Hawks sightings

I don't have much time to come up for air this week, it's been an incredibly busy and exciting meeting so far. But I wanted to take a moment to pass along this link, in which Ann Gibbons describes last night's plenary session for Science: "Anthropological Casting Call".

Paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, explained that he organized the 12 April share-and-tell session of published fossils at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists because many members have never even seen casts of important fossils, including Lucy, the 3.1-million-year-old member of Au. afarensis. As he lined up three skulls that showed changes in the evolution of the members of the human family from 1.8 million to 1.6 million years ago, Hawks said that seeing the fossils is the best way to learn about human evolution. "There are people in this association who are responsible for teaching evolution in the U.S. who have not even seen a cast of Lucy," he said.

What an incredible crowd we had -- at one point around 200 people, crowding around the biggest collection of fossil casts that has ever been assembled at the meetings. Here's a photo from my phone; I wish I had a wide-angle lens to get the entire crowd, as this is less than half of the room!

I am going to be offering a summer course this year that is outside my ordinary teaching rotation, Anthropology 300, "Cultural Anthropology: Theory and Ethnography". This is a survey of the history of anthropological theory. As a biological anthropologist, I have a distinctive perspective on this subject, which reflects my continued engagement with the history of anthropology and my exceptional training as a four-field anthropologist. I'm really excited to be able to offer this course to students here at UW!

If you're in the southern Wisconsin area early this summer, I encourage you to look into this course, either as a student or guest auditor. The course is offered in the 3-week Early Session, from May 29 to June 17. This is a great schedule for students who are taking other summer classes, because it is finished before the regular 8-week session starts on June 18.

I will be building a unique set of resources, including interviews, topical modules, and website devoted to the material. All this will be open access and free, so even if you're not in the area, I still encourage you to follow along with the course.

I guarantee that this will be the most highly-focused and thought-provoking survey of anthropological theory - a boot camp in the history of ideas about culture and human nature. I can't wait to start!

I have an article in Slate, where I riff on last week's silly suggestion to "bio-engineer humans" to stop climate change: "Can Bioengineers Make Human Beings More Sustainable?"

My take: The experiment has already been done!

When the climate warmed by several degrees around 8,000 B.C., it must have seemed at first like a wonderful dream. The glaciers melted. The human population grew and grew. There were more people than ever before, using a broader range of resources and eating a broader range of foods, and they invented beautiful and complex cultures.

That's when these people of the early Holocene did something truly bizarre. They reacted to all this climate change by engineering a new, more sustainable ecology. And they began to foster mutant children who would flourish in an alternate, globally warmed future.

Here's what I find interesting: Bioethicists suggest totalitarian-sounding approaches to genetic change. But with lactase persistence and amylase duplications, nature took a different course:

When it comes to cutting meat, natural selection has acted more like an entrepreneur than a eugenicist. Instead of giving us an aversion to meat, it lures us away from meat by offering a milkshake sweetened with corn syrup.

Of course, that just makes the population grow faster. Only one way to really solve this problem, and yes, my essay goes there...

The University of Wisconsin has a news article out on my new position as HHMI Faculty Fellow: "Forest and Hawks named 2012 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Fellows".

Hawks is an innovative educator and experienced mentor with a strong commitment to active learning and getting students involved in research.

“It is important to me that science be accessible, and that means that undergraduate students should be trained as creators, not merely consumers,” he says.

This is a really engaging program to work with, and we have to potential to do some real research on how biology undergraduate education can be improved. Plus, there's a great group of graduate and postdoctoral students now preparing to run the program in the fall, and it should be fun to mentor them!