emjohnson | August 10, 2009John Hawks points to a news story showing that orangutans make musical instruments:
When in a tight situation, the orangutans will strip the leaves off a twig and make a crude musical instrument to alter the calls they use to ward off predators -- not exactly a Stradivarius, but it seems to get the job done. . .
. . . Orangutans make this noise when they feel threatened, for example, when they fear a predator -- such as a snake, clouded leopard, tiger or human -- most likely to ward the predator off and not as a distress call.
The researchers call the noises produced "kiss squeeks." It…
emjohnson | August 7, 2009
For this week's Friday Follow I wanted to highlight two excellent sources for anthropology news and opinion.
Greg Laden's Blog is my go to for informed commentary and daily entertainment. I'm constantly impressed by his prodigious output as well as his thoughtful and informative content. A must read is his recent post on the natural basis for inequality of the sexes:
What is the premise we choose, as a society, to be the basis of our ethical and moral codes, our laws, etc.? For many people, this premise is mutualism. We agree to equality of all individuals (with special exceptions). This…
emjohnson | August 7, 2009The Evolution of Spite is the Evil Twin of Altruism
Someone walks into a crowded restaurant, looks about the diners calmly, and blows themselves up as well as everyone nearby. Why? This is a scenario that forces us to explain the dark side of human nature. Why do humans have a capacity for such hate that they'll take their own lives in order to destroy others?
A study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on chimpanzee behavior suggests that humans may be alone in this way: a dubious distinction to say the least. In a review published in the Chicago Tribune the researchers…
emjohnson | August 5, 2009Japanese artists' depiction of the horrors at Hiroshima.Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum
On August 6, 1945 the United States dropped "Little Boy," the first of only two nuclear bombs ever used in warfare, on the Japanese civilians at Hiroshima. In an instant flash of light an estimated 140,000 people were either incinerated or suffered an agonizing death that lasted several days. The standard mythology is that President Truman dropped the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki (three days later on August 9) in order to avoid having to send half a million American soliders to their deaths in a…
emjohnson | August 5, 2009However, Orly Taitz does have one thing absolutely right. "Who cares about Ann Coulter?"
emjohnson | August 4, 2009In 1996 Cornell astrophysicist and science popularizer Carl Sagan posed the question, "What are conservatives conserving?" It was not something he asked lightly. The question appeared in his final book following a prolonged battle with bone marrow disease. Faced with his own mortality, he wanted to understand the individuals whose actions, whether consciously or not, threatened the lives of so many others. Sagan was a passionate advocate for science but, first and foremost, he was an advocate for humanity itself.
A kindred spirit, someone representing the same passion for science and…
emjohnson | July 30, 2009
Artist Ricardo Cortes has a beautiful exhibition of his work in the current edition of Vanity Fair entitled Sketches of the Drug Czars. In his series he points out the steps that have led our country through the most expensive (and least effective) domestic policy in history.
Starting with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, Cortes describes the first federal restrictions on "medicines-gone-wild" such as morphine and cocaine (sorry Coca Cola) followed by the criminalization of marijuana in 1937, coincidentally taking place just a few years after the prohibition of alcohol was being…
emjohnson | July 30, 2009In a review in PLoS Biology Axel Meyer discusses a new book by Sander Gliboff on the history of evolutionary biology in Germany following the publication of On the Origin of Species. While many are familiar with evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel, few may know about the scientist who is primarily responsible for the wide acceptance of Darwin's work in Germany: Heinrich Georg Bronn (see right). A paleontologist by training, Bronn translated Origin into German within four months of its initial release. He also provided extensive commentary within the published translation as well as…
emjohnson | July 28, 2009From Democracy Now:
Newly declassified documents reveal that an active member of Students for a Democratic Society and Port Militarization Resistance in Washington state was actually an informant for the US military. The man everyone knew as "John Jacob" was in fact John Towery, a member of the Force Protection Service at Fort Lewis. The military's role in the spying raises questions about possibly illegal activity. The Posse Comitatus law bars the use of the armed forces for law enforcement inside the United States.
This took place just an hour from where I live in Seattle. According to…
emjohnson | July 28, 2009Conservatives and liberals conflict over their basic views on human nature.
As an evolutionary anthropologist and student of history, I'm always fascinated to learn what politically motivated figures have to say about human nature. It's one area of life where people require zero expertise but can still claim authority in. A case in point appears in Newsweek where Yuval Levin, Fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, insists that "Partisanship is Good" because it is based on conflicting assumptions about human nature.
Our deepest disagreements coalesce into two broad views…
emjohnson | July 27, 2009The 40th edition of the Humanist Symposium blog carnival is up at The Evolving Mind. My picks in this edition include:
Daylight Atheism looks at the story of Edward and Joan Downes who decided to die together when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer:
Voluntarily laying down your own life is the ultimate choice of a free individual, the ultimate affirmation that our lives are our own and we may direct them as we wish. However, in the U.K. (and in most of the U.S.), assisted suicide is still illegal - a regrettably irrational view, supported in large part by religious medievalists who want…
emjohnson | July 26, 2009
In the 1960s military strategists promoted the "domino theory" as a rationale for why the United States needed to intervene in what later turned out to be a Vietnamese civil war. The logic was that, as communist influence extended from Russian and China, every country that fell before the "Reds" would perpetuate yet another country going the same direction. However, as Secretary of Defense at the time, Robert McNamara, stated in his mea culpa documentary, The Fog of War, their logic was based on an erroneous foundation:
We saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War, not what they saw it as…
emjohnson | July 26, 2009Facebook is a wonderful resource, but there's good reason to be cautious about how much information we put out there about ourselves (and not just to avoid stalkers and advertisers):
You can friend me at facebook.com/eric.michael.johnson
emjohnson | July 25, 2009On July 25, 1920 the English biophysicist Rosalind Franklin was born. She was instrumental in discovering the molecular structure of DNA, though her vital contributions were only posthumously acknowledged. After receiving her PhD from Cambridge in 1945 she worked as a research associate for John Randall at King's College in London. Beginning in early 1951 she took X-ray diffraction photographs of DNA that showed a helical form of the molecule, a finding confirmed by James Watson and Francis Crick who subsequently won the Nobel Prize for their DNA research. In lecture notes dated November…
emjohnson | July 25, 2009Stanley Fish, distinguished law professor and close friend of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., puts the arrest of Gates and President Obama's comments into perspective in his latest piece for The New York Times:
Gates is once again regarded with suspicion because, as the cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson put it in an interview, he has committed the crime of being H.W.B., Housed While Black.
He isn't the only one thought to be guilty of that crime. TV commentators, laboring to explain the unusual candor and vigor of Obama's initial comments on the Gates incident, speculated that he had probably been…
emjohnson | July 24, 2009Jeff Hebert is an amazing artist. He created the banner for this page as well as that for Living the Scientific Life and Dispatches From the Culture Wars. His primary work is for HeroMachine and his work can be viewed at his online portfolio.
Juan Cole at Informed Comment is, along with Robert Fisk's reporting, my primary resource for Middle Eastern politics and perspectives. I encourage everyone to check out his work and subscribe to his twitter feed. To cite an example from one of his recent posts:
You obey the Geneva Conventions and the rest of international law on the treatment of…
emjohnson | July 24, 2009English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679) is widely held as the "father of political science." His 1651 book Leviathan makes the case for why monarchy is the only political system that is consistent with human nature. He bases his argument on the following assumption about humans in "the state of nature" (what we would now call indigenous peoples):
Let us return again to the state of nature, and consider men as if but even now sprung out of the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity without all kind of engagement to each other . . . Whatsoever therefore…
emjohnson | July 23, 2009Primate sociality is linked to brain networks for pair bonds.
Social conservatives are fond of linking morality with monogamy and will be quick to condemn the moral crimes of adulterous felatio while ignoring the moral crimes of cutting social programs for poor mothers. However, in a bizarre twist, research suggests that morality and monogamy are closely intertwined, though it's doubtful many conservatives will champion the reasons why.
In the journal Science Robin Dunbar revisits the question with a unique perspective as to why some species (including humans) succeed so well as members of…
emjohnson | July 22, 2009President Obama just stated the following at a press conference:
Now, I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there's a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That's…
emjohnson | July 22, 2009Cambridge authorities are now dropping the disorderly conduct charge against the country's leading African-American scholar, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (see right), after he was arrested in his own home when police confused him with a burglar. This was after Gates showed both his Harvard ID and Driver's License that gave proof of address.
Probably the best reaction to this story came from Al Sharpton who stated:
I've heard of driving while black, and I've heard of shopping while black. But I've never heard of living in a home while black.
Gates is asking for a formal apology…