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Death by any means

Shelley of Retrospectacle asks: "Are you for or against the death penalty, or (if its conditional), in what cases? Furthermore, do you believe that societies that sanction war are hypocritical for opposing the death penalty?" The answer, of course, is complicated. As I've said before, I know that there are some truly heinous people out there. I have no inherent moral objection to putting Osama bin Laden to death. Of course, bin Laden wants do die, and killing him will make him a martyr, so I guess I don't think it would even be good policy there. That said, too many people on death row are…

Is a science textbook adequate if science comes second?

A judge refused to toss out a suit over inadequate curricula at some religious schools in California. The schools claim that the University of California shouldn't be allowed to reject certain courses as adequate preparation for college. Or, as a lawyer for the schools explains, The lawsuit is about theological content in "every major area in high school except for mathematics," says Wendell Bird, a lawyer for Calvary Chapel. Bird previously lost Edwards v. Aguillard, thus ending the "equal time" rules for creationism and evolution. The University asserts a 1st amendment right to speak…

Iceland tells them to shove it

Icelanders reject deal to repay British and Dutch: The outcome of the referendum had not been in doubt since Iceland had recently been offered better repayment terms than those contained in the deal on which residents were voting. Partial referendum results from around a third of the cast votes showed 93 percent opposed the deal and less than 2 percent supported it. The rest cast invalid votes. But the rejection will still have major repercussions, keeping financial aid on hold and threatening to undermine the center-left government of Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir. "This has no…

Cobb & Coyne quote mine Nature

I'm not really a fan of the Templeton Foundation. In the past they've contributed quite a bit of money to the intelligent design crowd and folks who want to foster a teleological view of evolution, and the work resulting from the funded projects appears to be generally unimpressive. When John Templeton, the figure that started the foundation, died last month Nature ran an article about the foundation and what Templeton set out to achieve. Discussing Templeton's aims, the article reads; He believed institutional religion to be antiquated, and hoped a dialogue with researchers might bring about…

The first of many, I'm sure

Was Charles Darwin a genius? He certainly was extremely bright, but if we are to call him a genius on the basis of coming up with the theory of evolution by natural selection then we must recognize the genius of A.R. Wallace (and perhaps William Wells, Patrick Matthew, and Edward Blyth), as well. Although the idea of natural selection has developed independently several times in the past it was Darwin and Wallace who grasped the power of the theory as a driver for evolution, but even then it is Darwin who is the focal point of so many discussions about "transmutation." While there are…

Work day

Today is going to be another day of putting work into my book. Last night I read The War of Art from cover to cover, and while it waded into some vague notions of spirituality here and there (angels, muses, and the like), it still was a worthwhile read. It's put together as a collection of little definitions or thoughts, each strung together by a common theme but also floating on its own (the book Monogamy was organized in a very similar fashion). This made it more digestible as I definitely couldn't take a "Here are the 12 steps to getting your book done" approach. The main idea I got from…

What could ground sloths hear?

Presently only two genera of sloths exist, the two-toed sloths (Choloepus) and the three-toed sloth (Bradypus). They are the remaining vestiges of a much great past diversity, including many of the giant forms like Megatherium that occupied niches both in the trees and on the ground. As with most fossil mammals, though, the delicate inner ear bones of extinct ground sloths have rarely been preserved, but a new paper published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology attempts to analyze what the fossil sloths Glossotherium robustum and Lestodon armatus could hear based upon some well-…

Blog or and die

The New York Times has a new article out looking at stress and bloggers, particularly in the case of professional bloggers who pull down five and six figure salaries. When you're publishing things yourself, it's hard work to provide high-quality content quick enough so that you're first to a story. Otherwise, you'll just have to hope for some link love and try to be the first on the scene the next time. I assume that professional political and technology bloggers are the most stressed, but as far as my own habits go I don't feel particularly strung out or under pressure. If anything, I find…

Book Progress #2

Today I didn't get completed nearly as much as I would have liked. That's always the case, but this evening it's particularly true. The main reason for my lack of productivity is because the cat that I'm now fostering, a polydactyl named Little Foot, decided to walk on the keyboard and rip out the E, R, and T keys when I got up to get some reheated pork-fried rice from the microwave. Try as I might, I couldn't get them back on, and it served to remind me that I need to purchase a new computer (but can't afford one). For now I'll just work with the buttons under the keys and try to see if I…

That belongs in a museum!

The fiberglass skull of Barnum Brown's second Tyrannosaurus rex fitted on the revised mount now standing on the 4th floor of the AMNH. I guess it's appropriate that I just posted the trailer to the new Indiana Jones film, because as soon as I heard that there's a Tyrannosaurus up for auction on eBay my first thought was "That belongs in a museum!" I'm sure that some of you readers are more familiar with this particular case than I am, but according to the eBay listing the individual specimen is about 20% complete, primarily consisting of almost half the skull material, some leg bones,…

A war against mosquitoes?

Well, this was a weird article in Nature that made me think, at least: A world without mosquitoes. I was surprised to learn that there are actually ecologists/entomologists who believe the world would be a better place if we could simply exterminate entire genera of winged pests — that mosquitoes fill a readily replaceable niche, that they make minimal positive contributions to ecosystems, and we'd gain immeasurably from removing animals responsible for so much human suffering. The one thing they also agree on, though, is that there is no way to do it. And so, while humans inadvertently drive…

"It's not murder, it's just killing someone with a knife."

I'm sure that there are cases all over the world every day like this one that are generally ignored, but case of a creationist who killed a biomedical scientist during an argument over evolution has made a few of my fellow bloggers take notice. While it might be tempting to point at creationists and say "See! They're murderous theists!" details about the stabbing are sparse. According to a report about the incident from The Age, Alexander Christian York (the creationist) killed Rudi Boa (the scientist), Boa being on vacation with his girlfriend. All three were camping at Blowering Holiday…

Tail-Drop Analysis

I don't know why they call it a tail drop. Here is a video: The link I clicked that brought me to this video said the equivalent of "OMG!" That is not what I thought, really I am not sure what is so impressive (except that he didn't fall off the skateboard). If the original poster was impressed with the height of the fall, he clearly has not seen the 35 foot jump into 1 foot of water by Professor Splash. Anyway, it seems like a simple video to analyze with Tracker Video Analysis. Mostly because the camera is stationary, there is little perspective problems and the motion of the object is…

When is noon?

I was at the zoo this weekend, it was fun but hot. Somewhere near the middle, there was a sun dial. The cool thing (well, I think sun dials are cool anyway) was that the shadow was pointing about to the "12". I looked at my watch and it said 1:05 PM. What is up with that? The answer: Daylight Saving Time. What does noon traditionally mean? In this day of the digital watch, most people associate noon with 12:00, you know - lunch time. But before clocks, noon referred to the time of day where the Sun was at the highest point in the sky. It is not too difficult to find this time. Just…

Flu Wars - Episode V: The faculty strike back

Students are starting to get the flu around here - and that means that it is time to debate. Clearly there are going to be some absences in the coming month. The question is: what to do about it? There are two camps of thought here: Camp 1: Excuses are bad This camp of faculty is worried. They are worried that the administration is going to issue a statement something like this: "These are difficult times. Every is somehow affected by the flu. To encourage...blah..blah...blah... please allow students to make up any missed work without any doctor's note." So the faculty in camp 1 say "…

Modeling vs. Art

I have been reflecting on my recent failure to realize that the Giant Water Slide Jump was fake (more analysis here). I think the guys that made this video did a really good job on several levels. First, the motion appears to do two important things: shows constant acceleration in the vertical direction shows constant velocity in the horizontal direction That seems like such a simple thing, but it is surprising how often fake videos don't have those two elements. Maybe they were not close, but with the error associated with the panning and zooming camera, it seemed close enough. Also,…

A power estimate for heating a pool.

It is spring break, so we are at my parents house for a couple of days. The kids like it because there is a pool, a heated pool even. It really isn't that cold outside, but yesterday the water measured at 62 oF. So, with some help from the kids, we cleaned out the pool and turned on the heater. We also put a cover on it, hopefully to help it heat up some more. This is perfect for a quick calculation. Is it reasonable that the pool could get up to a swimable temperature by tomorrow? Let me first make some assumptions and data: 15,000 gallons of water in the pool. This is about 57 m3.…

Australians do it down under

Buswell fends off quokka rumours | The Australian: WEST Australian Opposition leader Troy Buswell has admitted to chair-sniffing in the past but today he denied having done anything untoward to a quokka. Mr Buswell, who has also admitted to snapping the bra of a Labor staffer, faced question at Parliament House after sacked frontbencher Paul Omodei had said “more stories” would emerge about Mr Buswell and that his leadership would “die the death of a thousand cuts”. Asked if he had done anything inappropriate to a quokka, Mr Buswell replied: “No”. Asked if he was aware of any rumours about…

Jenna Jameson outstrips Ben Stein

Here's the New York Times on porn actress/producer Jenna Jameson's new movie, Zombie Strippers: Strewn with some surprisingly decent effects, this unevenly paced film delivers, if nothing else, on the promise of its title: lots of surgically enhanced nude dead women strutting their stuff. … Though not nearly as clever as it aims to be, the film at least tries. In addition to drawing inspiration from Eugène Ionesco’s ever-relevant absurdist play “Rhinoceros,” it’s full of jabs at the Bush administration and philosophy references — for starters, Jenna Jameson, as the first stripper to…

Synecdoche, redux

For a while, I had this plan to follow up on my synecdoche post from a few days ago with a post about the revelation that the Bush administration actually knew that Iran stopped its nuclear program in 2003, and had known that for months, while still ratcheting up the rhetoric. I was going to make the point that the criticism of Bush in that regard is, again, synecdoche. The problem isn't that Bush is a warmonger who will do whatever he must to invade Middle Eastern nations, the problem is that the administration he represents is a pack of mendacious warmongers who would rather send our…

Does the Brain Care About the Truth?

A friend of mine recently asked me a simple question that I couldn't answer: i want to know if there is a physiological explanation for why we have an easier time remembering things that we perceive to be true. bad example: suppose that you believed that the earth was flat. then i took you out into space and showed you that it was round. you would not forget that. i'm having a hard time expressing this very simple thought: we are constantly replacing old beliefs with new ones that are in some sense "more true". you can intuitively distinguish between those thoughts that you have that…

Reconsolidating the Future

For most of the 20th century, neuroscience treated our memories like inert packets of information. They were created through Pavlovian reinforcement, and then just shelved away in the brain, like dusty old books in a library. While this approach led to many important discoveries, like CREB, Cam Kinase and cAMP, it also created a strange blind spot in the literature: while scientists were starting to understand how we create a memory, then had no idea how we remember our memories. What happens during he recollection process? An important paper arrived in 2000, when Karim Nader, Glenn Shafe…

Ian McEwan's Strange Plot Twist

In the past two years, we've been blessed with two remarkable novels about neuroscience and the brain: The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers, and Saturday, by Ian McEwan. Personally, I thought Saturday was the more perfect work, although both books address a similar set of themes. Can science solve consciousness? How do we deal with the fact that there is no soul, and that we are nothing but three pounds of fatty membrane? How does subjective experience arise from the shuttling of ions? In Saturday, McEwan's protagonist is a neurosurgeon, who, while operating on an exposed brain, ruminates on…

Agricultural Subsidies Make Food Taste Bad

Agricultural subsidies are bad policy on so many different levels. They artificially lower food prices, thus making it harder for farmers from developing nations to compete. (Cutting subsidies would do a tremendous amount of good for the third world.) They encourage the growth of monoculture farming, in which vast tracts of land are devoted to a single, genetically modified crop. (70 percent of subsidies go to just four different crops: corn, rice, soybeans and wheat. And the vast majority of subsidies go to large corporations, not family farmers.) They help make us fatter, since all that…

The Randomness of Life

PZ has a great post on a recent Nature Genetics paper that explores the startling connection between longevity and luck. (Or, as scientists like to stay, stochasticity). It turns out that genetically identical worms survive for very different amounts of time. The length of their life depends upon random cellular processes, which arise from "fundamental thermodynamic and statistical mechanical considerations."* Here's PZ: The fascinating thing to me is that they [the scientists] are finding so much significant (I think a 50% increase in average life span is certainly significant!) variation in…

Calorie Postings

A new study reveals that all those unappetizing calorie counts on New York City menus - do you really want to know how much sugar is in a Frappuccino? Or that an Olive Garden breadstick contains hundreds of calories? - don't lead to more responsible food decisions. Here's the Times: The study, by several professors at New York University and Yale, tracked customers at four fast-food chains -- McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken -- in poor neighborhoods of New York City where there are high rates of obesity. It found that about half the customers noticed the calorie…

The Blooming Self/Yo Yo Ma

The NY Times has a kind review of the Bruce Adolphe/Yo Yo Ma/Antonio Damasio performance that I was lucky enough to hear in person. (I also got to ask the collaborators a few questions afterwards, as moderator.) Most composers would shy away from depicting the evolution of consciousness. Well, maybe not Mahler, who grappled with the afterlife in his "Resurrection" Symphony. Mr. Adolphe, who had already written two works based on Mr. Damasio's writings, plunged right in. The result was "Self Comes to Mind," a 30-minute work for cello and two percussionists, with video imagery based on brain…

What's a little "perpetrating a fraud" between friends?

Ned Ryun, the wingnutty twin son of thankfully-disgraced former Congressman (and former middle distance runner) Jim Ryun, is worried: ACORN is going to be helping with the 2010 census. I think that’s a sign of the apocalpyse [sic] for the week; kind of like letting the fox guard the hen house. It should make us all a little nervous that a group which has come under suspicion for widespread fraud in over 12 states would somehow be involved with the census. So my thought is: why don’t the big conservative grassroots organizations like Americans for Tax Reform, Americans for Prosperity, American…

Next on the docket: Nun-rapers

The stories just get worse and worse. The Catholic priesthood hasn't just been abusing children in various places, but also has a history of abuse of women, especially in Africa and India. The crisis of religious abuse in Africa and India was brought to Rome's attention in 1998 when a four-page paper titled "The Problem of the Sexual Abuse of African Religious in Africa and Rome" was presented by Sister Marie McDonald, mother superior of the Missionaries of Our Lady of Africa. A March 2001 National Catholic Reporter article detailed McDonald's claims, which included accounts of sexual abuse…

Simple answers to simple questions: Stupid bigots edition

Slacktivist wonders "is Lou Sheldon dumb enough to believe his own slippery silliness, or is he just being dishonest to further his political agenda? Hard to say. But any question that begins with 'is Lou Sheldon dumb enough ...' I'm inclined to answer yes." The question of Lou Sheldon's stupidity arises from a flier he, as head of the Traditional Values Coalition, released. The flier is, as slacktivist writes, "a pro-hate crime flier made up to look like a 'wanted' poster of Jesus Christ." He continues The TVC doesn't explicitly call itself "pro-hate crime," but the flier expresses their…

Enter this sweepstakes!

It's a trivial little contest from JetBlue — it does require that you give them your contact information, which may be more than you want to surrender…but you can win fabulous prizes! Look at what you can get: A vacation in the Dominican Republic! A vacation in Costa Rica! A vacation in the Sonoran Desert! A Vespa scooter (they're giving away 10 each week)! The Grand Prize: A complete kitchen makeover with a set of appliances from Amana, and a $5000 gift card! And that's not all! There's an ULTIMATE PRIZE. Looking at that list of pricey luxury items, you know this has got to be…

Friday Sprog Blogging: it is rocket science!

When the weather gets nice, a sprog's thoughts turn to rocketry. Photos of the first mission of the bottle-rocket season after the jump. First, giving credit where credit is due: The rockets were built by our friends the Visiting Mathematicians who, with their sprogs Double Trouble, were picnicking with the Free-Ride family. We just got to share in the fruits of their awesomeness. The Visiting Mathematicians, in turn, credit Make Magazine as the source of the technological know-how. (There's an instructional video, too.) T-10 minutes: On-site rocket assembly commences. Despite my urging…

Scientific knowledge for the masses.

Over at Evolgen, RPM links to an article that lists ten "basic questions" to which ten different scientists think high school graduates should know the answers. (It was one question from each scientist, so it's unclear whether all ten would agree that they are the ten most important questions, or even that all ten of these scientists could answer all ten to the others' satisfaction.) RPM opines that the list seems heavy on trivia (or at least seemingly random facts) and light on really helpful scientific knowledge. He writes: Let's focus on two things: the hypothetical deductive method and…

Capt. Sully and Deliberate Calm

I've got an op-ed today in the LA Times on how Captain Sullenberger managed to stay calm in the face of terrifying circumstances: We can all learn something from Capt. Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III. After his US Airways plane lost power and the smell of smoke and jet fuel filled the cabin, he needed to make a decision. The air traffic controllers were instructing him to proceed to a small airport in Teterboro, N.J., which was less than 10 miles to the west. But could the plane make it that far? Or would it crash in the Bronx? In recent years, neuroscientists have been able to see what…

Mathematical Intuitions

Let's say I flash you a picture containing a mixture of blue and yellow dots for one-fifth of a second. You clearly don't have time to count the dots - you barely have time to register the image - but I ask you to guesstimate the ratio of blue to yellow dots anyways. Sounds like a pretty meaningless quiz, right? If anything, it would seem that I'm testing your visual cortex, or the ability of the brain to quickly make sense of its senses. Well, a new paper in Nature argues that I'm actually testing your mathematical intuition. Furthermore, this intuition strongly correlates with your past…

The Lying Brain

Radio Lab delves into the mystery: Yang and her colleagues put all 49 people, both the liars and the non-liars, into a magnetic resonant imaging scanner and took pictures of their prefrontal cortex. They chose to focus on this area of the brain because previous studies had shown that the prefrontal cortex plays a role in both lying and in antisocial behaviors. If you could look into this part of the brain, which sits right behind your forehead, you would see two kinds of matter: gray and white. Gray matter is the groups of brain cells that process information. Most neuroscience studies focus…

Shakespeare and Syntax

Shakespeare bent language in peculiar ways. He had a habit of violating our conventional grammatical categories, so that nouns became verbs and adjectives were turned into nouns. (This is known as a functional shift.) Here's Phillip Davis: Thus in "Lear" for example, Edgar comparing himself to the king: "He childed as I fathered" (nouns shifted to verbs); in "Troilus and Cressida", "Kingdomed Achilles in commotion rages" (noun converted to adjective); "Othello", "To lip a wanton in a secure couch/And to suppose her chaste!"' (noun "lip" to verb; adjective "wanton" to noun). The effect is…

More Book News

Don't worry, the period of shameless self-promotion is almost over. But Proust Was A Neuroscientist has been in the news lately. The San Francisco Chronicle had a very kind review: Interpreters of Woolf and Proust are legion, but Lehrer is gifted with the ability to find philosophy in science and stray bits of science buried amid the rubble of literary history. He is less critic than armchair philosopher, searching for meaning anywhere great thinkers have left their footprints. Chef Auguste Escoffier's brainstorm about the necessity of heat for fine cooking is granted no less significance…

Training the Tongue

It's not easy to re-educate our sense of taste. Britain is learning that the hard way: Two years ago, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver expressed horror at the Turkey Twizzlers being served in Britain's school cafeterias and equated many school lunches with a four-letter word for the ultimate byproduct of all meals. He vowed to help lead students down the road to healthful eating. The Pied Piper, it turns out, he was not. In the wake of an Oliver-inspired national program to provide more nutritious food, students have gravitated away from the cafeteria in a majority of the schools surveyed,…

The Eyjafjallajökull eruption quiets down

The small steam plume from Eyjafjallajökull on May 23, 2010, where explosive eruptive activity has ceased for now. The big news over the weekend, at least volcanically, was that Eyjafjallajökull seems to have entered a period of relative quiet. The eruption has died down dramatically, with the last ash explosion occurring two days ago. Since then, the vent has still be producing a significant steam plume that reaches 3 km / 10,000 feet, but none of the ash-laden explosions that marked the earlier parts of the eruption have occurred (meaning the airspace over the North Atlantic and Europe…

Coulées!

As a volcanologist, I am partial to impressive lava flows, especially in volcanoes that erupt material that you'd think wouldn't produce big flows. For example, there are quite a few volcanoes in the Chilean Andes that erupt dacite lavas, which are relatively viscous (sticky), so you might expect it to erupt explosively. However, you can get large dacitic to rhyolitic lava flows, quite commonly, and these large flows are called coulées (a "volcanic dome flow"). Lllullaillaco volcano on the Chile/Argentina border. Note the very prominent coulée with flow levees. Click on the image to see a…

No better demonstration of the futility of prayer

Angela Wright had a serious heart attack two months ago; she seems to have had a history of cardiovascular problems, because she'd also had a series of blood clots in her leg that required a partial amputation about 20 years ago. Her very supportive family seems to be the pious sort. They dropped to their knees and started praying fiercely for her. Then she had another heart attack, but she didn't die, and the family prayed harder and also said 'hallelujah, the prayers are keeping her alive!" Then there was another heart attack. More prayers, more certainty that the prayers were all that was…

The return of the dreaded "giant magma chamber" of the Cascades

The southern Washington (and northern Oregon) Cascades, with Hood (foreground), St. Helens and Adams (middle) and Rainier (background). Remember a few months ago when an abstract from a meeting got people are ruffled because the study said there was a "giant magma chamber" feeding all three of St. Helens, Adams and Rainier in the Cascades? Well, Nature Geosciences has been kind enough to publish the work (the article) and yes, yet again, we can say it is still most likely not true at all. Graham Hill and others claim that their magnetotelluric work in the Cascades show that a vast magma…

The Chaiten Rollercoaster ride continues

I am beginning to feel like a broken record, but the latest reports from Chile indicate that the ongoing eruption at Chaiten is ramping back up again, almost 3 months after the initial eruption began. As usual, the nitty-gritty details are limited, but reports of increased ash emissions and seismic activity are heralding this increase in activity. For certain, Chaiten is one of the most important eruptions in any of our lifetimes. This is really not because of the amount of material that has been erupted (although when all is said and done, it will be a significant volume), but rather for…

Catholic hospitals favor death

A pregnant woman in a Phoenix hospital was in a dire state: she was suffering from severe pulmonary hypertension, a condition made much worse by the pregnancy, and was at risk of heart failure. The hospital did what had to be done, with the approval of the family: the 11-week-old fetus was aborted, and the life of the mother saved. This was routine, and I think there was no moral ambiguity at all in this situation: either the mother's life was saved and the fetus was destroyed, or both mother and fetus would die. Except that this was in a Catholic hospital. One of the people on the ethics…

Zack Kopplin Rocks

In the video above, you can see my creation/evolution hero of the last school year. Zack Kopplin is a Louisiana high school senior (heading to Rice University next fall) who decided to fight the misnamed Louisiana Science Education Act. That bill, passed in 2008, opens the door to creationist materials in science classrooms. It is the only one of these so-called academic freedom laws that has passed a state legislature, though dozens have been proposed. It passed the Louisiana Senate unanimously a couple years ago, but Zack found a Senator to sponsor his repeal bill, he got 43 Nobel…

Ezra Klein is shrill

â¦And rightly so. He wrote, after a vote to allow debate on repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell failed to clear a 60 vote plurality: DADT didn't fail. The Senate did: The bill repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell didn't fail: The Senate did. The bill got 57 votes, not 49. As Dylan Matthews pointed out, a procedural failsafe that's theoretically meant to protect the rights of minorities was just used to restrict the rights of minorities -- which is how it's always been, of course. The various players are excitedly blaming one another. Anonymous aides to Harry Reid are arguing that Susan Collins's…

Disco. don't know much about science

Jan 8, 2010: Bruce Chapman, President of the Discovery Institute: Warming's Alarm-Ringer Stilled by U.K. Chill: Prime Minister Brown is one of the world's most outspoken alarmists on global warming. He presently is one of the quieter spokesmen on the subject of his freezing country. Leading to Marginally Shorter Bruce Chapman: People with fevers don't have cold toes and winter is never cold. And more importantly to a flashback⦠May 8, 2005, Jonathan Leake, Science Editor of The Times: Britain faces big chill as ocean current slows: CLIMATE change researchers have detected the first signs of…

NCSE's Peter Hess takes down Disco.'s John West

A week or so ago, John West pimped a new Disco. Inst. website on faith and religion in the Washington Post's On Faith blog. His claims were as mendacious as you would expect from looking at the site, most bizarrely inventing a movement of "new theistic evolutionists," when the folks he names are simply repeating a position on the compatibility of faith and science which has been part of Christian theology since the time of Augustine of Hippo. You don't need to know more about West's piece. NCSE Faith Project Director Peter Hess responded in On Faith today. His brief reaction to West: "He…

Africans & Neandertals

Two papers in PNAS this week. Human origins: Out of Africa: Our species, Homo sapiens, is highly autapomorphic (uniquely derived) among hominids in the structure of its skull and postcranial skeleton. It is also sharply distinguished from other organisms by its unique symbolic mode of cognition. The fossil and archaeological records combine to show fairly clearly that our physical and cognitive attributes both first appeared in Africa, but at different times. Essentially modern bony conformation was established in that continent by the 200-150 Ka range (a dating in good agreement with dates…