Tag: Humans

Working heads-down on a project for a few months, a few times a day I come back to Medium as a bit of a mind-vacation, to watch all you writers casting your spells and sharing your journeys and thoughts. It’s like the best kind of background conversations one might hear in an old, wood encr...

The Six Degrees of Separation concept is based on the premise that the world is a vast, interconnected network, and that each person is just a few steps away from every other individual through a chain of acquaintances. According to the theory, it takes only six or fewer “hops” or interm...

This was originally written for my Anthropology 113 course, “Witchcraft, Magic, Science, and Religion,” taken with Prof. Mark Sanders. Life on the Sepik: Introduction to the Kaningara The island of Papua New Guinea is home to almost 9 million people, 88% of which reside in rural ar...

Cooperating in large numbers (hundreds and thousands of people) is not really a trait of human beings. We can effectively cooperate only in groups of 100-150 at best. Once this threshold is crossed, the stability of groups starts to shake. What we need is fiction or a common imagined reality, a driv...

The human brain uses the same mechanisms to identify either real or fake faces. Once you’ve seen an imaginary mug, your mind won’t let go of the impression, storing the perception just like it would the image of a real person’s face. One study using brain scans suggest...

What defines humankind? Is it our remarkable ability to think, reason, and communicate? Or perhaps it’s the unique dexterity of our opposable thumbs that sets us apart in the animal kingdom. While these traits undoubtedly contribute to our identity, there’s another defining aspect tha...

Life can be seen as organic compounds seeking electromagnetic stability. Physics and chemistry lead to the formation of organic molecules and compounds. As these organic compounds interact with each other, the “magic” of biology comes to life. There is no magic, but rather a compounded a...

China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ campaign is widely regarded as one of the biggest disasters in human history. Initiated in 1958 by Mao Zedong, leader of China’s Communist Party, the Great Leap Forward included an ambitious plan to transform agrarian rural economies into an indus...

You may have heard that humans only use 10 percent of their brain power, and that if you could unlock the rest of your brainpower, you could do so much more. You could become a super genius, or acquire psychic powers like mind reading and telekinesis. However, there is a powerful body of evidence de...

Most people don’t realize we’re not the first Homo genus on this planet. Adding to that, they don’t even know Homo sapiens sapiens lived along side about ten different hominids that look similar to us — some with slightly bigger brains and bodies, and some with slightly small...