john hawks weblog

paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

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  • Perils of recycling

    Sat, 2012-05-05 11:14 -- John Hawks

    Today's public service announcement, by Virginia Postrel: "Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Feel-Good Waste of Money".

    In a paper published in March in the journal Optometry and Vision Science, four researchers compare the full costs of delivering used glasses to the costs of instead delivering ready-made glasses in standard powers (like my drugstore readers, but for myopia as well). The authors find that recycled glasses cost nearly twice as much per usable pair.

    Glasses (which we should probably call "polycarbonates" instead) are pretty cheap to manufacture and distribute in quantity these days. From the linked article, it's amazing how much wastage there is in the process of recycling this kind of product.

    Tags: 
    social

  • "Journals seem noticeably less important than 10 years ago."

    Mon, 2012-01-16 16:56 -- John Hawks

    As ScienceOnline2012 gets underway later this week, the New York Times is running an article about open science: "Cracking open the scientific process". The article spends many paragraphs promoting a social networking startup for scientists called ResearchGate, which honestly strikes me as having a not-very-useful approach to openness. For example:

    Dr. Rajiv Gupta, a radiology instructor who supervised Dr. Madisch at Harvard and was one of ResearchGate’s first investors, called it “a great site for serious research and research collaboration,” adding that he hoped it would never be contaminated “with pop culture and chit-chat.”

    I doubt that a walled garden where scientists share their reprints is the wave of the future. The "answering questions" aspect of the site seems similar to the Faculty of 1000 and similar concepts. Such sites aim to make social sharing into a virtue for scientists by credentialing them. On the other hand, if a social network for science can succeed in filtering out politics, that might be worth paying for.

    There are many other things in the article. One thing that shocked me: The open access fee for Nature Communications is really $5000. Holy cow. For $5000 I could pay someone to sit in a coffee shop all day and hand-type the contents of my article into personalized e-mails to everyone who reads it. What the heck is that about?

    Tags: 
    open access
    open science
    social
    metascience

  • The box isn't nearly as big, either

    Wed, 2011-10-05 23:20 -- John Hawks

    I saw this: "India launches Aakash tablet computer priced at $35" on Slashdot, which notes:

    The Aakash computer runs Android 2.2 (Froyo), has a 7-inch touch screen, 256MB of RAM, 32GB expandable memory slot, two USB ports, and weighs in at only 350 grams.

    I just want to note that 21 years ago I bought my first computer for $1700. It came with 2MB or RAM and 40MB of hard disk, 1 serial and 1 parallel port, and it weighed roughly 35 pounds. I know many readers can tell much scarier ghost stories about early computers, but those stats just struck me.

    Tags: 
    technology
    social

  • No echoing the echo chamber here

    Sun, 2011-05-29 17:20 -- John Hawks

    Seems to be a theme going in the press today: The Internet is making us stupid by connecting us with the things we like.

    Yes, when I write it that way, it sounds kind of silly, doesn't it?

    But that's the thesis of an essay by Natasha Singer in the NY Times: "The Trouble With the Echo Chamber Online", and a separate essay by Jonah Lehrer in the Wall Street Journal: "When We're Cowed by the Crowd".

    Singer posits that the problem is Google giving us search results that we want, not irrelevant ones.

    If you type “bank” into Google, the search engine recognizes your general location, sending results like “Bank of America” to users in the United States or “Bank of Canada” to those north of the border. If you choose to share more data, by logging into Gmail and enabling a function called Web history, Google records the sites you visit and the links you click. Now if you search for “apple,” it learns and remembers whether you are looking for an iPad or a Cox’s Orange Pippin.

    OK, seems like a pretty awesome thing to me. I'm here in Rome, and when I search for a location on my phone, it gives me the location in Rome! Not only does that give me the information faster, it saves me (expensive) bandwidth. Win!

    But Singer worries that this will harm our democracy. No, stop laughing. Really.

    But, in a effort to single out users for tailored recommendations or advertisements, personalization tends to sort people into categories that may limit their options. It is a system that cocoons users, diminishing the kind of exposure to opposing viewpoints necessary for a healthy democracy, says Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and the author of “You Are Not a Gadget.”

    This argument is bunk. At no time in history have people been exposed to a wider range of opposing viewpoints. And you know what? Most of them are bunk.

    We have always had algorithms to select content. In the past, those algorithms were inside the heads of a small number of newspaper editors and media programming executives. Most of these people knew each other socially, and all of them were locked in competition for eyeballs with the same small group of people, thinking in minor variations on the same theme. That's why you see things like different newspapers, owned by different companies, publishing opinion pieces on the same out-of-the-blue internet theme on the same day! It's like a throwback to the past.

    I like Google better. Who is more likely to get the truth about bunk theories -- somebody who Googles, or somebody who flips his television to the History Channel?

    Lehrer picks up a related theme: the "wisdom of the crowd". The idea is like the "ask the audience" lifeline on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Ask enough people who don't know the answer, and the result of the poll is more likely to be correct than if you asked any one of them. Lehrer notes a recent study that showed that a crowd where people can exchange guesses with each other is actually worse at this kind of thing than if they all remain mutually mute.

    So if you find yourself in Slumdog Millionaire, you'd better gag the audience.

    We can all see that this "wisdom of the crowd" thing has pretty limited utility. Guessing number of ping pong balls in wading pool, yes. Unified field theory, no. That's why we don't make decisions by polling random ignorant people.

    Oh, I know, you're going to say that's exactly what we do in a democracy! But really it isn't at all. Shaping the information environment before an election is a multibillion dollar effort by political parties, candidates, independent organizations, and the media. The public in modern democracy is highly informed. It's just that each person is highly informed about a small window of things. The internet helps us to connect with other people who know about the same things, allowing coordination of action among dispersed people on a scale rarely seen before.

    Lehrer thinks all this communication is making us stupid. No, stop laughing. Really!

    And yet, while the Web has enabled new forms of collective action, it has also enabled new kinds of collective stupidity. Groupthink is now more widespread, as we cope with the excess of available information by outsourcing our beliefs to celebrities, pundits and Facebook friends. Instead of thinking for ourselves, we simply cite what's already been cited.

    Yep, it's that groupthink thing. The echo chamber.

    Someone who uses the word, groupthink, invariably means, "I can't stand that everyone doesn't think like me!" Oh, if you weren't deluded by your cult of celebrity, surely you would listen to reason!

    Bunk. If you have an argument that can't make traction against somebody's Facebook friends, it's not a very good argument. If you don't like it, make it better.

    Yes there is a social influence effect on decision-making. That's the way humans think. We're social creatures, and our friends and relatives are important. It's important that we get to choose our friends. It's important that we get to choose what we want to know. A society where we can't choose those things would be a tyranny.

    So if you want to influence people's ideas in our social world, you need to engage with their social networks. Seems like the sort of think that could use a better algorithm.

    Tags: 
    communication
    metascience
    science communication
    media
    psychology
    social
    Synopsis: 
    Some say the internet is an echo chamber. I say there's an echo chamber of elite coastal internet critics.

  • Hunter-gatherer kinship and band composition

    Sun, 2011-03-20 00:18 -- John Hawks

    Kim Hill and colleagues described in last week's Science a study of kinship within bands of hunter-gatherers known from ethnographic research [1]. They couched their study to dispute the idea that most of the members of hunter-gatherer bands are kin.

    Why? Because the idea that hunter-gatherers live in bands composed mainly of close kin has been a very common answer to the question, "Why do humans cooperate?"

    Traditionally, anthropologists have suggested that hunter-gatherer co-residence is almost entirely based on kinship [e.g., (15, 16)], and evolutionary psychologists have embraced this idea in order to develop “mismatch hypotheses” about cooperation among non-kin in modern societies (17). Evolutionary researchers have also argued both that female philopatry and maternal grandmother provisioning is ancestral (5) and that male philopatry, typical of other African hominoids (18, 19) and leading to adult male provisioning (8), is the ancestral human pattern. If either of these is correct, and if foraging bands are mainly collections of close kin, inclusive fitness gains might be the primary motivator of ancestral human cooperation.

    True, many evolutionary psychologists have adopted this view with gusto: Hunter-gatherers cooperate because they live in small bands with their kin. But as many have realized, actual bands of hunter-gatherers pretty quickly show that this isn't true. Either men or women generally move when they marry, so bands have close relatives in them, but they also have unrelated individuals. In practice people often move with a sibling, or their adult parents may come to live with them as well (both practices described by Hill and colleagues).

    The net effect of residence changes is to reduce the levels of inbreeding within bands, and also reduce the genetic variation among bands. Some evolutionary psychologists occupy themselves with group selection precisely because the relevant level of cooperation in hunter-gatherers is the band, and bands include many people who are distantly if at all related. But (as Hill and colleagues also note) the high rates of intermarriage among bands greatly reduces the strength of group selection possible among them.

    I think the paper sets up a straw man when it claims that the "traditional view" in anthropology is that bands are made up of kin. That's certainly not the view I learned. Their "traditional" citations are Elmer Service and June Helm, writing in the 1960's, and I don't doubt that they and others have argued for kin-structured co-residence. My understanding of "kin-structured" was never that bands were made up of close kin, but instead that residence was determined by kinship pattern. Exogamy is driven by the incest taboo, for example. Whether men or women typically change residence to marry depends on other kinship rules. Humans recognize kin, and their movements are not incidental to this, resulting in a kin-structured society. Some rules force people to live in different groups from their close kin, not the same groups.

    At any rate, Hill and colleagues confirm that the groups in their dataset do not have bands composed mainly of close kin. They suggest that we need a new theory of human social evolution to explain the emergence of cooperative behaviors:

    The hunter-gatherer social structure we describe has important implications for theories about the evolution of cooperation and cultural capacity. First, bands are mainly composed of individuals either distantly related by kinship and/or marriage or unrelated altogether. In our sample of 32 societies, primary kin generally make up less than 10% of a residential band. For example, in the Ache we estimate the mean genetic coefficient of relatedness (Hamilton’s r) between adults in 58 precontact bands to be only 0.054 (n = 19,634 dyads, SE = 0.0001). This agrees with Ache informants who reported that during the precontact period they often lived with people described as “friends, not relatives.” The Ju/’hoansi results in Fig. 2 suggest that mean relatedness in other groups is not too different from the Ache. Thus, we cannot necessarily assume that cognitive features such as inequality aversion and enhanced prosocial emotions evolved in ancestral environments composed mainly of close kin. Given the constant flow of individuals between groups, genetic group selection at the level of the band also seems improbable. Instead, cultural group selection (27) may lead to the spread of cooperative institutions within ethnic groups, which might then create a context favoring the genetic evolution of prosocial cognitive mechanisms through individual-level selection.

    I have two reactions. The paper is missing a null model. It is true that the hunter-gatherers are much less related to each other within a band than would be predicted if they were choosing to live near close kin. But are they more related to each other than would be the case if they moved randomly? What if individuals move around without consideration of kinship at all, according to a simple distance function? If individuals behave as they would without any knowledge of kinship, it's clear that our explanation for cooperation needs to work at the individual level. Cultural group selection may help explain the persistence of institutions and rules, but I think it's insufficient to explain the evolution of people who can form institutions and rules.

    My second reaction is that humans are self-interested. In my experience, children learn to share when they can grasp the concept of reciprocity. Let me suggest that, like numbers, cooperation may be a cognitive technology in humans. We may have many biological changes that facilitate cooperation -- for example, I would look for human-specific changes to oxytocin regulation. But those changes may be mostly tuning a system to facilitate prosocial behavior (and reduce aggression). They don't explain the occurrence of specific prosocial behaviors, because those behaviors themselves did not evolve. They were invented.

    References

    1. Hill KR, Walker RS, Bożičević M, Eder J, Headland T, Hewlett B, Hurtado MA, Marlowe F, Wiessner P, Wood B. Co-Residence Patterns in Hunter-Gatherer Societies Show Unique Human Social Structure. Science [Internet]. 2011;331:1286–1289. Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1199071
    Tags: 
    group selection
    population structure
    social dynamics
    hunter-gatherers
    social

  • Tweets will find a way

    Tue, 2010-09-21 16:24 -- John Hawks

    A Twitter virus emerged within the 140 character limit:

    The exploit was fairly simple, but remarkably effective. Somebody found a bug in the Twitter.com website that allowed them to insert simple bits of JavaScript – a programming language that lets people add interactivity to web pages – into messages or Tweets sent on the service. The code was able to detect when the user's mouse passed over the tweet, and trigger a retweet. By hijacking user input in this way, the Twitter hack code was able to replicate itself. And so a new artificial life form of tenuous sorts was born.

    Given the transmission by retweeting, it would be interesting to see how the networks of followers facilitated or impeded its spread. There are many hub individuals with hundreds or thousands of followers. But the most widely followed may not themselves do much reading of tweets, and so may not have been very susceptible to spreading the virus. Smaller networks of frequent readers and retweeters would be better vectors. Still, eventually this bug got to the big twits:

    On Twitter, the spread of the worm to a highly connected person or people may have been enough to tip infection rates over that threshold and allow it to break out into the wider world. It may not be a coincidence that around the time the second peak was building Sarah Brown was infected, retweeting the bug to her 1.1m followers like a virtual Typhoid Mary.

    Tags: 
    social
    software

  • Social media in education

    Sat, 2010-08-28 08:30 -- John Hawks

    Krystal D'Costa (Anthropology in Practice) links to a mini-documentary about the role of social media in the education of "Gen-Y": "Decade 2: Encouraging Educators to Rethink Social Media Strategies in the Classroom."

    First, that these subjects are operating in a world that didn't exist five years ago. Some hold job titles like Social Media Strategist, and others are entrepreneurs who can shape their job as they want and need using social tools. These are individuals who have learned early the power of technology and shared communication, and they've harnessed it. Second, they're aware that they have needed to find their way in the dark. Several individuals in the documentary discuss how poorly prepared they feel their education has left them. This is an interesting statement when one considers reports that this not a tech savvy generation. And it prompts one to question whether the educational system can support the changing face of connectedness and business overall.

    Are teenagers and college students learning about social media in the same way they learn about the birds and the bees -- mainly from their peers? Only a handful are really learning to control the media in their lives. People who end up in jobs like "Social Media Strategist" are the result of some kind of uncontrolled selection experiment.

    Which maybe is as it should be. Uncontrolled selection experiments are pretty much how most successful people get started, I guess.

    Tags: 
    social
    technology
    education
    teaching

  • Questioning the "evolution of an underclass"

    Thu, 2010-07-29 08:30 -- John Hawks

    A little life history theory can be a dangerous thing. Case in point: "Die young, live fast: The evolution of an underclass." The article discusses correlations among longevity, health, income, and age at first birth within industrialized societies and cross-culturally worldwide.

    Evolutionary theory predicts that if you are a mammal growing up in a harsh, unpredictable environment where you are susceptible to disease and might die young, then you should follow a "fast" reproductive strategy - grow up quickly, and have offspring early and close together so you can ensure leaving some viable progeny before you become ill or die. For a range of animal species there is evidence that this does happen. Now research suggests that humans are no exception.

    The cross-mammal generalization is true, and the article discusses correlations within human populations that run the same way. Women who live in communities with shorter life expectancies and shorter expected healthy lives also tend to have their children younger and with shorter birth intervals.

    It should be obvious but I'll point it out anyway: The use of the word "evolution" is misleading. The comparisons among human groups discussed in the article are not cases of biological evolution; they are mostly social effects of industrialization. I wouldn't rule out long-run changes in gene frequencies coming from such systematic fitness differences, but calling it the "evolution of an underclass" is alarmism.

    The article goes on to quote public health researchers and sociologists who seem to confuse correlation with causation. They assume that making communities live longer will cause young women to wait longer to reproduce.

    That could happen, sure. The article suggests a plausible causal hypothesis: Young women decide that they'd better reproduce in a hurry so that they'll have healthy older relatives around to help them. Or they decide they've got nothing else to wait for, so they'd better have kids.

    But if you dig a little further into life history theory, there are alternatives. The cross-species comparison reflects the outcomes after a long process of adaptation, and appears simple mainly when you compare species across several orders of magnitude of longevity. Looking at any set of closely related species, the story is more complex.

    The dynamics by which a population may pass from one value to another can also be described mathematically, and interestingly that math may lead to different ideas about how age at first birth might respond to differences in longevity. Hamilton (following Fisher) noted that in a growing population, a reproductive bonus goes to younger mothers; in a shrinking population it's the opposite. A rational person might conclude that longer healthy lifespans would cause the population to grow (as indeed happened during the early twentieth century) and therefore decide that younger births will increase fitness. That is, if fitness outcomes were relevant.

    I don't think people generally care about fitness outcomes, and so I don't think there's much reason to expect the correlations in today's population to remain as strong as health improves. It seems pernicious to argue that we should invest in health because it will make women put off reproducing. Why not just recognize that health is an intrinsic good?

    Tags: 
    social
    development
    life history
    health

  • Mmmm...geese....

    Fri, 2010-07-23 16:18 -- John Hawks

    New York is considering a plan "to eliminate 170,000 wild Canada geese":

    He said that politicians peppered officials from the Department of Agriculture with questions about the science and asked how many goose strikes had occurred and the danger they posed. They learned that there have been 78 Canada goose strikes over 10 years in New York, and that those strikes caused more than $2.2 million in aircraft damage.

    They're talking about rounding them up, gassing them, and burying the bodies. Which seems like a terrible waste.

    Deer are a much larger threat to safety than geese, and much of the country is overpopulated to the tune of millions. The meat from wild animals is much healthier, and would be especially valuable for people who otherwise are relying on highly processed fat and carbohydrate rich foods. Can't somebody find a way for Jamie Oliver to make these animals into school lunches?

    Tags: 
    social
    conservation
    diet

  • A, C, and G, sure, but what's T?

    Sun, 2010-07-18 14:03 -- John Hawks

    A Sunday science story from last week: "Choir to sing the 'code of life.'"

    Scientists and composers have produced a new choral work in which performers sing parts of their own genetic code.

    Human DNA is made up of just four different chemical compounds, which gave musician Andrew Morley the idea of assigning a note to each of them.

    The new piece, Allele, will be performed by the New London Chamber Choir at the Royal Society of Medicine on 13 July.

    My first reaction was to think that this would be the most awful song ever. But it depends a lot on which part of the DNA they choose. They could pick some repetitive element, where different people have different lengths, which might end up sort of like a round. And of course most of the people will have the same sequence most of the time, so there will be relatively little discordance -- and the choice of musical encoding will make a difference to how variation sounds.

    Maybe they can just encode the bases as the notes of a major chord and BLAST for a sequence that corresponds to "Taps."

    Members of the 40-strong choir are all participants in a scientific study.

    Each of them has had his or her DNA decoded in order to see what it is genetically that distinguishes great singers from the rest of us.

    But then one starts to wonder what it actually means to have your sequence in a song. For most parts of our DNA, we have two -- are they picking one? Are they singing genotypes? What's the deal? If they're "participants in a study" looking for singing genes, I suppose the data are SNP genotypes. Those would be pretty misleading as a basis for singing "sequences."

    What a mess. But I'm sure that the audience will be appropriately beard-stroking in their appreciation.

    Tags: 
    art in science
    social
    music

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Neandertals

For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.

Denisova

From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.

Acceleration

The advent of agriculture caused natural selection to speed up greatly in humans. We're uncovering some of the ways that populations have rapidly changed during the last 10,000 years.

Malapa

Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.