Author: Lori Jia

Chimps Display a Hallmark of Human Behavior: Cooperation

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, March 3, 2006

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One of the hallmarks of being human is cooperation. No other primate exhibits the same kind of helpfulness to others. Humans have made even violence a highly cooperative effort, and scientists have wondered how far back in evolution this trait goes.

New studies on chimpanzees suggest that this part of human nature may have already existed millions of years ago, perhaps before the human and ape lineages divided.

Scientists had observed chimpanzees in the wild apparently cooperating in the past. “They work together to chase monkeys, and they’re quite effective when they chase them together,” said Brian Hare of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

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Darwin’s Passion and Fear

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, February 28, 2006

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Mounted on a carrot and a plum, two soldiers armed with swords and trumpets make war on one another. The Battle of the Fruit and Vegetable Soldiers is no ordinary child’s sketch. The artist was a young Francis Darwin, son of the celebrated Charles, and the drawing appears on the back of a manuscript page of his father’s most famous work, On the Origin of Species. Tucked away in a glass case in a corner of the American Museum of Natural History’s new Darwin exhibit, the page is one of only 28 to survive from the original manuscript of what many called “the book that shook the world.”

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Set Your Watch

Posted on by Lori Jia

This image came out a couple months ago in Nature, but I just came across it today. I quite like the way it sums up the history of life–something that’s maddening hard to do, since the time scales are so vast. It shows how life’s diversity has been accumulating for billions of years. This chart shows the timing of the earliest paeolontological evidence for different kinds of life, ranging from fossils to chemical markers. A few definitions may help.

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The Dawn of Brains and Bones

Posted on by Lori Jia

Go back far enough in our history–maybe about 650 million years–and you come to a time when our ancestors were still invertebrates. That is, they had no skulls, teeth, or other bones. They didn’t even have a brain.

How invertebrates became vertebrates is a fascinating question, made all the more fascinating because the answer tells us something about how we got to be the way we are. In order to reconstruct what happened, scientists can study several different kinds of evidence.

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Palm Trees and Lake Fish Dispel Doubts About a Theory of Evolution

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, February 21, 2006

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Sooner or later, everyone encounters a kentia palm. Its ability to grow in low sunlight has made it one of the world’s most traded houseplants.

“If you’ve been to a wine bar or to Starbucks, there may have been one in there,” said William Baker, a botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, England.

“Whether you realize it or not, you’re familiar with this palm,” he said.

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