"Changing humans in a changing environment"
This Friday, October 14, I'll be appearing in Anaheim, CA, at the National Association of Biology Teachers conference. I'm part of a symposium sponsored by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center...
View ArticleFlorida: Anthropologists not wanted
Last week I linked to my essay, "What's wrong with anthropology?" My theme was that anthropology has been a failure over the past two decades at engaging with policymakers and the public, and that the...
View Article3D printing, faster, please
Casts! Origo is still in the prototype phase, but its creators have openly discussed some of the ultimate specs on their Twitter feed and Facebook page, as well as on their main site. We should expect...
View ArticleThis is anthropology
With reference to my story earlier this week ("Florida: Anthropologists not wanted"), the students at the University of South Florida have put together something that is roughly three hundred and...
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Blombos pigment workshop
Synopsis: Complex toolkits from Blombos, South Africa, show pigment processing before 100,000 years ago.I know that some readers are starting to wonder if I've forgotten about paleoanthropology lately....
View ArticleExome sequencing as a stopgap
The new Genome Biology has a perspective piece by Jacob Tennessen and colleagues, titled "The promise and limitations of population exomics for human evolution studies" [1]. Exomics is the study of the...
View ArticleMagical psychology
I enjoyed this article by Mo Costandi: "Sleights of hand, sleights of mind". "In principle, neuroscience and magic have little in common," says Susana Martinez-Conde, director of the Visual...
View ArticleWhite on books
The Browser has up an interview with paleoanthropologist Tim White, focused around his choice of five books to recommend: ("Tim White on prehistoric man"). A snippet of the interview: Why do you think...
View Article"First Americans" article
Scientific American's November issue has a cover story on the peopling of the Americas, by Heather Pringle, and it has gone online for free: "The First Americans: Mounting Evidence Prompts Researchers...
View ArticleArchaic genome snooping from GWAS
The 23andMe blog reports on a recent genome-wide association study of type 2 diabetes in South Asian people: "SNPWatch: Genetic Variants Associated with Type 2 Diabetes in South Asians and Europeans"....
View ArticleBlogs, academic discourse in economics
Paul Krugman comments on how the growth in academic blogs in economics is a continuation of publication trends that long predate the World Wide Web: "Our blogs, ourselves". First of all,...
View ArticleBone of the victim mastodon
Michael Waters and colleagues [1] report on the date of a mastodon kill site from Manis, Washington. At 13,800 years old, it's not the earliest evidence of New World people, nor the only evidence of...
View ArticleQuirks and Quarks, Denisova edition
I was interviewed last month for the CBC radio broadcast, "Quirks and Quarks". They have done a segment on the Denisova genome, with contributions from David Reich, Peter Parham, Chris Stringer and me,...
View ArticleTaxonomy through art
Within paleoanthropology, we often witness taxonomic clashes. Species that were named on the basis of a single fossil are later discarded. Now with genomics, we can see that the fossil "species" we...
View ArticleWatch who you call "extinct"!
Synopsis: A news article on the genomics of Puerto Rican descendants of Taino peoples runs into hot water.Sometimes people wonder why human genetics projects should bother to involve anthropologists....
View ArticleSequence the old, fast
The Archon Genomics X Prize is a $10 million contest to see what company or organization can develop a low-cost accurate sequencing technology. The AP's Malcolm Ritter reports that the testbed...
View ArticleHollywood's war on Shakespeare
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...
View ArticlePotato sack race
Smithsonian magazine has a very nice article by Charles C. Mann, "How the Potato Changed the World", focusing on the effects of the Columbian exchange on Europe. “For the first time in the history of...
View ArticleLeadership prediction and investment risk
The Guardian has printed an excerpt of economics Nobelist Daniel Kahneman's new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. The story addresses the question of why investment bankers believe they are doing anything...
View ArticleAlfred Crosby interviewed
Last week I linked to an article about the dispersal of the potato ("How the Potato Changed the World"). Smithsonian also has an interview with Alfred Crosby, the historian who coined the term,...
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