Graffiti Personal scrawlings

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.

A test-tube for cultural evolution.

The story of Hezbollah's halal hookups. Foreign Policy.

It’s one of the best things you can do for your brain.

Women of the future are likely to be slightly shorter and plumper, have healthier hearts and longer reproductive windows. These changes are predicted by the strongest proof to date that humans are still evolving. New Scientist..

Countering a common theory that human evolution has slowed to a crawl or even stopped in modern humans, a new study examining data from an international genomics project describes the past 40,000 years as a time of supercharged evolutionary change, driven by exponential population growth and cultural shifts.

latimes.com.