quotes

The teaser to this post on Science Blog:

The next generation of genome sequencing has been published using the DNA of James Watson. I'll bet they used Rosalind Franklin's DNA as a test drive and didn't tell us.

Owen Lovejoy, quoted in an Ann Gibbons news piece:

To resolve this debate [about the style of early hominid bipedalism], says anatomist Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University in Ohio, researchers should also look at the pelvis, back, foot, and ankle of other early hominins, still under analysis.

In other words, "Nyah, nyah!"

References:

Gibbons A. 2008. Millennium ancestor gets its walking papers. Science 319:1599-1601. doi:10.1126/science.319.5870.1599

In Mankind Evolving, 1962, p. 310:

In the past the human race was always preoccupied with finding enough to eat. The ability to wring from the available food the last bit of nourishment conferred, therefore, a tremendous adaptive advantage on man, as it does no most animals. So does the ability of the camel to store in the hump on his back some of the nutriment available in times of plenty for use in times of want. Man is in this respect different from a camel in that he tends to develop his hump in a more ventral position.

Ann Althouse, confronting the Laetoli footprint-makers reconstruction at the American Museum of Natural History:

Is this really what we are and, if so, is it horrifying or is it wonderful that we figured it out?

My photo, not Althouse's. Clearly the museum has tried to make them look wonderful and not horrible, but so much depends on the up close encounter with these small apish people, bracing each other in their little glass box against these strange surroundings.

Spongebob: But Mrs. Puff, I don't feel like I really did anything.

Mrs. Puff: That's how extra credit is supposed to feel.

My UW colleague Karen Strier, writing in a comment after a paper by Sayers and Lovejoy on the chimpanzee referent in paleoanthropology:

In behavioral studies, an anomalous individual may be identified as an outlier and excluded from statistical analyses so as not to obscure otherwise meaningful patterns. In taxonomy, an anomalous specimen is usually assigned a unique name, which it retains unless or until new discoveries or new analyses of existing material support its placement within the range of variation of another known form.

Writer Jeff Harrell, on hacking together an obscure-but-useful piece of CSS/Javascript:

It would have been a tedious and repetitive operation even under the best of circumstances.

But every public-school-educated child knows that in 1689 New England religious scholar Cotton Mather, with the help of his best friends Einstein and Hammurabi, invented the digital computer specifically to relieve man of the burden of performing tedious and repetitive operations. Perhaps we can make use of that invention somehow...

Monk, explaining why he won't buy a used toaster, even if it is only five bucks:

Monk: Unless I'm wrong, that's how the bubonic plague got started.

Natalie: That's not true!

Monk: I said, unless I'm wrong.

Steven Pinker, on the experiments that drive interpretations about moral intuition:

When psychologists say "most people" they usually mean "most of the two dozen sophomores who filled out a questionnaire for beer money."

My colleague Greg Cochran, commenting on population models with small effective sizes up to the present:

As for the idea that the effective population size (for any purpose) of the human race (or Europe, or for that matter Italy) in the middle Holocene was 10,000 - well, we're talking early recorded history. Sumer and Egypt existed, it's not controversial.

Alec Baldwin, appearing in "Walking With Cavemen":

Surrounded by all these skulls, it feels like we're not doing history at all -- it feels like something more immediate...like doing Hamlet.

From the Origin, second edition, pp. 73-74:

I have, also, reason to believe that humble-bees are indispensable to the fertilisation of the heartsease (Viola tricolor), for other bees do not visit this flower. From experiments which I have lately tried, I have found that the visits of bees are necessary for the fertilisation of some kinds of clover; but humble-bees alone visit the red clover (Trifolium pratense), as other bees cannot reach the nectar. Hence I have very little doubt, that if the whole genus of humble-bees became extinct or very rare in England, the heartsease and red clover would become very rare, or wholly disappear. The number of humble-bees in any district depends in a great degree on the number of field-mice, which destroy their combs and nests; and Mr. H. Newman, who has long attended to the habits of humble-bees, believes that "more than two-thirds of them are thus destroyed all over England." Now the number of mice is largely dependent, as every one knows, on the number of cats; and Mr. Newman says, "Near villages and small towns I have found the nests of humble-bees more numerous than elsewhere, which I attribute to the number of cats that destroy the mice." Hence it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!

Julien Riel-Salvatore comments on the hunting Neandertal women (my comment from last year here). Read the whole thing by all means, but I laughed out loud at this:

On one side, people who still think of the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition in terms of a list of features that distinguish the UP from the MP (and by extension, modern humans from Neanderthals) probably clapped their hands excitedly before chiseling "sexual division of labor" into the stone tablet that bears the other commandments of modern human behavior.

An apeman is supposed to be dumb. One that smart, I can live without!

Commenter Yajeev, on A Blog Around the Clock:

To be honest, I've only ever liked the Fall Back bit of DST, where we gain an hour of sleep. I propose that we forget the Spring Ahead nonsense and instead Fall Back twice a year: once in spring, once in autumn. In this respect, we will gain an hour of sleep two times in a 365-day period.

Furthermore, if we increased the frequency of backfalling and, say, Fell Back every two months (and who would turn down 60 free sleep minutes), over the course of 4 years, we will have gained an entire 24 hours. Then, we could do away with Leap Year.

My little girl, Sadie, couldn't sleep last night and we sat up watching a show about the "Skunk Ape" of the South. She loved it! Well, today I happened across an article about skunk apes as an eastern Tennessee cultural phenomenon. Here's a quote:

The legend of Bigfoot, even as a symbol for a kind of unkempt redneck naturalism, can remind us of a simpler time, back when fantasy and reality had more of a symbiotic relationship. Back when tall tales had a tinge of morality woven into the yarn.

(via Instapundit)

Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) on Mad Men:

Sometimes when people get what they want, they realize how limited their goals were.