Graffiti Personal scrawlings

A lonely island in the middle of the South Atlantic conceals Charles Darwin's best-kept secret. BBC News.

Seismic cultural shifts about 10,000 years ago rendered the true story of human sexuality so subversive and threatening that for centuries, it has been silenced by religious authorities, pathologized by physicians, studiously ignored by scientists and covered up by moralizing therapists. CNN.com.

Gleick et al. Science.

Web-only special rich-media presentation of the feature, "12 Events That Will Change Everything," which appears in the June 2010 issue of Scientific American.

Asteroid strikes get all the coverage, but "Medea Hypothesis" author Peter Ward argues that most of Earth's mass extinctions were caused by lowly bacteria. The culprit, a poison called hydrogen sulfide, may have an interesting application in medicine. Video on TED.com.

Millions of Americans live trapped in soulless exurbs which lack any kind of community, leaving them feeling isolated and vulnerable. Without alternatives for their social despair, they flock to demagogues promising revenge and a mythical utopia. AlterNet.

We have the hubris that because we can make guns, cars and refrigerators we are the superior species on Earth. But the reality might be that tool-making societies are inherently unstable and destroy themselves in a tiny fraction of geologic time. Discovery News.

Sixty million people in the developing world are leaving the countryside every year. The squatter cities that have emerged can teach us much about future urban living. Stewart Brand. Prospect Magazine

Review of impacts of pollutants other than CO2. New Scientist.

The first monogamous amphibian has been discovered living in the rainforest of South America. BBC Earth News.

Flash visualization.

Darwinian selection cannot explain why all life on Earth shares the same genetic code – it looks like another form of evolution came first. New Scientist.

The Government’s 2020 vision has been blind-sided by a think tank's report on its population policy disaster. MercatorNet.

Blame nurture, not nature, for our moral atrocities against humanity. And blame educated partiality more generally, as this allows us to lump into one category all those who fail to acknowledge our shared humanity and fail to use secular reasoning to practise compassion. Marc D. Hauser. Edge.org

In his childhood, Toronto writer Kamal Al-Solaylee recalls a cosmopolitan, secular family from southern Yemen. Today his sisters and brothers are close-minded Islamists. As one middle-class clan loses its own struggle with extremism, so goes the country. The Globe and Mail.

The Boskops had big eyes, child-like faces, and an average intelligence of around 150, making them geniuses among Homo sapiens. Discover magazine.

Gizmodo.

There are actually four different views of global warming. Stewart Brand. NYTimes.com.

Backintyme Essays.

We should be careful about drawing rash conclusions from the correlation between religiosity and societal breakdown. guardian.co.uk.