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February 17 Hubble Finds Strong Contender For Galaxy Distance RecordScienceDaily (Feb. 13, 2008) — The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, with a boost from a natural “zoom lens”, has found the strongest evidence so far for a galaxy with a redshift significantly above 7. It is likely to be one of the youngest and brightest galaxies ever seen right after the cosmic “dark ages”, just 700 million years after the beginning of our Universe (redshift ~7.6). See also: Detailed images from Hubble’s Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) reveal an infant galaxy, dubbed A1689-zD1, undergoing a firestorm of star birth as it comes out of the dark ages, a time shortly after the Big Bang, but before the first stars completed the reheating of the cold, dark Universe. Images from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope’s Infrared Array Camera provided strong additional evidence that it was a young star-forming galaxy in the dark ages. “We certainly were surprised to find such a bright young galaxy 13 billion years in the past”, said astronomer Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA and a member of the research team. “This is the most detailed look to date at an object so far back in time.” According to the authors, the measurements are “highly reliable”. “This object is the strongest candidate for the most distant galaxy so far”, states team member Piero Rosati from ESO, Germany. “The Hubble images yield insight into the galaxy’s structure that we cannot get with any other telescope,” added astronomer Rychard Bouwens of the University of California, Santa Cruz, one of the co-discoverers of this galaxy. The new images should offer insights into the formative years of galaxy birth and evolution and yield information on the types of objects that may have contributed to ending the dark ages. During its lifetime the Hubble telescope has peered ever farther back in time, viewing galaxies at successively younger stages of evolution. These snapshots have helped astronomers create a scrapbook of galaxies from infancy to adulthood. The new Hubble and Spitzer images of A1689-zD1 show a time when galaxies were in their infancy. Current theory holds that the dark ages began about 400,000 years after the Big Bang, as matter in the expanding Universe cooled and formed clouds of cold hydrogen. These cold clouds pervaded the Universe like a thick fog. At some point during this era, stars and galaxies started to form. Their collective light heated and cleared the fog of cold hydrogen, and ended the dark ages about a billion years after the Big Bang. “This galaxy presumably is one of the many galaxies that helped end the dark ages”, said astronomer Larry Bradley of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA, and leader of the study. “Astronomers are fairly certain that high-energy objects such as quasars did not provide enough energy to end the dark ages of the Universe. But many young star-forming galaxies may have produced enough energy to end it.” The galaxy is so far away it did not appear in visible light images taken with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, because its light is stretched to infrared wavelengths by the Universe’s expansion. It took Hubble’s NICMOS, Spitzer and a trick of nature called gravitational lensing to see the faraway galaxy. The astronomers used a relatively nearby massive cluster of galaxies known as Abell 1689, roughly 2.2 billion light-years away, to magnify the light from the more distant galaxy directly behind it. This natural telescope is a gravitational lens. Abell 1689 is one of the most spectacular gravitational telescopes known and its gravitational properties are very well known. Though the diffuse light of the faraway object is nearly impossible to see, gravitational lensing has increased its brightness by nearly 10 times, making it bright enough for Hubble and Spitzer to detect. A telltale sign of the lensing is the smearing of the images of galaxies behind Abell 1689 into arcs by the gravitational warping of space by the intervening galaxy cluster. Piero Rosati says: “This galaxy lies near the region where the galaxy cluster produces the highest magnification – which was essential to bring this galaxy within reach of Hubble and Spitzer.” Spitzer’s images show that the galaxy’s mass is typical of galaxies in the early Universe. Its mass is equivalent to several billions of stars like our Sun, or just a tiny fraction of the mass of the Milky Way. “This observation confirms previous Hubble studies that star birth happens in very tiny regions compared with the size of the final galaxy”, Illingworth said. The faraway galaxy also is an ideal target for Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scheduled to launch in 2013. Even with the increased magnification from the gravitational lens, Hubble’s sharp “eye” can only see knots of the brightest, heftiest stars in the galaxy. The telescope cannot pinpoint fainter, lower-mass stars, individual stars, or the material surrounding the star-birth region. To see those things, astronomers will need the infrared capabilities of JWST currently being developed by NASA, ESA and CSA in a major international collaboration. The planned infrared observatory will have a mirror about seven times the area of Hubble’s primary mirror and will collect more light from faint galaxies. JWST also will be able to view even more remote galaxies whose light has been stretched deep into infrared wavelengths that are out of the reach of NICMOS. “This galaxy will certainly be one of the first objects that will be observed by JWST”, said team member Holland Ford of Johns Hopkins University. “This galaxy is so bright that JWST will see its detailed structure. This object is a pathfinder for JWST for deciphering what is happening in young galaxies.” The astronomers noted that the faraway galaxy also would be an ideal target for the ESO/NRAO/NAOJ Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), which, when completed in 2012, will be the most powerful radio telescope in the world. “ALMA and JWST working together would be an ideal combination to really understand this galaxy”, Illingworth said, noting that: “JWST’s images and ALMA’s measurement of the gas motions will provide revolutionary insights into the very youngest galaxies.” The astronomers will conduct follow-up observations with infrared spectroscopy to confirm the galaxy’s distance using ESO’s VLT and the Keck telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The results will be published in the Astrophysical Journal. Adapted from materials provided by ESA/Hubble Information Centre. August 14 Ass Eval C:\Documents and Settings\KWolfe\Desktop\New Folder\Report\Presentation & sound\GPHS-Training-Evaluation.html July 18 The Biology of TransformationA Living the Field ConferenceKing’s College, Waterloo campus, London SE1
Saturday, 22nd September and Sunday, 23rd September, 2007 The workshops
The workshops The speakers Dr Todd Ovokaitys
Todd Ovokaitys was accepted into an accelerated combined program at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, which conferred both B.A. and M.D. degrees. Advanced training was at Georgetown University Hospital, with a Residency and Chief Residency in Internal Medicine followed by a Fellowship in Pulmonary and Intensive Care Medicine. Following his own research work, he came to realize that science only partly understood how DNA worked. He maintains that DNA is a structure of coils within coils in an environment of moving charges that permits DNA to send electromagnetic signals much as a radio transmitter. Further, DNA could receive and be conditioned by electromagnetic signals. Most significantly, if it were possible to determine and transmit the correct resonant signals, it was possible to switch the activity of a sick cell to that of a healthy cell, an old cell to that of a young cell. Dr Bruce Lipton
Bruce Lipton began his scientific career as a cell biologist. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Virginia before joining the Department of Anatomy at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine in 1973. Dr. Lipton’s research on muscular dystrophy, studies employing cloned human stem cells, focused upon the molecular mechanisms controlling cell behaviour. His research at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, between 1987 and 1992, revealed that the environment, operating though the membrane, controlled the behavior and physiology of the cell, turning genes on and off. His discoveries, which ran counter to the established scientific view that life is controlled by the genes, presaged one of today’s most important fields of study, the science of epigenetics. His book, Biology of Belief, has been an inspiration to the many thousands who have read it. Dr Rupert Sheldrake Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than 75 scientific papers and ten books, including Seven Experiments That Could Change the World. A former Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he studied natural sciences at Cambridge University, where he was a Scholar of Clare College, took a double first class honours degree and was awarded the University Botany Prize. He then studied philosophy at Harvard University, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow, before returning to Cambridge, where he took a Ph.D. in biochemistry. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge University, where he carried out research on the development of plants and the ageing of cells. He is the current Perrott-Warrick Scholar and Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, near San Francisco, and an Academic Director and Visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut. Peggy Phoenix Dubro
Peggy Phoenix Dubro is best known as the founder and pioneer of the EMF Balancing technique. It is now practised in more than 60 countries by thousands of practitioners, and by people from a wide variety of backgrounds and religions It is based on a new biology and metaphysics that sees the universe as a unified system, and us as part of it. As part of her theory, she has also developed the concept of the Universal Calibration Lattice (UCL). After working regularly with clients for several years, and stimulated by their requests to know more about what she was doing, Peggy developed a training programme to teach others the theory and method of how to do the sessions. These training programmes have led to the current status of the work, and she is now known worldwide as the originator of the EMF Balancing Technique, and the foremost authority on the Universal Calibration Lattice. Dr Joyce Hawkes
Dr Joyce Hawkes is internationally recognized for her work as a research scientist and her more recent work as a teacher of Cell-Level healing. Her early work on the biophysics of cell structure and function included a position as a Postdoctoral Fellow with the National Institutes of Health. She published nearly 50 papers, abstracts, and book chapters. The innovative excellence of her research earned her election to the position of Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Following a near-death experience she changed careers in 1984 and embarked on an extensive exploration of spiritual and healing traditions. She discovered numerous practical applications of indigenous healing modalities, which led her on her new path of cellular healing, the subject of her book Cell-Level Healing: The Bridge from Soul to Cell. She has more than 20 years’ experience working as a spiritual counselor, healer, and seminar leader. presentations and writing.Eric Pearl
Lynne McTaggart
Lynne McTaggart is an award-winning journalist and researcher. She was born in New Jersey, USA, and she graduated from Benington College with a BA in English. She wrote two books – The Baby Brokers and Kathleen Kennedy – before moving to live in London, where she met her husband, Bryan Hubbard. Thoughts heard around the worldby Lynne McTaggart Ed Note: This is a follow-up and expansion of an article on the initial findings of the first-ever, long-distance double-blind group intention experiment in history which occurred March 10-11, 2007. Participants included 400 attendees of the first Intention Experiment Conference in London and consciousness researcher Dr. Gary Schwartz and his team at the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health at the University of Arizona in Tucson.For background: theglobalintelligencer.com/mar2007/life-health LONDON, UK - Now that we’ve carried out a number of our Intention Experiments, it’s safe to say that nothing we’ve learned was what we imagined we’d find, but everything we did find offered another extraordinary piece of the puzzle about the power of intention. Many of our new answers beg many more questions, the answers to which may be yielded up in future experiments. We have run five experiments thus far, one with German physicist Fritz-Albert Popp and his colleague Dutch psychologist Eduard Van Wijk at the International Institute of Biophysics, and four with psychologist Dr. Gary Schwartz and his team at the University of Arizona’s Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness Research. All experiments concerned examining the alteration in the tiny light — called biophoton emissions — being emitted from living things. We chose to look at this tiny current of light because it is infinitely more subtle than, say, cellular growth rate. The tiniest change in the organism can be controlled for. Popp has a number of extremely sensitive photocount detectors at his disposal, which can register an intensity of visible light of about 10–17 watts per square centimetre, analogous to the light coming from a candle several kilometres away. Schwartz used a highly sensitive CCD cameras, which record and photograph the faint light of outer space. This type of ultrasensitive equipment would enable us to record every single hair’s breath of difference – even by a single photon – and so determine the extent of our influence. For our first intention experiment we gathered a group of experienced meditators in London, and had them send positive intention to four targets at Popp’s IIB laboratory in Neuss, Germany. This included two very simple organisms: the algae Acetabularia acetabulum, a strange freak of nature, consisting of a single cell and dinoflagellates, a type of primitive fluorescent ‘animal’, the light emissions of which is extraordinarily responsive to change. With such primitive organisms, Popp explained, it would be possible to demonstrate, with a fair degree of certainty, that any effect, for better or worse, was entirely the result of our remote influence. As both Popp and Schwartz have cautioned many times, if we were going to attempt to do intention experiments, we need to begin on the ground floor – and dinoflagellates were certainly that. Eventually Popp acquiesced to including the use of several other subjects: a jade plant, and a human subject whom Eduard felt he could enlist. Each would constitute a separate experiment, and then we would have several results to compare. In our experimental design, we aimed for an ‘on off, on off’ effect, so that we could isolate any changes as being caused by remote influence. Popp suggested that we have our group send intention intermittently at regular intervals: 10 minutes on, then 10 minutes off, so that we would be ‘running’ intention a few times every hour. If our experiment worked and intention did have an effect, once we plotted our result on a graph it would create an identifiable, zigzag effect. As change of any sort is easier to see with something ill that you try to make well, we decided to stress some of our subjects in some way. The most obvious way to stress a life form is to place it in a hostile medium. Van Wijk decided to pour some vinegar into the medium of the dinoflagellates. We could stress the jade plant by sticking a needle through one of its fleshy leaves. Eduard ultimately decided to stress our human subject with three cups of coffee. We decided to leave the Acetabularia alone, to test whether our intentions could also affect a healthy organism. The experiment ran at night, between 3 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eduard would turn on the equipment, and I selected three half-hour windows within that time frame to carry out our group intentions unbeknownst to either our scientists or Annemarie, our human target a laser biologist and meditator of long standing. The 16 meditators and I met on March 28, 2006 at 5:30 pm and sent intentions to all four targets from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at every hour on the hour to 10 minutes past and from 20 past until the half hour. When analysing the data, once they’d received our meditation schedule, van Wijk studied not only the intensity of light but also its deviation from symmetry: normal emissions from a living thing, when plotted on a graph as a bell curve, are perfectly symmetrical. He also looked at any deviations in the kurtosis, or the customary ‘peakedness’, of the distribution. High kurtosis means a bell curve that is high around the middle, or mean. Again, when emissions are plotted on a graph, the normal peak distribution is 0 – the highs and lows cancel each other out. After examining our 12 block periods – the six times we sent intention and the six periods of rest – he found no change in light intensity. But he did find large changes in the skewness, showing a lack of the customary symmetry (from 1.124 to 0.922) and kurtosis (from 2.403 to 1.581) of the emissions. Something in the light was profoundly altered. The most interesting aspect of these results is that they exactly match those van Wijk had observed during a study of healers, when he had tested whether the act of healing has a ‘scatter effect’ on any other living things in the environment where the healing takes place. In the study, when he had placed some algae with a photon counter in the presence of a healer and his patients and measured the photons of the algae during 36 healings, he had been surprised to discover that the photon count distributions of the algae had ‘remarkable’ alterations during the healing rituals. Large shifts in the cyclical components of the emissions had occurred. His tiny study had suggested that healing caused a shift in the light emissions of everything in its path. Now he had discovered the same effect when simple intention was sent by ordinary people from 300 miles away. As for the two algae and the jade plant, in all three instances, our subjects registered a significant decrease in biophotons during the meditation sessions, compared with the control periods. The dinoflagellates had been killed by the vinegar, in the end; nevertheless, Popp said, their response (a lowering of emissions by nearly 140,000) was significantly different from the normal emissions of a dying organism. Among the survivors, the Acetabularia, the healthy subject, had evidenced a larger effect than the jade plant, perhaps because it was not overcoming a stress (544 emissions lower than normal), whereas with the jade plant (which had 65.5 emissions lower than normal), the stress (the pin) remained in the leaf during the experiment. During meditation, Popp wrote in his report, ‘there is a clear preference of dropping down reactions rather than going up’, which tracked the times of our intentions. With the Acetabularia, we had had an overall decrease over the norm of 573 emissions, and an increase of only 29. Our little meditation effort had created a major healing effect, a significant decrease in living light. Not only that, but the effect from all that distance was similar to the effect by an experienced healer when healing in the same room. The intention of our group had created the same light as a healer’s. May 31 The Evolution of Enlightenment The Guru and the Pandit Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen in Dialogue introduction
In this new WIE feature, Andrew Cohen, spiritual teacher and founder of What Is Enlightenment?, and Ken Wilber, the world's most renowned integral philosopher, join together, guru and pandit, heart to heart and mind to mind, to push the limits of their (and our) experience and understanding and to chart the emerging edge of a wholly contemporary spirituality. Now, the word pandit isn't just a strange spelling of pundit—those often caustic, overly intellectual, wise-cracking critics who pepper the airwaves. A true pandit is a scholar—not someone just wasting away in an Ivory Tower, but one who is deeply proficient and immersed in spiritual wisdom. So, we're calling upon the ancient Sanskrit meaning of pandit and, for that matter, guru, as the starting point for an interaction that has the potential to transcend and include (to use a distinctly Wilberian expression) the old, and propel us into something radically new.
So while we're reclaiming and transcending ancient spiritual terms, let's take a fresh look at guru—which in Sanskrit literally means "dispeller of darkness," one who teaches spiritual liberation from his or her own direct experience or realization. In the ever-changing and deepening inquiry of WIE, Andrew Cohen has sought to bring to light the meaning and significance of enlightenment for our time through the thoroughly modern medium of the magazine. And Andrew has fought the tide of anti-authority sentiment in the postmodern world by embracing the traditional demands of the guru principle and championing the student-teacher relationship as a radical partnership for human evolution. Fiercely independent, he is forging out of his experience a new spirituality—what he calls "evolutionary enlightenment"—arising from the mystical depth known to the Eastern enlightenment traditions and empowered by a Western passion for humanity's individual and collective evolutionary potential. Ken Wilber often says, "I am a pandit, not a guru." His soaring and searing words have graced the pages of WIE before, bringing a true pandit's wisdom to ignite our hearts and sharpen our minds, compelling us to think deeply about the whole of human life and inspiring us to reach for greater depth and higher potential. By Ken's own definition, "A pandit is a spiritual practitioner who also has a flair for the academic or scholarly or intellectual and so becomes a teacher of the Divine, an articulator and defender of the dharma, an intellectual samurai." A true warrior of the word, he has written more than eighteen volumes (and been translated into more than twenty languages), articulating his constantly evolving "theory of everything." At a time when postmodern fragmentation and relativism bring the contemporary academy perilously close to the edge of nihilism, Ken's independent voice cries for an integral, wholesome, and deeply spiritual synthesis of Eastern models of transcendence and Western philosophy and developmental psychology. What would happen, we wondered, when these two uncompromising and fearless idealists met to discuss the future of God? What happened, as you will see, is a thrilling example of the alchemy that can take place in the openness of true dialogue. In this debut of a feature that will appear regularly in WIE over the months and years to come, Andrew and Ken, third millennium guru and twenty-first-century pandit, at the edge of past and future, ride the swift currents of a rising spiritual tide—exploring the evolution of enlightenment itself. –Elizabeth Debold
The Evolution of Spirituality
May 28 I AMI AM
I looked deep inside myself and what did I see?
A universe expanding to eternity
I see, I see inside of me continuum eternity
Such a site, a site I see a light as bright as bright can be
It does however make more sense, now that I am whole,
The universe and all there is within my very soul
Inside the atom lies the eve of alpha and omega be
I Am will open up the door to everything and nothing more
I Am, I Am who is I Am or what does I Am mean?
Perhaps the answer lies within those wisely unseen
K a t h e r i n e G. W o l f e The Great Awakening***With this planet currently experiencing great geophysical and sociological change,
information from honest sources with the highest levels of integrity becomes a necessity for the conscious human. The arts of ethics, science and spirituality are the tools on which valuable knowledge can be uncovered. Proper use of the knowledge uncovered about our past and present will help us create a more prosperous and joyful existence for ourselves and the greater family of mankind*** *****The Universe is not a collection of objects, but is an inseparable web of vibrating energy patterns in which no one component has reality independently from the entirety. Included in the entirety is the observer. - Paul Davies***** LIGHT unto thee, LIFE unto thee, SUN may thou be on the cycle above. Sacred GeometryWhat is Sacred Geometry? When the teachings of geometry are used to show the ancient truth that all life emerges from the same blueprint, we can clearly see that life springs from the same source ... the intelligent force some call "God." When geometry is used to explore this great truth, a broader understanding of the universe unfolds until we can see that all aspects of reality become sacred. Understanding the simple truths of sacred geometry leads to an evolution of consciousness and an opening of the heart that is a next step in the process of human evolution. True sacred geometric forms never fixate or stagnate on one single form. Instead they are actually in constant fluid transcendence and change (evolving or devolving) from one geometric form to another at their own speed or frequency. These ever-evolving states of geometry mirror the constantly evolving nature of the human consciousness. Sacred Geometry in its pristine form is constructed of the fabric of conscious transcendent "Spirit Matter". These sacred geometric forms often appear in our dreams and visions. Often they are presented in a rapid-fire succession as if they were hieroglyphs with enormous amounts of emotion and meaning relayed within each symbol. In those cases, it is often not necessary to intellectually understand the meaning behind the barrage of imagery. Our unconscious understands, and it is from there that transformation begins. Sacred geometry and the teachings of the Flower of Life help us to see within ourselves the vastness of which we are all a part. Many humans have been conditioned to see and believe in a limited perspective of smallness. Elephant trainers of the far east tie a thin rope around the ankle of a baby elephant and throughout their lives reinforce the boundary of the rope. The adult elephant is fully capable of breaking the rope but the elephant has been so conditioned to believe he cannot, that he does not understand his own power to free himself. We are like those elephants, just learning about our self-imposed belief in limitation. Living with our limited perspectives of ourselves, we rarely see past our limitations and, as a consequence, we bind ourselves to our habits. With a little effort, the teachings of the Flower of Life and sacred geometry help us peer through the window of our conditioned beliefs and gaze at the vastness of our true selves and our infinite potential. http://www.floweroflife.org/toverview8.htm May 07 The Universe Speaks To UsThis is the time of the Awakening.
We exist here on this physical plane to learn.
We are here because we decided to be here.
This is MY REALITY and I AM IN CHARGE HERE!
OPEN YOUR MIND TO THE AWAKENING. January 06 Talking about Future of Evolution
Quote Future of Evolution June 26 Human Evolution
Human Evolution  The human species shares a common genetic code with all other life on this planet, and many of our basic traits are a heritage from the long evolutionary history that took place before the human lineage branched off from the apes around 6 million years ago. Yet we also have our own set of uniquely human adaptations. Explore these resources for more about the evolution of humans and our closest relatives, the other primates. MAY 20, 2003Chimps Belong on Human Branch of Family Tree, Study Says  (From National Geographic News) A new report argues that chimpanzees are so closely related to humans that they should be included in our branch of the tree of life. Chimpanzees and other apes have historically been separated from humans in classification schemes, with humans deemed the only living members of the hominid family of species. Follow the link below to read the full story. Additional information: National Geographic News http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/05/ 0520_030520_chimpanzees.html June 25 'Our Inner Ape': Hey Hey, We're the Monkeys'Our Inner Ape': Hey Hey, We're the Monkeys By TEMPLE GRANDIN
Published: October 9, 2005
Our closest genetic cousins, the apes, are capable of great empathy but also of violent, ruthless killing. Frans de Waal, a prominent primatologist, compares our social behavior with that of two species of apes: chimpanzees and bonobos (which look like smaller, more upright chimps). Despite their physical similarities, the two species behave very differently. Bonobos live in a relatively peaceful matriarchy; when conflicts do arise, instead of fighting they often use sexual activity to resolve them, defusing the aggression with friendly physical contact. Like hippies, they make love, not war. Chimp society, however, is a male-dominated hierarchy based on power. Unlike the gentle bonobos, who seldom kill, chimps will hunt for meat and even kill members of rival groups. 
Dusan Petricic In this fascinating book, de Waal suggests that the two species represent sides of our own nature. We have "not one but two inner apes," he writes, speculating that humans may act like a hybrid of bonobos and chimps. (Little is known about actual bonobo-chimp hybrids except for a group that lives in a French traveling circus and strikes visitors with its "gentility and sensitivity.") Helping the weak and sharing are part of both bonobo and chimp societies. De Waal gives a rather fierce example for the chimps: When individuals cooperate to hunt a monkey, they always share the meat. Among bonobos, Kidogo, a male with a heart condition, was having difficulty adjusting to shifting routines when he was transferred to a new zoo. The other bonobos "approached Kidogo, took him by the hand and led him to where the keepers wanted him, thus showing they understood both the keepers' intentions and Kidogo's problem." Kuni, meanwhile, a bonobo at a zoo in Britain, helped an injured starling that had crashed into the glass of her enclosure. She picked it up and tried to set it on its feet, then climbed a tree and carefully spread its wings to help it to fly before she released it. "She tailored her assistance to the specific situation of an animal totally different from herself," de Waal writes. Where the two ape species diverge most are in the realms of sex and violence. Bonobos don't exactly distinguish between sex and friendly touching. Since their behavior is so often X-rated, you will have to read the book to learn the details. There you'll also find details of chimpanzee violence. Infanticide, de Waal tells us, is a leading cause of death among chimps, both in zoos and in the wild. One reason bonobos engage in so much sex is to prevent rival males from killing their babies. If everybody has sex with everybody else, there's no saying who's the daddy. Like humans, chimps can be ruthless toward individuals who are not part of their troop. De Waal explains that large-brained animals capable of using empathy to do kind things for others are also capable of great cruelty, because they can imagine what their victims will feel. One of the most shocking incidents he describes occurred at Gombe National Park in Tanzania, where a group of chimps lived peacefully for years. As youngsters they played and groomed one another, but the group gradually drifted apart and formed two new groups. Chimps that had known one another for years were now in conflict. "Shocked researchers watched as former friends now drank each other's blood. Not even the oldest community members were left alone. An extremely frail-looking male, Goliath, was pummeled for 20 minutes and dragged about." De Waal compares this horrible chimp behavior to genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia. With chimps, as with humans, fighting within one's own group is restrained compared with attacks on outsiders. De Waal does not discuss the possible genetic implications of many of his observations. Animals who have high-fear genetics are less inclined to be aggressive because they are afraid to fight, and stressful, scary situations can affect them more dramatically. When bombs fell on Munich during World War II, de Waal tells us, all the bonobos in the zoo died of heart failure, but all the chimps survived. Unfortunately, he does not discuss how these differences in fearfulness might affect social behavior. Fear and other traits, like aggression and sociability, have a strong genetic component. In my own work with antelopes, I have observed huge differences in the startle and fear response between individual animals. It is likely that there may be genetic differences between the most peaceful and most violent chimps. Also, since I am a person with autism, I do not agree with de Waal's view that emotions are required for making choices and storing memories. I use my visual thinking all the time to make logical choices. When Kuni helped the injured bird, emotion may have been the motivation, but visual thinking was the method. She compared the wing to her visual memories of flying birds and spread it to fit that image. I think her brain and mine would perform the task the same way. De Waal's most hopeful message is that peaceful behavior can be learned, as he showed when he raised juvenile rhesus and stumptail monkeys together. The aggressive rhesus juveniles picked up peaceful ways of resolving conflict from the larger, gentler stumptails. And the lessons took: even after the two species were separated, the rhesus continued to have three times more grooming and other friendly behavior after fights. This important and illuminating book should help our own species take that lesson in civility to heart. Temple Grandin is an associate professor of animal science at Colorado State University and the author of "Animals in Translation." June 22 Talking about How warming is changing the wild kingdom - LiveScience - MSNBC.com
Quote
June 20 I AM - by KGW (alias Citichic, alias Webwolfe)
June 13 Future of EvolutionScientists are fond of running the evolutionary clock backward, using DNA analysis and the fossil record to figure out when our ancestors stood erect and split off from the rest of the primate evolutionary tree. But the clock is running forward as well. So where are humans headed? Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says it's the question he's most often asked, and "a question that any prudent evolutionist will evade." But the question is being raised even more frequently as researchers study our past and contemplate our future. Paleontologists say that anatomically modern humans may have at one time shared the Earth with as many as three other closely related types — Neanderthals, Homo erectus and the dwarf hominids whose remains were discovered last year in Indonesia. Does evolutionary theory allow for circumstances in which "spin-off" human species could develop again? Some think the rapid rise of genetic modification could be just such a circumstance. Others believe we could blend ourselves with machines in unprecedented ways — turning natural-born humans into an endangered species. Present-day fact, not science fiction "These issues touch upon religion, upon politics, upon values," said Gregory Stock, director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at the University of California at Los Angeles. "This is about our vision of the future, essentially, and we'll never completely agree about those things." The problem is, scientists can't predict with precision how our species will adapt to changes over the next millennium, let alone the next million years. That's why Dawkins believes it's imprudent to make a prediction in the first place. Others see it differently: In the book "Future Evolution," University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward argues that we are making ourselves virtually extinction-proof by bending Earth's flora and fauna to our will. And assuming that the human species will be hanging around for at least another 500 million years, Ward and others believe there are a few most likely scenarios for the future, based on a reading of past evolutionary episodes and current trends. Where are humans headed? Here's an imprudent assessment of five possible paths, ranging from homogenized humans to alien-looking hybrids bred for interstellar travel. Biologists say that different populations of a species have to be isolated from each other in order for those populations to diverge into separate species. That's the process that gave rise to 13 different species of "Darwin's Finches" in the Galapagos Islands. But what if the human species is so widespread there's no longer any opening for divergence? Evolution is still at work. But instead of diverging, our gene pool has been converging for tens of thousands of years — and Stuart Pimm, an expert on biodiversity at Duke University, says that trend may well be accelerating. "The big thing that people overlook when speculating about human evolution is that the raw matter for evolution is variation," he said. "We are going to lose that variability very quickly, and the reason is not quite a genetic argument, but it's close. At the moment we humans speak something on the order of 6,500 languages. If we look at the number of languages we will likely pass on to our children, that number is 600." Cultural diversity, as measured by linguistic diversity, is fading as human society becomes more interconnected globally, Pimm argued. "I do think that we are going to become much more homogeneous," he said. Ken Miller, an evolutionary biologist at Brown University, agreed: "We have become a kind of animal monoculture." Is that such a bad thing? A global culture of Unihumans could seem heavenly if we figure out how to achieve long-term political and economic stability and curb population growth. That may require the development of a more "domesticated" society — one in which our rough genetic edges are smoothed out. Reader mailbag But like other monocultures, our species could be more susceptible to quick-spreading diseases, as last year's bird flu epidemic illustrated. "The genetic variability that we have protects us against suffering from massive harm when some bug comes along," Pimm said. "This idea of breeding the super-race, like breeding the super-race of corn or rice or whatever — the long-term consequences of that could be quite scary." Environmental pressures wouldn't stop Some environmentalists say toxins that work like estrogens are already having an effect: Such agents, found in pesticides and industrial PCBs, have been linked to earlier puberty for women, increased incidence of breast cancer and lower sperm counts for men. "One of the great frontiers is going to be trying to keep humans alive in a much more toxic world," he observed from his Seattle office. "The whales of Puget Sound are the most toxic whales on Earth. Puget Sound is just a huge cesspool. Well, imagine if that goes global." Global epidemics or dramatic environmental changes represent just two of the scenarios that could cause a Unihuman society to crack, putting natural selection — or perhaps not-so-natural selection — back into the evolutionary game. Then what? Surviving doomsday is a story as old as Noah’s Ark, and as new as the post-bioapocalypse movie “28 Days Later.” Catastrophes ranging from super-floods to plagues to nuclear war to asteroid strikes erase civilization as we know it, leaving remnants of humanity who go their own evolutionary ways. The classic Darwinian version of the story may well be H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine,” in which humanity splits off into two species: the ruthless, underground Morlock and the effete, surface-dwelling Eloi. At least for modern-day humans, the forces that lead to species spin-offs have been largely held in abeyance: Populations are increasingly in contact with each other, leading to greater gene-mixing. Humans are no longer threatened by predators their own size, and medicine cancels out inherited infirmities ranging from hemophilia to nearsightedness. “We are helping genes that would have dropped out of the gene pool,” paleontologist Peter Ward observed. But in Wells’ tale and other science-fiction stories, a civilization-shattering catastrophe serves to divide humanity into separate populations, vulnerable once again to selection pressures. For example, people who had more genetic resistance to viral disease would be more likely to pass on that advantage to their descendants. If different populations develop in isolation over many thousands of generations, it’s conceivable that separate species would emerge. For example, that virus-resistant strain of post-humans might eventually thrive in the wake of a global bioterror crisis, while less hardy humans would find themselves quarantined in the world’s safe havens. Patterns in the spread of the virus that causes AIDS may hint at earlier, less catastrophic episodes of natural selection, said Stuart Pimm, a conservation biologist at Duke University: “There are pockets of people who don’t seem to become HIV-positive, even though they have a lot of exposure to the virus — and that may be because their ancestors survived the plague 500 years ago.” Evolution, or devolution? Reader mailbag Even Ward gives himself a little speculative leeway in his book “Future Evolution,” where a time-traveling human meets his doom 10 million years from now at the hands — or in this case, the talons — of a flock of intelligent killer crows. But Ward finds it hard to believe that even a global catastrophe would keep human populations isolated long enough for our species to split apart. “Unless we totally forget how to build a boat, we can quickly come back,” Ward said. Even in the event of a post-human split-off, evolutionary theory dictates that one species would eventually subjugate, assimilate or eliminate their competitors for the top job in the global ecosystem. Just ask the Neanderthals. “If you have two species competing over the same ecological niche, it ends badly for one of them, historically,” said Joel Garreau, the author of the forthcoming book “Radical Evolution.” The only reason chimpanzees still exist today is that they “had the brains to stay up in the trees and not come down into the open grasslands,” he noted. “You have this optimistic view that you’re not going to see speciation (among humans), and I desperately hope that’s right,” Garreau said. “But that’s not the only scenario.” http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7103668/page/4/ All credit goes to this writer: Alan Boyle |
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