John Hawks Anthropology Weblog
Paleoanthropology, genetics, and evolution
Darwin, languages, and genetics
How are languages and genes related to each other? Anthropology is an interdiscipinary subject, and this is probably the topic that pushes that envelope the furthest, in terms of calling on the expertise of many different disciplines in the humanities and...
~ published: Wednesday at 22:42 ~ permalink
Stickleback sex
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel prints a nice article about the work of my UW colleague, Jenny Boughman. Boughman studies adaptation and mating behavior in sticklebacks -- a model species for much current research on speciation. Either form of cuckoldry un...
~ published: Wednesday at 20:57 ~ permalink
Penn museum evolution review
Another review of the evolution exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, this time a long piece by Julia Klein in the Wall Street Journal. ...
~ published: Wednesday at 09:46 ~ permalink
The bovine compass
This is too strange: Dr Sabine Begall and colleagues from the University of Duisburg-Essen looked at thousands of images of cattle on Google Earth in Britain, Ireland, India and the USA. They also studied 3,000 deer in the Czech Republic. The deer tended ...
~ published: Tuesday at 20:45 ~ permalink
Sample sizes and the "Neandertal haplogroup"
I have an excellent e-mail question about last week’s Neandertal mtDNA paper, which has provoked a lot of commentary.I just skimmed over your comments on the recent paper and I have a couple questions. First, how many Neanderthals did they rece...
~ published: Tuesday at 10:47 ~ permalink
Bolt and Johnson as statistical outliers
An interesting post from Justin Wolfers about statistical outliers and sprinters, referencing a New York Times story about Usain Bolt, along with a key graphic showing Bolt's and Michael Johnson's records versus the 249 other fastest 200 meter sprint time...
~ published: Monday at 21:30 ~ permalink
Beneath the Bigfoot hoax
Newsweek is running a long story with the details behind the latest Bigfoot hoax: [Las Vegas promoter Tom] Biscardi says he and his backers shelled out $50,000 for the body, only to discover days later that—shock!—it was nothing but a costume stuffed ...
~ published: Monday at 20:42 ~ permalink
Connecting with your Bronze Age ancestors
The BBC has a story about Y chromosome matches between German Bronze Age skeletons and a couple of guys living in the same area now:"I didn't expect it at all, to end up being the direct descendant of the cavemen. It's amazing, especially as on that ...
~ published: 08/24 at 21:20 ~ permalink
A sixth taste receptor for calcium?
Do people taste calcium?By measuring the electrical activity of nerves linking the brain and tongue in mice, "we can now say with some certainty that calcium is tasted," Tordoff said.There's an interesting genetic story here, with a high-calcium...
~ published: 08/24 at 16:34 ~ permalink
Florida evolution education: a Mickey Mouse subject?
There's a long article by Amy Harmon about Florida biology educator David Campbell and his struggle to get better evolution standards in Florida. It's a good article with lots of elements that give the flavor of high school biology education and the strug...
~ published: 08/24 at 16:26 ~ permalink
Harvey Cushing
At Neurophilosophy, a cool post on the photorecord of early neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing: Before Cushing began his career, brain tumours were considered to be inoperable, and the mortality rate for any surgical procedure which involved opening the skull wa...
~ published: 08/22 at 21:31 ~ permalink
Y chromosome migrations and African pastoralism
Sharon Begley covers a recent paper by Joanna Mountain on Y chromosome migrations and African pastoralists: The novel mutation arose in eastern Africa about 10,000 years ago and was carried by migration to southern Africa about 2,000 years ago not by Bant...
~ published: 08/22 at 11:12 ~ permalink
Working out how smart brains work
Scientific American Mind has an interesting article in the September issue, called "High-aptitude minds". The article ponders explanations for how smart brains work, reviewing some research along the way, and a whole lot of confusion. For exampl...
~ published: 08/22 at 11:06 ~ permalink
Open science profile
The Boston Globe runs a piece on "open science" (big in the Boston area) and hits on an obvious problem: Scientists who plunge into openness also risk giving a competing lab a leg up."Maybe somebody has discovered some interesting gene and ...
~ published: 08/22 at 09:35 ~ permalink
Bobsleds, no; sprinting, yes
If you're interested in athletic performance and genetics, read Daniel Macarthur on ACTN3, sprinting, and Jamaica:At this point I probably should confess to having a more than casual interest in this story: I was one of the authors on the first study show...
~ published: 08/21 at 09:53 ~ permalink
Bigfoot hoax a rubber suit
I hope the "undisclosed sum" included the freezer:Two researchers on a quest to prove the existence of Bigfoot say that the carcass encased in a block of ice -- handed over to them for an undisclosed sum by two men who claimed to have found it -...
~ published: 08/20 at 23:48 ~ permalink
Catholicism and science
An interesting article from Discover about Catholicism, faith, and science includes an exchange between Richard Dawkins and former Vatican Observatory chief Fr. George Coyne:“I did not tell Richard Dawkins that there was no reason to believe in God,” ...
~ published: 08/19 at 11:50 ~ permalink
Paranormal belief, religion, and education
Depressing? "Perhaps amazingly, [paranormal beliefs] are not related at all to education," Stark said. "Ph.D.s are as likely as high school dropouts to believe in Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, ghosts, etc."The 2006 study of college stude...
~ published: 08/19 at 11:28 ~ permalink
Judson on teaching evolution
Olivia Judson editorializes on the value of teaching evolution:[A] failure to consider the evolution of other species may result in a failure of our efforts to preserve them. And, perhaps, to preserve ourselves from diseases, pests and food shortages. In ...
~ published: 08/18 at 23:40 ~ permalink
How I do LaTeX on Drupal
Some people wanted to know what I am using to enter my LaTeX code into Drupal. There are several Drupal modules that can deal with some LaTeX, but none of them really suited my needs. The most important advantage of LaTeX blogging is that I’m able...
~ published: 08/18 at 21:52 ~ permalink
1918 flu antibodies still pulse on
The immune system's long memory: Scientists tested the blood of 32 people aged 92 to 102 who were exposed to the 1918 pandemic flu and found antibodies that still roam the body looking to strangle the old flu strain. Researchers manipulated those antibodi...
~ published: 08/17 at 21:59 ~ permalink
Complete Neandertal mitochondrial sequence, and selection on human (not Neandertal) mtDNA
In the current Cell, the Max-Planck group, in coordination with 454 Life Sciences, report the sequence of a complete Neandertal mtDNA. I'm out of town right now, so I'm writing fairly quickly, and I haven't seen any of the reporting. Keeping that in mind,...
~ published: 08/09 at 16:39 ~ permalink
Pandas
Finally, a panda story I can get on board with: Pandas: Evolution's big fat (adorable) mistake?Their unlikely perseverance seems to argue against 'survival of the fittest'Oh, well -- despite the encouraging headline, it's mainly an article about how the p...
~ published: 08/09 at 16:15 ~ permalink
Politics and evolution, reverse-wise
I missed this op-ed by David Barash when it came out last month. It is an argument that commentators on the political left would prefer to ignore evolution just as those on the right, but for reasons having to do with innateness:Indeed, ideologues of both...
~ published: 08/07 at 07:00 ~ permalink
How to blog, get tenure and prosper: A very useful engine
This is part 2 of my four-part series on blogging and tenure. In the last installment, I mentioned the kinds of motivations that might drive a tenure-track scientist to blog, and naturally your personal motivation will help drive your writing style. What...
~ published: 08/05 at 08:20 ~ permalink
Gorillas that persist
Good news for gorilla conservation: A grueling survey of vast tracts of forest and swamp in the northern Congo Republic has revealed the presence of more than 125,000 western lowland gorillas, a rare example of abundance in a world of rapidly vanishing pr...
~ published: 08/04 at 21:40 ~ permalink
Obsolete thinking discarded, life goes on
In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Russell Jacoby bemoans progress (paywall). He thinks that colleges aren't teaching people to revere the right nineteenth-century intellectuals: The divorce between informed opinion and academic wisdom could not be mor...
~ published: 08/04 at 09:17 ~ permalink
Rapid 3-d prototyping by mail
Have our problems getting casts suddenly become a lot easier?A new online service aims to bring customized manufacturing to the masses by allowing consumers to submit digital designs of products that are then printed, using 3-D printers, and shipped back....
~ published: 08/01 at 10:08 ~ permalink
Carl Wieman on science education
Carl Wieman is a scientist at the University of British Columbia. He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work creating the first Bose-Einstein condensate (a state of matter that can be induced at extremely low temperatures). In recent years, he...
~ published: 07/28 at 23:42 ~ permalink
Hawks in U.S. News
I'm featured in an article in U.S. News and World Report, by Nancy Shute. It was a great interview, and she's put together our work on recent acceleration with some questions about where human evolution is headed. She also cites work by Simon Baron-Cohen,...
~ published: 07/27 at 16:26 ~ permalink
Organizing the "idea marketplace"
Sabine Hossenfelder (BackReaction) has written some extended thoughts about the "marketplace of ideas" in science, and some of the ways it may have gone wrong. Her thoughts are focused on her field, theoretical physics, but many of them will app...
~ published: 07/26 at 15:33 ~ permalink
Quote: High Priests of Anthropology
Reading through the introduction to Archaeology and Language, by Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs (1998), I thought this quote was great: All the lights in the House of the High Priests of American Anthropology are out, all the doors and windows are shut ...
~ published: 07/24 at 21:15 ~ permalink
Worms do calculus
Another sign I'm not expecting enough of my students: "Worms do calculus to find food":Worms calculate how much the strength of different tastes is changing -- equivalent to the process of taking a derivative in calculus -- to figure out if they...
~ published: 07/23 at 18:56 ~ permalink
Graduate students and blogging
I've received a tremendous response to my essay earlier this week, the first part of my series on blogging and tenure. I wanted to thank everyone for their congratulations. More important, I got a lot of questions. Some of these questions will be answered...
~ published: 07/23 at 12:46 ~ permalink
Binford blogging
Lew Binford: What's the big deal? Hot Cup of Joe explores: In other, later, publications, Binford went on to refine and perfect his perspective of processual archaeology, but it’s my opinion that “Archaeology as Anthropology” was the seminal paper ...
~ published: 07/22 at 22:14 ~ permalink
Timing Y-chromosome STR evolution
Dienekes details his argument for why date estimates based on Y-chromosome STRs are overestimated. I'd like to see him publish it!...
~ published: 07/21 at 11:52 ~ permalink
How to blog, get tenure and prosper: Starting the blog
This is the first of a four-part series on blogging and tenure. Each installment covers a different portion of the tenure process, from starting and establishing the tone of your blog, up to documenting your blog for your tenure dossier. I don't guarantee...
~ published: 07/20 at 14:12 ~ permalink
Lateral gene transfer in evolutionary history
Carl Zimmer describes a recent paper documenting lateral gene transfer across a broad phylogeny of organisms. It's one of the topics covered in his book, Microcosm, and his post has some very cool pictures. ...
~ published: 07/20 at 10:44 ~ permalink
A new "Wizard"?
Am I the only one who noticed the irony of a car company named "Tesla" opening its premier dealership in a city called "Menlo Park"? ...
~ published: 07/20 at 10:32 ~ permalink
Epistasis and Fisher
A long explication of R. A. Fisher's views on epistasis by Gene Expression writer DavidB. Worth reading for its outside-the-textbook presentation of the Fisher-Wright debate. ...
~ published: 07/19 at 22:13 ~ permalink
Notes from Altenberg
Massimo Pigliucci has posted his notes from the Altenberg conference....
~ published: 07/19 at 22:00 ~ permalink
The mtDNA sequence of Paglicci 23
Is there anything surprising about finding the Cambridge Reference Sequence in Paglicci 23?UPDATE follows at the bottom.read more...
~ published: 07/18 at 23:26 ~ permalink
Quote: Scientists and politics
Ann Althouse, writing about science and politics:[T]he whole point of science is to question and investigate and test. If scientists close ranks when they think that they have enough evidence and that they will have more influence if they claim consensus,...
~ published: 07/18 at 09:15 ~ permalink
Book review: Spook, by Mary Roach
I've just finished Mary Roach's entertaining book, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. I haven't read Roach's previous book, Stiff, which explores some of the odd things that happen to cadavers after people die. Being an anthropologist, I guess I know a...
~ published: 07/17 at 11:06 ~ permalink
Neandertal, other ancient DNA review
Last week, a short article in Science by Rachel Mackelprang and Edward Rubin discussed some of the recent advances in ancient DNA extraction. Of most interest is the paragraph that discusses ways to probe for particular genes while avoiding some drawbacks...
~ published: 07/16 at 10:25 ~ permalink
Darwin, emotion, and WALL-E
Jonah Lehrer went in to WALL-E (an enormously entertaining movie) and came out thinking of Darwin's Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals:The emotional brain is actually the most ancient part of our cortical machinery, a piece of hardware that's been r...
~ published: 07/16 at 09:36 ~ permalink
Underwater search for early Americans
James Adovasio is going looking for underwater early American sites off Florida, according to this article in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: Adovasio plans to co-lead a two-week expedition in the Gulf of Mexico at the end of the month to look for evidence...
~ published: 07/16 at 08:14 ~ permalink
Liang Bua cave
Another Flickr find, Liang Bua cave, by Rosino (Creative Commons Share-alike license)...
~ published: 07/15 at 14:36 ~ permalink
Pigment use and symbolic behavior in the Neandertals
Some months ago I was taking some notes about Neandertal pigment use, drawn from a recent article by Marie Soressi and Francesco d'Errico. I got distracted and didn't finish writing them up at the time. Recently, a number of readers have asked for my thou...
~ published: 07/15 at 12:06 ~ permalink
Vonnegut on writing style
Ann Althouse links to Kurt Vonnegut's "How to write with style,", which deserves to be linked. I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is wha...
~ published: 07/15 at 09:10 ~ permalink