To study humankind, AAA responds
This morning I received an email from the communication director of the American Anthropology Association. The contents are on the web:
AAA Responds to Public Controversy Over Science in Anthropology
Some recent media coverage, including an article in the New York Times, has portrayed anthropology as divided between those who practice it as a science and those […]
We were all Africans…before the intermission
Quick review. In the 19th century once the idea that humans were derived from non-human ancestral species was injected into the bloodstream of the intellectual classes there was an immediate debate as to the location of the proto-human homeland; the Urheimat of us all. Charles Darwin favored Africa, but in many ways this ran against the […]
European man of many faces: Cain vs. Abel
When it comes to the synthesis of genetics and history we live an age of no definitive answers. L. L. Cavalli-Sforza’s Great Human Diasporas would come in for a major rewrite at this point. One of the areas which has been roiled the most within the past ten years has been the origin and propagation […]
Size doesn’t always matter
Neandertals famously had larger cranial capacities than modern humans, and, have gone through multiple phases of de- and re-humanization. A few weeks ago there was a revision of the idea that Neandertals in France ~30,000 years ago adopted some aspects of modern human culture through diffusion. This was a support for the Neandertal “ooga-booga” thesis. […]
Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization
The cockroach as we know it has been around for ~140 million years. That’s a rather long run. The evolutionary design of the cockroach seems to be well suited to avoiding obsolescence; it’s withstood the test of time. I suspect that the particular example of the roach is often used to illustrate the blindness of […]
‘dem bones tell strange tales
There is a new paper in PNAS on remains from China which re-order and muddle our understanding of the emergence of anatomical and behavioral modernity in Eurasia. Human remains from Zhirendong, South China, and modern human emergence in East Asia:
The 2007 discovery of fragmentary human remains (two molars and an anterior mandible) at Zhirendong (Zhiren […]
Body odor, Asians, and earwax
When I was in college I would sometimes have late night conversations with the guys in my dorm, and the discussion would random-walk in very strange directions. During one of these quasi-salons a friend whose parents were from Korea expressed some surprise and disgust at the idea of wet earwax. It turns out he had […]
The essence of the alien
If you found out a new fact about yourself could that reshape how you view yourself? An extreme case involves the Polish Neo-Nazis who found out that they are actually of Jewish origin. But it can be more subtle. A friend recently told me that her proud Irish American father found out that he carried […]
To gain pallor is easier than losing it
John Hawks illustrates what can be gained at the intersection of old data and analysis and new knowledge, Quote: Boyd on New World pigmentation clines:
I’m using some statistics out of William Boyd’s 1956 printing of Genetics and the Races of Man[1]. It gives a good accounting of blood group data known more than fifty years […]
The hobbits were cretins. Perhaps. Or perhaps not
I was thinking a bit about H. floresiensis today. Probably my thoughts were triggered by John Hawks’ post on the propensity for paleontologists to be “splitters,” naming new finds as species when they’re not. The issue with H. floresiensis is a little more cut & dried: if they weren’t a separate species they were obviously […]
The city that kills you makes you strong!
Over the past day I’ve seen reports in the media of a new paper which claims that long-term urbanization in a region is strongly correlated with genetic variants for disease resistance. I managed to find the paper on Evolution’s website as an accepted manuscript, ANCIENT URBANISATION PREDICTS GENETIC RESISTANCE TO TUBERCULOSIS:
A link between urban living […]
The naked years
When I talk about sexual selection I usually make sure to have an accompanying visual of a peacock to go with the post. But really I could have used a dandy as an illustration, or perhaps in our day & age “The Situation”. Unlike the peacock much of what passes for human “plumage” is not […]
Which population is most genetically distant from Africans? Amerindians
Yesterday I stated that it was wrong to think of any non-African population as more genetically distant from Africans. Well, I was wrong. Sort of. This is obviously a case where I had a model in mind, and went looking for visuals which reinforced the story I was going to tell. As noted in the […]
Which population is most genetically distant from Africans?
A comment below:
Razib, I don’t know much about genetics but is it true that these people of Melanesia are among the least related people (even more so than Europeans) to sub-saharan Africans genetically??
This is a common question. The typical scientifically curious intelligent person is generally aware that on the order of 100,000 years ago there […]
One principal component to rule them all?
Despite the reality that I’ve cautioned against taking PCA plots too literally as Truth, unvarnished and without any interpretive juice needed, papers which rely on them are almost magnetically attractive to me. They transform complex patterns of variation which you are not privy to via your gestalt psychology into a two or at most three […]
Disease as a byproduct of adaptation
How we perceive nature and describe its shape are a matter of values and preferences. Nature does not take notice of our distinctions; they exist only as instruments which aid in our comprehension. I’ve brought this up in relation to issues such as categorization of recessive vs. dominant traits. The offspring of people of […]
“The Inheritors”
I just purchased a copy of William Golding’s The Inheritors. Golding is famous for writing Lord of the Flies, a work of literature of such influence that it has made the transition into our everyday lexicon. But I just listened to a podcast of an interview with a biographer of the great author, and it […]
The Price of Altruism
Sometimes in a narrative you have secondary characters who you want to revisit. What do to do after the story is complete? An convenient “work-around” to this problem is to find the story rewritten from the perspective of the secondary character. In broad strokes the picture is unchanged, but in the finer grained shadings different […]
The Human Edge (on NPR)
NPR has a series on Morning Edition titled “The Human Edge,” which explores human evolution and genetics. The first episode is up, Finding Our Inner Fish. They focus on Neil Shubin’s work (also, some reporting on what fish can tell us about human skin color on All Things Considered).
As a constructive criticism, I wonder if […]