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!"
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.
