emjohnson | July 6, 2009Scientia Pro Publica #7 is now up at Greg Laden's Blog. This is the crème brûlée of science carnivals and includes the best writing from the past two months. Greg was kind enough to include my recent post The Struggle for Coexistence. There are some excellent posts in this edition, so click on over and check them out. Some of the ones I found particularly interesting in this edition include:
A Primate of Modern Aspect looks at the evolution of a malaria resistance gene in wild primates, a paper co-authored by my former professor Susan Alberts:
This is an important step forward in the…
emjohnson | July 6, 2009Rejection of authority and working-class values inspired the scientific method.
As everyone knows, when food is digested it is processed into chyle and turned into blood by the liver. This blood then flows to the lungs where it releases any impurities into the air. Flowing from the lungs into the left ventricle of the heart the blood then mixes with air and is charged with animal spirit - where it changes from dark purple to bright red. This charged blood then passes through the arteries and throughout the body.At least, if you had lived anywhere in the Western world up until the early 1600s…
emjohnson | July 5, 2009Bonobos (Pan paniscus) at Frankfurt Zoo, Germany. Joachim S. Müller / Creative Commons
emjohnson | July 5, 2009I've been blogging for a few years now, first at Blogger and recently at Nature Network, and in that time I've accumulated a fair amount of material. Rather than ask people to scan through my archives I thought I would repost some of my earlier pieces as a way for new readers to get an idea of where I'm coming from and what they can expect on these pages in the future. In some cases I will modify these "classic" posts in order to make them more topical (or to edit what in hindsight was simply poor writing). Each will bear the above icon and interested readers can click on it to read the…
emjohnson | July 4, 2009Inspired by the nation's birthday, Larry Arnhart at Darwinian Conservatism has a few thoughts about the term "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" as it appears in the Declaration of Independence:
That phrase provokes questions. Do the "Laws of Nature" depend on some religious belief in "Nature's God"? Does "Nature's God" suggest some kind of natural theology--some conception of the divine that is manifest in nature without need for revelation? Could "Nature's God" suggest a deistic notion of God as the uncaused cause of Nature? Or do we need a more biblical conception of God as a divine…
emjohnson | July 4, 2009There has been much speculation as to why Sarah Palin announced her sudden decision to withdraw as Governor of Alaska Friday. Nate Silver at 538.com speculates:
There seem to be three* basic theories to explain why Sarah Palin decided to quit:
1. She's simply burned out;
2. There's some kind of "other shoe dropping";
3. She's so crazy she thinks this could actually help her for 2012, 2016, etc.
On FOXNews today Karl Rove stated:
Everybody's going to want to have her come campaign, or appear or make speeches and she no longer has the useful excuse of saying, 'Look, I would love to help you on…
emjohnson | July 4, 2009On July 4th, 1852, Frederick Douglass gave a speech at an event commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence, held at Rochester's Corinthian Hall entitled, "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro":
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of…
emjohnson | July 4, 2009Danny Schecter asks, how independent are we?
"This isn't just about Madoff. This is about the system in which Madoff's scam took place. This is about systemic fraud and malpractice, the cultural trade of due diligence for easy profit. It's about conflicts of interest where companies paid ratings agencies for their ratings. It's about ideological blinders that let regulators and the Federal Reserve look the other way while banks turned into betting parlors."
Amy Goodman looks into the overthrow of independence in Honduras.
The first coup d'etat in Central America in more than a quarter-century…
emjohnson | July 3, 2009Or, Why I Love ScienceBlogs Reason #372:
Mo at Neurophilosophy has a fascinating article on the evolutionary origins of the nervous system:
THE HUMAN BRAIN is a true marvel of nature. This jelly-like 1.5kg mass inside our skulls, containing hundreds of billions of cells which between them form something like a quadrillion connections, is responsible for our every action, emotion and thought. How did this remarkable and extraordinarily complex structure evolve? This question poses a huge challenge to researchers; brain evolution surely involved thousands of discrete, incremental steps, which…
emjohnson | July 3, 2009Human nature is one of those concepts that, like "common sense", everyone knows what you mean but no one knows how it's defined. Ironically, the most insistent proponents of human nature are often those who have benefited from the status quo in society and prefer people to remain just as they are.
June 27 (the day before my son was born) was the birthday of the famed feminist, author and political radical Emma Goldman. I had the opportunity to spend last summer at the Emma Goldman Papers in Berkeley, California to study her unpublished speeches and correspondence. As someone who was…
emjohnson | July 1, 2009Four Stone Hearth #70, the migrating anthropology blog carnival, has been posted today at the new site of Afarensis. I hosted the carnival earlier at the original home of The Primate Diaries, and I hope to again soon.
There's a lot of great posts in this edition and I encourage everyone to check them out. My picks include:
Anthropology.net has a terrific review of the new paper on Eem Neanderthals:
The suggestion that Neanderthals made their own fitted clothes and kept food in storage rather than eating as much as they could on the spot, before heading off in search of the next meal,…
emjohnson | July 1, 2009
Image: Auzigog / Creative Commons
Each week I plan to highlight a Creative Commons photographer whose work I think should reach a larger audience. This week I chose Jeremy Blanchard's self-portrait of what reading Ishmael was like the first time. Having had a similar experience myself I completely understand and I think his photograph captures this perfectly.
To see more of his work, check out his Flickr page here. For those of you who haven't yet been introduced to Ishmael I encourage you to do so. To whet your appetite allow me to offer the following:
Ishmael selected a fresh…
emjohnson | June 30, 2009Peter and Billy Getty over at City Brights write:
There are slews of people richer than we are, just in this neighborhood. We're more famous for being rich than we really are rich. But we have enough to belong to the leisure class, meaning we get to spend very little of our time doing anything we don't feel like, and we have means to sample, if not to gorge on, pleasures that most people, sad to say, won't likely ever share in -- things like yacht trips and safaris, ludicrously expensive wine, and private jet travel. You can be richer than we are, but you can't live a whole lot better without…
emjohnson | June 30, 2009On June 30, 1905 Albert Einstein published his paper on Special Relativity with the paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" in the journal Annalen der Physik (original German version in pdf here).
This was Einstein's third of what have become known as the Annus Mirabilis papers (Latin for "extraordinary year") and revolutionized the field of physics by reconciling Maxwell's equations for electricity and magnetism with the laws of mechanics. He was 26 years old. In this paper Einstein also dispelled with the concept of "luminiferous ether" (proposed by Isaac Newton in 1704), a…
emjohnson | June 29, 2009
Sunrise on the Maasai Mara, Kenya. Vearl Brown / Creative Commons
From the beginning our human family has been on a journey. Born together, in eastern Africa about 100,000 years ago, our ancestors migrated to distant points around the globe. Our family scattered, communication was cut off and, in most cases, we forgot about them all together. We went our separate ways and lived our separate lives. Like siblings each adopted by different parents in distant lands, we came to identify with where we were raised instead of where we were from. Now, after accumulating so many years of…
emjohnson | June 28, 2009 Our newborn takes after his father.The following is something of an impromptu experiment in live birth twittering. It started out simply as a means to update friends and family, but as events transpired we received some unexpected international attention. The entire labor lasted 47 hours, involved three different locations and two surgeries. This after we had carefully planned for a natural birth with no interventions. Thank you to the hundreds of people in at least eight countries who followed our story and sent messages of support. Special thanks to Henry Gee, Senior Editor of…
emjohnson | November 1, 2005Reprinted from Wildlife Conservation Magazine
"Behind Enemy Lines"
November/December 2005
By Eric Michael Johnson
December 2002 -- After four days traveling upriver in a dugout canoe, Belgian primatologist Jef Dupain became the first researcher in five years to return to the war-torn Lomako Forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo). As he surveyed the overgrown field station that had once been his home, a boy soldier wielding an AK-47 stepped into view from a concealing tangle of vines. Fortunately the boy was only one of the rebel fighters who had escorted Dupain…