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Publishing Original Research on Blogs - Part 2

This is a repost (with some edits) of an introduction to publishing original research on blogs -- a series I am reintroducing. The original entry can be found here. Previous entries: Part 1 - Introduction This post is part of a series exploring the evolution of a duplicated gene in the genus Drosophila. Links to the previous posts are above. Part 2 of this series (The Backstory) can be found below. The Backstory The reason you and I and all other animals (and most other forms of life) can do things (like live) is because we combine oxygen with sugars to make energy. Eventually, the oxygen…

A fish, a rabbit -- same thing, to a creationist

JBS Haldane is said to have responded to a question about how evolution could be disproved by saying, "A Precambrian rabbit". What was meant by this, of course, is any substantial discovery that greatly disrupted the evidence for the chronological pattern of descent observed in Earth's life. That pattern of descent is one of the central lines of evidence for evolution, so creationists would dearly love to find something that wrecked it -- this is why they send expeditions to Africa to find a living dinosaur, Mok'ele-mbembe, or more conveniently, to Canada in search of a plesiosaur, Manipogo.…

The Most Elegant Solution In All Of Physics

A day or two ago, I posted my nomination for the greatest mystery in all of physics: why is it that the "gravitational charge" (i.e. how strongly you couple to the gravitational field) is identically equal to your inertial mass (i.e. how strongly you resist being pushed around by any kind of force)? Einstein's General Relativity is our modern theory of gravity, and it answers this question in an extremely satisfying and elegant manner. Specifically, gravity is not a force at all; it's the geometry of spacetime. All objects move through spacetime in as straight a line as they can; if they…

Impressions from an American at the Mall

I believe in Obama. So I wanted to be part of his story. Our story. So last Saturday, I flew from London to Washington, D.C. to spend four days celebrating and witnessing the inauguration of our 44th President. I made my way down to the Sunday concert featuring actors and musicians. The music part was great with opening performances from The Boss and Mary J. Blige. They did what they do best: sing. But when Steve Carell stood up and gave a short political speech with no intentions of making me laugh I became suspicious. And by the time Tom Hanks opined on Abraham Lincoln's…

Mike Adams on Vaccines: Orac's Corollary to Poe's Law strikes again

A frequent lament of members of the anti-vaccine movement is that they are not "anti-vaccine" but rather "pro-safe vaccine." they like to claim that they are not opposed to vaccines in general. Of course, in many, if not most or even all cases, that denial is either a lie or self-delusion. After all, even the most die-hard anti-vaccine zealot realizes that being anti-vaccine is quite correctly viewed by the vast majority of people as not rational. That's why, in a perverse way, I'm thankful for loons like Mike Adams. Yes, Mike Adams. He lays the crazy out in a way that no one else does. But…

Origin of Life

A new hypothesis for how life got started has been proposed, by Helen Hansma, of UC Santa Barbara. Mica. Here's the essential problem. Cells work because they have membranes surrounding them. These membranes protect the cells from nasty outside things, keep the stuff that is supposed to be working together in the cell in one place, and also, provide a communication and transport boundary for what goes in and out of the cell (various molecules as well as information). However, a lot of the mechanisms involved in cells involve making, maintaining, and using this membrane. It is all very…

The Bible as Ethnography ~ 05 ~ The Virgin Birth

I have a cousin in law who tells this story: Her youngest child found out about sex. Then he made the connection that if he existed, his parents must have had sex. So he confronted the parents with this, and mom was forced to admit, yes, of course, this is how babies get "made" and this is simply how things are. The child did not seem too concerned. Moments later, the child noticed his sister playing in the other room. A thought occurred to him ... a light went on, as it were. He turned back to his mother with an expression somewhere between accusation and perplexity. "You did it twice…

A Universal, One-Shot Flu Vaccine?

A Better Grip: T Cells Strengthen Our Hand against Influenza Clinical Infectious Diseases, 52 (1), 8-9 DOI: 10.1093/cid/ciq018Flu vaccines are important and useful, but also relatively ineffective compared to many other vaccines. Immunity is imperfect, there are many 'strains' of influenza in a given year only some of which are addressed by the available vaccine (though often the most common ones) and one year's vaccine does not provide immunity to subsequent years' influenza because the virus changes so much. Well, actually that's not exactly true: The influenza virus has various…

Circus of the Spineless #45

Welcome to the 45th installment of the Circus of the Spineless Blog Carnival. The previous installment of this panoply of boneless metazoans was at Marmorkrebs, and the next edition will be at Life Photo Meme. Please check with the carnival's home for information on how to submit your spineless blog posts. Trees, Plants and More: Scale Insect Infestation The scale insect, which has struck all over the city seems to have found its way here as well. It secretes honeydew that attracts ants. Indeed, i saw many big black ones right next to the scale insects. ~ National Park Service: Native…

My baby was designed by god just like a banana

When my baby nurses from his mom, he can see her face and bond with her because he was designed to do so by god. Like how a banana is designed by god to fit comfortably in the hand for eating, or maybe just carrying around. What am I talking about? Imagine the following two alternative scenarios. Alternative Universe One The Scene: Visiting Nurses Inc. VNI contracts with health care providers to send trained visiting nurses around to check in on newly minted babies and their parents. This is standard procedure in many health care plans, and of course, VNI wants to develop and maintain…

Starving Dengue Fever Virus of Critical Building Blocks

The following press release touches on a recently emerging and probably valid method of addressing some infections. New research shows that cutting down the amount of fat particles in cells may be an effective way to prevent the dengue fever virus from replicating and spreading. Howard Hughes Medical Institute international research scholar Andrea V. Gamarnik and her colleagues have shown that the dengue virus hijacks fat droplets inside cells and uses those tiny fat globules to build new infectious virus particles. The scientists have been able to slow down dengue virus assembly in a…

The nuttiness that is Whale.to: Save Scopie's Law!

Some of you may have heard of John Scudamore's Whale.to site. I've referred to it in the past as a repository of some of the wildest and most bizarre "alternative" medicine claims out there. However, I will admit that I've only ever scratched the surface of the insanity that is Whale.to. Kathleen Seidel has dug deeply into the madness. It goes far beyond what even I had thought. She found parts of the website that I had never known to exist. For example, the complete text of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is there. There's also the complete text of Maniacal World Control Thru The Jesuit…

When surgical dogma is challenged

From my perspective, one thing that's always been true of surgery that has bothered me is that it is prone to dogma. I alluded to this a bit earlier this week, but, although things have definitely changed in the 20 years since I first set foot, nervously and tentatively, on the wards of the Cleveland VA Medical Center for my first ever surgical rotation, some habits of surgeons die hard. Of course, regardless of the tendency towards dogma, one thing that differentiates evidence- and science-based medicine from pseudoscientific woo is that studies do make a difference. In general and…

No more can-kicking

Having made it back at last from Scotland despite the ash cloud, and overcome jetlag and (some) to-do list explosion, I finally have leisure to reflect a bit on UKSG 2010. My dominant takeaway is that nearly everyone in the scholarly-publishing ecosystem—publishers and librarians alike—is finally aware that we can't keep kicking the journal-cost can down the street any longer. Serials expenditures cannot and will not continue at their current level, much less increase. When I think back to the last talk I gave to an audience of publishers, I see that a lot has changed just in my own demeanor…

Dept. of Unintended Consequences: Hepatitis B in West Virginia

Via ProMED Mail comes a news report that about 2,000 people in 5 states are being sought by health departments so they can be checked for hepatitis B infection. The potential source: the Mission of Mercy Dental Clinic, a free dental-care fair held just about a year ago in Berkeley County in the far north-east corner of West Virginia. The potentially infected include 1,137 people who were treated at the two-day clinic and 826 of the volunteers who worked there, from West Virginia, Washington, D.C., Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Three patients and two volunteers have…

Migrations between Science & Art

Jennifer Jacquet joins us from Guilty Planet. Jennifer is a postdoctoral research fellow working with the Sea Around Us Project at the UBC Fisheries Centre. It is nice to see science and art getting along. The World Science Festival's event Eye Candy demonstrates how science can help us understand some of our notions of beauty. Art is equally useful to science, especially to scientists who envy the artist's ability to parlay an idea into something visual—something that does not make too many demands on their audience's time. Most people are unaware of human impacts on the oceans, such as…

Petit canard, grand canard

The flu pandemic of 1918 was horrific. Millions of people died (by some estimates 4% of the world population), and the medical establishment worked feverishly to find a cause and a treatment. There were many dead-ends in the search for the cause of the flu. One of the most enduring errors was the attribution of the pandemic to a bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae. It turned out that the flu was actually caused by a virus rather than a bacterium, but H. flu is still an important discovery. The fight against influenza was in many ways successful (although too late for the 1918…

Stewart v. McCaughey---more to it than you think

Last night's Daily Show was hands down the best discussion of the health care reform insanity on TV, radio, or web. What interested me the most was how McCaughey revealed some of her real agenda, and how she actually brought up some almost-right points. Even more surprising, Jon Stewart misunderstood some bits that need fleshing out, so here we go. We've met McCaughey before as the right wing wacko pushing the death panel idea. She does a good job hiding her real agenda for a while with Stewart, insisting on her support for public health care, and for end-of-life discussions. Let's review…

When you believe your own lie, is it still lying?

Smelting: gerund, the act of catching smelt (a small Great Lakes fish) by dipping a bucket in the water during the smelt run season: ex. Smelting is like shooting fish in a barrel. Sometimes it's too easy. You see, when you criticize someone for being wrong, that's one thing, but when you imply that they are wrong because their entire world-view is incorrect, well, sometimes you get a response. In a piece last week I was very critical of a new diet and it's creator, and she apparently watches the web, because she came by to comment. From reading her website and her comment, I get the…

What is disease? Diabetes, diagnosis, and real science

One of the concepts we often discuss around here is "what is disease?" As we've seen in the discussion of Lyme disease and so-called Morgellons syndrome, this is not always an easy question to answer. Knowing what states are disease states does not always yield a black-or-white answer. The first step is usually to define what a disease is. The next problem is to decide who in fact has that disease. The first question is hard enough, especially in disease states that we don't understand too well. The second question can be equally tricky. To explore the scientific and philosophical…

Blogger vs Big Media, part 2

Tim Blair has posted emails from Ted Lapkin and Andrew Bolt who object to a couple of my posts. Blair fails to provide links to the posts so that readers can determine whether Lapkin and Bolt have accurately described what happened. Lapkin begins: In November 2003, I argued in the pages of Quadrant magazine that the environmental movement is moral culpable for the deaths of 2 million Africans killed each year by malaria. In mid-February 2005, a left-wing blogger named Tim Lambert (Deltoid) accused me, and others, of participation in what he described as "The Great DDT Hoax". Without…

Making that deep-sea connection to mangroves

Think of an aquatic habitat as far away from the deep-sea as you can get without coming up on land, and we will find a connection to the deep-sea. River rock = settlement substrate. Kelp forest = urchin food. Beaches = spawning grounds for tuna food. Mangroves = seafood ... food. Bumper stickers in the Carolinas say it best - "no wetlands, no seafood." Now imagine for one moment that you actually depend on the ocean for your daily meal. That you couldn't go to the grocery store, or even a restaurant, for seafood. And, it's getting harder and harder to find your seafood. That's the story I…

Eureka: a semi-flaccid thumb's up.

Here's a belated follow-up on my previous yammering about the SciFi Network's series Eureka. As I expected, the show blends the quirkiness of Northern Exposure with the Big Science of the Manhattan Project. I watched most of the episodes and would rank it in the "OK, I guess" category of marginal TV. Keep in mind that my pop culture entertainment bar is set low. Colin Ferguson and Joe Morton are the saving graces of the show, and both are highly watchable. Ferguson's role is Jack Carter, the US marshal who, along with his quasi-Goth teener daughter, stumbles into Eureka where he is…

When Augmenting Photons and Longitudinal Pressure Waves Meet with Impeachment Demands

My wife and I went to a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young concert the other evening at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. It was a great show in spite of a little rain. You can read a local review of it here. What does this have to do with photons and pressure waves? I'll get to that in a minute. First, a little about the show. This concert was part of their 2006 "Freedom of Speech" tour. They did two sets, each around 90 minutes long. We had lawn seats (if you're not familiar with SPAC, the facility is on a hillside with a portion of the seating on a grassy slope). The first half was…

I Had A Dream

Reader Jason commented on my post about compulsory smiling thusly: I just wanted to thank everyone for the comments here. They've been enlightening... to be honest I had never heard of anyone being ordered to smile outside of greeter/public relation jobs (chalk it up to youthful naivete, I suppose). With that in mind when I first read the post it struck me as an overreaction to something minor, but it's hard to argue with a few dozen women from all over with the exact same stories and reactions. I don't know if I've ever been guilty of this behavior in my life (I hope not, though I am a…

Theocracy, naturalism, and preferring what works

Reposted from ye olde site, in preparation for another post soon to come. Ed Brayton asks Is Risk of Theocracy Overblown? His answer is a slightly qualified "Yes." And he highlights why I don't rail against theocracy, but against "religious authoritarianism." While he may be right that Dobson and Falwell (or Fox and Johnston in Kansas) aren't theocrats in the strictest sense of wanting to replace the Constitution with the Mosaic Law, they do want to impose their own religious values on the entire society, which is authoritarianism. This problem is one shared by many battalions arrayed on…

They get letters: Creationism, aquifers, and the future of Kansas

A repost from a year ago today. Intelligent Design decision boon to other states | LJWorld.com: Dear Members of the Kansas State School Board, I am the Welsh Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I have a number of colleagues at Kansas State and the University of Kansas and had the chance to present a seminar there a few years ago and see the vibrant scientific community that had grown up there. Your current discussion of what to include in your curriculum is an interesting one to all who teach at State Universities. One of the great things…

It helps to know your history

This morning I was browsing YouTube in an attempt to find some nutty creationist argument no one had seen yet, but instead I came across a few cable TV "debates" between creationists and defenders of evolution. They were painful to watch; the creationists proffered the same nonsense and the various skeptics/scientists often talked right past them and did not do a very good job at refuting the "freedom of inquiry" spin creationists love to use. This clip is a case in point; Ouch. I don't have warm feelings for Anderson Cooper, either, as asking vague, "objective" questions that create such…

Book Review: Science Talk by Daniel Patrick Thurs

Those who remember the Clinton sex scandal will probably recall the classic line "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is," Bill Clinton floundering about in order to obfuscate inquiries into his improper conduct. While this is example is a somewhat comedic attempt at playing with the definitions of words, it is often important to consider what certain words mean in their past & present historical contexts, and in the book Science Talk Daniel Patrick Thurs takes on the evolution of what we mean by "science" and how that influences the gap between what (and who) is included…

Memory and Journalism

There's an illuminating four part series looking at neuroscientist Gary Lynch in the LA Times. It's written by Terry McDermott. What makes this series so compelling is that it does two things rarely done by science journalists. First of all, the articles present Gary Lynch as a complex human being, complete with the usual human flaws, features and foibles. Most newsy profiles of scientists portray the researcher as some sort of emotionless lab machine, motivated by nothing but the search for objective truth. This, of course, is a false stereotype. Science is a human endeavor, and the data is…

Instant Love

It's not the usual version of love at first sight: it's much better. Elizabeth Fitzsimons was adopting a Chinese baby. The girl was a year old, but she already suffered from a long list of medical ailments. She'd had a tumor removed from her back, and suffered nerve damage during the surgery. She had a terrible rash, was dangerously thin and wouldn't smile. Elizabeth was now faced with a profound dilemma: Back at the hotel, we hounded the women from the [adoption] agency: Why wasn't this in her medical report? How could a scar that size not be noticed? It was two inches long, for God's sake.…

Inequality and the Perception of Fairness

David Leonhardt has an excellent column on the squeezed middle class. He notes that while inequality is increasing, the other common complaint - that the income of middle class workers is now more volatile - is not supported by government statistics. There has been no great risk shift, at least when you look at income. As Leonhardt notes, accurately diagnosing the problem is a necessary part of coming up with a solution: There is now a big push in both Washington and state capitals to come up with policies that can alleviate middle-class anxiety. That's all for the good. In fact, it is…

The Benefits of Loss Aversion

It's easy to deride our irrational bias against losses. From the perspective of economics, there is no good reason to weight gains and losses so differently. (Losses feel twice as bad as gains feel good. We demand a $40 payoff for a $20 bet.) Opportunity costs should be treated just like "out-of-pocket costs". But they aren't: losses carry a particular emotional sting. Take this imaginary scenario: The U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact…

Praise the water!

It's strange how the people who most advocate sympathy and rapprochement with religion are blind to what religious people really think. Here's another case where Josh Rosenau complains that I misunderstand what the faithful were trying to do with their prayers for the Gulf…and then goes on to do exactly as I said the apologists should stop doing. He ignores the religious part of these prayer events. He says, as if it is refuting anything I say, that prayer reduces stress, has positive physiological effects, brings communities together, etc., etc., etc. It's utterly clueless, and in a bizarre…

What angle should you throw a football for maximum range?

College football season is coming to an end (I guess technically, the season is over - it is bowl season). Anyway, this is something I wanted to do a long time ago, but I kept getting side tracked. If I don't do it now, I will never do it. Most people know that a ball without air resistance (traditional projectile motion) goes the farthest if you throw it at a 45 degree angle. What if there is air resistance? Why is 45 the best angle without air resistance? What other questions are there? I posted about projectile motion before - so you might want to start there. When people say "…

Metacognitive Apes

I've always been fascinated by tip-of-the-tongue moments. It's estimated that, on average, people have a tip-of-the-tongue moment at least once a week. Perhaps it occurs when you run into an old acquaintance whose name you can't remember, although you know that it begins with the letter "J." Or perhaps you struggle to recall the title of a recent movie, even though you can describe the plot in perfect detail. What's interesting about this mental hiccup is that, even though the mind can't remember the information, it's convinced that it knows it, which is why we devote so many mental…

Snitchens works both sides of the transept

Max Blumenthal reviews Christopher Hitchens and his latest book: "God Is Not Great" represents little more than the disingenous posturings of a certified fraudmeister who has openly cavorted with the most reactionary elements of the Christian right. If Hitchens had any principles at all -- if he truly feared the cultural and political consequences of the encroachment of religion into public life -- he would have used his still-considerable influence to support organizations and causes that shore up the wall between church and state and which defend the rights of non-believers. Instead,…

Ted Haggard, The National Review, and Homosexuality

Over at the National Review, David Klinghoffer tries to argue that the Haggard affair "confirms some truths of the worldview he defended." (If so, it's hard to imagine what an evangelical preacher would have to do to not confirm the truths he preaches. Murder? Rape? Incest? Apparently, buying meth from a male prostitute isn't enough.) But here's Klinghoffer: Gay advocates reason that because a man has a temptation to homosexuality, he has little moral choice other than to obey it. This view of morality goes back to Darwin, who reduced behavior to biologically determined instincts. In The…

The Art Instinct

In yesterday's Washington Post, I reviewed The Art Instinct, a new book by Denis Dutton that uses evolutionary psychology to explain the odd human obsession with making art: The list of cultural universals -- those features that recur in every human society, from remote rainforest tribes to modern America -- is surprisingly short. There's language, religion and a bunch of traits involving social structures, such as the reliance on leaders. Denis Dutton, a New Zealand philosopher, would like to add one more item to this list: art. As he observes in his provocative new book, The Art Instinct,…

Magical Thinking

This is interesting stuff. As G.K. Chesterton is said to have once said: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything." "What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the…

An honest peek into the brain of a Christian conservative

In North Carolina, Christians defaced an atheist billboard. These things happen; there are always a few jerks in any movement who'll go out and vandalize private property because they're so sure they're in the right that the laws don't apply to them. Normally, the organizations and the sane people behind the movement will repudiate such actions — if it had been a Christian billboard (and there are many of those, I can tell you) that had been defaced (which I have never seen happen), I'd be deploring the action myself. Unfortunately, sane people are in short supply on the side of Christianity…

The Benefits of Diversity

The Times has an interesting interview with Scott Page, a professor of complex systems, political science and economics at the University of Michigan: Q. In your book you posit that organizations made up of different types of people are more productive than homogenous ones. Why do you say that? A. Because diverse groups of people bring to organizations more and different ways of seeing a problem and, thus, faster/better ways of solving it. People from different backgrounds have varying ways of looking at problems, what I call "tools." The sum of these tools is far more powerful in…

Why Do We Need the Humanities?

Rachel Donadio, over at the Times Book Review, had an interesting little essay on the canon wars, Allan Bloom and the fate of the humanities. But what caught my eye was this melancholy paragraph: All this reflects what the philosopher Martha Nussbaum today describes as a "loss of respect for the humanities as essential ingredients of democracy." Nussbaum, who panned Bloom's book in The New York Review in 1987, teaches at the University of Chicago, which like Columbia has retained a Western-based core curriculum requirement for undergraduates. But on some campuses, "the main area of conflict…

Looking inside the structure of the Yellowstone Caldera

With all the talk of the current Yellowstone earthquake swarm, I thought it would worth it to write a post on the the structure and caldera - and why we get earthquake swarms that are structurally rather than magmatically-related. First off, lets think about why calderas formed. This is relatively simple - at least superficially. The land (or volcano) above a magmatic system is partially supported by that magma, especially because magma is hot and buoyant. The isostatic support by the magma holds up the land surface or volcanic edifice, so when an eruption expels a large volume of magma, this…

Body Worlds

After visiting the Body Worlds exhibit today, my short summary is that it was disappointing, but it wasn't all bad. I'll get the complaints over first. Here's the thing: I like my biology wet. It's supposed to be vital and dynamic and messy and complicated, but it all ties together into a lovely integrated whole. A collection of plastinated cadavers is precisely the opposite of what I enjoy about the science: it's dead and static and distressingly dry. Seriously, when you've got a kidney on a table, it should look meaty and quiver a bit and lie there in a nice saucy pool of blood—it shouldn'…

On politics

Ophelia Benson has a post up looking at an interview between Benjamin Nelson (a sometime commenter here) and Chris Mooney. Nelson summarizes the interview, and the broader accommodation/confrontation conflict, by writing: [Mooney's] stance is self-consciously political. At least to some extent, there is a âdifference in goalsâ between Mooney and the activist atheists â by which, I think, he means a difference in priorities. Mooney does not think that speaking out against religion is a priority, and that it is on the whole detrimental to science education; while others think it is a priority…

Simple answers to stupid implications

Martin Cothran, enabler of racists and Holocaust deniers, doesn't like that I busted a bad argument of his. He made the trite "it's snowing so Al Gore is fat" line of argument, and I pointed out that an individual weather event doesn't actually tell you about long term trends. He retorts: I wonder how many posts Josh has made cautioning those who equate weather and climate when discussing warm weather events. It would but puerile to criticize this logic teacher for employing a tu quoque fallacy here, especially given Cothran's established love of ad hominem arguments and other logical…

Levels of selection & the full Price Equation

In the post below on the Price Equation I stayed true to George Price's original notation in his 1970 paper where he introduced his formalism. But here is a more conventional form, the "Full Price Equation," which introduces a second element on the right-side. Δz = Cov(w, z) / w One can specifically reformulate this verbally for a biological context: Change in trait = Change due to selection on individuals + Change due to individual transmission The first element on the right-side is explicable as selection upon a heritable trait. w is the conventional letter used for "fitness," so w is…

How religious are Albanian and Bosnian Muslims?

There are some really weird comments about Albania below. Part of these confusions have to do with ambiguities as to the religious identity of Albania, traditionally majority Muslim, but after decades of Communism very secular. What exactly are the religious breakdowns? How religious are Albanians? Additionally some of the same questions are thrown toward the Bosnian Muslims. Are Balkan Muslims true religious moderates, or, are they simply secular Europeans whose ancestors practiced the Muslim religion? The World Values Survey can help answer these questions, or least put some numbers on…

Thick-waisted women of the world take heart!

Evolutionary curveball for curvy?: While women with curvy figures might enjoy more attention from men in Western culture, and find it easier to become pregnant, new research suggests they may also face some evolutionary disadvantages compared to women with thicker waists. That's because the same hormones that increase fat around the waist can also make women stronger, more assertive, and more resistant to stress, according to a new study published in the December issue of Current Anthropology. Given those findings, it makes sense that the slim-waisted body has not evolved to become the…