Come back, Lucretius

Book review of: From Where We Came: poems. By Arthur J. Stewart (2015). Knoxville: Celtic Cat Publishing. xiv + 92 pp. $15.00 (paper). ISBN 978-0-9905945-9-8

Those who can, teach

Book review for: "Darwin's unfinished symphony: How culture made the human mind" By Kevin N. Laland. Princeton: Princeton University Press. xiv, 450 p. $35.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0-691-15118-2

Convergent? Minds? Some questions about mental evolution

In investigating convergent minds, we need to be sure that the things we are looking at are both minds and convergent. In determining whether a shared character state represents a convergence between two organisms, we must know the wider distribution and primitive state of that character so that we can map that character and its state transitions onto a phylogenetic tree. When we do this, some apparently primitive shared traits may prove to represent convergent losses of cognitive capacities. To avoid having to talk about the minds of plants and paramecia, we need to go beyond assessments of behaviourally defined cognition to ask questions about mind in the primary sense of the word, defined by the presence of mental events and consciousness. These phenomena depend upon the possession of brains of adequate size and centralized ontogeny and organization. They are probably limited to vertebrates. Recent discoveries suggest that consciousness is adaptively valuable as a late error-detection mechanism in the initiation of action, and point to experimental techniques for assessing its presence or absence in non-human mammals

Clavicle length and shoulder breadth in hominoid evolution

For a given body mass, hominoids have longer clavicles than typical monkeys, reflecting the laterad reorientation of the hominoid glenoid. Relative length of the clavicle varies among hominoids, with orangutans having longer clavicles than expected for body mass and gorillas and chimpanzees having shorter clavicles than expected. Modern humans conform to the general hominoid distribution, but Neandertals have longer clavicles than expected for their size. [TRUNCATED

Do beetles have experiences? How can we tell?

We attribute consciousness to other humans because their anatomy and behavior resembles our own and their verbal descriptions of subjective experiences correspond to ours. Nonhuman mammals have somewhat humanlike behavior and anatomy, but without the verbal descriptions. Their sentience is therefore open to Cartesian doubt. Robot minds lack humanlike behavior and anatomy, and so their sentience is generally discounted no matter what sentences they generate. Invertebrates lack both neurological similarity and language. Although it may be safest in making moral judgments to assume that some invertebrates are sentient, cogent reasons for thinking so must await an objective causal explanation for subjective experience

What, if anything, is Australopithecus afarensis?

Accepted manuscrip

Birth canal shape and fetal rotation in Australopithecus and Neandertals

Accepted manuscrip

A re-evaluation of fossil hominin obstetric constraints

Accepted manuscrip

Sixty Years of Modern Human Origins in the American Anthropological Association

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/65197/1/aa.2003.105.1.89.pd

Do horses gallop in their sleep? : consciousness, evolution, and the problem of animal minds (James Arthur lecture on the evolution of the human brain, no. 66, 1996).

23 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 21-23)