Will we get control of intractable brain diseases like schizophrenia or autism? Some interpret this to mean future answers lie purely in biochemistry, not neural circuits.
Others argue the key is for the neuroscientist to start to think in terms of overall brain architecture—not specific neural failures. Will technology eliminate the need for animal testing in drug development? That will eventually lead to significant reductions in use of animal testing. Importantly, these devices also will open up new approaches to drug development not possible with animal models today, such as personalized medicines and development of therapeutics for specific genetic subpopulations using chips created using cells from particular patients.
Will gender equality be achieved in the sciences? We need to fix the institutions by implementing dual-career hiring, family-friendly policies, and new visions of what it means to be a leader. And, most importantly, we need to fix the knowledge by harnessing the creative power of gender analysis for discovery and innovation.
Do you think we will one day be able to predict natural disasters such as earthquakes with warning times of days or hours? Hurricanes approach over days, volcanoes often build up to an eruption over days to hours, tornadoes strike within a few minutes.
Earthquakes are perhaps the greatest challenge. What we know about the physics of earthquakes suggests that we will not be able to predict earthquakes days in advance. But what we can do is predict the damaging ground shaking just before it arrives and provide seconds to minutes of warning.
Not enough time to get out of town, but enough time to get to a safe location. This article was originally published with the title "20 Big Questions about the Future of Humanity" in Scientific American , 3, September Already a subscriber?
Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. Read more from this special report: The Future of Humanity.
Cleland, philosophy professor and co-investigator in the Center for Astrobiology at the University of Colorado Boulder 3. Conley, NASA planetary protection officer Media Lab Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. Support science journalism. Knowledge awaits. See Subscription Options Already a subscriber? Create Account See Subscription Options. Anthropologist Glynn Isaac unearthed evidence of animal carcasses that had been purposefully moved from the sites of their deaths to locations where, presumably, the meat could be shared with the whole commune.
As Isaac saw it, food sharing led to the need to share information about where food could be found—and thus to the development of language and other distinctively human social behaviors. We Swim in the Nude : A little later in the age of Aquarius, Elaine Morgan , a TV documentary writer, claimed that humans are so different from other primates because our ancestors evolved in a different environment—near and in the water.
Shedding body hair made them faster swimmers, while standing upright enabled them to wade. But, in , David Attenborough endorsed it.
We Throw Stuff : Archaeologist Reid Ferring believes our ancestors began to man up when they developed the ability to hurl stones at high velocities. At Dmanisi , a 1. So how did hominins survive?
How did they make it all the way from Africa? Rock throwing offers part of the answer. Hunting also allegedly led to a division of labor between the sexes, with women doing the foraging. Which raises the question: Why do women have big brains too?
We Trade Food for Sex : More specifically, monogamous sex. The crucial turning point in human evolution, according to a theory published in by C. Owen Lovejoy, was the emergence of monogamy six million years ago.
Until then, brutish alpha males who drove off rival suitors had the most sex. Monogamous females, however, favored males who were most adept at providing food and sticking around to help raise junior. Our ancestors began walking upright, according to Lovejoy, because it freed up their hands and allowed them to carry home more groceries.
We Eat Cooked Meat : Big brains are hungry—gray matter requires 20 times more energy than muscle does. They could never have evolved on a vegetarian diet, some researchers claim ; instead, our brains grew only once we started eating meat, a food source rich in protein and fat, around two to three million years ago.
And according to anthropologist Richard Wrangham , once our ancestors invented cooking—a uniquely human behavior that makes food easier to digest—they wasted less energy chewing or pounding meat and so had even more energy available for their brains. Eventually those brains grew large enough to make the conscious decision to become vegan. We Eat Cooked Carbs : Or maybe our bigger brains were made possible by carb-loading, according to a recent paper.
Once our ancestors had invented cooking, tubers and other starchy plants became an excellent source of brain food, more readily available than meat. An enzyme in our saliva called amylase helps break down carbohydrates into the glucose the brain needs.
Evolutionary geneticist Mark G. Thomas of University College London notes that our DNA contains multiple copies of the gene for amylase, suggesting that it—and tubers—helped fuel the explosive growth of the human brain.
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