John Hawks, Fighting Missionary of the North
I always knew I had a superhero name -- but what I didn't know was that it was already taken:
First panel of "Sky Pilot" No. 10
That text reads:
The rugged stretches of the great Northwest were a spawning ground where the worst in men too often came out... and through this wild, dangerous territory roamed John Hawks, Sky Pilot, a man who quoted from the scriptures... and backed his words with muscles of steel, to guarantee that evil doers heeded them...
Hmm... sounds kind of like Samuel Jackson's character in Pulp Fiction! Oh yeah!
Memories of winter
I suppose winter's not quite over yet, but spring seems to have arrived here all of a sudden; all the snow melted this week.
So pictures are all we have left! We had the only giant caveman snowhead on the block:
About the site: a mission statement
There are few totally stable things on a weblog, but some sort of mission statement ought to be one of them. Mine has been more or less stable for a couple of years, and honestly, I haven't thought about it much since I wrote it. But things do have a way of changing, and that includes one's motivation for writing. So, this is the March 2007 version of the mission statement.
I started writing this blog for two basic reasons: first, because there are some really interesting issues in paleoanthropology that are not well covered in the mainstream science press, and second, because I needed a good way to organize my notes.
It turned out that the solution to the note-taking problem also made a nifty solution for writing about interesting issues -- blogging software is one of the best means of content management around. It became very simple to take notes on things I was reading, punch them up with a bit of information and context, and blog about them. In large part, what you see here are my own notes -- the very ones that I use to write my research papers and books.
Of course, things changed when people actually started reading the site.
About six months after I started writing, I had a steady readership with around 300 visits a day. This was quite an accomplishment -- for example, it was around twice the number of students I teach in an ordinary day. And those readers included many of my colleagues in the field -- it was not just a random sample of people interested in paleoanthropology, it included some highly influential opinion-leaders. I cannot express how much I was encouraged by the early praise of a few people.
Now, you have to understand -- I never advertised the site anywhere, or told anyone about it. I have to admit, I was worried that other people might not think this blogging thing was such a hot idea.
For one thing, I didn't have tenure. As useful as I find the blog to my own research efforts, it is not research itself. I don't get any credit for it, in other words. And I could easily imagine someone else wondering why I was spending my time this way, when I could be spending more time turning out research articles. I didn't worry about it too much -- my research record is pretty good -- but other prominent academic bloggers have been denied tenure.
For another thing, I'm honest. I'm critical when I review weak work. I point out when people say silly things -- of course, always making clear that they may have been misquoted. I'm critical of science reporting that gets the facts wrong. I've heard from people who don't like this, and they're entitled. Happily, most people like the honest approach!
Since those first months, the site has had basically monotonic growth. The current figures, for March 2007, are that I receive an average of 3500 visits a day. My readers are roughly half drive-bys from Google and other sites, and half regulars. During the course of a month, I am visited from over 100 countries on all continents -- including Antarctica (Hi, McMurdo!).
Remember, I thought I was a success when I had less than a tenth the readers I do now. So really, I'm delighted, and I think that the readers represent a great increase in both interest in the field, and in peoples' willingness to find out deeper details behind the stories in the news.
As my readership has increased, my writing style and inspiration has changed a bit. Mainly, I've gotten better at it. I have a much more natural style and a quicker rate of posting than when I started out. I would recommend to anyone -- if you want to get better at writing, then you have to set out deliberately to do it everyday. I've added more pop-culture elements, to the ultimate chagrin of my students, who can't understand where I get the time to watch all this television.
Another change is that I write rather less about my own research than when I started. I'm still taking the same notes that I started off with, but fewer of them find their way to the site. This is not for the reasons you might think -- if anything, they have gotten vastly more interesting. The main reason for suppressing them is that I have gotten involved in some big projects that really need to be kept under wraps until they are published. There's no helping it, really -- some of these involve data from other peoples' labs, and all of them involve ideas that could fairly easily be stolen by somebody with the right mathematical knowledge. So, I'm keeping secrets from you, at least for a while. Fortunately, since I am keeping the writing going on all of these projects, I will have a lot to post about them when I can do so.
Unlike many weblogs, I've never had a comments section here. Sometimes people ask me why I don't have comments. I don't have anything against them; in fact, I get quite a bit of pleasure out of reading comments threads on other blogs. I like a good flamewar as much as anyone else. But I really don't have time to administer comments in the way I would need to, and I definitely don't have time to be an active participant. So that takes away a lot of the interest -- if I spent a lot of time moderating a comment thread, it would definitely distract me from what I've been doing well.
Still, this isn't a one-way conversation -- I link to and respond to other weblogs, and include links to a number of newsgroups. If you are reading here and are inspired to write something, maybe you should consider starting your own site! It doesn't take a large investment of time, and it can be much more rewarding than being hidden in somebody's comments.
Or send me an e-mail. It's not so hard to find, and I really do reply most of the time. One of my regular correspondents complains that I never write back to him directly; I always reply in the form of a blog post. I always warn people that I teach several hundred students in an average semester, who have my e-mail priority, but I write back to almost everyone who writes me -- especially if it's interesting!
I'm always looking for new chances to talk about my work and collaborate with other scientists. If you're working on a problem related to human evolution, and you think I might be able to help, please let me know! I'm a unique scientist combining knowledge of human genetics with the fossil record, and I'm especially good at applying math to the problems of human origins. I specialize in solid, old-fashioned evolutionary theory -- you can call me a population genetics fundamentalist. It turns out that there's not quite enough of that to go around these days. So, if you think I might be able to help you out, please let me know!
John Hawks
I am currently Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University
of Wisconsin—Madison. This is my fifth year in Madison.
Research
Usually, in a person's CV there is a boilerplate section with a list of different general research areas. Here's mine:
Paleoanthropology. Anthropological genomics. Population genetics. Statistical approaches to fragmentary samples. Old World.
But what does this really mean? A bit of history about my work and some examples of what I am currently working on will help make that a little clearer.
Paleoanthropology:
I was trained as a paleoanthropologist. ``Paleoanthropology'' is more than a speciality within anthropology, or biology. It is an integrated study involving methods and insights from many fields.
To use evidence from the fossil record, we must be trained in human anatomy -- especially bone anatomy, or osteology. We have to know the anatomical comparisons between humans and other primates, and the way these anatomies relate to habitual behaviors. The social and ecological behaviors of primates vary extensively in response to their unique ecological circumstances. Understanding the relationship of anatomy, behavior, and environment gives us a way to interpret ancient fossils and place them in their environmental context.
Ancient environments were not the same as the ones we can explore today. These environments included different plants and animals, and they underwent large climatic shifts over time. Learning about the environmental context of human evolution. This is the subject matter of geology and paleontology, which are also essential to understanding the chronology of events in the past.
Integrating human biological evolution with the record of human behaviors requires a knowledge of archaeology. Stone tools and human-modified animal bones are the earliest record of our behavior. But some of the most recent evolutionary changes in humans happened at a time when people lived in cities and grew agricultural crops -- an even broader area of archaeology, ranging into history.
My doctoral advisor was Milford Wolpoff, who is well known as an innovator of the "multiregional" theory of modern human origins. But one of the reasons why Milford was so interesting to me as a student was his work on nearly every time period in human evolution -- ranging from the earliest hominids up to the evolution of modern humans. The integrative view across different time periods focuses on evolutionary theory and mainstream biology, not the particular hypotheses relating to any single event. I have been able to take this broad perspective in my own work -- I've written papers about the earliest hominids, later australopithecines, the origin of the genus Homo, Neandertals, modern human origins, and evolution within modern humans of the Late Pleistocene.
Statistical approaches to fragmentary samples
Skeletons don't generally come out of the ground whole. And there aren't very many of them. That means we need ways to compare and make conclusions based on bits and pieces. Every problem in paleoanthropology is to some extent unique, because it depends on a unique combination of the bits and pieces. My unique ability is figuring out how to make valid comparisons out of this mess.
Sometimes this means working out boundary conditions for valid comparisons. That is to say, sometimes the data look like an evolutionary trend happened, but how can we know that the "trend" isn't just the way the bones happened to fall into the ground?
For example, a lot of people used to think that Neandertals in Europe became stranger and stranger-looking over time. Their increasing anatomical "specialization" was taken as evidence that they were evolving separately from other humans -- the two groups were proposed to be more and more different into the last ice age. But together with Milford, I was able to show that Neandertal features weren't becoming more specialized. Instead, Neandertals seem to have maintained a fairly consistent degree of difference from other human populations throughout their existence, with many features evolving in the same pattern in Neandertals and other humans.
This was a case where understanding the evolutionary theory was essential to interpreting the pattern of anatomical evolution. Clearly, Neandertals and other humans were different. But how much difference is expected between populations that share a common pattern of evolution? And how much difference does it make that the small samples of these populations come from different times and places? Those are the kinds of questions that I answer.
Population genetics
Population genetics is the mathematical theory of evolutionary change. It major development occurred during the 1920's and 1930's by Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright, and J. B. S. Haldane. The concepts of population genetics were integrated into the study of biological evolution during the 1930's and 1940's, and the study was consolidated as the "Synthetic Theory" of evolution.
I'm a bit of a fundamentalist about genetics. A lot of interesting strings were dropped by Fisher and Wright, and didn't really get woven into the synthetic understanding of populations. I've been working on picking up a few of these. Additionally, the later development of genetics by people like W. D. Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, and C. H. Waddington created new opportunities to examine the evolution of populations over time. But for the most part, their theories have been examined in a static context, without a consideration of their dynamics over time.
If you're training to be an anthropologist, some of this probably sounds strange and foreign to you. It's OK. Read some Dobzhansky, that will give you a start.
My current work has involved two of these dropped threads of theory -- one related to the introgression of selected alleles onto new genetic backgrounds, and the other...well, the other is a secret for the moment. Introgression is a possible model for a number of genes that appear to document the genetic survival of Neandertals into later European populations. The idea that a gene could be plucked from an ancient population and actually succeed in a later population
Anthropological genomics
During the past few years, I have spent an increasing proportion of my time working with data from the Human Genome Project, the International HapMap, and other projects that have generated information about the workings and variation of multiple genes.
Ten years ago, we were lucky to be able to assess the variation of a single gene within more than one human population. I, like many other people, spent much effort trying to distinguish the effects of natural selection and ancient human demography on a single gene. Most people who know anything about human genetics will remember those days well -- nearly 10 years spent arguing about what mitochondrial DNA could say about modern human origins, without any substantial information from any other gene! My dissertation tried to test hypotheses about ancient human demography using information from four genes. That was a major innovation!
The missing connection in genomics is the historical and prehistoric record of human evolution. Both recent and ancient evolutionary changes in genes had effects on human phenotypes. Genomics has recently made two things very clear. First, the kind of variation between people is heterogenous -- with different genetic systems showing different patterns of variation. Second, the pace of change during human evolution was not uniform.
This is the most active area of my research, and so I can say the least about it. But it is an important direction moving the field forward to consider a new, and vastly greater, source of data.
Other stuff
My scientific work hasn't been limited to genetics and fossils. Lately, I have become more and more interested in the problems of cultural transmission and information theory. This is part of my "first principles" approach to problems in prehistory -- I think that we have to build an account of the origins of culture that is based in the simplest rules of information transfer.
In a sense, these issues are very similar to the issues of genetic transfer and the evolution of human genetic variation. However, with genetics we are beginning with a very well-defined system with rules that have hardly changed since the Paleocene. The content in humans is new, but the system is old.
With culture, we have a very new system, certainly novel in primates, that has been rapidly changing. The transmission properties are not well defined, and our ability to pick up information has recently rapidly evolved. Why? What were the factors that led to these new adaptations? How do the problems of information transfer relate to the human perception and use of signs? What are the connections between information theory and semiotics in the origin of culture?
It's an interesting problem, and since none of it is secret, I've been writing about it a bit.
Zagreb.
Welcome to a new Hawks
Wednesday night Gretchen and I went to the hospital at 11:30, where she delivered our new son, Goodwin Everett Hawks, at 5:54 Thursday morning.
Goodwin weighed 9 pounds 4 ounces and was 20.5 inches long. He came home on Saturday, and is the apple of all three sisters' eyes.
Welcome to "Higher Ground" listeners!
If you are coming by because you heard the address on WPR's "Higher Ground" with Jonathan Overby, let me wish you a warm welcome. Feel free to explore a bit.
I have a FAQ about the Flores hominids, or you can go to the full listing about Flores, which includes the latest news about the damage to the fossils and my opinion about what the fossils represent.
The weblog is a combination of news in human evolution, my own research and reviews, and thoughts about our place in nature. I try to update often, and include as much "behind the scenes" information about new finds as I can. I also have a number of posts relating to the teaching of evolution in schools. Some of the material is a little technical, because I keep my own notes here; but I refer the site to all my students, so I try to keep it accessible.
If you're a teacher in Wisconsin public schools and would like to find out more about human evolution, please let me know. You'll find my email address on my faculty listing at the UW anthropology department. (Why don't I provide a direct mailto:// link? To cut down the spam, of course!)
John Hawks Department of Anthropology
University of Wisconsin—Madison
Copyright © 2007 John Hawks