The Informational Stakes of Dominance

The commodity that is immediately at stake in contests of dominance is information, and that feature differentiates dominance from predation in several ways. One is that while contests of dominance can escalate into lethal clashes, especially when the contestants are closely matched and intoxicated with positive illusions, most of the time (in humans and animals alike) they are settled with displays. The antagonists flaunt their strength, brandish their weapons, and play games of brinkmanship...

 Human Self-Domestication

...the hypothesis of human self-domestication has recently been revived as a possible explanation of changes of human physical traits since the late Pleistocene. These changes include the reduction of body size and decrease in skeletal robusticity, modifications in cranial and dental features including reduction in cranial capacity, shortening of the facial region of the skull and maleruption of teeth, and reduction in sexual dimorphism. In contrast to earlier biological writings, other domes...

 Did Lower Testosterone Help Civilize Humanity?

A new study appearing Aug. 1 in the journal Current Anthropology finds that human skulls changed in ways that indicate a lowering of testosterone levels at around the same time that culture was blossoming. “The modern human behaviors of technological innovation, making art and rapid cultural exchange probably came at the same time that we developed a more cooperative temperament,” said lead author Robert Cieri, a biology graduate student at the University of Utah who began this work as a...

 What is a Person?

What is a person? This seems like an easy question, but appearances can be deceiving. Throughout the long sweep of human history, the answer to the question of what a person is has continually changed. Was a woman a person, or was she a piece of property? Or was she even a liability, something that had to be compensated for with a dowry before a man’s family would agree to take her on? Was a man alien to their immediate culture a person? Not if you were of African descent in the United Sta...

 Neoteny in Humans

...the concept of "neoteny"—the retention of juvenile features into adult life. It is a commonplace of human evolution that the transition from Australopithecus to Homo and from Homo habilis to Homo erectus and thence to Homo sapiens all involved prolonging and slowing the development of the body so that it still looked like a baby when it was already mature. The relatively large brain case and small jaw, the slender limbs, the hairless skin, the unrotated big toe, the thin bones, even the ...