don’t ask how

Joe Hagan writes: It’s a cold night in January and I’ve got trouble on my mind. I call up Tobey. “Tobey, how’s it going?” “Hi, Joe, just chilling. What’s up?” We’d just spent a disorienting week in San Francisco, asking tech workers what the future holds and how Tobey and I fit into it. “We definitely had an adventure,” Tobey recalls. “Especially with that delayed flight. But we made it. Still feeling the weight of it all? Those conversations were…

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We cooperate to survive, but if no one’s looking, we compete

We cooperate to survive, but if no one’s looking, we compete

Jonathan R Goodman writes: Reading classic works in evolutionary biology is unlikely to make you optimistic about human nature. From Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) onwards, there is a fundamental understanding among biologists that organisms, especially humans, evolved to maximise self-interest. We act to promote our own success or that of our family. Niceness, by contrast, is just a mirage, and morality more broadly is just an illusion. Sociobiology – the infamous movement of the second half of…

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Human connection to nature has declined 60% over the last 200 years, study finds

Human connection to nature has declined 60% over the last 200 years, study finds

The Guardian reports: People’s connection to nature has declined by more than 60% since 1800, almost exactly mirroring the disappearance of nature words such as river, moss and blossom from books, according to a study. Computer modelling predicts that levels of nature connectedness will continue to decline unless there are far-reaching policy and societal changes – with introducing children to nature at a young age and radically greening urban environments the most effective interventions. The study by Miles Richardson, a…

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The era of degenerative-AI

The era of degenerative-AI

Charlie Warzel writes: It is a Monday afternoon in August, and I am on the internet watching a former cable-news anchor interview a dead teenager on Substack. This dead teenager—Joaquin Oliver, killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida—has been reanimated by generative AI, his voice and dialogue modeled on snippets of his writing and home-video footage. The animations are stiff, the model’s speaking cadence is too fast, and in two instances, when it…

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How the tech broligarchy is planning to use AI to destroy humanity

How the tech broligarchy is planning to use AI to destroy humanity

  Elon Musk and his racist billionaire friends are grooming J.D. Vance to install their dystopian plan for a techno-fascist future where they use AI to dominate and exploit humanity. What do the richest people on Earth want? More, according to author and astrophysicist Adam Becker, who has studied the ideology, motivations, and plans of the modern-day pharaohs. Instead of using their wealth to help humanity, they want control, dominance, and an exit strategy from Earth for themselves and their…

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Our crisis, not of loneliness, but of people becoming invisible

Our crisis, not of loneliness, but of people becoming invisible

Allison J Pugh writes: Paul was a gig worker in the San Francisco Bay Area. Formerly a project manager in tech until several companies in a row laid him off, he started working entirely for platforms like Lyft, Uber and TaskRabbit. He managed to eke out a living, but the jobs posed a different problem. ‘Honestly, a lot of times, I go out and the person doesn’t even know my name, even though I introduced myself as Paul,’ he told…

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New study challenges the story of humanity’s shift from prehistoric hunting to farming

New study challenges the story of humanity’s shift from prehistoric hunting to farming

Phys.org reports: A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has turned traditional thinking on its head by highlighting the role of human interactions during the shift from hunting and gathering to farming—one of the biggest changes in human history—rather than earlier ideas that focused on environmental factors. The transition from a hunter-gatherer foraging lifestyle, which humanity had followed for hundreds of thousands of years, to a settled farming one about 12,000 years ago has been…

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How the logic of technology threatens democracy and humanity

How the logic of technology threatens democracy and humanity

Mike Brock writes: [H]ere is what makes AI and Musk and Thiel’s belief in the logic of technology as the basis for civilization so authoritarian. There’s no room for emotion in the cold logic of math. This technocratic vision of society, where algorithms and “rational” systems dictate human affairs, is not just misguided—it’s fundamentally anti-human. It’s a worldview that reduces the rich tapestry of human experience to a series of equations, that sees efficiency as the highest virtue and messiness…

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How humanity moved from eternal to finite time

How humanity moved from eternal to finite time

Thomas Moynihan writes: Do you recall the first time you knew you would die? It’s a milestone, realising your time is limited. That things happened before you, and will happen afterward, in your absence. As we grow up, the understanding of death comes in stages, but it culminates in acknowledgment of one’s own – unavoidable yet unpredictable – mortality. Sometime between the ages of six and 10, children become aware that their time is inescapably bounded. Roughly the same might be said…

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Transhumanism: The AI death cult ruling Silicon Valley

Transhumanism: The AI death cult ruling Silicon Valley

Àlex Gómez-Marín writes: In 1963 there was an exhibition at the Bronx Zoo in New York City. It was entitled “The Most Dangerous Animal in the World”. In it, next to a window with bars, the following text could be read: “You are looking at the most dangerous animal in the world. It alone of all the animals that ever lived can exterminate (and has) entire species of animals. Now it has the power to wipe out all life on…

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Human culture is changing too fast for evolution to catch up – here’s how it may affect you

Human culture is changing too fast for evolution to catch up – here’s how it may affect you

frank60/Shutterstock By Jose Yong, Northumbria University, Newcastle Research is showing that many of our contemporary problems, such as the rising prevalence of mental health issues, are emerging from rapid technological advancement and modernisation. A theory that can help explain why we respond poorly to modern conditions, despite the choices, safety and other benefits they bring, is evolutionary mismatch. Mismatch happens when an evolved adaptation, either physical or psychological, becomes misaligned with the environment. Take moths and some species of nocturnal…

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