Mailund on the Internet

Lecture at YouTube:

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Just read this post on my good friend Thomas Widmann’s blog: A body that requires a brain:

One thing about human evolution that has been puzzling me for years is that there are several areas where the human body seems to be dependent on a highly developed brain

He then mentions head hair and nails – that needs to be cut – and human buttocks – that needs to be wept for fæces.

In short, I can’t see how human head hair, nails and buttocks could have evolved before the human brain was sophisticated enough to invent combs, knives and toilet paper.

My guess is that those features are results of sexual selection, but the question remains if we evolved these features before or after we had the means to deal with them.

Our modern brain seems to be more recent than our body – in the sense that we see anatomically modern humans earlier than we see art or complex tools – but do we have any knowledge about when features like these evolved?

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I just upgraded WordPress – mainly because of the recent security thread (although I usually keep it reasonably up to date it has been a few months since my last upgrade) – and upgraded the necessary plugins at the same time.

Upgrading the “stats” plugin, though, ate all my views statistics.  Right now, this looks like the most unpopular blog ever:

Only one hit ever!

Does anyone know if there is any way I can get this back, or should I just try to get a lot more new hits to compensate?

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If you think you know the answer to this question, you should go read this entry at Scitable: Why should we care about species?

The question is especially complicated when we consider closely related species or sub-species, or when we think about the evolution of species and speciation, but this text is more on the fundamental definitions.

It is written by Jody Hey of IM fame and really worth a read.

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