David Acevedo's Blog

Agriculture in humans arose around 11,000 years ago give or take a few thousand years with the domestication of grasses across the world. Wheat, Rice, Maize, and others were the domestic crops upon which agriculture was based. Before that Hunter gather groups did grow plants but not in an organized social way like they do in agriculture. Ants evolve something like generalized agriculture 50 million years ago. Around 15 million years after the Dinosaurs kicked the bucket. This is co-evolution of species (the ants harvest fungi) not merely breaking up of the ground that ants normally do that's beneficial to plants. I'd never given that much thought to ants, they're not as easy to study as bees which have a fascinating dance language and an industry appeal right of the bat. But Ants have been recently on my mind due to the connection to flowering plants that I hadn't considered. Ants don't pollinate plants, so their contribution went unnoticed by me, but they are es...

Most people get Darwin wrong by confusing him with Social Darwinism. I just heard an interview with author Lawrence Goldstone and he had really good grasp of Social Darwinism and how it's really more of an excuse for social discrimination than a scientific theory. Social Darwinism attempts to do something very ancient in Western Tradition which is the application of a "natural law" to social order. Since Darwin had just upended the traditional creationist view of the world at the time, many intellectuals sought to apply this new knowledge to old "natural laws" similar in a way to what Newton did. This turns out to be hogwash. Not too different from kings claiming divine lineage to justify their position in life, now the rich could use Social Darwinism to claim superior fitness, and justify their position in society. A feeling that still lingers today in some circles, with claims of superior intelligence and books like "The Bell Curve." Goldstone...