Steve Hsu points me to a piece in The New Yorker on the science and personality of Svante Pääbo. The personality part includes references to Pääbo’s bisexuality, which to me seemed to be literally dropped into the prose to spice it up. Of course it was the science which I found interesting. There are many more bisexuals than there are heterodox scientists. And yet like many researchers of yore it seems that Pääbo is out to find the genes which make humanity distinctive as we understand it (if the reporting is accurate, which I don’t take as a given). There are some interesting tantalizing clues littered about; some genes implicated in autism seem to exhibit Neandertal vs. modern human differences (with the Neandertals carrying the autism-implicated variants).
But here’s a consideration: what if the premise that there are a set of traits which are disjoint between Neandertals and modern humans is false? What I’m saying here is that there are traits which are fixed and universal within a species, and totally differentiate species x from species y. Anatomically and behaviorally modern humans seem to be exceptionally strange …