红酒·绿茶 / Red Wine & Green Tea / Vin Rouge et Thé Vert

Book review: "The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution" by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending Like Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" , this book heralds a scientific way of studying history. History is not science. At least not yet. One proof is that nobody has been able to predict the future with the same degree of success as Newtonian Dynamics does, say, the lunar eclipse. In fact, the more you study history, the more you understand how fickle it is and feel hopeless in predicting anything. However, with the method of natural experiment  and great advance in molecular biology, I see hope. This book convincingly argues that human evolution did not stop after modern human expanded from Africa. On the contrary, there are strong evidences that we evolved at faster and faster pace. People from different places are not only different culturally, but also biologically. Our culture affects ...