Social Sciences
razib | October 13, 2009A new paper adding some decimal places on Indian mtDNA phylogeography, Updating Phylogeny of Mitochondrial DNA Macrohaplogroup M in India: Dispersal of Modern Human in South Asian Corridor:
To construct maternal phylogeny and prehistoric dispersals of modern human being in the Indian sub continent, a diverse subset of 641 complete mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genomes belonging to macrohaplogroup M was chosen from a total collection of 2,783 control-region sequences, sampled from 26 selected tribal populations of India. On the basis of complete mtDNA sequencing, we identified 12 new haplogroups…
razib | October 11, 2009About two weeks ago I pointed to the peculiar disjunction between what a paper on Indian genetics actually said, and how people, including some of the researchers who contributed to the paper, were spinning it. For instance, the finding that South Asians can be reasonably modeled as a two-way admixture between "Ancestral North Indians" (ANI) and "Ancestral South Indians" which varies in ratio between between 7:3 and 2:3 across regions & caste groups was translated into "the genetic unity of India." And now I notice in The Guardian another Indian has an article titled Tracing the fissures…
tfk | October 9, 2009It seems like a better hypothesis than that religion is epistemically incompatible with science. (Trying to replace political science with CNN? Really?)
Consider. Roughly half of scientists are religious, but fewer than 10% are conservatives. John McCain, the leader of the Republican party, denigrated astronomy education by calling a star-projector for a planetarium "foolishness" and "an overhead projector." His hand-picked successor suggested that fruit fly research should be defunded, and suggested that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth together. By contrast, the Catholic church's…
gregladen | October 8, 2009On September 11th, 2008 Meleanie Hain went to her child's soccer game with a Glock pistol in a holster strapped to her hip.
This was in the vicinity of Lebanon, Pennsylvania. To her and presumably others, it may have been an act of patriotism. I suspect it was an explicitly anti-Obama act given the ado about his remark during the primaries. But I could be wrong. The Lebanon County Sheriff very appropriately thought it was inappropriate for a gun owner to bring an overtly displayed dangerous weapon to a children's soccer game, so he revoked her permit. Hain managed to get the permit…
gregladen | October 8, 2009It does not matter what you believe about god, creationism, science, evolution, whatever. If you were raised in a society in which there is an evil enemy that you are convinced intends to arrive some day on your country's shores, take over your government, impose a new social order, marry your sister, and so on, then when this evil foreign government sends the first warning shot in this war and it is an unprecedented and amazing feat of science, then suddenly you love science.
You pay taxes to fund science. Your idolize science. You start demanding that science comes to the rescue. One…
cwilcox | October 8, 2009
Boyish good looks - the next generation of sexy?
Men like Mike Rowe on the outs?
I couldn't help but notice that a new study has come out about the behavioral effects of hormonal contraception. It's all over the science news sites. With titles ranging from the conservative "Pill May Change Attraction" to the bolder "Taking the pill for past 40 years 'has put women off masculine men'"and "The pill 'gives women a taste for boyish men like Zac Efron'," this new publication has swept the media outlets by storm. This idea that birth control might have behavioral side effects isn't new, even I'…
clock | October 7, 2009From Sigma Xi:
We'll reconvene at noon, Tuesday, Oct. 20, at Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, with a peek at one of the many ways technology helped our species survive and prosper long ago.
Steven Churchill, an associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, will discuss the origins of projectile weaponry, and how that fit with the emergence of other aspects of modern human behavior. He'll talk about his fascinating forensics work exploring ways our ancestors may have used weapons against evolutionary cousins who no longer roam this planet.
American Scientist…
drorzel | October 7, 2009
Confessions of a Middlebrow Professor - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education
"Beam makes light of Adler's inflexibility, but he does not entirely embrace the by-now clichéd disdain for the Great Books, because they represent something admirable that, perhaps, should be revived in our culture: "The animating idea behind publishing the Great Books, aside from making money for Britannica and the University of Chicago," Beam observes, "was populism, not elitism." The books were household gods. They shared the living room with the television, and they made you feel guilty…
jrosenhouse | October 5, 2009Andrew Sullivan has posted several more blog entries on the subject of theodicy. Here's one written from a theistic perspective. It gets off to a bad start:
The emails you have received regarding the theodicy problem are, I think, very telling. Most striking to me is how few of your correspondents -- and none in the set of notes posted just yesterday morning -- seem interested in, or even cite with a measure of familiarity, any of the great Christian theologians on the matter: St. Augustine or St. Thomas, Luther or Calvin, Kierkegaard, or even a near contemporary like Reinhold Niebuhr.…
omnibrain | October 5, 2009
So how does Superman do it! He can see through buildings and clothing (he checks out Lois Lane's underwear in Superman 1 - more on this later). Many have attempted to answer this question of the ages yet few have explored this in as much depth as J.B. Pittenger who published a study in the journal Perception back in the stone ages (1983) entitled "On the plausibility of superman's x-ray vision"
But first, before we get into the meat of the paper, lets see what others around the InterWebs have said about Superman's amazing seeing through underwear powers.
In Correcting Misconceptions…
oracknows | October 4, 2009My first hometown, as many readers of this blog know, is Detroit, where I spent the first ten years or so of my life. My second hometown, as I pointed out a while back when a particularly loony city council candidate caught the eye of the skeptical blogosphere.
Unfortunately, I just found out that there's some more looniness going on there in a little more than a week. My cousin e-mailed me this notice:
Event: Mrs. Michigan Autism Lecture
Date: Thursday, October 15, 2009
Time: 6:30pm Location: Zerbo's Health Foods
Event Details:
Heidi Scheer is a national spokesperson for Autism Awareness…
jdupuis | October 2, 2009Yes, it's the IgNobel Awards for 2009!
Let's take a look at a couple of the more amusing ones:
PEACE PRIZE: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining -- by experiment -- whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.
REFERENCE: "Are Full or Empty Beer Bottles Sturdier and Does Their Fracture-Threshold Suffice to Break the Human Skull?" Stephan A. Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael J. Thali and Beat P. Kneubuehl, Journal of…
emjohnson | September 30, 2009Over the years anthropologists have had a good deal to say about notions of power and inequality. For example, the late CUNY anthropologist Eric R. Wolf took his early experiences working with peasants in Puerto Rico to explore these larger questions in the global system. In the opening to his book Envisioning Power he wrote:
We stand at the end of a century marked by colonial expansion, world wars, revolutions, and conflicts over religion that have occasioned great social suffering and cost millions of lives. These upheavals have entailed massive plays and displays of power, but ideas…
clock | September 27, 2009
Background
When Futurity.org, a new science news service, was launched last week, there was quite a lot of reaction online.
Some greeted it with approval, others with a "wait and see" attitude.
Some disliked the elitism, as the site is limited only to the self-proclaimed "top" universities (although it is possible that research in such places, where people are likely to be well funded, may be the least creative).
But one person - notably, a journalist - exclaimed on Twitter: "propaganda!", which led to a discussion that revealed the journalist's notion that press releases are…
esiegel | September 27, 2009I've liked the musician Rufus Wainwright for some time, but I didn't realize that he was the son of Loudon Wainwright, whom I've just recently discovered. Loudon's a singer/songwriter who's been around for even longer, and who I like even better than Rufus. His song Father and Son was written for Rufus, but I think the Peter Blegvad song Daughter that he performs here is more appropriate for today.
Why? Because I just learned about the Asgarda women of the Ukraine, via Planet and Bust magazines.
[Image removed due to copyright claim.]
I take so many things for granted in this country that I…
jdupuis | September 25, 2009God, I love The Onion: Nadir Of Western Civilization To Be Reached This Friday At 3:32 P.M.
An international panel of leading anthropologists, cultural critics, biologists, and social theorists announced this week that Western civilization will reach its lowest conceivable point at 3:32 p.m. Friday.
"From the prehistoric Lascaux cave paintings to the stirring symphonies of Mozart to today's hot-dog eating competitions and action films with comical gerbils, culture has descended into a festering pool of mass ignorance," said Yale sociologist Paul Riordan, who has spent his career analyzing…
bcohen | September 25, 2009Instead of me answering that, I wondered instead how other people have argued about the question. To be more specific, since I am interested in the role of scientific practice for defining the land, I wondered how people argued about whether or not science was better for agriculture. I wrote a book about it. It's called Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside. I commented here a few months ago that the book was finally on its way. Although Amazon sales do not begin until October 20th (here is their link), the publisher has it officially listed for…
drorzel | September 25, 2009
The Microhistorical Unknown « Easily Distracted
"One thing that frustrates me at times about "big history", world history or large-scale historical sociology is the extent to which historians writing in those traditions tend to assume that it's turtles all the way down, that the insights of big history extend symmetrically to the smallest scales of human life, that microhistory contains no surprises or contradictions for the macrohistorian. "
(tags: humanities history blogs easily-distracted society culture)
Confessions of a Community College Dean: The White Glove Test
"I'm thinking it…
emjohnson | September 23, 2009Author's Note: This piece is a continuation of my article "Survival of the Kindest" that appeared in Seed magazine.
As an undergraduate in biology and anthropology I read every one of Dawkins' books voraciously and would get into heated debates with my close friends about the Dawkins-Gould rivalry. He was one of the primary voices that taught me to love science and want to devote my life to the pursuit of natural knowledge. So before you read anything else, go out and read Dawkins' work. It's worth your time. This post will still be here when you come back.
The problem that I've found as…
gregladen | September 23, 2009This is the third of three parts of this particular falsehood. (Here is the previous part)
I previously noted that to survive as a Westerner, you can get away with participating in a culture that asks of you little more than to understand the "one minute" button on the microwave, while to survive in a foraging society you needed much much more. Moreover, I suggested that the level of complexity in an individual's life was greater among HG (Hunter-Gatherer) societies than Western societies.
However, this is not to say, in the end, that one form of economy and society is more complex than…