Neandertal anti-defamation files, 22
This, from ScienceAlert:
This, from ScienceAlert:
This is Thanksgiving weekend in the U.S., and friends on my social feeds have been forwarding a proverb: “When you have more than you need, build a longer ta...
Another view on paleo lifestyles:
From PC World: “Neanderthals vs. Homo sapiens - Lessons Learned”
Me: “So apparently today is the tenth anniversary of the first Eccleston episode.”
Female Science Professor has a new post, “Contest Entry: Rejection Letters, 3”, which presents what must be the most ideal rejection letter for a faculty job...
Chris Mooney reviews the book, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us by Avi Tuschman, in an article in Washington Monthly: “The O...
This explains a lot. Nobody likes lumpers:
I was just telling an audience of 500 the other day that Neandertals were really not very much like professional athletes. Now this, from BusinessWeek: “NFL ...
From The Onion:
Mindy Pitre forwarded me a video done by her undergraduate students at St. Lawrence University, and I just had to share it. It is about as adorable as cavema...
Talking to my clones today during their St. Patrick’s Day preparations:
I have to drive some more traffic to this post on Forbes’ website (“The least stressful jobs of 2013”), because it has me laughing out loud. Number one on th...
Let no one say that I’m an uncritical voice about the many advantages of releasing preprints. They do have their downsides. Lack of editing is one.
Highly recommended for Friday: Michael Eisen on “Is the NIH a cult?”
Brian Palmer: “Who Would Win in a Fight: a Modern Human or a Neanderthal?”
The headline of this Guardian story really says it all: “Priceless Tibetan Buddha statue looted by Nazis was carved from meteorite”.
Razib Khan raises the question whether Neandertal cloning could be ethical, and a varied comment thread quickly ensues.
I’ve been offline for the past several days on a family vacation. So I get back and what do I find in my feed reader?
Barbara King joins the Neandertal Anti-Defamation League with her new post at NPR: “Giving Neanderthals Some Respect (Especially In An Election Year)”.
“Peer fortress: The scientific battlefield” uses first-person shooter gaming characters to put a humorous spin on scientific peer review. Six characters that...
David Swindle, writing at PJ Media about George Lucas’ revelation that Han Solo would never have shot first.
I have to note this brouhaha from across the Atlantic: along with Pippa Middleton, Gabrielle Giffords and others…
Marshall Sahlins writing in the pamphlet, Waiting for Foucault, p. 18:
Another Geico commercial tonight during college football bowl season: Geico Caveman is playing Scrabble with some famous NFL player. Caveman plays “CAT” and ...
G: Guess what Daddy and I learned last night? I'm more Neandertal than he is!
John Scalzi: “Lord of the Tweets”.
I was genome browsing this morning and noticed something strange going on at UCSC.
The New York Times Magazine tries for a new record in academic killjoy columns: “Wouldnt It Be Cool if Shakespeare Wasnt Shakespeare?”
Our Lady of Eternal Osteology:
The Guardian writes about the amazing comeback of Zahi Hawass (“Egypt’s man from the past who insists he has a future”). Whether it’s a comeback or just an u...
From an article about exploring Saturn’s moon, Titan, I have never in my life seen a scientist quote that sounds more like something Professor Frink would sa...
This is the time of year when hapless students all over the world turn to my blog to answer their exam questions.
From The Economist, “What’s wrong with America’s economy?”
Martin Robbins goes ape:
I so totally wish I’d thought of this first: “An Open Letter To People Who Think They Have Found The Artifact That Will Change Archaeology As We Know It”
I am just about to go crazy today. I just can’t seem to escape the “gay caveman” story.
British wine guru, Oz Clarke, of Top Gear-head James May as he teaches him how to judge wine and squash grapes:
From satirical site Glossy News: “Painting of Big Mac Found in Neanderthal Cave”.
Here’s a quote from Ales Hrdlicka’s report on “Lansing Man” – a skeleton found near Lansing, Kansas in 1902, which was proposed as extremely early evidence o...
Slate has an editorial by Farhad Manjoo, featuring the idiocy of people who write crank letters to NPR (“We Listen to NPR Precisely To Avoid This Sort of Stu...
Today, it was Senator John Kerry:
I can’t bear to watch it again, and I don’t see why I should tolerate anyone else having to watch it. But I can’t sit quietly while physicist Michio Kaku tel...
From The Onion:
Why do they have to bring poor Neandertals into it?
Before anyone asks: Yes, I’m aware of the Academy’s unfortunate misspelling.
Cracked.com features “8 Famous Fictional Archaeologists Who Suck At Their Job”.
OK, at ScienceOnline2011 I did a little bit of talking about Neandertals represented in art. So this entry in the NAD files truly pains me.
On tonight’s Hawaii Five-O:
From The Simpsons:
Headline from the Telegraph:
GOODWIN: Are atoms made of smaller atoms? ME: No, atoms are made of smaller particles, called protons, neutrons and electrons. GOODWIN: I’m a neutron and you...
I love the Poster Venn diagram” from Better Posters – stuff people usually put on academic posters intersected with what viewers care about. So I won’t cut a...
For two weeks I’ve been reading news feeds about how volcanoes killed the Neandertals. I mean, seriously:
A comic-page exposition of Neandertal DNA is online from Scientific American MIND.
OMG! Sue Sylvester said “hominid!”
So, it’s a perfectly ordinary story about epigenetics and how the methylation of some genes may be correlated with BMI. But what I don’t understand is the he...
A reader writes: “A good argument to require introductory anthropology”:
Well, it looks like the British Science Festival is going to be a whole lot stranger than the World Science Festival was:
Savage Minds:
Headline from Radio New Zealand:
Headline from The Telegraph:
MRS. PUFF: Congratulations, SpongeBob, you pass! SPONGEBOB: But Mrs. Puff, I don't feel like I've really done anything. MRS. PUFF: That's how extra credit is...
Man, I wish I’d have thought of this:
Ringo Starr turns 70 years old today. Many are reminiscing about some music group he was apparently part of. As for myself, I will forever treasure his geniu...
Homer Simpson, at the zoo:
If you want to give yourself a caveman (or cavewoman) makeover, well, now there’s an app for that:
The New York Times decided to honor our newfound ancestry with Neandertals by…
The Age:
ME: Sophie! You’re lying down on the job, frittering your young life away!
From the Toronto Sun:
A real headline:
The local station is playing the “creationism” episode of The Simpsons today – maybe in honor of Darwin this week? A Marge Simpson quote from the end:
By popular request from scads of readers:
I blame Harold Dibble. Oh, sure, all these “paleo diet” people point the figure at Loren Cordain, but Dibble was the first to give them a cookbook!
From The Onion:
From The Onion:
Happy New Year, from One Million B. C.:
From The Onion:
Here’s the top hit for “Neanderthal” on Google News today:
A club I won’t be joining, from Improbable Research:
I haven’t been blogging quite as often, but you can see I’ve been busy with other business:
I’m laughing so hard it hurts:
Lawn Chair Anthropology: “Halloween special: Heterotopy, pleiotropy, and the origins of vampires”
From a reader, a comparison:
EXTREME PILBEAM ON LOVEJOY ACTION!!!!
Uhhh…
A reader forwarded the news about a new baby panda at the San Diego Zoo. Now, I know everybody expects to get their hot panda news here, but the video was ba...
From the New York Times story about Caster Semenya, “Gender Test After a Gold-Medal Finish”:
From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:
Scene opens: Geico cavemen bowling commercial
Funny, this didn’t stand out to me at the Field when we were there last…
Earnest Hooton, on p. 170 of Up From the Ape:
There was a really stupid article in the Times (UK) yesterday: “Women are getting more beautiful”. You know I don’t say that lightly. But I had to quote what...
From The Onion:
It’s like the final scene in The Maltese Falcon:
This is random, but John Dvorak writing about the portable phone craze had me laughing:
If you don’t know about Ricky Gervais and Karl Pilkington, you can read more at this interview of Gervais by Australia’s Asylum. Where Ricky exposes his secr...
Strange experience of today: hearing Christian Slater explain to me how to integrate myself into australopithecine society.
A reader sent along this NY Times article about the town in Brazil with an unusual concentration of twins. Naturally, it’s a Boys from Brazil type of scenari...
A recent BBC story described one musician’s attempt to recreate the “Neandertal” musical experience:
I naturally select you…
A nice little blog post on David Reed’s work transmutes into a headline from the Onion:
Story 1:
GRETCHEN: Crazy Like a Fox? Where do you think you are, 1984?
As you ramp up for finals, you may want to keep your options open:
And isn’t that always the way?
Julien Riel-Salvatore on peer review:
In the Halloween spirit yet? If not, think about this:
Bracey said he bought the skulls as a teenager on a family trip to Egypt. But he buried them years later when his wife said she didn't want them around any l...
From the “AntiCraft”: instructions for making the ultimate bacon tiara:
In this political season, those of us in “battleground states” are looking back to the political ads of 1796:
Biologists to get their own accelerator:
John Dvorak:
GREEDO: Going somewhere, Solo?
This is too strange:
Finally, a panda story I can get on board with:
Reading through the introduction to Archaeology and Language, by Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs (1998), I thought this quote was great:
On Monday’s “NewsHour”, PBS ran an interview with archaeologist Dennis Jenkins, who worked on the Paisley Caves human-DNA-containing scat.
Hoowuulyeaaaach!
In an otherwise very interesting story about the mechanism of behavioral dimorphism in fruit fly mating:
Not exactly a metaphor, but certainly of questionable taste in this story titled, "'Sex Pest' Seal Attacks Penguin":
John: I got the strangest e-mail today. It was from the University -- they wanted me to fill out "an important survey from Homeland Security."
The teaser to this post on Science Blog:
In a New Scientist story about the feet of H. floresiensis:
The first seal is broken, and the Giant Panda Genome Project commences:
I've been noticing lately an awful lot of stories in which some celebrity blithely espouses total pseudo-medical mumbo-jumbo. Since celebrities exist only t...
Last week's story about the negative correlation between beer consumption and scientific productivity has brought out the cutting crew. In this blog post at...
Owen Lovejoy, quoted in an Ann Gibbons news piece:
This seems like a fitting St. Patrick's Day story:
The movie, 10,000 B.C., blew away the competition last weekend, with an estimated $35.7 million in US box office receipts.
In Mankind Evolving, 1962, p. 310:
Ann Althouse, confronting the Laetoli footprint-makers reconstruction at the American Museum of Natural History:
Reading up on inbreeding depression and deleterious recessive alleles, I happened across a reference to a 1997 paper by W. Scheidel:
They could have just asked...
Spongebob: But Mrs. Puff, I don't feel like I really did anything.
My UW colleague Karen Strier, writing in a comment after a paper by Sayers and Lovejoy on the chimpanzee referent in paleoanthropology:
The National Geographic story about gorillas mating in the missionary position is one of those unique science stories: it's full of lines that sound innocuo...
How could I not look at an article headlined, "Coping with the Caveman in the Crib"? It's a health piece by Tara Parker-Pope, profiling "baby whisperer" Har...
Writer Jeff Harrell, on hacking together an obscure-but-useful piece of CSS/Javascript:
Uhhh...this headline doesn't say it all, but it says enough:
Monk, explaining why he won't buy a used toaster, even if it is only five bucks:
So, a monkey in North Carolina was controlling a robot in Japan, using only its brain waves.
Steven Pinker, on the experiments that drive interpretations about moral intuition:
My colleague Greg Cochran, commenting on population models with small effective sizes up to the present:
Product design guru Donald Norman looks at this year's crop of "smart" machines in this NY Times article, and reminds us why future robot sex ain't all it's...
National Geographic is reporting on an internet hoax: A digitally altered photograph created in 2002 shows a reclining giant surrounded by a wooden platf...
Alec Baldwin, appearing in "Walking With Cavemen":
From the Origin, second edition, pp. 73-74:
TechRepublic blogger Jay Garmon pinpoints the problem with the Star Wars prequels: midichlorians.
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 a...
It's cute, it hugs its own little toy, and it's brought to you by WowWee, the same nice people who built the "Alive" Chimpanzee. It's beginning to smell lik...
An apeman is supposed to be dumb. One that smart, I can live without!
Commenter Yajeev, on A Blog Around the Clock:
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 acro...
Michelle Tsai of Slate tells what to do when monkeys attack:
Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) on Mad Men:
Has this guy gone over the edge?
From p. 48 of P. V. Tobias, Dart, Taung, and the Missing Link, Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg:
Raymond Dart (p. 198 of Australopithecus africanus, the man-ape of South Africa, Nature 115:195-199, 1925), summing up why hominids might have lived in what...
In a LiveScience article about how capuchin monkeys wash their hands and feet in urine:
GRETCHEN: You mean that I wouldn't have been tall enough to leave Africa?
From Tuesday's New York Times article:
From p. xviii-xix of the preface of Selection, by Graham Bell (Chapman and Hall, New York, 1997):
Attributed to Niels Bohr, in response to Wolfgang Pauli's account of electron spin:
Charles Darwin, p. 50 in The life and letters of Charles Darwin, including an autobiographical chapter, vol. 1., edited by Francis Darwin, John Murray, Lond...
Joseph Hooker, commenting on an address by Lord Kelvin concerning achievements in mathematics, in a letter to Charles Darwin, August 5, 1871:
Astronomer Christopher Martin, about the star with the tail:
Bernard Wood, quoted in Ann Gibbons' story about KNM-ER 42700:
Scooby and the gang, in "Never Ape and Ape Man", 1969:
My headline being an homage to the legless panda story earlier this month, I note the continued interest in panda dung recycling, which has now combined wit...
I always get the most interesting mail right after any kind of news interview. Here's the best from last week:
Ego Seeman, on page 4583 of "Sexual dimorphism in skeletal size, density, and strength," J Clin Endocrin Metabol 86:4576-4584, 2001:
F. G. Parsons, commenting on the more brachycephalic student body of Cambridge compared to Oxford, in "The Cephalic Index of the British Isles," Man, 22:19-...
From Don Surber, with reference to the music at "Live Earth":
Now, see, here's the thing. I was reading this story about how this panda in Washington D.C., Mei Xiang, isn't pregnant:
Jim Laidler, quoted in a Slate article about vaccines and autism:
UK Entertainment Retailers Association co-chairman Paul Quirk, quoted in The Guardian, on Prince's distribution of over 2 million free copies of his new alb...
Justice Clarence Thomas, concurring in the decision of Parents v. Seattle School Board No. 1:
Another one of those random Google Scholar results:
Problems with panda releases:
From the NY Times sports section:
Ernest Hooton, in Up from the Ape (1946, Macmillan, New York: p. 488):
Answer to the "genetic modification myth," "GM food means that we'd be eating genes and it's not natural to eat another organism's genes,"
Is there a subtle hidden plan?
That's what they're calling the imminent invasion of 17-year cicadas that we're supposed to get here next month.
Business columnist John Brandt, using "Neanderthal Inc." as a stand-in for your typical stupid corporation:
Daniel Drezner, commenting on why suburbs mark the top ten places to live for "families with children":
In a press release about the successful application of green bottlefly larvae to cure (by chewing on) foot ulcers in diabetic patients, by University of Man...
There's this quiz from USA Weekend -- that Sunday newspaper insert magazine:
From a Carl Zimmer story about the incredibly long phalluses of certain ducks:
JOHN: Now, that's a frightening headline.
Savage Minds poster Thomas Strong, in reference to blogging:
Joel Allen (1877:139), quoted in Virginie Millien and colleagues (2006):
Erik Trinkaus, quoted by the BBC on the Tianyuan skeleton</a>:
If you're waiting for an update on the effectiveness of panda porn -- and I know you are! -- well, here is the story for you:
Gretchen and I have been laughing for twenty minutes at the Sloganizer. They warn of a danger of addiction. So remember, "Step into the light with John Hawk...
G. H. R. von Koenigswald, in "Early Man: Facts and Fantasy", p. 67:
Ann Miller in On the Town:
OK, I have to admit I went looking right away for a Mr. Potato Head picture to illustrate that last story, and what do I find but this:
Saw this today from The Onion, it's an oldie but a goodie:
"Instapundit" Glenn Reynolds, contrasting the idea of trans-fat bans with the infamous fast food rat problem in NYC:
Local personality Bill Wineke, on the channel 3 news, commenting on the Jesus tomb documentary:
ME: There's this long-running debate about limb proportions in australopithecines. Lucy is sort of humanlike -- she has short arms and long legs.
Hmmm...
Zen priest Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi:
J. B. S. Haldane, first line of "A mathematical theory of natural and artificial selection" (1924, Trans Camb Phil Soc 23:19-41):
The Cowardly Lion costume in The Wizard of Oz film was made from real lions.
Gretchen, on the real estate listings for the tiny tax haven, Principality of Sealand, and Romania's Bran Castle, linked to Vlad the Impaler.
Pandas, of course. This article about the exceptional 2006 panda birth rate (217) is acccompanied by a photo of a half dozen flopping panda cubs in a pile. ...
Ann Althouse, deep in the comments wrapping a One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest metaphor:
Tom Kirkwood, in "Ageing: Too fast by mistake", Nature 444:1015: </p>
G. Ledyard Stebbins, on p. 241 of "The role of hybridization in evolution," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 103:231-251, 1959:
In honor of the season, I ran across Radar Magazine's list of 10 dangerous toys from years gone by.
New York Times corrections column, on July 17, 1969 (a day after the Apollo 11 launch), referring to a 1920 column that claimed Robert Goddard's rockets cou...
From p. 1 of Risk, by John Adams:
Regular Althouse commenter Madison Man, on the story about Neandertal women hunting:
From The Onion:
From a story titled, "Porn sparks panda baby boom in China":
A conversation:
Found this in Nature a couple of weeks ago:
Signs that the Japanese robot industry has gone too far:
I was putting together some anagrams on human evolution-related phrases, which turns out to be a bit of a challenge. I have no idea how hard they are to uns...
Has the Hwang Woo-suk scandal jumped the shark?
From the AP:
From the Fortune sources:
Rachael Ray, in Entertainment Weekly:
Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), according to Yahoo:
In the "great minds think alike" category, Gretchen sends me this:
Hmm... How will I explain this charge to Gretchen?
Milford Wolpoff, in “Neandertals in our family tree”: </p>
Hmm...
You may have heard how I feel about pandas:
Ann Althouse, on the death of an albino squirrel: </p>
Franz Weidenreich, in The Scientific Monthly 67, p. 106:
Dirk Hooijer, writing in Scientific Monthly (72:3-8, 1951):
John Gibson, on Pluto's demotion:
From The Onion:
In case you haven't been following the "pluton" controversy, here's a pointer to Nature News on the topic. A pluton is a kind of underground igneous rock fo...
Writer Brian Alexander, on the future of sex:
In a case of neuroscience resembling the Onion, we have a Reuters article about how stupid dolphins are. It ends with this quote:
General Zod, from Superman II, on visiting the Fortress of Solitude:
This just in:
Ronald M. Green, ethicist, on building the "Bride of Neanderthal":
...is Al Gore, who is staring over my shoulder from the cover of Entertainment Weekly that Gretchen is reading:
I think I'll make this a new feature, since all kinds of interesting things pop up in my Google Scholar searches. Here's one:
With apologies to James Taranto, this from Science Blog caught my eye:
Metagenomics maven Eddy Rubin, on grinding up some more Neandertals, in Wired:
Is it so wrong that my guilty pleasure this week is reading this man's diary of his experiment in eating only monkey chow?
One of those things that says, "Please stop reading now" :
Is this the definition (CNN) of a slow news day?
Darwin, in a letter to J. D. Hooker (Dec. 12, 1856):
Claude Shannon, in The Mathematical Theory of Communication (p. 56-57):
K. S. Lashley (Quarterly Review of Biology 24:28, 1949):
Jesper Hoffmeyer, in Signs of Meaning in the Universe (translated by Barbara Haveland):
Karl Popper, in Unended Quest:
Ann Althouse, on spouting off about topics outside one's expertise:
Frank Livingstone, in Current Anthropology (5:150, 1964):
Gregory Bateson, in Mind and Nature:
My 5-year-old daughter, Sophie:
James Lileks, on novice ice skaters:
I'm catching up on some blogging, and this story in New Scientist has been sitting on my computer for a couple of days:
From my secret, "Why I am not a physicist", file:
Couples really do look like each other:
You've probably seen the story about the Foja Mountains in Papua New Guinea. Here are a couple of paragraphs:
From an Althouse commenter:
I can't believe my #1 Google search this month is "Humanzee". I wrote about King Kong humanzee trivia last month. It sure is an interesting story, about Sov...
From Science Blog:
I have a history of quality pig-blogging here, and this BBC story has all the right ingredients:
If you need a laugh, try this piece of fake news from The Swift Report:
OK, I wouldn't be so concerned about "Gene turn-off makes meek mice fearless" (New Scientist):
My eye was drawn to this LiveScience story about "virtual professors". The idea is that you could get young women more interested in engineering if they had...
From Cardinal Paul Poupard of the Pontifical Council for Culture (story at News.com.au):
From tonight's CSI:
From the "any publicity is good publicity" department: Popular Science's list of the worst jobs in science includes "Orangutan-pee collector".
Cited in a lecture I heard today, from T. H. Huxley:
In honor of the season, HowStuffWorks.com has an article on the workings of zombies.
Googling something else entirely brought me this page by Edmund D. Brodie III, chronicling a few of the comments from manuscript reviews he's received over ...
In honor of Halloween, the Washington Post has a story on extreme pumpkin-growers. It's a great example of massive phenotypic change in a few generations:
From Jerry Pournelle:
The AP article ends this way:
On the topic of animal intelligence, there is this from The Observer:
H. L. Mencken:
From Jerry Pournelle:
On the "Chimpanzee Genome Consortium": Gretchen says that anything involving the words "chimpanzee" and "consortium" creeps her out.
From Ann Althouse:
From MSNBC:
I have to say I love this quote:
National Geographic News is running an interview with space scientists Seth Shostak and Bruce Betts on whether the extraterrestrial worlds in the Star Wars ...
On the subject of pigs, there is this story from the Weekly World News: