john hawks weblog

paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

humor

  • Peer review in Castle Wolfenstein

    Tue, 2012-03-13 20:24 -- John Hawks

    "Peer fortress: The scientific battlefield" uses first-person shooter gaming characters to put a humorous spin on scientific peer review. Six characters that might show up whenever you submit a manuscript. The one I seem to get most often is the Medic:

    The Medic wanted to save your paper.

    But, they ended up killing the patient.

    Rife with suggestions for improvement, the Medic's review somberly concludes that "even though I enjoyed the paper, it would be premature to publish these results at this time."

    Tags: 
    humor
    peer review

  • Neandertal anti-defamation files, 15

    Sun, 2012-02-12 21:10 -- John Hawks

    David Swindle, writing at PJ Media about George Lucas' revelation that Han Solo would never have shot first.

    Here’s the medicine we all need to swallow: as children we were more grown up than George Lucas is now as an adult. Han Solo’s entire character rested on what we saw in that early scene in the film. In shooting first Han Solo was a role model doing what any Real Man was supposed to do. Now we know that character only existed in our imaginations, not his creator’s. And that George Lucas regards most of his fans as amoral neanderthals.

    Han shooting first has appeared previously here. It's quite obvious that any moral Neandertal would have shot first, too. No one who brought us midichlorians can be trusted on matters of morality.

    Tags: 
    Neandertal anti-defamation files
    humor
    Neandertals
    Star Wars
    movies

  • Pandagate

    Thu, 2011-12-29 10:34 -- John Hawks

    I have to note this brouhaha from across the Atlantic: along with Pippa Middleton, Gabrielle Giffords and others...

    BBC criticised for naming panda as a woman of the year

    John Prescott took to his Twitter account and said: "So the BBC couldn't find a woman for Sports Personality of the Year but they could find a panda for a female face of 2011 #pandagate."

    Labour MP Stella Creasy said: "No offence to sweetie – sure a lovely panda and best in class etc- but clue is in title 'women' not 'female of the species' of the year ..."

    Lovely.

    Tags: 
    pandas
    humor

  • Quote: Marshall Sahlins on relevance

    Mon, 2011-12-19 15:36 -- John Hawks

    Marshall Sahlins writing in the pamphlet, Waiting for Foucault, p. 18:

    Relevance

    I don't know about Britain, but in America many graduate students are totally uninterested in other times and places. They say we should study our own current problems, all other ethnography being impossible anyhow, as it is just our "construction of the other."

    So if they get their way, and this becomes the principle of anthropological research, fifty years hence no-one will pay the slightest attention to the work they're doing now. Maybe they're onto something.

    Tags: 
    history of anthropology
    humor
    teaching
    ethnography

  • Neandertal anti-defamation files, 14

    Sat, 2011-12-17 18:48 -- John Hawks

    Another Geico commercial tonight during college football bowl season: Geico Caveman is playing Scrabble with some famous NFL player. Caveman plays "CAT" and is proud of himself. Football jock plays "NEANDERTHAL".

    The usual huffy indignation ensues.

    I suppose it's not really defamatory...but I've come to expect a certain level of entertainment from the Geico Cavemen, and this just fell far short of my standard.

    Tags: 
    Neandertal anti-defamation files
    Neandertals
    humor
    GEICO cavemen

  • Over coffee

    Fri, 2011-12-16 08:03 -- John Hawks

    G: Guess what Daddy and I learned last night? I'm more Neandertal than he is!

    S: How did you find that out?

    G: Our genes.

    S: That's creepy.

    G: What do you mean, creepy? We think it's awesome!

    S: Awesome... in a creepy way.

    Tags: 
    over coffee
    humor
    Neandertal DNA
    testing
    23andMe

  • Phylogeny capitulates to ontology

    Sun, 2011-11-06 09:41 -- John Hawks

    I was genome browsing this morning and noticed something strange going on at UCSC.

    Whoa, I thought! What's Denisova doing there listed with the yeasts? Just an accident of how they have categorized, of course -- it's a catch-all category because they have really few human-specific datasets. Err...

    Hey! Perfectly innocent, I'm sure...

    Tags: 
    humor
    genomics
    UCSC Genome Browser

  • Hollywood's war on Shakespeare

    Thu, 2011-10-27 15:43 -- John Hawks

    The New York Times Magazine tries for a new record in academic killjoy columns: "Wouldn’t It Be Cool if Shakespeare Wasn’t Shakespeare?"

    Professors of Shakespeare — and I was one once upon a time — are blissfully unaware of the impending disaster that this film means for their professional lives. Thanks to “Anonymous,” undergraduates will be confidently asserting that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare for the next 10 years at least, and profs will have to waste countless hours explaining the obvious. “Anonymous” subscribes to the Oxfordian theory of authorship, the contention that Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Among Shakespeare scholars, the idea has roughly the same currency as the faked moon landing does among astronauts.

    Oh, criminy. Just like undergraduates have been confidently asserting for the last decade that the boy actors in Shakespeare's time were actually women who look a lot like Gwyneth Paltrow and really wanted to get it on with the bard?

    Tags: 
    humor
    Shakespeare
    history
    killjoys

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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.