Saturday, January 30, 2010 Sometimes I have streaming shows on my laptop as I work on my desktop. I could be watching anything from anime, to Community, to Modern Marvels. This time I chose something popcorn-light: Fight Science, the most recent in a long series of shows explaining the physics of martial arts. It turned my head when I heard "Wolff's Law." They were talking about how the bones of these martial artists have remodeled to be stronger due to repeated physical stress from training. It's all connected, people.
Labels: anthropology, dissertation link : 5:24 PM
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Sunday, July 19, 2009What is man's greatest achievement? So posits CNN. Ignoring the sexist wording, my answer is culture. Culture, shared and learned behavior, allowed humans to adapt rapidly to their environment in a way far more efficient and responsive than natural selection. The accumulation of these shared behaviors across generations leads to the other common answers as reported by cnn.com: writing, music, technology, landing on the moon, etc..
Labels: anthropology link : 11:54 PM
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Saturday, March 28, 2009The Answer is "Both""First, arguing over the extent to which nature or nurture is responsible for cross-cultural regularities, such as the apparent long-standing dominance of males as perpetrators and victims of violent acts, is a sterile exercise. The question makes no more sense than arguing about whether the length or the width of a rectangle makes a greater contribution to its area (Petrinovich 2000)." From: Walker, P. L. (2001). A bioarchaeological perspective on the history of violence. Annual Review of Anthropology, 30, 573-596. Petrinovich LF. 2000. The Cannibal Within. New York: de Gruyter. Labels: anthropology link : 12:19 PM
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Friday, August 1, 2008Always Thinkin' I was doing my usual studying thing, reading Life History of the Ache, when I had a crazy idea.
Ok, the behavior of an organism is affected by its genes and environment. This interaction, through our evolutionary past, has been acted upon by natural selection: gene-environment interactions that result in more successful reproduction than others is propagated through the gene pool until they are commonplace. That's one train of thought. Here is the other: Earth experiences seasons based on its axial tilt and revolution around the sun. Humans do not have a seasonal reproductive period, so babies can be born at any season. A human baby born in a certain season experiences different harmful environmental stimuli, like freezing weather, heat, predators. So, it would be beneficial if human babies had custom behaviors to maximize their own survival depending on the time they were born. Ok, now mash those trains together (don't worry, they're pilotless freight trains). What if... humans have certain personality tendencies depending on the time of year they were born which were the result of genetic-environmental interaction? Or, what if some general aspect of western astrology (a yearly-repeating cycle of personality attributes) had a phylogenetic explanation? A quick perusal of a zodiac book in my old bedroom and some internet sleuthing quickly dashed my inquiry. No study has found that astrological readings correlate with personality traits. But, if someone does explore this further and finds something significant, I wrote it down first lol. Labels: anthropology, whut link : 6:15 PM
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Monday, July 14, 2008Miscellany It's hard to imagine that in less than twenty four hours I'll once again be jetting off to San Diego to visit the family. Here are updates on recent goings on before the San Diego/Comic-Con stuff fills the blog.
Labels: animals, anthropology, games, Keeley link : 6:11 PM
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Monday, June 30, 2008Diving into the New with Dr. Wadley MU lost one of its best faculty members last weekend. Dr. Reed Wadley had been fighting cancer for the past few years all the while doing what he could for the department.
Dr. Wadley and I arrived at MU in the same semester. As I ran around trying to make sense of grad school, I saw him adapt to his new office and his new class in Middlebush. Because of our mutual newness he kind of became my anchor: if hey can work this out (being in a more high-pressure position), then so can I. On September 11th, a month after we started our first semester and hours after the event, I sat in his class and we discussed the breaking news and he reminded us that facts are scarce compared to speculation-disguised-as-fact. Dr. Wadley's class was lighter on other days. He told us about his research in Borneo and the Iban friends he made there. He told us about the battle for indigenous rights. He told us how he sacrificed a pig to increase his social standing in a traditional society. Some things were a mystery with him: the tip of a large tattoo could be seen on the back of his neck peeking out over the collar of his dress shirt but I never got the nerve to ask its story. In a way I didn't want to know: it spoke of a life of unique experiences that cannot be distilled into an answer. Here's to six years of knowing Dr. Wadley and his impact on the lives of me and all of the students he advised and taught. Labels: anthropology link : 12:31 PM
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Friday, April 25, 200868,000 BC CNN had a headline that caught my attention: "Humans nearly wiped out 70,000 years ago, study says." Now that's news! The gist of the Associated Press article it uses can be summed up by two quotes:
Paleontologist Meave Leakey, a Genographic adviser, asked, "Who would have thought that as recently as 70,000 years ago, extremes of climate had reduced our population to such small numbers that we were on the very edge of extinction?"And: "Dr. Spencer Wells, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and Director of the Genographic Project, said ... "Tiny bands of early humans, forced apart by harsh environmental conditions, coming back from the brink to reunite and populate the world. Truly an epic drama, written in our DNA.”" My suspicio-meter immediately hit the jackpot. That's a pretty tall order for a study on genetics. The mention of climate also sounds like an attempt to make the news by linking this study to global warming. I followed a link to the Genographic Project which was the source of this story. Being the responsible researchers they are (after all being part of National Geographic), they had a free link to the actual scientific paper that is the root of these findings. Of course I read it immediately. It's a good paper. And this is coming from someone who, let's say, doesn't have that much faith in genetics research. It's highly technical of course, but the introduction and discussion are very clear. And I'm glad to report, the article is very non-sensationalist. It does contradict the popular digest of the source material on several key points: Humans were Near Extinction The AP article states that populations might have been as low as 2,000 around 70,000 years ago, citing another scientific paper not referenced. I tracked it down!* It actually does not say that the human population dropped to 2,000. Instead, the human variation we see today can be projected to exist in around 2,000 people 70,000 years ago. Is there a difference? Yes, because there could be untold number of people living 70,000 years ago whose unique genetic markers did not make it into our modern population. Unfortunately one of the flaws of genetic research in anthropology is that these hypothetical extinct lines cannot be detected, measured or accounted for, though they are likely to have existed. The scientific paper clearly states this, though that didn't make it into the Genographic or AP articles. The Wells quote is very dramatic, mentioning how ancient humans had to band together after a long split to repopulate Africa and then the rest of the world. But, the scientific article portrays this split differently. The split isn't between caves, huts, villages, or other small groupings. The split is between the entire south Africa and east Africa! At this continental scale, there is really no personal drama as the quotes suggest. If one of the two groups had gone extinct who is to say that the other group wouldn't have taken over and populated the world? Did the people living back then even recognize an intracontinental split between populations? Climate is the Culprit Even the AP article says "It is possible that this climatological shift contributed to the population splits," (emphasis mine). In fact, there is absolutely nothing linking climate to low population in the scientific paper. The paper does mention droughts as an event that kind of coinicides with the period of low human population (actually according to the paper the droughts ended 20,000 years before the populations merged, making me wonder if they even correlate). In this case, both quotes about climate or the environment as the cause of these populations shifts are just pure speculation and "wishful thinking" if you can call it that. It is very important to remember that correlation does not equal causation. Just because two things seem to be happening together, doesn't mean they are related. It's 70 degrees this fine morning and I had Chex for breakfast, but it doesn't mean I ate Chex instead of Trail Mix Crunch (which is really good by the way) because it's 70 degrees. --- Considering material from the scientific papers, the popular quotes above exagerrate a few key points. Human population has not been determined to be around 2,000 at that time, nullifying any talk of near-extinction. Climate has not been determined to be the cause of the misinterpreted population estimate. There was a large split between two African populations, but not between individual bands. The groups eventually fused before humans crossed into Eurasia, but at such a scale of time and space that the lay-term of reunion is meaningless. So there you go, scientific research from paper to popular press and all of it's varying forms. *sigh* if only I can write my dissertation proposal with this much speed and energy. *Zhivotovsky LA, Rosenberg NA, and Feldman MW. 2003. Features of Evolution and Expansion of Modern Humans, Inferred from Genomewide Microsatellite Markers. Am. J. Hum. Genet. 72:1171–1186 Labels: anthropology, genetics, news link : 10:13 AM
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Thursday, November 8, 2007Learn Anthropology; Save the World The latest issue of Shadowpact (#18, page 4) has a weird endorsement of physical anthropology:
 If physical anthropology teaches me how to fight werewolves, then sign me up! Oh wait, I'm already signed up. Labels: anthropology, comics link : 4:21 PM
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Monday, June 11, 2007The World's Greatest Drug Czar Coca, though it is a forbidden to even bring a tea bag's worth to the United States*, is actually a folk cure-all that has no narcotic effects without extensive processing. In rural communities, coca is one of the elements that sponsor social cohesion as well as spirituality. An ethnography, The Hold Life Has by Catherine Allen, pursues these links in detail. Before the Spanish arrived, coca was an important part of the economy of the state-level societies such as the Inca. None of this matters to Batman though, as you can see in this comic from 1988:
*Though you can buy it from Amazon.com (?) Labels: anthropology, coca, comics:batman link : 10:21 PM
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Wednesday, May 9, 2007Uncle Owen, Space Anthropologist My brother sent me this awesome book: The Making of Star Wars. It focuses solely on A New Hope, from Lucas's first concepts to post-release and the making of the universe surrounding the movie for all of the promotional tie-ins. I found one thing the most interesting to read: first are his early notes on the story. They describe the journey of Mace Windy and his fight against the Empire which is supposed to reflect the Vietnam War. Wow did that get toned down! Also the heroes run into Owen Lars, an anthropologist in the field. It was only in later drafts that he was turned into Luke's cranky uncle. It would've been nice if the kept an anthropologist in the movie. Maybe they can make a new movie around anthropology in Star Wars. Hmm...
Day 1: Jawas seem distrustful of me even though I am dressed as one of them. Perhaps I should trim my costume and walk on my knees. It's still better than the prequels. Labels: anthropology link : 10:10 PM
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Wednesday, February 21, 2007The High Price of Number Crunching I do a lot of work in statistics. In fact, almost all of my work involves statistics. I don't collect data in the field. I don't do things in a lab. I sit in front of my computer working with data sets and spreadsheets. Lately I've been doing a lot of online research for a good Mac statistical package. Right now I use a combination of SPSS and Excel.
SPSS seems like the perfect thing for me (it stands for Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). But it's, in a word, bad. It's just bad. I have version 11, which ironically works on Intel while version 13 does not. Still, it follows archaic command line structure under its GUI. Variables can have a name eight letters long or less. No numbers or symbols. What? You can assign labels to variables but that's killing one bird with two stones. And that's gross. Excel... well Excel is easier to use (which says more about SPSS than Excel) but there are several published articles on how you shouldn't use Excel due to its inaccuracy. In the statistical package market there are a few alternatives. Aabel and Stata are both up-to-date to work with Intel Macs. The problem, they're around $500 each, and that's the student price (it's almost as expensive as.. a PS3!). If you're just some guy who wants to do statistics, it's $1500. Additional feature packages are $300 or so each. Why're they so expensive? I guess they're trying to sell to people with grants, but you'd think they would want to aim low and get students to like it first, then sell it to them again when they're professors with labs. Open source to the rescue! Kind of. R is free, but it's strictly command line. And it's hard. The manuals and tutorials aren't very good. Lesson 2: Add and subtract. Lesson 3: Multiple regression! I got lost somewhere in there. Also, trying to find outside advice for using R is hard in itself because it's hard to Google. The internet has a lot of things, and the letter R is one of them. Labels: anthropology, science, tech:computers link : 11:14 PM
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