Discover Magazine: Human Origins

Discover Human Origins

• The end of Sex Week and the start of SciFoo | The Loom
  I hope you enjoyed Sex Week (in a purely intellectual way, of course). I’m now off to a confab called SciFoo, which I’ve heard a lot about over the years and am now finally able to attend. Each year, Google and O’Reilly Media bring together a motley crew of scientists, writers, and others, and basically tell [...]
  
  
• The End of Sex Week: Darwin, Sex, and Dada | The Loom
  [This is the last post for Sex Week] The animal kingdom is filled with wild extravagances, and a lot of them have something to do with sex. Hermit crabs wave their claws, swordtail fish flash their swordtails, manakins leap and buzz their wings. Darwin considered these displays so important and so puzzling (”the sight of a [...]
  
  
• Sex Week continued: Water strider blues | The Loom
  [This is my third post of Sex Week] Here’s a song for the male water strider, from the days when Rod Stewart could do no wrong: In my first two posts for Sex Week, I wrote about the delights of courtship: the alluring, informative fragrance of yeast and the seductive buzz of electric fish. These signals stir [...]
  
  
• The Anglo Revolutions | Gene Expression
  Over my lifetime in the United States there has been a shift toward a set of values which emphasize diversity, understood as being expressed along a few particular parameters: racial, sexual and ethnic. Part of the project is obviously concrete: increased representation of various segments within American society at the commanding heights of institutions and [...]
  
  
• You Think You (And Your Parents) Are Hot | Discoblog
  Is the taboo against incest really just a psychological device to keep us from people we subconsciously find attractive? Could be, since apparently, these hotties are our parents, and even ourselves, according to research published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Studies have shown that people are more turned on by photographs of faces [...]
  
  
• Sex Week continued: when love shocks | The Loom
  [This is my second post of Sex Week] In the sexual universe, all sorts of things can feel good, even if we humans have a hard time imagining how they can bring any pleasure. Electricity, for example, may be nothing for us beyond a painful shock. But for some fishes, it is the essence of [...]
  
  
• Gonna Have A Fungal Good Time [With Apologies to James Brown] | The Loom
  If yeast could sing, it might sound something like this. This single-celled fungus–for which we should give thanks for bread, beer, and wine–can reproduce in several ways. Most of the time, it produces buds that eventually split off as free-living cells of their own. Its daughters are identical to itself, carrying the same two sets of [...]
  
  
• It’s sex week on the Loom | The Loom
  Birds do it, bees do it, even educated viruses do it. And for some reason my stack of interesting scientific papers is particularly heavy at the moment with research on the evolution of sex. So let’s not be shy. All this week, I will blog about sex. [Image: mating sand wasps, Alex Wild]
  
  
• Linguistic diversity, other views | Gene Expression
  Readers might find these responses of interest. Mostly I just laughed, though some of you may be a bit more serious than I, so if anthro-gibberish drives you crazy, don’t follow the links. As I told “ana” below a lot of the discussion we had was basically just talking past each other. I kept telling [...]
  
  
• Disease as a byproduct of adaptation | Gene Expression
  How we perceive nature and describe its shape are a matter of values and preferences. Nature does not take notice of our distinctions; they exist only as instruments which aid in our comprehension. I’ve brought this up in relation to issues such as categorization of recessive vs. dominant traits. The offspring of people of [...]
  
  
• Details on My Writing Class This Fall At Yale | The Loom
  It’s terrifying to think that we’re weeks away from the fall semester, but so it seems. I will once more be teaching an upper-level seminar at Yale called “Writing About Science and the Environment.” Last year’s class was a wonderful experience, and I’m hoping to apply some of the lessons I learned about teaching to [...]
  
  
• Knowledge is not value-free | Gene Expression
  This isn’t The New Yorker, and I’m not writing twenty page essays which flesh out all the nooks and crannies of my thought. When I posted “Linguistic diversity = poverty” I did mean to provoke, make people challenge their presuppositions, and think about what they’re saying when they say something. I think knowledge of many languages [...]
  
  
• The Microbiome Never Ceases to Amaze | The Loom
  While I was away last week on vacation, the New York Times published my feature on the hidden jungle that each of us carries, known as the microbiome. I was very happy to come home to a lot of kind notes, tweets, and various communications about it. Yet I would never claim that my article [...]
  
  
• Infecting Minds: My Lecture at the American Society for Microbiology | The Loom
  I gave a talk at the President’s Forum at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in May about how I go about telling stories about science. The folks at ASM have done some slick video editing and posted the lecture at their site, where you can also download it in various formats. Or [...]
  
  
• BORA! | The Loom
  The force of blog nature known as BORA! has decided he does not like the Pepsi aftertaste and is leaving Scienceblogs. I’m just back from a wonderfully rain-soaked vacation in Ireland, so I’m scrambling to get back up to speed. I won’t update my post on the scienceblogs diaspora till this afternoon. But in the [...]
  
  
• From the Vault: Us and Them Among the Slime Molds | The Loom
  [An old post I'm fond of] Scoop up some dirt, and you’ll probably wind up with some slime mold. Many species go by the common name of slime mold, but the ones scientists know best belong to the genus Dictyostelium. They are amoebae, and for the most part they live the life of a rugged individualist. [...]
  
  
• A Fossil Emblem [Science Tattoo] | The Loom
  Maria, a paleontologist, writes, “Archaeopteryx, to me, represents a beautiful example of a transition fossil and of evolution in general, showing characters that both dinosaurs and birds share.” Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
  
  
• Humans, Fish, & Flies Share a 600-Million-Year-Old Sperm Gene | 80beats
  Dear male reader: Just so you know, your sperm isn’t that different from a sea anemone’s. Sperm is so vital, a new study in PLoS Genetics found, that one of the genes responsible for it hasn’t changed in 600 million years. Insects, humans, marine invertebrates, other mammals, even fish—the males of all these creatures share a [...]
  
  
• Insane Clown Posse Dissed Scientists; Lab-Coated Geeks Strike Back | Discoblog
  In 2009, the hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse released the song “Miracles.” The song asks how certain things work: stars, rainbows, inherited genetic traits, magnets–and other stuff to “shock your eyelids.” The exact lyrics are a bit off-color for this blog, but the two singing clowns certainly ask some valid questions. Unfortunately, the song [...]
  
  
• Caring with cash, or How Radiohead could have made more money | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  In October 2007, the British band Radiohead released their seventh album – In Rainbows – as a digital download that customers could pay whatever they liked for. The results of this risky venture are a guarded secret, but the album’s popularity was clear. It topped the charts and allegedly sold 1.2 million copies in the [...]
  
  
• Fossil May Reveal When Humanity’s Ape Ancestors Split from Monkeys | 80beats
  Perhaps you’re one of those people who get their dander up when you hear creationists saying “I’m not descended from some monkey” not only for the obvious reason, but also because you can’t help but blurt out, “No, you mean ‘ape!’ We’re apes, not monkeys.” Indeed, our superfamily, Hominoidea, split from the group labeled “old world [...]
  
  
• Trade Center Construction Workers Stumble on a 1700s Sailing Ship | Discoblog
  World Trade Center construction workers dug up something unexpected this week: an 18th century sailing ship. Plans for the new Trade Center require workers to unearth parts of lower Manhattan left undisturbed during construction of the original buildings. During part of this dig, in an area between Liberty and Cedar Streets, beams of wood rose from [...]
  
  
• Really fine grained genetic maps of Europe | Gene Expression
  A few years ago you started seeing the crest of studies which basically took several hundred individuals (or thousands) from a range of locations, and then extracted out the two largest components of genetic variation from the hundreds of thousands of variants. The clusters which fell out of the genetic data, with each point being [...]
  
  
• “The Inheritors” | Gene Expression
  I just purchased a copy of William Golding’s The Inheritors. Golding is famous for writing Lord of the Flies, a work of literature of such influence that it has made the transition into our everyday lexicon. But I just listened to a podcast of an interview with a biographer of the great author, and it [...]
  
  
• The Price of Altruism | Gene Expression
  Sometimes in a narrative you have secondary characters who you want to revisit. What do to do after the story is complete? An convenient “work-around” to this problem is to find the story rewritten from the perspective of the secondary character. In broad strokes the picture is unchanged, but in the finer grained shadings different [...]
  
  
• The Growth of a Baby’s Brain Looks Like Human Evolution in Fast-Forward | 80beats
  It’s what happens to your brain after you’re born that makes you human. Jason Hill and colleagues were comparing the structure of newborn brains to those of adults when they came upon a striking find, documented this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Clearly, the brain expands greatly as you grow from [...]
  
  
• The First Brits Settled on the English Seashore 800,000 Years Ago | 80beats
  It makes sense: stay where it’s warm, sunny, and there’s a lot of food. What, then, were prehistoric people doing on the British seashore? New research published today in Nature pushes human arrival in Britain back to about 800,000 years ago, roughly 100,000 years earlier than our previous estimations. The evidence? A trove of 70 [...]
  
  
• Norfolk – the home of the earliest known humans in Britain | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  Happisburgh, Norfolk is a fairly unassuming village on the English coast. Highlights include a pretty church and Britain’s only independently operated lighthouse. The entire lot might imminently fall into the sea, which would put it on the map just as it catastrophically disappears from it. But this tiny village is about to get a boost [...]
  
  
• Yo Readers: Who Are You? And What Would You Name a Subatomic Particle? | Discoblog
  We’re copying DISCOVER’s other bloggers and calling out to commenters. Here we give you, Discoblog readers, a chance to speak your minds. Ed Yong on Note Exactly Rocket Science, Carl Zimmer on The Loom, Razib Khan on Gene Expression, Daniel Holz at Cosmic Variance, and Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum on The Intersection want to know [...]
  
  
• Sports results can affect election results | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  Anyone currently following the World Cup, Wimbledon, or any of the many sporting events around the world will know the emotional highs and lows that they can produce. But these events wield even more power than we think. According to Andrew Healy­ from Loyola Marymount University, sports results can even swing the outcome of an [...]
  
  
• The Human Edge (on NPR) | Gene Expression
  NPR has a series on Morning Edition titled “The Human Edge,” which explores human evolution and genetics. The first episode is up, Finding Our Inner Fish. They focus on Neil Shubin’s work (also, some reporting on what fish can tell us about human skin color on All Things Considered). As a constructive criticism, I wonder if [...]
  
  
• Why Tibetans breathe so easy up high | Gene Expression
  I said yesterday I would say a bit more about the new paper on rapid recent high altitude adaptation among the Tibetans when I’d read the paper. Well, I’ve read it now. Sequencing of 50 Human Exomes Reveals Adaptation to High Altitude: Residents of the Tibetan Plateau show heritable adaptations to extreme altitude. We sequenced [...]
  
  
• More markers, or more populations? | Gene Expression
  Here’s a letter to The American Journal of Human Genetics worth reading, Genetic Landscape of Eurasia and “Admixture” in Uyghurs: …In the papers…by Xu and Jin, the genetic structure of Uyghurs was described by 8150 ancestry-informative markers (AIMs). These markers estimated the admixture rate of the Uyghur population to be around 50% East Asian ancestry by [...]
  
  
• Tibetans May Be the Fastest-Evolving Humans We’ve Ever Seen | 80beats
  Clearly, the people of Tibet must have evolved quickly to tolerate a life spent living at the top of the world. How quickly? A study out in this week’s Science, which compared Tibetans to Han Chinese to see the differences in their DNA, says that the two groups may have diverged no more than 3,000 [...]
  
  
• Very recent altitude adaptation in Tibet | Gene Expression
  Nick Wade in The New York Times is reporting on a new paper which will come out in Science tomorrow which investigates the evolution of genes implicated in adaption to higher altitudes among Tibets. I’ve posted on the genetics of this topic before, it obviously is of great interest. The major new finding is that [...]
  
  
• Scientist Smackdown: Did King Tut Die of Malaria or Sickle Cell? | 80beats
  What struck down ancient Egypt’s King Tutankhamen at the tender age of 19? Just this winter, Egyptian researchers seemed to think they had a definitive answer. After years of genetic tests and CT scans, they concluded that royal incest had produced a sickly boy with a bone disorder, and argued that a malaria-bearing parasite finished him [...]
  
  
• The essence of pleasure | Gene Expression
  I highly recommend this discussion between Paul Bloom & Robert Wright. The topic under consideration is the psychology of pleasure, as reviewed in Bloom’s new book How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. You can also find out about Bloom’s ideas in this exchange in Slate. The essentialism examined [...]
  
  
• What has Rome to do with Nairobi? | Gene Expression
  There are very few books which would attempt to connect the experiences of the 1st century British who lived through Roman conquest with the French under the Vichy regime in World War II. The The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall by Timothy Parsons attempts [...]
  
  
• The dismal gods | Gene Expression
  Larry Witham’s Marketplace of the Gods: How Economics Explains Religion is a manifestly ill-timed book. He states that “…around 2006 I began to notice a good deal of hoopla in the book market about economic explanations for just about everything-books that were best sellers.” Marketplace of the Gods was obviously written to capitalize on the [...]
  
  
• The English & Irish, together again | Gene Expression
  One of the peculiarities of the synthesis of 19th and early 20th historical linguistics and biological anthropology was the perception by many British thinkers that the English, as the scions of the Anglo-Saxons, were fundamentally a different race from the Celtic nations to their west, the Welsh and Irish, and the Scots to the north [...]
  
  
• Baby’s first bacteria depend on route of delivery | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  They are mum’s first gift to her newborn baby on the day of its zeroeth birthday – bacteria, fresh from her vagina. Vaginal bacteria are among the trillions of microscopic hitchhikers that share our bodies with us. Collectively known as the ‘microbiota’, these passengers outnumber our own cells by ten to one. Children partly inherit [...]
  
  
• Lucy’s New Relative, “Big Man,” May Push Back the Origin of Walking | 80beats
  No offense, Lucy, but at three feet, six inches you were kind of short. Your diminutive, 3.2 million-year-old bones made it difficult to tell whether your species could even walk like us. Fortunately, researchers in Ethiopia have uncovered an older, bigger relative. As described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, some researchers believe [...]
  
  
• New Nicaraguan sign language shows how language affects thought | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  One of the signs for “Nicaragua”. Photo by Ann Serghas In the 1970s, a group of deaf Nicaraguan schoolchildren invented a new language. The kids were the first to enrol in Nicaragua’s new wave of special education schools. At first, they struggled with the schools’ focus on Spanish and lip-reading, but they found companionship in each [...]
  
  
• “Here be dragons” | Gene Expression
  I just stumbled onto two amusing articles, Ancient legends once walked among early humans?, and The discovery of material evidence of a distinct hominin lineage in Central Asia as recently as 30,000 years ago is no surprise. The second is a letter from a folklorist: Sir, The discovery of material evidence of a distinct hominin lineage [...]
  
  
• Hobbits on NOVA | Gene Expression
  This looks interesting, Aliens from Earth: An ancient legend on the Indonesian island of Flores tells of an elflike creature similar to the fictional hobbit of novels and film. But a controversial 2003 archeological find not only suggests that there could be some truth behind the legend but promises to rewrite a key chapter in the [...]
  
  
• The Ur-Sneaker: 5500-Year-Old Shoe Found in Armenian Cave | 80beats
  Three jaw-less heads and one really old shoe. These aren’t the clues in a Law and Order episode; they’re findings from a limestone cave in Armenia. As described in a paper published yesterday in PLoS ONE, archaeologists believe they have found the world’s oldest leather shoe: it’s 5,500 years old. “It’s pretty weird,” said lead author [...]
  
  
• Decapitated, Lion-Chewed Remains = Ancient Gladiator Graveyard | Discoblog
  As archaeologists dug up the ancient corpse, something looked a little off. For one, it didn’t have a head. Second, one of the skeleton’s arms looked like it supported a lot more muscle than the other. Third, it seemed a lion had chewed on it. Meet a dead Roman gladiator. Archaeologists uncovered around eighty such skeletons [...]
  
  
• How Ancient Beekeepers Made Israel the Land of (Milk and) Honey: Imported Bees | 80beats
  It took Turkish bees to make Israel flow with milk and honey. When archaeologist Amihai Mazar and colleagues turned up 3,000-year-old remains of hundreds of preserved beehives from the ancient town of Tel Rehov in 2007, it was the first confirmation of the ancient beekeeping suggested by Egyptian paintings and Biblical references. Now, three years [...]
  
  
• Genetics & the Jews | Gene Expression
  The 2,000 year dance between the Jewish people and Western civilization has spawned many questions of scholarly interest. A relatively minor point, though not trivial, has been the issue of the biological relatedness of the Jewish people, and their relatedness to the nations among whom they were resident. This particular point became more starkly relevant [...]
  
  
• Despite the Diasporas, Jewish Genes Worldwide Show Ancient Connections | 80beats
  Just how connected are the Jews, genetically speaking? Despite the fact that pockets of Jewish people are spread around the globe, the new genetic analysis by Harry Ostrer and his team says that they share genetic markers that go back thousands of years. In the study in the American Journal of Human Genetics, Ostrer investigated Jewish [...]