Related papers: Hominid evolution: genetics versus memetics
The central nervous system and particularly the brain was designed to control the life cycle of a living being. With increasing size and sophistication, in mammals, the brain became capable of exercising significant control over life. In…
Growth of the world population and the world economic growth were hyperbolic in the past 2,000,000 years. Recently, from around 1950, they started to be diverted to slower trajectories but they are still close to the historical hyperbolic…
A variant of microcephalin, MCPH1 gene, was introgressed about 37,000 years ago into Homo sapiens genetic pool from an archaic (Homo erectus) lineage and rose to exceptionally high frequency of around 70 percent worldwide today. It is…
Using current empirical data from 10,000 BCE to 2023 CE, we re-examine a hyperbolic pattern of human population growth, which was identified by von Foerster et al. in 1960 with a predicted singularity in 2026. We find that human population…
Growth in brain volume is one of the most spectacular changes in the hominid lineage. The anthropological community agrees on that point. No consensus, however, has been reached on selection pressures contributing to that growth. In that…
In this paper we propose a new mathematical model capable of merging Darwinian Evolution, Human History and SETI into a single mathematical scheme: 1) Darwinian Evolution over the last 3.5 billion years is defined as one particular…
The "Machiavellian intelligence" hypothesis (or the "social brain" hypothesis) posits that large brains and distinctive cognitive abilities of humans have evolved via intense social competition in which social competitors developed…
Expansion of the neocortex is a hallmark of human evolution. However, it remains an open question what adaptive mechanisms facilitated its expansion. Here we show, using gyrencephaly index (GI) and other physiological and life-history data…
The natural evolution of life seems to proceed through steps characterized by phases of relatively rapid changes, followed by longer, more stable periods. In the light of the string-theory derived physical scenario proposed in [1], we…
Darwin's theory of evolution is considered to be one of the greatest scientific gems in modern science. It not only gives us a description of how living things evolve, but also shows how a population evolves through time and also, why only…
The Sapient Paradox is the apparently unexplainable time delay of several ten thousand years following the arrival of Homo sapiens in Asia and Europe and before the introduction of impressive innovations with the agricultural revolution.…
The current theory of evolution is almost the one Darwin and Wallace proposed two centuries ago and the following discoveries e.g., Mendelian genetics and neutral mutation theory have not made significant modifications. The current…
According to the "hard-steps" model, the origin of humanity required "successful passage through a number of intermediate steps" (so-called "hard" or "critical" steps) that were intrinsically improbable with respect to the total time…
We assume that the natural intelligence (human, particularly) is equivalent to a large inferring structure, which took shape in the last 400/500 million years. Then two hypotheses, about this structure and its development, are put forward…
The discovery of Paranthropus deyiremeda in 3.3-3.5 million year old fossil sites in Afar, together with 30% of the gorilla genome showing lineage sorting between humans and chimpanzees, and a NUMT ("nuclear mitochondrial DNA segment") on…
Data describing the growth of the world population in the past 12,000 years are analysed. It is shown that, if unchecked, population does not increase exponentially but hyperbolically. This analysis reveals three approximately-determined…
The process of speciation, where an ancestral species divides in two or more new species, involves several geographic, environmental and genetic components that interact in a complex way. Understanding all these elements at once is…
I propose to treat the biological evolution of genoms by means of quantum mechanical tools. We start with the concept of meta- gene, which specifies the "selfish gene" of R.Dawkins. Meta- gene encodes the abstract living unity, which can…
Empirical evidence suggests that social structure may have changed from hierarchical to egalitarian and back along the evolutionary line of humans. We model a society subject to competing cognitive and social navigation constraints. The…
Biological aging is characterized by an age-dependent increase in the probability of death and by a decrease in the reproductive capacity. Individual age-dependent rates of survival and reproduction have a strong impact on population…