Category Archives: Evolution

Jurassic World Evolution 2 is coming, and we got our first look at gameplay footage during the Future Games Show powered by WD_BLACK.

Game director Rich Newbold introduces the clip, promising more of what players loved with Jurassic World Evolution. Newbold promises "the most authentic Jurassic experience yet," as the sequel offers tons of new features across four different game modes. There's even an original Jurassic Campaign, with the story set after the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

Jurassic World Evolution is a construction and management simulation game, and the sequel will task you with containing, controlling, and protecting the dinosaurs that now roam free on Isla Nubar. You'll do that alongside characters from the film franchise, including the man whose voice you hear early on in the clip. Yes, that's Jeff Goldblum's voice narrating the Jurassic World Evolution 2 clip - he'll be reprising his role as Dr. Ian Malcolm in the the sequel, alongside other characters from the films.

Newbold introduces an exclusive first clip from the Jurassic World Evolution 2's Species Field Guide video, which offers details on the dinosaurs on Isla Nubar. This Species Field Guide is all about the triceratops, shown in a new environment added for Jurassic World Evolution. You can see the environment is full of coniferous trees, which is something we haven't seen in the Jurassic World universe before.

In case you missed the last Jurassic World film, Fallen Kingdom takes place three years after the destruction of the Jurassic World theme park, with Chris Pratt's Owen Grady returning to Isla Nubar to help save the remaining dinosaurs from a volcano that's meant to erupt. He discovers terrifying new species while he's there, as well, which is likely why Jurassic World Evolution 2 will have 75 species, including new dinosaurs, returning community favorites, alongside flying and marine reptiles.

Jurassic World Evolution 2 is set to launch sometime later this year in 2021 for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, and PC.

For a complete look at all the games slated to launch over the remainder of the year, head over to our new games 2021 guide for more.

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Jurassic World Evolution 2 stomps into the Future Games Show Powered by WD_BLACK - Gamesradar

Grey has been helping its clients speak the language of culture for decades. Cultural insights overlaid with behavior have driven Famously Effective Ideas for our clients, solved business challenges and changed the perception of brands and categories. A rapid change in consumer and physician behavior, particularly in the last year, has significantly elevated the need to account for cultural impacts, especially in healthcare. In rethinking how externalities impact cultural relevance, we are afforded a new lens on our foundational approach toward marketing.

Within the broad health and wellness space, marketers historically base their strategic decisions at an individual level, ignoring the macro environmental and culture implications. Our current thinking and approach are centered around getting to that one special insight or nugget that is focused on the individual.

This approach has one fundamental flaw: It tends to disregard the impact of the world the decision maker lives in, the culture that directly and substantially influences their behavior.

At its essence, culture exists at the micro individual level, meso-community level or ultimately the macro level. While culture may be predominant in varying degrees across any of these levels, its impact will have a ripple effect across all three. It can be as specific as the culture around a disease, or simply the results of communal dynamics that impact overall human health needs and habits. The COVID-19 global pandemic has made the necessity of understanding these imperatives at a strategic and executional level a matter of vital importance.

Simply knowing isnt enough. To truly understand the influential factors of culture, we need to identify the forces that are shaping, driving and evolving the culture. At Grey, we call the most powerful forces, whether direct or indirect forces, the Culture Keepers. And we think about the Culture Keepers as those who influence the cultural influencers.

Culture Keepers, unlike traditional influencers, arent always people; they can be a trend, philosophy, a belief, a religion or even a global pandemic. It is the impact on category overall that changes the lens on brands, treatments, care, category and consequently the overall decision-making processes and, ultimately, their experience. The influence they exert can be positive or negative, but in the end, they are critical and omnipresent.

In the healthcare space, Culture Keepers have largely been ignored but have been quietly impacting decisions and trends for decades. The current pandemic has significantly elevated their impact, and Culture Keepers have started transcending digital and social channels to change perceptions and alter reality despite data, insights and experiences. There are a number of instances across the healthcare space where the influence of the Culture Keepers is running rampant.

BREAST CANCER: Misplaced perceptions driving category beliefs.

As far as cancers go, breast cancer has been associated with a culture of positivity and hope and almost a sense that it is a good cancer. While the therapeutic advancements are a key component of this, ask patients and it is obvious what the Culture Keeper is: the Susan G. Komen foundation and the narrative that it has propagated. There is no denying the impact the foundation has had, not just in terms of patient support but also clinical development.

However, when you talk to patients with metastatic breast cancer or even triple negative breast cancer, they tend to express a disconnect and relative annoyance with the foundation and its narrative. This is largely due to the fact that this narrative is tied into the dynamics associated with early breast cancer, where outcomes are fantastic, and cure is within reach. For any product or brand launching within the breast cancer space, accounting for this Culture Keeper is imperative, for without doing so it risks coming across as superficial, out of touch with real needs and inauthentic.

PHARMA EQUITY: Standing up and making the corporate image matter.

Pharmaceutical companies have long been vilified, with most accused of subverting widespread access to healthcare. Yet, despite many pharma companies best attempts at heralding all the good they do, even the most well-known corporate reputation campaigns were not enough to combat the Culture Keeper: a pervasive belief that pharma companies put profits over patients, exacerbated by years of misattributed global media coverage. The COVID-19 pandemic shifted the reputational fate of the pharma industry on March 12, 2020, when the world awoke to the news that Pfizer was not only going to pursue a vaccine for COVID-19, but openly communicated that it was lowering its walls and inviting competitors to become collaborators united as one to save humanity. The resulting Science Will Win campaign took a brand name that often found itself in the crosshairs of negativity and heroicized it to everyone from the industrys harshest critics (key physicians and opinion leaders) to its biggest skeptics (patients and their caregivers).

Were now seeing an overall sea change, where pharma brands have pervasively entered the dialogue taken into greater account when HCPs are making treatment or prophylaxis decisions and when consumers are now asking for treatment by the manufacturer brand, not product brand, name. In turn, Pfizer has actually become the new culture keeper: the company that put the first truly human face on pharma.

As we cautiously yet optimistically come out of the pandemic, marketers will have to face a true reckoning as they encourage brands to make an impact. We believe that there are five key factors that every marketer should consider when identifying and addressing their Culture Keepers:

Teasing out the environment vs. culture: Look at the world your customers are living in and then identify why that world exists.

The cultural polarity that exists: Is the culture positivity- or negativity-driven? The answer forms the very foundation of how we will identify the impact that the Culture Keeper will have on the brand.

Determine the Keeper: The Culture Keeper could be an ideology (e.g., anti-vaxxers and vaccination), a person and organization (Susan G. Komen and breast cancer) or simply any force that you believe to be the primary factor constantly shaping and influencing culture.

Absolute vs. relative impact of the Culture Keeper: Here we ask how representative the Culture Keeper is of our customers and what their exact level of influence and control is.

Customer engagement dynamics: At a very tangible level, we will need to understand how the Culture Keeper influences brand and customer interactions. Knowing and addressing the Culture Keeper will not serve any purpose unless brands pull through their strategic approach at a customer experience level.

As marketers now move into this post-pandemic era, accounting for these five factors and identifying the Culture Keeper will be more vital for brand success than ever. It is clear that we are entering an era where cultural influences and influencers will take on a more important role in shaping healthcare, the customer habits that drive it and the end consumer reaction. Identifying and directly addressing these Culture Keepers could hold the key to successfully developing enduring brand strategies that set a foundation for short- and long-term success.

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Culture Keepers: The Vital Call for Marketing Strategy Evolution in Healthcare - Partner Content - MM+M - Medical Marketing and Media - Medical...

Artistic composition of a supermassive black hole regulating the evolution of its environment. Credit: Gabriel Prez Daz, SMM (IAC) and Dylan Nelson (Illustris-TNG)

At the heart of almost every sufficiently massive galaxy there is a black hole whose gravitational field, although very intense, affects only a small region around the center of the galaxy. Even though these objects are thousands of millions of times smaller than their host galaxies our current view is that the Universe can be understood only if the evolution of galaxies is regulated by the activity of these black holes, because without them the observed properties of the galaxies cannot be explained.

Theoretical predictions suggest that as these black holes grow they generate sufficient energy to heat up and drive out the gas within galaxies to great distances. Observing and describing the mechanism by which this energy interacts with galaxies and modifies their evolution is therefore a basic question in present day Astrophysics.

With this aim in mind, a study led byIgnacio Martn Navarro, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofsica de Canarias (IAC), has gone a step further and has tried to see whether the matter and energy emitted from around these black holes can alter the evolution, not only of the host galaxy, but also of the satellite galaxies around it, at even greater distances. To do this, the team has used theSloan Digital Sky Survey, which allowed them to analyze the properties of the galaxies in thousands of groups and clusters. The conclusions of this study, started during Ignacios stay at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, were published on June 9, 2021, in Naturemagazine.

Surprisingly we found that the satellite galaxies formed more or fewer stars depending on their orientation with respect to the central galaxy, explains Annalisa Pillepich, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA, Germany) and co-author of the article. To try to explain this geometrical effect on the properties of the satellite galaxies the researchers used a cosmological simulation of the Universe called Illustris-TNG whose code contains a specific way of handling the interaction between central black holes and their host galaxies. Just as with the observations, the Illustris-TNG simulation shows a clear modulation of the star formation rate in satellite galaxies depending on their position with respect to the central galaxy, she adds.

This result is doubly important because it gives observational support for the idea that central black holes play an important role in regulating the evolution of galaxies, which is a basic feature of our current understanding of the Universe. Nevertheless, this hypothesis is continually questioned, given the difficulty of measuring the possible effect of the black holes in real galaxies, rather than considering only theoretical implications.

These results suggest, then, that there is a particular coupling between the black holes and their galaxies, by which they can expel matter to great distances from the galactic centers, and can even affect the evolution of other nearby galaxies. So not only can we observe the effects of central black holes on the evolution of galaxies, but our analysis opens the way to understand the details of the interaction, explains Ignacio Martn Navarro, who is the first author of the article.

This work has been possible due to collaboration between two communities: the observers and the theorists which, in the field of extragalactic Astrophysics, are finding that cosmological simulations are a useful tool to understand how the Universe behaves, he concludes.

Reference: Anisotropic satellite galaxy quenching modulated by black hole activity by Ignacio Martn-Navarro, Annalisa Pillepich, Dylan Nelson, Vicente Rodriguez-Gomez, Martina Donnari, Lars Hernquist and Volker Springel, 9 June 2021, Nature.DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03545-9

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Astrophysicists Surprised by Unexpected Effect of Black Holes Beyond Their Own Galaxies - SciTechDaily

for years, a day in the life of artist tom sachs has begun with a strong cup of coffee and a series of drills some serious physical feats, others a test of manual dexterity. these drills function to focus the body and mind to the task at hand, and for members of his studio, this means building sculpture. we started doing this because I noticed that as some people in the studio were getting older, they were beginning to demonstrate the same physical symptoms of wear and tear that I had, and I was hoping to protect the young men and women who lay down their lives for our work I didnt want them to have bad backs, says sachs.

tom sachs artistic work has ranged from bricolage sculpture and deconstructed furniture, to full-scale interpretations of the NASA mars mission but here, we dive into the history of sachs longstanding creative collaboration with one of the biggest sporting goods brand on the planet. few projects elucidate NIKEs better is temporary philosophy as effectively as the ongoing collaborative initiative NIKECRAFT. the endeavor has produced products since 2012, including iterative improvements to the popular mars yard shoe and a shape-shifting poncho. underpinning every NIKECRAFT action is a transparent approach to doing, whether charting tests and trials or relaying evidence of construction methods.

the mars yard shoe from tom sachs NIKECRAFT collaboration in 2012read more on designboom here

back in may 2012, NIKE and tom sachs partnered on the NIKECRAFT mars yard a shoe inspired by the artists interactions with NASAs highly specialized scientists, and designed as high-performance equipment for the building of his space program 2.0: mars exhibition (see designbooms firsthand coverage of the show at the park avenue armory in new york here). at NIKECRAFT, products are developed for athletes, not consumers, sachs shares on the now-sold out mars yard shoe. our athlete, tommaso rivellini, is a mechanical engineer at jet propulsion laboratory in pasadena, california. among many other projects, tommaso invented the airbags used on the 1997 and 2004 mars rovers. long gone are the days of wingtipped brouges, pocket protectors, and skinny ties. the rocket scientist uniform of today is faded jeans, a golf shirt, and sneakers. these shoes are built to support the bodies of the strongest minds in the aerospace industry.

the mars yard shoe from tom sachs NIKECRAFT collaboration in 2012read more on designboom here

special features of the first edition mars yard included outsoles borrowed from the NIKE special forces boot (SFB), vectran fabric from the mars excursion rover airbags, and detailing from apollo lunar overshoes. these premium athletic shoes thrive in the rugged terrain of the simulated mars yard in pasadena, CA as well as stealthily creeping the mission-funding hallways of headquarters in washington, D.C.

the 2012 marsfly jacket is packed with functionality that would prove useful in the voyage through spaceread more on designboom here

from this dynamic between sachs DIY aesthetic and the wide reaching NIKE brand, an entire artisanal capsule collection NIKECRAFT was born. this partnership debut included the mars yard shoe, the trench, the marsfly jacket, and the lightweight tote. NIKE and sachs applied materials that had never before been used in sportswear sourced from automotive air bags, mainsails for boats, and space suits themselves. each piece was packed with functionality that could prove useful in a voyage through space, featuring zipper pulls that doubled as storage containers, paracords fashioned as a tourniquet, and embellishments like a periodic table of elements on the inside of a jacket.

the 2012 trench front view (left) and view of the back interior (right) as the jacket is worn invertedread more on designboom here

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the evolution of tom sachs' NIKECRAFT and the wear tests challenging the future 'mars yard' - Designboom

Conspiracy theory-endorsing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) probably shocked no one with her latest anti-evolution declaration about science.

I dont believe in evolution, the QAnon adherent told former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon on his Real Americas Voice podcast this week.

I dont believe in that type of so-called science. I dont believe in evolution. I believe in God, Greene continued, gesturing with air quotes during a discussion about the potential origin of the coronavirus.An estimated 40% of Americansbelieve God created humans as described in the Bible, according to a 2019 poll.

Greene has become a GOP celebrity for peddling racist and antisemitic conspiracies, including a claim about Jewish space lasers starting wildfires in California.She was removed from her House committee assignments in February after she liked social media posts calling for the execution of prominent Democrats.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene: I Dont Believe In Evolution, That Type Of So-Called 'Science' - HuffPost

Evolution Gone Wrong: The Curious Reasons Why Our Bodies Work (Or Don't), by Alex Bezzerides Hanover Square Press hide caption

Evolution Gone Wrong: The Curious Reasons Why Our Bodies Work (Or Don't), by Alex Bezzerides

We humans have been evolving for millions of years and as any good biologist will tell you in response to pressures in our environment, we are evolving still.

So how come our bodies are so flawed? Why does sharp vision so often elude us, for instance? Why do our backs hurt so frequently?

The theme of Alex Bezzerides' Evolution Gone Wrong: The Curious Reasons Why Our Bodies Work (or Don't) is that we experience these and other embodied challenges teeth that require braces, feet that acquire bunions, knees that blow out not despite of evolution, but because of it. We are animals, and animals' early evolution in the ocean, and our primate lineage's transition from the trees to the ground, continue to affect how our bodies function and break down even today.

A biologist at Lewis-Clark State College who specializes in anatomy and evolution, Bezzerides has written a fantastic, informative book, a home run on his first try (he makes a point of noting his first-time author status in the Acknowledgments). Never did I expect to praise prose like, "The human foot... is made up of a whole gob of bones" but Bezzerides makes it work. He never condescends to his readers. Instead he mixes the technical anatomical stuff we need to know with vivid examples and humorous phrases.

We can grasp the main idea Bezzerides wants to get across by focusing on eyes and backs.

Our eyes evolved originally in the ocean, where ancestral vertebrates dwelled and needed to see underwater. Around 375 million years ago, when they ventured to land, their eyes were already 100 million years old. Gradually, eyes in this lineage became land-adapted, but these organs have retained fluids and, as a result, never achieved the type of light refraction that would result in consistent sharpness of image on land. Light travels more slowly through water than it does through air, but to our advantage in modern times, even more slowly through glass. "Many of us take advantage of this fact by placing glass in front of our eyes to compensate for the imperfect job our corneas and lenses do in bending the light."

Bezzerides offers nifty evolutionary explanations too for why we can distinguish more shades of green than any other color, and why our night vision is poor. He clarifies that it's not only our evolution that makes for vision troubles today, but also our current behavior. Most of us spend way too much time in spaces that lack natural light. "Children who spend greater chunks of their day outside have a lesser risk of developing myopia than children who spend their days inside," he writes. Kids don't even have to be doing healthy things out there, it turns out, because it's the light and not the activity that makes the difference.

Back trouble, the leading cause of disability globally, is directly traceable to primates' leaving the trees for open areas more than 4 million years ago, Bezzerides notes. The move to the forest floor was "a pressure cooker" that caused human ancestors' center of gravity to shift. For the first time, a primate could balance on only two feet; the human spine is shaped quite differently from that of our ape cousins', with curves that cause a "precarious" structure. For example, "The inward, or lordotic, lumbar curve needs to be far enough inward to place the position of the spine under the head and to get the center of gravity above the hips," Bezzerides writes. Back pain, and even intervertebral disc pain, happens all too readily with slight misalignments.

Cultural factors come into play with backs just as much as eyes. People whose work requires them to lift heavy objects may be at higher risk, and those who work hard to maintain core-body strength may offset the worst of back pain. But, Bezzerides warns, for almost all of us, back pain is in the cards.

Thanks a lot, evolution.

If I were meeting with the author to hash out evolutionary issues as scientists like to do, I would ask him a few questions. Why cite that old theory suggesting that monogamy evolved early in the human line by way of males provisioning females? Monogamy isn't even that common an arrangement today, and females past or present are unlikely to be quite so helpless. How come it's "slightly uncomfortable" to think of our ancestors mating with Neanderthals? And hey, that slap at sheep in the brain section? They're smarter than you think, an important point for analyzing comparative mammalian intelligence.

More concerning, the chapters on reproduction are uneven. It's jarring to see four questions grouped together, about why we're prone to choking; why infertility is widespread; why so many people need braces; and why females menstruate. Which one of these things is not like the other? Menstruation isn't a risk or medical condition. Bezzerides refers to "significant blood loss, significant iron loss, and a significantly lousy few days every month." Yet not everyone's experience with menstruation is so lousy just as the process of childbirth, challenging as it is, doesn't always involve "screaming and trauma."

Bezzerides taught me some cool new science when explaining what's called spontaneous decidualization, a change in the uterine lining. Unlike in other animals, that lining in humans changes not in response to pregnancy but instead in preparation for pregnancy. The reason, more complicated than I can explain fully here, has to do with fetal burrowing into the womb, a type of maternal-fetal conflict that is more elaborated in humans.

Yet another example of that unevenness I mentioned in continuing to explore reproduction he replicates without question the old myth of sperm making a "perilous trip" so that "only the strongest, fittest sperm" fight their way to an egg. As anthropologist Robert Martin puts it, "Convincing evidence has instead revealed that human sperm are passively transported over considerable distances while travelling through the womb and up the oviducts. So much for Olympic-style racing sperm!"

I still say this book is a home run. Perfection is no more necessary in order to be grateful that a book was written than it is to experience appreciation for the human body with all its flaws. I recommend Evolution Gone Wrong highly to anyone wishing to grasp the mix of biological and cultural forces at work on our anatomy today.

Barbara J. King is a biological anthropologist emerita at William & Mary. Her seventh book, Animals' Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in Captivity and in the Wild, was published in March. Find her on Twitter @bjkingape

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Book Review: 'Evolution Gone Wrong' Helps Answer Why Human Bodies Are Flawed - NPR

Networking Is Key to Healthcare Communication

With local area network speeds reaching up to 10/100 gigabits per second and over 400Gbps in the data center, the IT industry has long evolved from the 10-megabit-per-second connections that would be too slow to support the size of modern-day digitized files. Many clinical diagnostics have gone digital, and that means easier sharing capability. Picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) are an example of this. With more data generated and shared, whether by clinicians or patients, networks need to be increasingly robust, scalable, resilient, fault-tolerant and secure.

Digital communications were once limited to emails, text messages or alerts from routers or email servers. With the advent of PACS, telemetry waveforms, EHRs, cloud-based storage portals, private blockchain and other network-based security tools, healthcare is generating far more data than any other industry.

MORE FROM HEALTHTECH:VA, Air Force test out 5G in hospital settings.

Even with the advent of newer technologies, devices such as video cameras have also evolved to support a greater number of use cases than simple on-premises security. The number of use cases supporting video streaming in real time include centrally managed patient monitoring, in which fall reduction programs are implemented; surgical monitoring for teaching or collaborative operative care; safety programs that guard against baby abduction risk and support Alzheimers patient containment; and monitoring of drug dispensing areas.

Clinical compliance and efficacy can also be monitored. For example, handwashing, personal protective equipment use and patient treatment protocols can be monitored using real-time video for optimal risk reduction practices or collaborative efforts all of which require an increasing amount of network bandwidth as well as a simple way to manage it all securely.

Any network-bound device is at risk of being targeted by ransomware. Today, there are a few options for integrating anti-ransomware software within a smart network interface card, or SmartNIC, which helps redirect and block threats. Data processing units on SmartNICs are taking CPU burdens and processing packet inspections at wire speed.

In a smart hospital strategy, there seems to be no limit to the number of devices possible, whether wireless or wired. And with new technology manufacturers wanting to jump on the smart hospital bandwagon, the number of devices on an organizations network will continue to grow. Its no wonder healthcare facilities are the second-most energy-intensive operations after food stores, and healthcare executives are constantly looking for ways to reduce operational costs.

LEARN MORE:Why healthcare organizations need an effective incident response plan.

Today, smart energy/grid network management systems offer feature-rich and customizable industry protocols that can manage a healthcare facilitys smart energy devices while also managing the communication network connecting them.

The number of nodes continues to grow on any given network, and while traditional wireless connectivity hovers around 150Mbps to 900Mbps, service providers are increasingly making 5G available for healthcare environments whose walls are heavily nested with CAT 6, 7 or 8 cable (and in some cases, older CAT 5). Be it copper or fiber, theyre simply running out of room. According to HealthAffairs, 5G has the unique potential to contribute to preventative care by leveraging high speeds for data transmission to increase the ubiquity of sensor data, which in turn would facilitate patient access to hospital-like monitoring at [patients] homes.

Link:

How the Evolution of Networking Infrastructure Supports Smart Hospitals - HealthTech Magazine

Fungal symbiosis with early land plants

Hundreds of millions of years ago, evolved descendants of aquatic plants began showing up on dry land. These newly terrestrialized species had to deal with increased ultraviolet light exposure, desiccation, and less accessible nutrients. Rich et al. show how mutualist fungi may have helped these nascent plant lineages with adaptation to their newly challenging environment (see the Perspective by Bouwmeester). Genetic and metabolic analysis of a liverwort as a representative of such plants suggests that the mutually beneficial exchange of nutrients with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi may have been a feature of these most early land plants.

Science, abg0929, this issue p. 864; see also abi8016, p. 789

Symbiosis with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) improves plant nutrition in most land plants, and its contribution to the colonization of land by plants has been hypothesized. Here, we identify a conserved transcriptomic response to AMF among land plants, including the activation of lipid metabolism. Using gain of function, we show the transfer of lipids from the liverwort Marchantia paleacea to AMF and its direct regulation by the transcription factor WRINKLED (WRI). Arbuscules, the nutrient-exchange structures, were not formed in loss-of-function wri mutants in M. paleacea, leading to aborted mutualism. Our results show the orthology of the symbiotic transfer of lipids across land plants and demonstrate that mutualism with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi was present in the most recent ancestor of land plants 450 million years ago.

Link:

Lipid exchanges drove the evolution of mutualism during plant terrestrialization - Science Magazine

There is a mystery in human evolution. As we progressed from knuckle-walking to striding, from swinging from branches to throwing rocks and then spears, surely our tools developed in parallel. Right?

Put backwards, many assume that inferences can be made about our evolutionary state going by our industry. Right?

Well, theres a snag. What does it mean that stone choppers, among the earliest tools, persisted for around two million years, and stone Acheulean hand axes for over a million years? The upscale Levallois-style tools were also used for hundreds of thousands of years. Did our evolution stagnate in that time?

It did not. Evolution is the nature of all things, but in thrall to neophilia (love of the new), and we tend to view human evolution through the prism of physical and mental change. Leaving the trees for the savanna necessitated physical and mental changes. Among other things, we grew: were about a third bigger than our australopithecine predecessors. Now, Dr. Meir Finkel and Prof. Ran Barkai of Tel Aviv University offer a paradigm-changing interpretation, published in Science Direct (Anthropology) of the stasis in these basic tools in the context of our continuing development.

As long as the animal environment remained stable, so did the tools we used to obtain these animals (to eat). If anything, this stability provided safe ground for technological and behavioral innovations, Barkai and Finkel write.

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The paradigm says these are problems in innovation, that the hominids didnt innovate [during that time], for whatever reasons. For instance, that Homo erectus didnt have sufficiently developed cognition, or that there were difficulties in innovation relating to social aspects. We say the opposite! Finkel explains to Haaretz. There wasnt a problem with innovation: it was conservatism by choice. Innovation has a price.

The myxozoan and the mosaic

Thinking on evolution in general has been changing. For example, we tended to simplistically perceive evolution as a roughly linear procession from primitive to complex. But evolution is broader than that. Take the delight that is myxozoans: microscopic parasitic jellyfish that evolved backwards, from sublime to slime. They evolved from proper multicellular animals to single-celled ones, or a few cells; and one went so far backwards as to even lose its genes for breathing.

Yet these tiny parasites are remarkably successful, infesting what seems to be all species of fish and seafood, in all the oceans except possibly the Antarctic. They even made it onto land, alone among the cnidarians. Myxozoans thrive in the duck and the frog and a strictly land animal: the shrew.

Also, the rationale of evolution may be fairly clear but scientists are still arguing over the process fits and starts? Huge leaps? Other? All the above? Either way, paleontology has helped to enrich the debate with the concept of mosaic evolution (aka modular evolution), which posits that some body parts will change without simultaneous changes in other parts.

Mosaic evolution is key to the theory Barkai and Finkel propound: that technological persistency like the hand ax remaining unchanged over a million years was because their hominin users enjoyed stability of their prey, namely mega-fauna (big animals). As in, specific technologies were associated with specific animal types. It wasnt broke so they didnt fix it.

In the interim, while the hand ax persisted, we made great strides. Vast strides. The stability of mega-fauna and of the toolkit used to hunt them over a vast stretch of time gave early humans space to innovate, Finkel and Barkai explain.

We could depend on our trusty hand ax and chopper to predate on elephants and other mega-fauna, and meanwhile could monkey around with developing other technologies and tools which came in handy when the mega-fauna disappeared. At which point, in turn, we didnt need the trusty hand ax any more.

As humans shifted to smaller animals, new toolkits had to be adopted in order to better catch and process them. Once another change occurred in animal availability, a corresponding transformation took shape in the technological repertoire, and so on and so forth.

This approach could explain technological changes such as the replacement of hand axes by Levallois, to be replaced later by systematic blade production, Barkai and Finkel explain.

And absolutely, during those million-plus years of hand ax persistency, the very type of human being changed, starting with Homo erectus and ending with Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals in Europe. During those million-plus years, archaic humans learned how to use, and ultimately to sort of tame, fire. In that time they developed all sorts of hunting technologies, including maybe its hard to say when spear technology.

All that was within the period of the hand ax, Finkel says. There were vast advances, yet the hand ax remained stable. We realized its an anchor: a stable basis on top of which we can innovate. Conservatism by choice gives you energy security, caloric security, enabling innovation and invention in other areas.

Thus, the technological persistency itself can be seen as an adaptive strategy, Barkai and Finkel argue.

Enter the megalodon

In separate work, Miki Ben-Dor and Barkai have argued that hominins took a turn to carnivory with Homo erectus over two million years ago. Our bodies did evolve to handle a high-protein diet, but only so far. Eat too much lean meat and protein poisoning will ensue. So the other chief source of calories was fat, which we came to crave. Large animals have abundant avoirdupois, while small ones dont (as a rule).

Thus, we evolved to eat mega-fauna and ate them until they were no more. Only then did we have to adapt our tools to obtaining smaller, fleeter animals.

Drawing a parallel between technological and morphological persistency, Finkel and Barkai note that in animals, body design tends to persist as long as their food supply is stable. Morphological stasis over eons indicates that the animal has the wherewithal to survive in the changes of its environment but that doesnt mean its evolution ground to a halt.

Take sharks. Or horseshoe crabs, or the coelacanth living fossils one and all. They seem unchanged over hundreds of millions of years, suggesting that they didnt need to.

The great megalodon, the biggest of all sharks (as far as we know), seem to have dominated the seas from about 16 million to 2.6 million years ago shame we missed them. Their remarkable size remained static in that time, dear reader: possibly up to 25 meters (82 feet) in length. It has been posited that megalodons went extinct because the oceans cooled and/or because their favorite meal small- to medium-size baleen whales half their size vanished and were supplanted by gigantic baleen whales, too big for even the great and terrible Meg to cope with. Yet the discovery of megalodon mouth marks on fossil seal remains suggests that while basking in the security conferred by their morphological persistency, they may have expanded to new prey types. Namely, pinnipeds. They do say the starving will eat anything.

Take the humble lungfish, which evolved over about 75 million years, then seems to have remained in morphological stasis for 250 million years. Lungfish were old before dinosaurs were even a gleam in the eye of the Creator. Yet to this day the lungfish feeding mechanism has remained largely primitive, which Finkel and Barkai argue enabled them to amble on through the eons while evolving advanced abilities to survive in variable conditions.

Here is a video of what African lungfish do when their river turns into mud.

Turning to another fish, in February a team revealed that the coelacanth, which didnt go extinct 66 million years ago after all, gained 62 new genes in the last 10 million years ago. How? From other fish, via transposons, aka jumping genes.It looks pretty much the same, though. Morphological stasis did not mean genetic stasis, evidently. It is possible that over the eons, the coelacanth exploited its morphological stability to expand its feeding options.

Haaretz is not suggesting that archaic humans exchanged genes with fish or did anything untoward with fish. But the apparently unchanged exterior of the shark and coelecanth can be misleading. Obviously they did change, statistics obliges it; and even if they look like their primordial predecessors, they cant be the same.

The bottom line of the beasts is that morphological persistency, including body size and shape, is quite common in nature, Barkai and Finkel explain. This enables the animal to depend on a specific prey type, or habitat, while expanding its trophic horizons, and when the fecal matter hits the fan, they are prepared to adapt find a new prey, nocturnal feeding instead of diurnal, etc.

This piscine stasis brings us to the analogy drawn by Finkel and Barkai: that the lithic stasis, the unchanged appearance of tools, doesnt mean the humans didnt change in other ways. Their theory of mosaic evolution suggests that the early humans were happily and confidently hunting with their old-time tools while developing new behaviors and making other advances, which enabled them to cope when the mega-fauna disappeared and rendered their long-standing toolkit obsolete.

For further support, they go to the archaeological record to find examples of faunal stability matched with technological persistency; fish, even the great megalodon, will only take us so far.

The tale of the hand ax and the herbivore

The Olorgesailie Basin prehistoric site in the Kenyan section of the Rift Valley boasts the gamut of the Acheulean from 1.2 million to 500,000 years ago, and the Middle Stone Age span from about 322,000 to 300,000 years ago.

A separate paper showed a massive shift in the animals populating the Olorgesailie basin from the Acheulean to the Middle Stone Age. The change in fauna likely caused by the climate change associated with a period of heightened aridity starting 575,000 years ago is associated with a shift in technology.

Hand ax persistency during the Acheulean, in this case, is directly correlated with faunal stability, as mega-herbivores, and in particular elephants, are present throughout the pre-500,000 sequence alongside hand axes, Finkel and Barkai write. But both the hand axes and giant herbivores disappeared there following the environmental and climatic conditions that prevailed in the region from 400,000 years onward.

In the Levant, meanwhile, elephants also disappeared about 400,000 years ago, forcing the local hominins to find some other source of meat and fat. They went for fallow deer, it seems, resulting in technological persistency of the tools needed to hunt, skin and butcher deer: blades and flakes. In fact, as Barkai and Finkel point out, the blades and flake technologies were developed while hand axes were still in broad use: Hand axes might have served as an anchor, allowing early humans to test and practice new technological developments that would later play a crucial role in their adaptation to dependency on smaller game, they explain.

They also bring examples of much more recent technological persistency as a function of game persistency from Sri Lanka and Brazil.

And thus, Meir Finkel and Ran Barkai propose a unifying theory of biological and human evolution, in which a biological or technological trait will persist as long as the main caloric source persists. If theres an elephant, we need the appropriate tools to hunt the elephant. And when the elephant is gone, we need the tools appropriate to hunting a deer, and when theyre gone, to catching the rabbit and so on. Safe in this stable zone, we had the opportunity to innovate without risking our lives in the process, producing a mosaic evolution pattern.

For Finkel, who came to archaeology after a military career, its obvious. In both early humanity and the army, one doesnt innovate for no reason, he explains. You could starve or lose the war. You innovate cautiously. Conservatism is a very successful strategy neophiliacs ignore the fact that conservatism works.

Link:

Israeli archaeologists resolve ages-old evolutionary conundrum: Enter the elephant and the hand ax - Haaretz

KIRKLAND, Wash., May 26, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- RightBound, the technology company that created the first autonomous sales prospecting engine, announced today that it has raised $12 million in funding, led by Innovation Endeavors with participation from IBI Tech Fund and Operator Collective. RightBound brings a new paradigm for B2B sales, addressing what has become an impossible complexity in the prospecting process, transforming manual routines such as company research, prospect selection and multi-channel outreach into a data-driven, AI-based autonomous process.

RightBound is the start of a whole new evolution and category of sales development, said Aravind Avi Bharadwaj at Innovation Endeavors, who led the Series A round. Other solutions in this space are more like guidance or workflow tools; RightBound actually drives the prospecting process for you. It takes the power of AI to a whole new level of optimization and results. Its like the difference between a navigation system and an autonomous vehicle. RightBound has the potential to fuel the sales efforts of every B2B business, from traditional industries to high-growth startups.

Todays outbound sales teams are forced to invest significant time on repetitive prospecting routines - including account research, list building, and outreach orchestration - instead of focusing on 1:1 interactions with relevant prospects. RightBound automatically completes the manual account research on the reps behalf, conducts personalized outreach to prospects across multiple channels, and connects teams with relevant, engaged buyers. With continuous optimization per every target account and individual prospect, RightBound helps to increase their average conversions from target account to qualified meeting from the industry standard of 0.5% - 1% to 1.9%, a notable improvement. Within 1-4 months of implementing RightBound, customers see between 100% and 300% ROI in terms of deals closed from leads sourced and engaged by the RightBound machine. See customer video here.

During the months of widespread work-from-home during the COVID-19 pandemic, sales development reps have discovered that most common practices for engaging prospects no longer apply. Office phones became obsolete, traditional work hours shifted and sending gifts to their office is no longer an option. Since RightBound is constantly learning their prospects behavior, and adjusts the playbook on the fly, it was a game changer for many sales development representative (SDR) teams and enabled them to recover and grow their performance during these times.

RightBound is bringing a completely new approach to sales prospecting that provides autonomous optimization for outbound sales for the first time, said Ran Oelgiesser, co-founder and CEO of RightBound. No machine could or should replace humans in B2B sales conversations. But its time for sales teams to step up and benefit from AI to its full extent when it comes to automation and optimization of research, targeting and customized outreach beyond whats humanly possible.

RightBound boosts the performance of sales teams in multiple ways. The RightBound machine connects with Salesforce, SalesLoft, Outreach.io and Hubspot. Sales teams still work on their prospects in those platforms, but they no longer do the heavy lifting and manual work, and instead can focus on building relationships with personalized effort for fewer, warmer, engaged prospects. Over time, the RightBound machine learns and gets better to continuously optimize its targeting and outreach.

Along with lead investor Innovation Endeavors, the financing round included new investments from Operator Collective, and additional investments from lead seed investor IBI Tech Fund, existing angel investors Zach Weinberg, Nat Turner, and Gil Shklarski.

Founded by Ran Oelgiesser and Rotem Dafni, RightBound currently has 20 full-time employees on the team and intends to double its headcount by 2022, hiring for new positions in the U.S. and Israel. With offices in Kirkland, Washington, Tel Aviv, Israel, and employees in Arizona, Massachusetts, Virginia and North Carolina, the company has been growing its revenues 100% per quarter for the past year.

About RightBound RightBound is the next evolution of outbound sales development. With the power of AI and machine learning, RightBounds technology helps automate and optimize the sales development process, engaging in cold outreach, collecting data on prospects, eliminating time-consuming manual cadences, and freeing up the sales development team to do more of what people do best. RightBound customers have achieved 20-40% increases in outbound sales results and 100% ROI within 3 months of implementation. To learn more visit RightBound.com

Media Contact for RightBound:

Carolyn Adams, BlueRun PR847-867-3005carolyn@bluerunpr.com

More here:

RightBound Raises $12M to Drive Next Evolution of Sales - GlobeNewswire