Investigating the role of food processing in human evolution: a niche construction approach

While it is generally agreed that food processing has had a role in human evolution, the specific ways that is has affected our evolution are not well understood. Using a Niche Construction Theory (NCT) perspective, coupled with methodologies borrowed from “post-harvest” research in the plant sciences, this paper investigates the means and mechanism by which food processing is of evolutionary consequence. The central tenet of NCT is that organisms have an active role in their own evolution through reciprocal interactions with their environments; niche construction is understood to occur when organisms initiate long-term changes to their environments that modify the selection pressures on themselves and their descendants (and on other organisms in the environment). Humans and our hominin ancestors are considered to be the ultimate niche constructors due to our ability to modify selection pressures through diverse culturally generated and transmitted cultural means, i.e. cultural niche construction. In this paper, post-harvest methods are used to identify how food processing could feasibly have permitted hominins to modify their evolutionary selection pressures. Food processing is shown to facilitate access to increasing amounts of digestible nutrients and energy (kilocalories/kilojoules) as well as promoting increased dietary breadth and making possible the production of safer and more stable foods. It is argued that these advancements catalysed related technological and ecological skills and knowledge, which together with the nutritional benefits, further triggered changes in hominin brain and body and locomotory adaptations and increased longevity, disease prevention and juvenile survival rates.     

‘Cypriot-led,Cypriot-owned’: Cyprus talks revisited

Cyprus occupies an unenviable position among a group of intractable international conflicts which transcend their national borders and whose resolution has eluded third-party mediation. The Cyprus dispute has preoccupied theorists and practitioners of conflict resolution ever since the United Nations stationed its peacekeeping force on the island in 1964. Even attempts by the United Nations to revitalise the Cyprus talks following the 2004 referendum on the Annan plan have not yielded satisfactory results. For decades, the Cyprus problem has challenged conventional international analysis and defied traditional approaches to negotiation and peacemaking. This article grapples with the question of why this conflict has not been resolved despite endless negotiations. By extrapolating three seemingly distinct variables—Cypriotisation, Europeanisation and post-Kemalism—this article alludes to changes in the conflict's contextual parameters that are conducive to a political settlement.     

Wilhelm Reich: Culture as power

The past several generations of scholarship on Rembrandt's “Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp” have suffered from the anxiety of influence exercised by the influential interpretations of William Heckscher and William Schupbach. Schupbach's interpretation in particular has guided interpretation of the painting in the past generation and has given rise to a fundamental misunderstanding of the painting and its cultural significance. Schupbach and those whom he has influenced have failed to recognize that, from the standpoint of Baroque consciousness, there is an inner compatibility rather than a paradox or tension between the optimistic endorsement of earthly science and the putatively pessimistic resignation to the inevitability of death. Where the figure of Tulp represents the optimism of science and technology, that of the topmost surgeon Van Loenen represents the recognition that the technological project functions within the larger context of a Christian worldview. A reflection on the original form of “Tulp,” in which Van Loenen was depicted wearing a hat, shows how Rembrandt's painting can still speak to us from a distance of almost four hundred years and pose a challenge to our own secular ambitions.