This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
The 2010 May edition of our beloved Carnival of Evolution is up today on the official blog for Springer Verlag's journal, Evolution: Education and Outreach. And with that, surely getting your post accepted in CoE is now akin to peer-reviews on some level. Thanks to Adam M. Goldstein for hosting.
I have two pieces up:
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Jason G. Goldman’s post, “Starting from the Beginning: Evolutionary and Developmental Origins of Human Knowledge” offers a readable, useful overview of some main approaches and problems in the study of how people think and learn, focusing on “core knowledge systems,” which are important because they “evolved early in the timecourse of evolution and are shared with other animals” and also “emerge early in human development, and can be found in infants and children, as well as adults” Goldman’s second post, “Biological Evidence That Dog is Man’s Best Friend” has produced an especially long discussion in the comments section. Goldman’s considers intriguing findings about the coevolution between humans and dogs which suggest that “the human-dog relationship emerges out of a mechanism initially designed to stimulate and maintain the parent-child relationship.” Goldman’s comment in the post that “only dogs (and to some extent, cats, though at the risk of alienating readers, I maintain that cats are evil) have established for themselves a social niche within human society” is taken up early in the comments, the second commenter throwing down the gauntlet, stating “I contend that cats were never domesticated, in the sense that dogs & livestock have been.”
And in addition to my pieces, there is a TON of great stuff (33 posts total). Go check it out - the whole point of blog carnivals (as far as I'm concerned) is to expose blog readers to other great blogs and bloggers. So, here is the link again.
Looking ahead to next month, the Carnival of Evolution will be hosted at Zen Faulkes' blog, Neurodojo. Any post about evolution is welcome, but those about the evolution of the brain are especially encouraged.
The address for submitting posts is http://blogcarnival.com/bc/cprof_5028.html