MICHAEL RUNDLE DOT COM

About


Michael Rundle is a writer who lives in London.

He is the Technology Editor of the Huffington Post UK.

Employment history and portfolio can be found above, various things he has written and found are collected to the right.

For Twitter and secret files, click the blue arrow to the right.

Get in touch via the links below.

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Darwin is one of my heroes, but I believe he was wrong in seeing human evolution as a result of the same processes that account for other evolution in the biological world - especially when it comes to the size of our cranium. Darwin had to put large cranial size down to sexual selection, arguing that women found brainy men sexy. But biomechanical factors make this untenable. I call this the smart biped paradox: once you are an upright ape, all natural selection pressures should be in favour of retaining a small cranium. That’s because walking upright means having a narrower pelvis, capping babies’ head size, and a shorter digestive tract, making it harder to support big, energy-hungry brains. Clearly our big brains did evolve, but I think Darwin had the wrong mechanism. I believe it was technology. We were never fully biological entities. We are and always have been artificial apes.

Archaeologist and anthropologist Timothy Taylor explains how a long-vanished artefact explains human evolution and led to “survival of the weakest”