Anthroplogy

National Geographic has an interesting piece of ethnographic travel writing up on the Hadza of Tanzania. The Hadza are one of the few remaining hunter-gather populations in the world, and their language is an isolate which has clicks. There's a bit too much "noble savage" archetype loaded into the piece, but this portion is of note: The chief reason the Hadza have been able to maintain their lifestyle so long is that their homeland has never been an inviting place. The soil is briny; fresh water is scarce; the bugs can be intolerable. For tens of thousands of years, it seems, no one else…
I found this SNL sketch about an Obama/Jintao press conference very funny.
There was recently a conference on evolution in Egypt. Some interesting numbers: Dr Guessoum, who is a Sunni Muslim, said that in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and Malaysia, only 15 per cent of those surveyed believed Darwin's theory to be "true" or "probably true". This stand was equally prevalent among students and teachers, from high school to university. Most alarmingly, he claimed, science teachers were misrepresenting the facts and theories of evolution by mixing it with religious ideologies. A survey of 100 academics and 100 students that he conducted at his own…
The relationship between language families and historical population genetics has a long history. In the 19th and early 20th centuries anthropologists were wont to substitute and synthesize the connections discerned in linguistic relationships with those of presumed biological affinities. This resulted in great hilarity. Older works sometimes labeled the Finns a "Mongoloid" people because of their Uralic language. But once the physical substrate of genetic inheritance (DNA) was ascertained some correspondences did emerge. The figure to the left is from an L. L. Cavalli-Sforza paper, Genes,…
Tom Rees, Income inequality drives church attendance: ...we find that attendance rates are particularly high in countries with more socioeconomic inequalities and fewer social welfare expenditure. This effect equally applies to both poor and rich people, which is in line with the idea that because of economic mobility and the possibility of unemployment in the (nearby) future also the more affluent population feels more insecure in countries with more inequalities and without a well-developed social welfare system. We also see that people with a lower income and who are unemployed attend…
In reviewing a paper which sketches out the boundary conditions under which group-level natural selection would result in the emergence of altruism as a genetically encoded trait, I stated: ... I would look to cultural group selection, because there are many cases of women being assimilated into a dominant culture, and their offspring speaking the language, and expressing the values, in totality of their fathers. One inherits 50% of one's genes from one's mother and one's father, but inheritance of cultural traits which are distinctive between parents may show very strong biases. Partitioning…
Ruchira Paul has a post up, "Religious, superstitious, nonsense" and other harsh words. The point at issue is the fact that a teacher who expressed anti-Creationist views in harsh tones was sued. Ruchira asks somewhat rhetorically as to the sort of things parochial schools say about other religions and atheists. The bigger issue is one of public decorum, and decorum is very contextual. When my 7th grade teacher had us read Medea she explained a bit about the context of Greek society, including the nature of their religion. She spoke of "their gods" and "our God." Her reference to "our God"…
I've discussed menopause as an adaptation and the grandmother effect before. I was also pleased to see the responses of Larry Moran's readers when he presented his standard anti-adaptationist line of argument. I don't want to retread familiar ground here, I'm not sure if menopause is an adaptation, but let's assume so for the purposes of reviewing a new paper which has come out and offers a slight but fascinating twist on the grandmother hypothesis. Grandma plays favourites: X-chromosome relatedness and sex-specific childhood mortality: Biologists use genetic relatedness between family…
The Spittoon points to a new paper, Drawing the history of the Hutterite population on a genetic landscape: inference from Y-chromosome and mtDNA genotypes, which I've been meaning to look at more closely. Unlike some attempts to use genetics to illuminate questions about the human past here the historical record is rather complete. The 16th century was the high tide and maximal efflorescence of German Protestantism. Not only were vast swaths of what we think of as redoubts of German Catholicism in the Austrian lands brought into the Protestant fold, but the diversity was also at a peak, as…
Eric Michael Johnson is doing some serious science blogging. Worth checking out.
If you're at ASHG, a session you might want to attend, Scale Effects and Recent Brain Evolution: Theory and Preliminary Evidence. Here's the abstract: What forces have driven human evolution since the grand human diaspora? In this paper, I argue that the scale effects so central to endogenous growth theory in the field of economics (e.g., Kremer's widely-cited "Population Growth and Technological Change: 1,000,000 B.C. to 1990," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1993) have been important drivers of human brain development since the diaspora. Scale effects have made prominent appearances in…
In the comments of this post I mildly disagreed with Eric Michael Johnson that humans are "polygynous" and the relevance of the fact that "estimates range between 5-10% that all children have been sired by men other than a woman's partner." The human monogamy vs. polygamy argument is long-standing, with anthropologists on both sides. Myself, I'm not sure what I believe, because I think binning into two categories is simplistic. In terms of evolutionary biology societal ideals matter less than the relationship of the distribution of reproductive output of males to females.From what I know…
From the comments: Jizya is only a financial tribute / aid to the Muslim State which is in-charge of safeguarding the security of the state and non-muslim's lives and properties on their behalf. Non-muslims pay Jizya BUT they are EXEMPTED from any other taxes which muslims pay in a Muslim State i.e. Zakat, Khums etc. As compared to taxes which the Muslims are subjected in a Muslim state, the amount of Jizya is very low. As such, Jizya should not be interpreted as "Additional Tax" imposed on non-muslims. It is rather a "lesser" obligation as compared to that of a Muslim. I've heard this…
Another episode with me interviewing John Hawks on Bloggingheads.tv. Mostly we're talking about about Ardipithecus. The last 1/3 is about Indian genetics. We recorded on Thursday, but since then I've changed my mind on some issues and now disagree with some of what I said. I will likely post on my revisions soon, though have a rather low degree of certitude as to the accuracy of what I suspect, so I am poking through the literature to see if I can become more confident, or just falsify (if you missed my last discussion with John from two weeks ago, it's here).
A few days ago I pointed to a paper, Stature, Mortality, and Life History among Indigenous Populations of the Andaman Islands, 1871-1986. It looks at the specific case of the Andaman Islanders to explore the general phenomenon of "pygmy" populations, especially among "Negritos." The Andaman Islanders are an interesting test case, as the authors note, because the disparate groups have taken different stances toward interaction with the outside world. The Great Andaman Islanders have mixed for over a century with the British and Indian settlers. The Onge began to interact with the outside…
Reading the papers on Ardipithecus ramidus which just came out in Science one of the take-home points that jumps out at me is that extant apes may be very misleading analogs to extinct hominins. Here is Owen Lovejoy: In retrospect, clues to this vast divide between the evolutionary trajectories of African apes and hominids have always been present. Apes are largely inept at walking upright. They exhibit reproductive behavior and anatomy profoundly unlike those of humans. African ape males have retained (or evolved, see below) a massive SCC and exhibit little or no direct investment in their…
I've talked about menopause before. One question in evolutionary anthropology is whether it is an adaptation, a derived trait in our species which emerged due to the force of natural selection, or simply a physiological byproduct of some other phenomenon. The key point is the peculiar asymmetry in male and female reproductive potentials; males decline gradually over time, while the general suite of female reproductive function simply shuts down at during middle age. Eric Michael Johnson reviews a new paper by the redoubtable Virpi Lummaa, Fitness benefits of prolonged post-reproductive…
Stature, Mortality, and Life History among Indigenous Populations of the Andaman Islands, 1871-1986: Despite considerable interest in the evolution of small body size, there is little evidence for changes in body size within smallâbodied human populations. This study combines anthropometric data from a number of studies of the body size of Andaman Islanders from 1871 to 1986. The colonial history of the Andaman Islands is characterized by high rates of mortality among the indigenous populations. However, longâterm conflicts between tribal groups of the Andaman Islands and British and Indian…
Eric Michael Johnson has a post up, Does Taking Birth Control Alter Women's Sexual Choices?, where he surveys a new paper,Does the contraceptive pill alter mate choice in humans?. Eric notes: The concern of the researchers is that a woman who gets involved with a guy while on the pill might find that she's no longer compatible with him once she stops later on in the relationship. Imagine waking up next to your boyfriend, or even your husband, one morning only to discover that you're just not that into him. While female comedians make such scenarios commonplace in their stand-up routines,…
At Cognition & Culture, a review of Sarah Blaffer Hrdry's new book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. I really liked her previous work, Mother Nature, so I'm definitely going to check this out. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy was a prominent source in Ullica Segerstrale's Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate.