Ear­li­er this week, we high­light­ed a great con­ver­sa­tion about whether we inher­it­ed moral­i­ty from our pri­mate ances­tors. It raised the ques­tion whether our “inner chimp” tells us what is right or wrong.

Now, to switch gears just a bit, we bring you an inter­view with Neil Shu­bin that delves into your “inner fish” (MP3 — iTunes — Feed — Web Site). Shu­bin is the author of Your Inner Fish: A Jour­ney into the 3.5‑Billion-Year His­to­ry of the Human Body, and here he talks about how var­i­ous parts of the human body (our hands and head, for exam­ple) evolved from the anato­my of ancient fish and oth­er long extinct crea­tures. What this goes to show is that “our human­i­ty, … which makes us so unique … is real­ly built by bits and pieces shared with every­thing we call worms, jel­ly­fish, sponges, and so forth.” “The utter­ly unique and beau­ti­ful can be made from some­thing very com­mon.” And there’s some­thing aes­thet­i­cal­ly beau­ti­ful about that.

Shu­bin, I should men­tion, made head­lines in 2006 when he and a team of sci­en­tists revealed the dis­cov­ery of Tik­taa­lik roseae, a 375 mil­lion year old fos­sil that cap­tures the moment when sea crea­tures made their tran­si­tion to land. Good stuff.

Sub­scribe to Our Feed

Is moral­i­ty a sixth sense that’s in all of us, and is it per­haps a prod­uct of our bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion? Writ­ing recent­ly in The New York Times Mag­a­zine, Har­vard psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor Steven Pinker sug­gests that moral­i­ty may well be hard­wired. And he points to fas­ci­nat­ing new research that backs up this belief. Pinker’s arti­cle cov­ers pret­ty much the same ground as does this engag­ing Radio Lab pod­cast (MP3 — iTunes — Feed — Web Site). Tak­ing an hour-long look at the “sci­ence of moral­i­ty,” the pro­gram gets into some fas­ci­nat­ing stuff. It gets into the great Trol­ley moral dilem­ma, into what brain scans (MRI’s) reveal when human brains grap­ple with moral ques­tions, and into how sci­en­tists think that we inher­it­ed moral instincts from our pri­mate ances­tors. You’ll learn all about how moral­i­ty is our “inner chimp.” If this is not enough, you can also lis­ten to Pinker’s inter­view yes­ter­day on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. Get it here.

See our col­lec­tion of Sci­ence Pod­casts and Sub­scribe to Our Feed

What Have You Changed Your Mind About? — That is the ques­tion that the web­site, Edge.org, posed this year to 165 lead­ing sci­en­tif­ic minds. The answers, which are all over the map, can be found here. (Make sure that you scroll down the page a lit­tle.) Some of the more well-known thinkers to offer their thoughts include: Richard Dawkins, J. Craig Ven­ter, Daniel Gole­man, Sher­ry Turkle, Daniel Den­nett, Steven Pinker and Stew­art Brand. And then even Alan Alda is added to the mix.

Sub­scribe to Our Feed