john hawks weblog

Brian Vastig reports in the Washington Post on the problem with calls for more Ph.D. scientists: "U.S. pushes for more scientists, but the jobs aren’t there".

Traditional academic jobs are scarcer than ever. Once a primary career path, only 14 percent of those with a PhD in biology and the life sciences now land a coveted academic position within five years, according to a 2009 NSF survey. That figure has been steadily declining since the 1970s, said Paula Stephan, an economist at Georgia State University who studies the scientific workforce. The reason: The supply of scientists has grown far faster than the number of academic positions.

The story goes on to note the job losses in pharmaceuticals and other industry categories. Related, from Bob Cringely on the IT industry: "IT class warfare — It’s not just IBM".

In America right now there is a glut of $80,000-and-above IT workers and a shortage of $40,000-and-below IT workers.

Remember that $80,000-and-above population comes with a surcharge for benefits that may not equally apply to the $40,000-and-below crowd, especially if those are overseas or in this country temporarily. A good portion of that surcharge relates to costs that increase with age, so older workers are more expensive than younger workers.

It’s illegal to discriminate based on age but not illegal to discriminate based on cost, yet one is a proxy for the other. So this is not just class warfare, it is generational warfare.

Academic jobs are subject to different dynamics than corporate jobs, but some related phenomena are at play. Most academic scientists who make it onto the tenure track begin to experience "salary compression" -- the phenomenon in which institutions pay a market rate to new Ph.D. hires, which grows faster than the salaries paid to continuing faculty. This is a sort of perverse intergenerational conflict that arises in part because of tenure. By limiting the ability of mid-career academics to move to a new job, tenure protects universities against having to offer experienced faculty competitive salaries. Young researchers enter a speculation market in which most will fail to find academic jobs, while a few good "tenure prospects" are offered higher and higher salaries by the institutions that can afford them.

I was reading this morning an interesting paper from last year by Damien Flas [1], who considered the context of archaeological assemblages grouped as Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician industry in northern Europe. This awkwardly-named archaeological grouping is one of the "transitional" initial Upper Paleolithic industries of Europe, plausibly made by Neandertals but involving artifacts built on a blade-based reduction strategy.

Flas tentatively concludes that LRJ was produced by Neandertals, mainly because of its early date, the late appearance of Aurignacian in northwestern Europe, and the lack of technical connections to traditions that were plausibly made by modern humans. I will share the portion of the text where he discusses the lack of such links:

Recently, maybe because an acculturation process related to the Aurignacian complex has been challenged on the basis of chronological and stratigraphic data (e.g. Bordes 2003; d'Errico et al. 1998; Zilhão 2006a), other industries have been proposed as proxies for the spread of AMH and as acculturators driving the last Neanderthals to develop the ‘transitional industries’ (Bar-Yosef 2007; Hoffecker 2009; Mellars 2005). In Central Europe, the Bohunician has been seen as a complex related to the spread of AMH from the Near East (Bar-Yosef and Svoboda 2003; Kozłowski 2004). Indeed, it shows similarities with the assemblages in layers 1–2 of Boker-Tachtit (Skrdla 2003; Tostevin 2003), and Tostevin (2007) has set out in a detailed way how the Szeletian assemblage from Vedrovice V may be seen as the result of acculturation of the local Middle Paleolithic (Keilmessergruppe from Kulna Cave) by the Bohunician complex.

However, the extension of this model to include a scenario whereby LRJ Neanderthals are acculturated by Bohunician AMH finds little support in the evidence, and is thus a weak hypothesis. There are no human remains, either in the Near East or in Central Europe, showing that this ‘Emireo-Bohunician’ complex is made by AMH, and it could alternatively correspond to the diffusion of technical ideas rather than to a population dispersal (Tostevin 2003). Moreover, the relationship between Boker Tachtit (in the Negev) and the Bohunician (in Moravia) is based on technological similarities, but intermediary assemblages between these two distant regions are rare (Bar-Yosef and Svoboda 2003; Kozłowski 2004) and sometimes show variability (as at Temnata and Bacho Kiro: Teyssandier 2008; Tsanova 2008). It would be also necessary to assess other European late Middle Paleolithic industries that could potentially play a role in the emergence of the Bohunician (Kozłowski 2001), such as the Polish sites of Piekary IIa and Ksiecia Jozefa (Sitlivy et al. 2007a, 2007b; Zilhão 2006a), as well as Korolevo I/IIb (Ukrainia: Monigal et al. 2006) and the Bulgarian Moustero-Levalloisian with leaf-points of Samuilitsa and Muselievo (Tsanova 2008). Even if the hypothesis that the Bohunician corresponds to an AMH dispersal from the Near East is accepted, the LRJ shows different objectives and reduction strategies from the Bohunician. More generally, it is difficult to see any lithic innovations in Bachokirian or Bohunician industries that could provide the stimulus for long-distance acculturation.

He posits a transformation from some Mousterian variant, based on the specialization toward "laminar blanks" (that is, cores suitable for striking blades). I find very interesting the implication of information exchange and possible dispersal among late Neandertals in the northern tier of Europe.

Related: my post from last year on Kent's Cavern dating, "The radiocarbon dating paper without a radiocarbon date". The Kent's Cavern maxilla overlies some artifacts attributed to LRJ traditions.

References

Once again, I'm looking through source material for a very different reason, but ran across an interesting piece of history. J. Barnard Davis was a British physician and anatomist who, as a private collector, amassed an immense collection of nearly 1800 skulls. His studies on the cranial capacity of these skulls, including comparisons of skulls of different races, were cited by Darwin in The Descent of Man (which is what brought me to Davis' work).

He published this work on human variation in the critical period between the 1859 publication of Darwin's Origin of Species and the 1871 publication of Descent of Man. During this period, Darwin did not publish on the subject of human evolution, but was engaged in a great deal of reading and correspondence on the subject. In his stead, publications and lectures by Huxley, Wallace, and others began to apply Darwinian principles to human variation.

I may write more about Davis, but I wanted to make a note of a passage in the introduction to the 1867 catalog of his collection, the Thesaurus Craniorum [1]. He addresses the importance of a large collection of skulls, which among other things allows an assessment of the breadth of variation within populations. One consequence of our additional sampling of human variation in the 20th century was the recognition that variation among human populations was clinal -- with characteristics forming a gradient across geographic space.

The extent of a collection is of much moment; for, besides affording more reliable averages of measurements, a large one is far more sure to illustrate the types of each race fully, and to contain its aberrant forms. The statement made by Prof. Theodor Waitz, that only small collections of race-skulls exhibit different forms of skulls strikingly whilst rich collections fill up the apparent intervening gaps and show a continual transition from every one form to every other, is only very partially correct, and is an assertion much more characteristic of a Professor of Philosophy than a Professor of Anatomy, essentially a science of observation. Although large collections, philosophically considered, must of necessity, by containing skulls that have intermediate forms, tend to lessen distinctions, they, at the same time, serve to develope [sic] race-characters more fully, and to define the play of diversities round these race-characters with more precision.

The citation to Waitz is to Anthropologie der Naturvölker, 1859.

From a certain point of view, Davis was correct: An increase of sample size will increase the range of the sample, but not greatly increase the proportion of overlap between samples drawn from two populations with different means. Large samples might increase a statistical precision in the description of races. Yet, Waitz' point is also correct. Large samples destroy the typological description of races by showing that no character uniquely typifies any human race. The effect of large samples on the range is often the key evidence that populations share common biology.

Statistics is fundamental to population biology -- so much so that population geneticists like R. A. Fisher and Sewall Wright invented many statistical concepts. Until they understand statistical concepts, people seem inevitably drawn toward essentialism. Essentialism in the history of biology led to typological concepts of species, race, characters, and developmental stages, all of which explained variation in terms of deviation from the ideal type. We now appreciate that populations transform according to statistical rules, not typological rules.

With his immense collection of skulls, Davis showed the extensive variation within populations. He argued so forcefully for the importance of variation that he predicted that the original Neandertal skull would be soon matched within the cranial diversity of living populations. Davis maintained that the skull's elongated shape and browridges could be explained as a result of craniosynostosis, premature closure of the cranial sutures. He looked to human pathology for anatomical intermediates with the Neandertals, arguing that the variation attributable to craniosynostosis would be found to grade continuously right up to the extreme found in the Neandertal skull. In other words, he argued against typology when it came to pathology.

He turned out to be wrong about Neandertal, it was an overreach of his assumptions about variation in development. At the same time, he believed that "race-characters" were stable and that they reflected a long history of separation of human races. He provides an interesting case of how a nineteenth-century anatomist could toss a typological salad.

References

It's hard to predict folding patterns of RNA in cells. As Hayley Dunning describes, RNA has been "gamified" to give scientists some help: "Toying with RNA".

Players of the game EteRNA are given a real-world RNA shape and asked to manipulate a chain of nucleotides to fit that shape, by observing how different patterns of nucleotides form certain structures, like loops or tails. Then, every week, a few molecules are selected for synthesis in a lab at Stanford to see how closely they match the desired shape.

The game itself, "EteRNA", is pretty cute. It took me a few tries to realize it's pronounced like the first six-sevenths of "eternal".

I wish there were some way to gamify paleoanthropology. I mean, something more illuminating than just sticking Neandertals into World of Warcraft.

The South African Palaeocave Survey has a new post reporting on a visit to the Taung site:

We visited the Taung limeworks near the town of Buxton in the North West province. The site, which was designated a National Heritage Site in 2002 (see plaque photo), is quite large and was an active mine during the 1920s. It was later systematically excavated by paleoanthropologists from the University of California in the 1940s, and from the University of Witswatersrand between 1988 and 1992. Both the mining and excavations resulted in extensive dumps that surround the area of the site from which the skull is thought to derive. However, the exact location at which the skull was found can only be approximately reconstructed from mine records and historical documents – after all, it was only recognized after it arrived in Johannesburg in a wooden crate!

A couple of weeks ago, the project posted about a trip to "Wonderwerk Cave". This is an interesting blog to follow this summer.

I got passed along this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it just keeps striking me as BS: "Just Because We're Not Publishing Doesn't Mean We're Not Working".

We have no concise term to describe what we spend much of our time doing. Our colleges are focused on scholarly products that can be peer-reviewed and published, but the reality is that many of us spend much of our time on being scholarly, not on producing scholarship. We are, and should be, consuming the scholarship of others. Consuming scholarship includes preparatory time for teaching but is much broader. We need a name for this ubiquitous activity. I offer "consumatory scholarship."

I suppose "consumatory scholarship" sounds better than "consumptive scholarship", mainly because it doesn't draw attention to the reality that it's the opposite of "productive scholarship"...

In case you worry that paleoanthropology never casts off bad ideas, take a look at the intro to a review paper by Ernest Hooton in 1925 [1]:

Within the last few years the discoveries of new fossil forms of man and of the anthropoid apes have made it very obvious that the early range of the giant Primates was considerably more extensive than most anthropologists previously were willing to admit. A remarkable and indubitably ancient form of man has come to light in Northern Rhodesia. A precursor of the modern Australian man has been discovered at Talgai, Queensland, and Professor Dubois, the discoverer of Pithecanthropus erectus, has disclosed the fact that his Java finds included apparently Australoid human crania, the knowledge of which he imparts to his fellow-workers only after some two-score years of silence. A molar tooth from the Middle Pliocene deposits of Nebraska has been pronounced by distinguished authorities to be that of a new genus of anthropoid ape, and the face and endocranial casts of a young anthropoid ape, claimed by its discoverer to show humanoid characters, has just been recovered from the limestone at Taungs, Bechuanaland, South Africa. More than this, some of the most recalcitrant antagonists of the eolithic theory have recanted and admitted to the human origin of the Pliocene flints from the 16-foot level of the Foxhall gravel pit in England, thus acknowledging the existence of an implement-using Tertiary man.

Crazy. Whenever you hear people tell you about the resistance faced by people like Dart and Leakey to their early discoveries, remember the sheer amount of nonsense that passed for paleoanthropology in those days. It must have been a constant effort for scholars to sift the wheat from the windstorm of chaff. Most claims were extraordinary, and many of them contradicted each other.

Of course, many of my colleagues will be happy to rail at length against the nonsense that passes for science now. I note only one element of consistency -- it really hadn't been "two-score years of silence" for Dubois, but it had been more than 20. We seem to bump up against similar prolonged periods of secrecy fairly often.

References

A new paper by Guillaume Guérin and colleagues in the Journal of Archaeological Science [1] provides a detailed chronology for the Neandertal site of Roc de Marsal (near Les Eyzies, France).

The paper includes an interesting discussion, which focuses on the emerging picture of Neandertal technological strategies to a changing climate. In short, during the middle of Marine Isotope Stage 4 (around 60,000 years ago), the regional environment in southwestern France shifted. Before this time, the Neandertals in the area made Denticulate and Typical Mousterian industries and hunted a variety of large fauna including red deer, roe deer, reindeer and horse. After the shift to a mix of steppe and some boreal forest, the Neandertals hunted mainly reindeer, some horse, and made Quina Mousterian tools. As they discuss, this picture is now consistent with the stratigraphies of many sites in the region that preserve Quina Mousterian:

In southwest France, Roc de Marsal Layers 7–9 are not an exception, as similar faunal patterns have been observed in other archaeological sites. It is striking to see that for sequences that span both Quina and Typical Mousterian, a number of similar features have been observed: first, Quina Mousterian layers are always on top of Typical Mousterian layers (Jaubert, 2010); second, Quina Mousterian is, in Dordogne, always associated with faunal remains dominated by reindeer; third, in the layers underlying Quina industries, fauna exhibits singular patterns combining “forest-adapted” (red deer and/or roe deer) and “cold open-air” species (reindeer).

There is some more in the discussion about the palynological record and other regional climate indicators. The meta-archaeological perspective would point out that this is a perfect synthesis of the Bordes-Binford debate: There really were different cultural groups of Neandertals and they really did use these technofacies for different activities. What was necessary is the kind of systematic comparison among sites that shows Quina Mousterian systematically overlying the Typical/Denticulate wherever they occur, along with the evidence of climatic and faunal change across sites.

References

Alex Stone, author of Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind, gives a short account of the psychological insights from magic tricks in the NY Times: "Your brain on a magic trick".

Such tricks suggest that we are often blind to the results of our own decisions. Once a choice is made, our minds tend to rewrite history in a way that flatters our volition, a fact magicians have exploited for centuries. “If you are given a choice, you believe you have acted freely,” said Teller, of the duo Penn and Teller, to Smithsonian magazine. “This is one of the darkest of all psychological secrets.”

The Times also reviews the book, here: "Fooling Houdini by Alex Stone".

In Slate, Daniel Sarewitz commits science communication heresy: "The Gambler and the Scientist".

I raise these points to challenge the idea of "science literacy." We have this belief that unless a person knows that the Earth rotates around the sun and that birds evolved from dinosaurs, she or he won’t be able to exercise responsible citizenship or participate effectively in modern society. Scientists are fond of claiming that literacy in their particular area of expertise (such as climate change or genomics) is necessary so “the public can make informed judgments on public policy issues.”

Yet the idea that we can say anything useful at all about a person's competence in the world based on their rudimentary familiarity with any particular information or type of knowledge is ridiculous. Not only is such information totally disembodied from experience and thus no more than an abstraction (and an arbitrary one at that), but it also fails to live up to what science ultimately promises: to enhance one's ability to understand and act effectively in a world of one’s knowing

Worth discussion. I generally agree with his points. The poll questions that purport to gauge "science literacy" tend to be proxy markers for politically salient markers such as evolution, or confusingly worded factual questions. These may be measuring something, but they are poor measures of people's real-world use of scientific concepts. I find that students come into my courses with a pretty sophisticated understanding of evolution. This understanding is in some predictable ways wrong, but it can form a base to learn deeper and more accurate information once I acknowledge and work with it.