Quote of the day
From p. 1 of Risk, by John Adams:
The apprehension, determination and intense concentration that can be observed in the face of a toddler learning to toddle, the wails of frustration or pain if it goes wrong, and the beaming delight when it succeeds -- are all evidence that one is in the presence of a serious risk-management exercise.
Quote of the day
From an Althouse commenter:
A friend of mine took a DNA test and found out what part of Africa his ancestors came from 186,000 years ago. This knowledge changed his life -- for about 10 minutes.
Quote of the day
Writer Brian Alexander, on the future of sex:
We're at that 1939-World's-Fair moment in which there's just enough new technology out there to spark some creative thinking about the shape of boinking to come.
Quote of the day
Joel Allen (1877:139), quoted in Virginie Millien and colleagues (2006):
The present more or less unstable condition of the circumstances surrounding organic beings, together with the known mutations of climate our planet has undergone in past geological ages, points clearly to the agency of physical conditions as one of the chief factors in the evolution of new forms of life.
References:
Allen JA. 1877. The influence of physical conditions in the genesis of species. Radical Review 1:108-140.
Millien V, Lyons SK, Olson L, Smith FA, Wilson AB, Yom-Tov Y. 2006. Ecotypic variation in the context of global climate change: revisiting the rules. Ecology Letters 9:853-869. doi:10.1111/j.1461-0248.2006.00928.x
Quote: What human evolution tells us about ourselves
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.
Quote of the day
Ann Althouse, deep in the comments wrapping a One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest metaphor:
Academia is, apparently, a mad house, and this blog is my bus ride and fishing expedition.
Quote of the day
Ann Althouse, on the death of an albino squirrel:Sometimes Mother Nature does the hawks a favor and serves up an easy lunch.
Quote of the day
Ann Althouse, on spouting off about topics outside one's expertise:
There are many problems that, for me, provoke only this thought: If it were my job to solve this problem, I would work on it, and, in this process working on it, anything I have to say about it now would be something I wouldn't waste my time on.
Quote of the day
Ann Miller in On the Town:
Yes, you see there are not too many modern males who can measure up to the prehistoric.
Quote: Ardipithecus alert!
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!"
References:
Gibbons A. 2008. Millennium ancestor gets its walking papers. Science 319:1599-1601. doi:10.1126/science.319.5870.1599
Quote: how immediate was that, again?
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.
Quote of the day
Last words of the real-life Bat Masterson, found "in his typewriter in the column he had been writing":
There are those who argue that everything breaks even in this old dump of a world of ours. I suppose these ginks who argue that way hold that because the rich man gets ice in the summer and the poor man gets it in the winter things are breaking even for both. Maybe so, but I'll swear I can't see it that way.
Quote of the day
Gregory Bateson, in Mind and Nature:
Naturally, anybody who feels heresy to be a danger will devote some care to being conscious of his or her own presuppositions and will develop a sort of connoisseurship in these matters.
Quote of the day
Bernard Wood, quoted in Ann Gibbons' story about KNM-ER 42700:
I am not willing to sell my shares in H. ergaster just yet, but I am not relying on them for my retirement!
Quote of the day
Gretchen, on the real estate listings for the tiny tax haven, Principality of Sealand, and Romania's Bran Castle, linked to Vlad the Impaler.
If I were Bill Gates, I could buy both and move Dracula's castle to my own island!
Quote: Not crazy enough to be believed
Attributed to Niels Bohr, in response to Wolfgang Pauli's account of electron spin:
Yes, I think that your theory is crazy. Sadly, it's not crazy enough to be believed.
Quote of the day
Business columnist John Brandt, using "Neanderthal Inc." as a stand-in for your typical stupid corporation:
Listen up: I've been CEO of Neanderthal Inc. for a lot of years, and if I've learned one thing, it's that if our employees were smart enough to be trained, they sure as hell wouldn't work here.
Quote: Effective population size in the Holocene
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.
Quote of the day
Regular Althouse commenter Madison Man, on the story about Neandertal women deerstalkers:
I'm guessing that cognitively less advanced is anthrospeak for dumber. It must be too judgemental to call Neanderthals stupid -- even though that's what the adjective means!
Quote of the day
Romanian skull dated to plus 35,000 years could be the product of Human-Neanderthal intercave love. I'm guessing this kid got beat up a lot. By humans and Neanderthals. Because cave children can be cruel.
Quote of the day:
From tonight's CSI:
KATHERINE: He manipulates evidence.
GRISSOM: He manipulates people. The public assumes that scientists are ethical, but many of us are no better than politicians, evidently.
Quote: Dart on the savanna model
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 seemed "harsh and forbidding" environments for a primate:
In anticipating the discovery of the true links between the apes and man in tropical countries, there has been a tendency to overlook the fact that in the luxuriant forests of the tropical belts, Nature was supplying with profligate and lavish hand an easy and sluggish solution, by adaptive specialization, of the problem of existence in creatures so well equipped mentally as living anthropoids are. For the production of man a different apprenticeship was needed to sharpen the wits and quicken the higher manifestations of intellect -- a more open veldt country where competition was keener between swiftness and stealth, and where adroitness of thinking and movement played a preponderating role in the preservation of the species. Darwin has said, "no country in the world abounds in a greater degree with dangerous beasts than Southern Africa," and, in my opinion, Southern Africa, by providing a vast open country with occasional wooded belts and a relative scarcity of water, together with a fierce and bitter mammalian competition, furnished a laboratory such as was essential to this penultimate phase of human evolution.
Quote: Darwin's beetle-poppin' youth
Charles Darwin, p. 50 in The life and letters of Charles Darwin, including an autobiographical chapter, vol. 1., edited by Francis Darwin, John Murray, London.
I will give a proof of my zeal: one day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.
Quote: Darwin on the food chain
From the Origin, second edition, pp. 73-74:
I have, also, reason to believe that humble-bees are indispensable to the fertilisation of the heartsease (Viola tricolor), for other bees do not visit this flower. From experiments which I have lately tried, I have found that the visits of bees are necessary for the fertilisation of some kinds of clover; but humble-bees alone visit the red clover (Trifolium pratense), as other bees cannot reach the nectar. Hence I have very little doubt, that if the whole genus of humble-bees became extinct or very rare in England, the heartsease and red clover would become very rare, or wholly disappear. The number of humble-bees in any district depends in a great degree on the number of field-mice, which destroy their combs and nests; and Mr. H. Newman, who has long attended to the habits of humble-bees, believes that "more than two-thirds of them are thus destroyed all over England." Now the number of mice is largely dependent, as every one knows, on the number of cats; and Mr. Newman says, "Near villages and small towns I have found the nests of humble-bees more numerous than elsewhere, which I attribute to the number of cats that destroy the mice." Hence it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!
Quote of the day
Darwin, in a letter to J. D. Hooker (Dec. 12, 1856):
It is really laughable to see what different ideas are prominent in various naturalists' minds, when they speak of 'species': in some, resemblance is everything and descent of little weight -- in some resemblance seems to go for nothing, and Creation the reigning idea -- in some descent is the key, -- in some, sterility an unfailing test, with others it is not worth a farthing. It all comes, I believe, from trying to define the undefinable.
Quote: What to do with Daylight Savings Time
Commenter Yajeev, on A Blog Around the Clock:
To be honest, I've only ever liked the Fall Back bit of DST, where we gain an hour of sleep. I propose that we forget the Spring Ahead nonsense and instead Fall Back twice a year: once in spring, once in autumn. In this respect, we will gain an hour of sleep two times in a 365-day period.
Furthermore, if we increased the frequency of backfalling and, say, Fell Back every two months (and who would turn down 60 free sleep minutes), over the course of 4 years, we will have gained an entire 24 hours. Then, we could do away with Leap Year.
Quote of the day
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,"
It's impossible to eat without eating genes.
from Biotechnology Australia (via Eye on DNA)
Quote: Dobzhansky on fat
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.
Quote of the day
Daniel Drezner, commenting on why suburbs mark the top ten places to live for "families with children":
At this point in the 21st century, having small children is kind of like belonging to a different religious persuasion that others view as bizarre and discomfiting. It's nice to be with one's own kind during these years.
Quote of the day
John Gibson, on Pluto's demotion:
Long ago I learned it was a planet and I see no reason to unlearn it. Why should I?
Quote of the day
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 could not possibly operate in space:
Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.
(from Wikipedia)
Also, from the original 1920 unsigned editorial, this nugget of wisdom:
To claim that it would be [able to operate in a vacuum] is to deny a fundamental law of dynamics, and only Dr. Einstein and his chosen dozen, so few and fit, are licensed to do that.
Quote: Selection is "widely ignored"
From p. xviii-xix of the preface of Selection, by Graham Bell (Chapman and Hall, New York, 1997):
One might expect, for example, that in Britain, the cradle of evolutionary biology, natural selection might be accorded an honored and conspicuous position. But in the published curricula of the programs that students follow preparatory to the university, it is no more prominent than aquaculture....
The treatment of selection in textbooks usually follows more or less the same course. There is an introductory section on genetics, sometimes even outlining the chemical structure of DNA, followed by an account of Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, a page or two of population genetics, and of course the history of the peppered moth. The whole is illustrated by a picture of Darwin, looking stern, as well he might. This is a caricature, of course, but by no means an unrecognizable one. Thousands of students have left courses on evolution with the vague impression that selection is something to do with the Hardy-Weinberg law, and study for the examination by trying to remember which it is that adenine pairs with.
Quote of the day
Ronald M. Green, ethicist, on building the "Bride of Neanderthal":
"If we learn this is a species that was wrongly pushed off the stage of history, there is something of a moral argument for bringing it back," he said. "But the status quo is not without merit."
Quote of the day
J. B. S. Haldane, first line of "A mathematical theory of natural and artificial selection" (1924, Trans Camb Phil Soc 23:19-41):
A satisfactory theory of natural selection must be quantitative.
Quote: the utility of computers
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...
Quote of the day
Jesper Hoffmeyer, in Signs of Meaning in the Universe (translated by Barbara Haveland):
When we became human beings, language ran its hyphae far into the nervous system allowing, today, no hope of excision -- not even in theory.
Quote of the day
Dirk Hooijer, writing in Scientific Monthly (72:3-8, 1951):
In Java it was a tribute to the experience of von Koenigswald that one out of every ten thousand specimens of vertebrate fossils found by his collectors belonged to a hominid.
Quote: Hooker on skepticism
Joseph Hooker, commenting on an address by Lord Kelvin concerning achievements in mathematics, in a letter to Charles Darwin, August 5, 1871:
I do not think Huxley will thank him for his reference to him as a positive unbeliever in spontaneous generation-these mathematicians do not seem to me to distinguish between un-belief and a-belief. I know no other name for the state of mind that is produced under the term scepticism.
Quote of the day
Ernest Hooton, in Up from the Ape (1946, Macmillan, New York: p. 488):
Any man or woman who has ever tried on a stiff straw hat, a bowler, or a silk "topper" knows that heads differ in shape and do not fit all hats. The only people who seem to be ignorant of this fact are those who make the hats.
Quote of the day
Cited in a lecture I heard today, from T. H. Huxley:
How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of Dun when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.
Quote of the day
From an article about An Inconvenient Truth causing controversy in a Washington school district:
"Condoms don't belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He's not a schoolteacher," said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old. "The information that's being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is. ... The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn't in the DVD."
Quote of the day
"Instapundit" Glenn Reynolds, contrasting the idea of trans-fat bans with the infamous fast food rat problem in NYC:
Before they start with their bureaucrat-empowering agenda of 21st-century health initiatives, maybe they should get a handle on the 19th-century health problems first.
Quote of the day
Tom Kirkwood, in "Ageing: Too fast by mistake", Nature 444:1015:
Contrary to general expectation, human life expectancy in developed countries has not bumped into a ceiling, but continues to increase by around two years per decade -- or five hours per day.
Quote of the day
Jim Laidler, quoted in a Slate article about vaccines and autism:
History tells us that a lot of ground-breaking discoveries are made by mavericks who don't follow the mainstream. What is often left out is that most of the mavericks are just plain wrong. They laughed at Galileo and Edison, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown and Don Knotts.
Quote of the day
K. S. Lashley (Quarterly Review of Biology 24:28, 1949):
When Phungst (1911) demonstrated that the horses of Elberfeld, who were showing marvelous linguistic and mathematical ability, were merely reacting to movements of the trainer's head, Mr. Krall, (1912), their owner, met the criticism in the most direct manner. He asked the horses whether they could see such small movements and in answer they spelled out an emphatic "NO."
Quote of the day
Frank Livingstone, in Current Anthropology (5:150, 1964):
In recent years there has been a remarkable outburst of interest in the problems connected with the origin of the hominids. These problems have great intrinsic interest for all of us but appear to have been somewhat neglected for many years. Perhaps new evidence, such as the many recent finds of the Australopithecines, has been responsible for some of this increased interest in hominid origins, but I think it is also due in part to a change in our theoretical outlook. We have begun to realize that facts do not speak for themselves but are always interpreted in a theoretical framework, and that, as much as we might wish it, we will never discover enough facts to reveal to us the total way of life of our transitional ancestors. Thus the development of an adequate explanation of the origin of the hominids and their peculiar capacities will result as much from the sifting of theoretical speculations as from the uncovering of new facts.
Quote: A Mad Men moment
Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) on Mad Men:
Sometimes when people get what they want, they realize how limited their goals were.
Surreal Neandertal quote of the day
Astronomer Christopher Martin, about the star with the tail:
If Neanderthal man had had ultraviolet eyes and could look above the atmosphere, he could have seen the beginning of this tail forming.
Quote of the day
H. L. Mencken:
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
Quote of the day: About that used toaster
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.
Movie synopsis of the day
Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), according to Yahoo:
A mad Darwinist has his ape fetch young women for experiments in 19th-century Paris. Based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe.
(It stars Bela Lugosi, and it's on tonight at 8:30 on TCM, in case you wondered).
Quote of the day
F. G. Parsons, commenting on the more brachycephalic student body of Cambridge compared to Oxford, in "The Cephalic Index of the British Isles," Man, 22:19-23, 1922, p. 23:
Where so many observers are involved the personal equation is sure to be there; indeed, in some places, glaring discrepancies need accounting for -- such as the enormous difference in the records of the Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates. Possibly a mistake in the arithmetic has crept in; but, if not, it would be very interesting to learn whether Cambridge still keeps up her average index of 796 while Oxford is only 780.
Quote: experiments and psychological universals
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."
Signs of irrelevance
From the NY Times sports section:
Old N.B.A. Try Is Becoming Cautionary Tale
Maybe Rick Pitino shared with Billy Donovan what he best remembers about his last N.B.A. coaching experience, when the grass in Boston looked so much greener than Kentucky's but life with the Celtics left him feeling a discredited shade of blue.
Maybe in a reported telephone conversation between mentor and disciple Pitino reminded Donovan of how some of the same players who jumped to his every frenzied college command tuned him out as if he were an anthropology professor when they were reunited in the pros.
Ooooh, that stung!
Quote of the day
Karl Popper, in Unended Quest:
Never let yourself be goaded into taking seriously problems about words and their meanings. What must be taken seriously are questions of fact, and assertions about facts: theories and hypotheses; the problems they solve and the problems they raise.
Quote of the day
From Cardinal Paul Poupard of the Pontifical Council for Culture (story at News.com.au):
The fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no scientific aim.
Quote of the day
From Jerry Pournelle:
Magic and Science were born twins. One of them worked.
Quote of the day
From Jerry Pournelle:
"'Trust us, we're the professionals' is almost always snake oil, and if you drink the snake oil you should not be astonished to discover that it wasn't even pure snake oil. There's probably kerosene and strychnine in there too."
Quote of the day
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 album in The Mail on Sunday newspaper:
The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behaviour like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores.
Quote of the day
Rachael Ray, in Entertainment Weekly:
EW: Do you ever worry that there can be only so much happiness in the universe, and that every time you smile, a unicorn gets punched in the face?
RR: I would smile all day long, if it guaranteed a unicorn getting punched in the face. I find them really annoying.
Strike "unicorn," insert "panda."
Quote: Riel-Salvatore on the "trait list" approach
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 at this:
On one side, people who still think of the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition in terms of a list of features that distinguish the UP from the MP (and by extension, modern humans from Neanderthals) probably clapped their hands excitedly before chiseling "sexual division of labor" into the stone tablet that bears the other commandments of modern human behavior.
Quote: Watson's DNA
The teaser to this post on Science Blog:
The next generation of genome sequencing has been published using the DNA of James Watson. I'll bet they used Rosalind Franklin's DNA as a test drive and didn't tell us.
Quote of the day
Metagenomics maven Eddy Rubin, on grinding up some more Neandertals, in Wired:
I need to get more bone ... I'll go to Russia with a pillowcase and an envelope full of euros and meet with guys who have big shoulder pads. Whatever it takes.
Quote of the day
Scooby and the gang, in "Never Ape and Ape Man", 1969:
DAPHNE: That's strange, apes don't eat meat.
FRED: Maybe this ape is more than an ape.... OK, let's split up and search for this ape man who eats hamburgers. And watch out for trap doors.
Quote of the day
Ego Seeman, on page 4583 of "Sexual dimorphism in skeletal size, density, and strength," J Clin Endocrin Metabol 86:4576-4584, 2001:
Osteoporosis begins by picking the wrong mother and father, it gains expression in the follies of a misspent youth and the excesses of adulthood, and strikes those forced to endure the futility of old age, inheriting its gifts, like senility and fractures.
Quote: Shaggy on the apeman
An apeman is supposed to be dumb. One that smart, I can live without!
Quote of the day
Claude Shannon, in The Mathematical Theory of Communication (p. 56-57):
The redundancy of a language is related to the existence of crossword puzzles. If the redundancy is zero any sequence of letters is a reasonable text in the language and any two-dimensional array of letters forms a crossword puzzle. If the redundancy is too high the language imposes too many constraints for large crossword puzzles to be possible. A more detailed analysis shows that if we assume the constraints imposed by the language are of a rather chaotic and random nature, large crossword puzzles are just possible when the redundancy is 50%. If the redundancy is 33%, three-dimensional crossword puzzles should be possible, etc.
Quote: Skunk apes
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 across an article about skunk apes as an eastern Tennessee cultural phenomenon. Here's a quote:
The legend of Bigfoot, even as a symbol for a kind of unkempt redneck naturalism, can remind us of a simpler time, back when fantasy and reality had more of a symbiotic relationship. Back when tall tales had a tinge of morality woven into the yarn.
(via Instapundit)
Quote of the day
My 5-year-old daughter, Sophie:
Reading is fundamental. What does "demental" mean?
Quote: Extra credit
Spongebob: But Mrs. Puff, I don't feel like I really did anything.
Mrs. Puff: That's how extra credit is supposed to feel.
Quote of the day
G. Ledyard Stebbins, on p. 241 of "The role of hybridization in evolution," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 103:231-251, 1959:
We inevitably reach the conclusion, therefore, that introgressive genotypes not only persist indefinitely, but that also, like polyploids, they can migrate far beyond the areas in which they originated, and can actually survive after the non-introgressed parental species has become extinct.
(quoted in our own paper, "Dynamics of adaptive introgression from archaic to modern humans," available as free full text):
Quote: Taxonomic versus behavioral outliers
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.
Quote of the day
Savage Minds poster Thomas Strong, in reference to blogging:
Melanesians not infrequently associate concealment with growth. As with the child in the womb, or the sweet potato in the garden, or the young woman before her debut, one way to achieve growth is to contrive its concealment.
Quote of the day
Zen priest Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi:
In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few.
Quote of the day
Justice Clarence Thomas, concurring in the decision of Parents v. Seattle School Board No. 1:
Indeed, if our history has taught us anything, it has taught us to beware of elites bearing racial theories.
Quote: Tobias on Dart's scientific importance
From p. 48 of P. V. Tobias, Dart, Taung, and the Missing Link, Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg:
All fossil hominid discoveries up to 1925 had bearings on the evolution of established and unequivocal hominids; they had illustrated teh changes that had occurred along the way from incontrovertible earlier hominids (like Homo erectus of Java) to later hominids (like Neandertal and Cro-Magnon men). Australopithecus imported an entirely new dimension into the picture: it opened a window, not on to the evolution of established hominids, but on to human emergence -- the very roots of the family of hominids from non-hominid predecessors. It posed such questions as these: What are the features that distinguish hominids from other primate families? Which of the hallmarks of mankind were the first to appear and when did they arise? How were the different traits that characterize the human family related to one another? -- such traits as uprightness and bipedal locomotion, reduced canines, brain enlargement and structural re-arrangement, the human grasping and manipulating hand, human communication, human material culture including tool-making activities?
These were the kinds of questions which Dart's discovery and what he made of it compelled upon the world of science. Countless new areas of investigation were opened up -- even if the motivation was the felt need to repudiate Dart's claims! Dart's plunge into ancestral waters took the twentieth century to the very fountainhead where one could plumb the depths of human genesis.
Quote of the day
From the Fortune sources:
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
Quote of the day
Erik Trinkaus, quoted by the BBC on the Tianyuan skeleton:
Sex happens. I find this neither disturbing nor surprising.
Quote of the day
G. H. R. von Koenigswald, in "Early Man: Facts and Fantasy", p. 67:
When I say 'our science' I mean what is called the science of Early Man or Palaeoanthropology, of which one quarter is anthropology, another palaeontology, another archaeology, and the last quarter is composed of fantasy, intuition, hard work and good luck, because our early ancestors really are elusive. What in more than a hundred years has been discovered of Neanderthal Man, fills but a small churchyard. What is known of pre-Neanderthal Man can be placed on two middle-sized tables, and what might belong to our Tertiary ancestors I can put on the palm of my hand. You can expect traces of Early Man practically everywhere, in caves, sand pits, and Chinese drugstores, but the hunt is still difficult, you have to be hunter and dog in one person.
References:
von Koenigswald GHR. 1964. Early man: facts and fantasy. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 94:67-79.
Quote of the day
Franz Weidenreich, in The Scientific Monthly 67, p. 106:
In the face of all these facts it is hard to understand why people cannot get rid of the idea that mere size or configuration of a special convolution or fissure must give a clue to the mental qualities in general and to those of certain individuals in particular. The desire to gaze into the crystal ball seems to exist not only among the clients of fortunetellers but also among scientists.
Quote of the day
Local personality Bill Wineke, on the channel 3 news, commenting on the Jesus tomb documentary:
My first reaction, I thought they should take the bones, put them back in the box, pop in Anna Nicole Smith, and put them back in the tomb.
Quote of the day
Nero Wolfe, in Prisoner's Base, by Rex Stout:
Archie, I said it was vainglorious to reproach yourself for lack of omniscience. The same is true of omnipotence.
Quote of the day
Milford Wolpoff, in "Neandertals in our family tree":Is it intellectually dead ideas about Neandertals or ideas about intellectually dead Neandertals?
Quote of the day:
General Zod, from Superman II, on visiting the Fortress of Solitude:
Scruffy. So morbid. A sentimental replica of a planet long since vanished. No style at all!
John Hawks Department of Anthropology
University of Wisconsin—Madison
Copyright © 2007 John Hawks