As I pointed out elsewhere: Once culture became more important to our survival then there were traits that became selective and culture largely defined how we developed biologically, not just our biology defining our culture. And I would even say that environmental factors were more important in our tendency toward culture than our biological makeup.

Actually, the formation of our modern human brains had a lot to do with our adoption of culture. After it became advantageous to have culture then there were particular traits that obviously would've been more selective that would've enhanced culture such as your ability to remember more, use representative language, and just be social in general. So in a way our brains are created by culture, definitely not directly, but we definitely wouldn't be the same without it.

"When Homo sapiens started populating the world, it viciously exterminated its closest relative in the hominid family, Homo neanderthalensis..." If by viciously exterminated you mean viciously had sex with.

This one's not even believable in the least bit. If you're going to do April Fools at least make me wonder if it's true or not.

People would want to live in this relatively crime free area until they find out that something they do behind closed doors is considered by someone else, immoral, a crime, undesirable.

With Flash I can play games for a reasonable amount of time, at a reasonable fps, with reasonable load times, and a reasonable quality before my computer slows considerably. With these games it's the contrary.

They all slow my computer down to a halt.

I think the scientists would truly have to look at what they mean by religious. Does the gene make you tend toward religion, or could it also make you tend toward anything resembling religion under specific definitions of religion. In many ways the way people view science could be considered religious. Just pulling a sample wouldn't be enough. Research should be based on a very specific definition of what they mean by "religion" which is then used in surveying people to find a sample that shows what would be expression of that gene, and then another that shows what wouldn't be expression of the gene, and then a random sample of people. Then they could possibly start to pinpoint this religious gene, if it were to exist.

I think the way this work is being formed right now is mainly in a phase of "We're really trying to pinpoint the discrete tendencies this gene would create so we can further refine how to pinpoint it."

So far the data for this year has shown that the sea level has receded a significant amount. I wonder what is happening to all of this melted glacier ice.

http://sealevel.colorado.edu/

I know this may be a slippery slope, but it seems like if it was decided to monitor those with power 24/7 to make sure they aren't abusing that power at any point, then that would mean that you're giving someone else power by having them monitor those with power. So then it would seem that eventually we would need to monitor those monitoring others to make sure the monitors aren't abusing their power, and this would just continue until everyone's being monitored because who knows when anyone will abuse any amount of power that they could possibly have. Admittedly the power of any normal person is much different than that of a government official, but it doesn't seem like a very big stretch could be made from monitoring one to make sure they don't abuse their power to monitoring the other for similar reasons.

I think the idea that "If you haven't done anything wrong, you shouldn't have anything to hide" isn't particularly true. You have to understand that everyone has a different concept of when something's "wrong." And some people respect others' beliefs in what is wrong enough to want to hide some parts of their lives that don't necessarily need to be out in the open in order to avoid unnecessary conflict.

Sucks for TENQ's new Ubuntu powered tablet.

I wouldn't try to inspire people through movies that you watch maybe in the theater once, maybe rent it once, possibly see it a grand total of two or three times. People aren't always watching movies. However, a lot of people watch a generous amount of television, something where you get a persistent storyline that spans seasons. You don't just get into the characters for an hour or two, you get into them several times a week. Just think, how many people wanted to get into forensics, much less learned that forensics existed, after shows like CSI got really popular? I can't count the number of people in my anthropology department that joined because they started watching Bones and really wanted to be a forensic anthropologist.

Previous studies have tried to link social network size to the size of the neocortex. Through this it was estimated that humans have social networks upwards near 150 people. This was further backed up through other research.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/pphfpu3c39ee9009/

This study, however, doesn't seem to address the neocortex since they only checked for links among different subcortical structures. The journal article itself doesn't even address the neocortex. In fact the article claims to be in accord with the "social brain hypothesis" which was formulated by Dunbar who developed the idea that the neocortex could be linked to social network size, which is in complete contrast to a belief that social network size can be calculated from the amygdala in the limbic system.

I feel like this could be pretty nifty if you're trying to learn a language by using the internet and you want to make sure that what you're looking at isn't going to go over your head for sure. However, while looking at google.de, it seems like the reading level isn't an option in advanced search.

This is the first time I've seen something that was published by Wikileaks that I don't think should have been. The summary refers to a cable documenting vital points to America's overall infrastructure. Most of the arguments for Wikileaks seem to say that the government should take responsibility for whatever bad things its representatives have communicated to others. However, this leak is something that I don't see as whistleblowing, or showing the government caught saying something they might regret. No, this is an outline of points of interest to keep the country running smoothly, important facilities spanning the entire globe. I can't see any actual good coming from the leak of this particular document.

When I see people saying the publishing of the cables is compromising US security, this is the first thing I have seen where I would agree.