In my Science Confirms the Obvious post today, I discussed the first psychological proof (so say the authors) that humans can indeed experience emotions without immediately knowing why. We do this, they say, because we evolved that way. True, scientists love that explanation, but here it’s quite intriguing.

Say you’re walking through the woods and encounter a grizzly bear. You see it and freeze that instant—even before your stomach drops with fear.

I’ve been thinking about chimps lately. I called them a “who” and not a “which” in a recent piece I produced for the American Museum of Natural History. This earned me a virtual slap by my copy editor. As in:

“Chimpanzees, who WHICH are not bipedal…”

I was just giving a nod to a fellow hominid—the taxonomic group that includes chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and humans. Pan troglodytes are 99.8% genetically similar to us, making them our closest living relative.

The unsettling prospects of climate change seem to be inspiring a flurry of research on the innate ability of humans to cooperate for the common good. In my last post, I described a clever game by German scientists that found that freeloading impedes cooperation among a group of individuals chipping in to prevent a global warming disaster.

Welcome to the inaugural post of Future Human: Covering the prospects of Homo sapiens and the future of humanity.

You can follow subsequent postings here, where you can also subscribe to an RSS feed.

If we were assured that climate change would doom the planet’s future, we'd all chip in to help stop it, right? Well, maybe not. An interesting forecast from researchers at Germany’s Max Planck Institute contends that humans have a fifty-fifty shot of cooperating on climate for the benefit of the common good.