Torino, Italy

Evolution of Animal and Human Behaviour

Evoluzione del comportamento animale e dell'uomo

Master's
Language: ItalianStudies in Italian
Subject area: biology
University website: www.unito.it
Animal
Animals are multicellular eukaryotic organisms that form the biological kingdom Animalia. With few exceptions, animals consume organic material, breathe oxygen, are able to move, reproduce sexually, and grow from a hollow sphere of cells, the blastula, during embryonic development. Over 1.5 million living animal species have been described—of which around 1 million are insects—but it has been estimated there are over 7 million animal species in total. Animals range in length from 8.5 millionths of a metre to 33.6 metres (110 ft) and have complex interactions with each other and their environments, forming intricate food webs. The study of animals is called zoology.
Evolution
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. Evolutionary processes give rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organisation, including the levels of species, individual organisms, and molecules.
Human
Humans (taxonomically Homo sapiens) are the only extant members of the subtribe Hominina. The Hominina are sister of the Chimpanzees with which they form the Hominini belonging to the family of great apes. They are characterized by erect posture and bipedal locomotion; high manual dexterity and heavy tool use compared to other animals; open-ended and complex language use compared to other animal communications; and a general trend toward larger, more complex brains and societies.
Evolution
Even in her transfigured state, the thought of goal-oriented evolution gave Evelyn the creeps. It smacked of Intelligent Design, the ludicrous evangelism of engineers masquerading as biologists, their PowerPoint presentations riddled with evasions and half-truths and pseudoscience. Such thinking confused causes and effects; it complicated unnecessarily the idea of evolution, a field where explanations are valuable only for their parsimony.
Joe Pitkin, A Murmuration of Starlings in Rich Horton (ed.) The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013, p. 367 (Originally published in Analog magazine, June 2012)
Evolution
[While research] … has revealed unexpected, stunning complexity, no progress at all has been made in understanding how that complexity could evolve by unintelligent processes.
Michael Behe, as attributed without citation in Awake! magazine (anonymous), January 2015
Evolution
A mighty stream of tendency.
William Hazlitt, Essay, Why Distant Objects Please; Reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 241-42.
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