LIVESCIENCE.

COM
Greatest Mysteries: How Did Human Culture Evolve?
by Andrea Thompson (August 9, 2007)

What is culture?
- Biologists and animal behaviorists tend to define culture and tradition as any behavior that
is learned by observing or interacting with others

Clues in our cousins

- The problem with this analogy is that researchers aren't certain that these traditions are
really learned by observing others. They could be learned individually or could vary with
environmental influences.

Accounting for complexity

One aspect of human culture that makes it so complex is that it is cumulative, as people
build on the inventions of past generations.

"We adapt now culturally to an extent that's unparalleled in any other creature," said
anthropologist Jon Marks of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. As a human
product, technology evolves separately from human biology. (For example, you don't need
to talk about the biology of the makers to discuss the evolution of the airplane.)

- But one of the biggest differences between human and animal culture is "the fact that we
have language and writing, and we can record our cultures and transmit them in that way,"
Thornton said.

Language allows us to talk about abstract ideas such as happiness or love, about the past
and the future, and to combine words to express an infinite variety of ideas. The forms of
communication that animals use are much more limited—they can express a desire to mate,
or warn of the approach of a predator, but those calls cannot be combined to mean
something new.
Greatest Mysteries: How Did the Universe Begin?
by Ker Than (August 13, 2007)

Fundamental mysteries
- "What's disturbing is when you have a theory and you make a new observation, you have
to add new components," Steinhardt added. "And they're not connected … There's no
reason to add them, and no particular reason to add them in that particular amount, except
the observations. The question is how much you're explaining and how much you're
engineering a model. And we don’t' know yet."
Greatest Mysteries: Is There a Theory of Everything?
by Dave Mosher (August 21, 2007)

Supersymmetric search
"There are basically two approaches; one is the bottom-up, which is taking data and fixing
pieces of a theory to make it more elegant," said Fermilab cosmologist Scott Dodelson. "The
other approach is top-down, starting with an elegant theory and working down toward the
data. My chips are on the bottom-up people wanting to get down and dirty with data."
Quotes
Intuition is science’s most powerful and yet most untrustworthy engine.

No measure, no meaning.

Space makes geometry; space and time make animation; mass, space, and time make the
universe.