Anthropology
Gene Expression
Tag archives for Anthropology
What does not kill the group, makes it stronger!
Posted by Razib Khan on November 7, 2009 I recently finished reading The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, a new book by Nicholas Wade, a science writer for The New York Times. Before giving it the “full treatment” I thought it behooved me to revisit some of the scientific literature which Wade relies upon to give form to his…
Mortality leads to small stature
Posted by Razib Khan on October 12, 2009 Stature, Mortality, and Life History among Indigenous Populations of the Andaman Islands, 1871-1986: Despite considerable interest in the evolution of small body size, there is little evidence for changes in body size within small‐bodied human populations. This study combines anthropometric data from a number of studies of the body size of Andaman Islanders from 1871…
Mothers & Others
Posted by Razib Khan on September 7, 2009 At Cognition & Culture, a review of Sarah Blaffer Hrdry’s new book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. I really liked her previous work, Mother Nature, so I’m definitely going to check this out. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy was a prominent source in Ullica Segerstrale’s Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate.
Australian Aborigines arrived via South Asia
Posted by Razib Khan on July 22, 2009 BMC Evolutionary Biology has a new paper which will be up soon (not on site), Reconstructing Indian-Australian phylogenetic link. ScienceDaily has a preview: Dr Raghavendra Rao worked with a team of researchers from the Anthropological Survey of India to sequence 966 complete mitochondrial DNA genomes from Indian ‘relic populations’. He said, “Mitochondrial DNA is inherited…
The evolutionary origins of human nature
Posted by Razib Khan on May 26, 2009 On this week’s Science Saturday John Horgan interviews Richard Wrangham. The second half of the conversation focuses on Wrangham’s new book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. I’ve heard pieces of the arguments mooted in the back & forth before, but it looks like in this book they’re all brought together. Humans are a…