So does this mean that Cro-Magnons and other big-brained earlier humans were smarter than us? Not necessarily, but it also doesn’t mean that they weren’t smarter.

An expert cited in the Daily Mail article gives a more common opinion:

Dr Lahr thinks that part of the answer may lie in improving
efficiency ... 'We may have smaller brains than early humans
but it doesn't mean we are less intelligent,' she said.

This second issue means that Lahr is technically correct: brain size might change for any number of reasons without affecting intelligence, depending on how we define it. But many researchers do assume that increasing brain size accompanied greater “intelligence” among earlier species in our line, say from Australopithecus afarensis (“Lucy”) to Homo habilis. So why would that association between size and smarts stop once brain size decreases in our species? Could it be that researchers suffer from an emotional stake in our superiority?

(By the way, we could begin to test Lahr’s idea by comparing a series of skulls within various species to see whether it is common for brain size to decrease in this fashion.)

Maybe, as individuals, we actually are less “intelligent” than our ancestors, whether due to dietary changes or to some other cause. For these purposes, let’s consider intelligence to be the combination of our cognitive flexibility and creativity. Flexibility is basically the ability to learn and remember, and creativity is the ability to produce new ideas or combinations of ideas. Why wouldn’t a hunter-gatherer – moving throughout a large and varied landscape and frequently encountering different people, plants, places, and animals – need more intelligence, thus defined, than a sedentary farmer? Or a factory worker? Or a blogger?

If our ancestors were capable of more flexibility and creativity than us, would that make us less valuable?

Maybe so – but this impressive research is preliminary. It represents only an initial step in demonstrating that this pattern occurred. And, despite some fun headlines, the species involved are not necessarily our ancestors. So here’s a list of concerns to temper the fanfare:

• The researchers assumed that small-toothed individuals were female and that large-toothed ones were male. Given the probable sexual dimorphism (size differences) in these species, this seems reasonable. But many things that seem reasonable work out differently in practice. At least one other expert has highlighted this as iffy: “their assignment of sex is methodologically risky.”
• Even if the methodology were unimpeachable, the research depends on a statistical analysis of only 19 fossils. This is too few to generalize about two species who existed for hundreds of thousands of years. The possibility that the pattern they see is the result of chance is too high. As researchers find more fossils to test, this objection will fade away.
• The researchers do not make universal claims about the movement of females and males, but news articles, and especially headlines, suggest that all women moved away from their birthplace and that no men did so. Depending on how they assigned individuals to groups, only 50-75 percent of females had died away from their birthplace, and 11-17 percent of males. So females might have been just as likely to stay put as to move.
• The research depends on ratios of strontium isotopes in teeth. These chemical signatures differ based on geological conditions in a given area, and they develop in the first eight years of life. If there were a clear pattern of some individuals staying in place and others moving after childhood, we would expect to see a clear division between the local ratio and non-local ones. Instead, the researchers found a smooth progression of ratios (see their Figure 2); I’m curious about their explanation. Also, some non-local areas have strontium signatures that overlap with the signature of the area where the fossils were found. Presumably this could hide movement between these areas by males or females.
• This raises a further issue: could members of these species really have lived in such a small area? Areas with different strontium ratios are less than 2 miles away. Are there large, foraging primates who would not travel that far in childhood?
• Of the two species studied, Australopithecus africanus might be our ancestor, or this name might refer to two species, one of which might be our ancestor. The other species in the study, Paranthropus robustus, almost certainly isn’t our ancestor. So headlines regarding this research that refer to “human ancestors” are misleading.
• The researchers don’t help matters when their article refers to “many human groups” who display a “similar” pattern of female mobility, along with chimps and bonobos. They don’t acknowledge that, as other researchers recently noted, “the human pattern of residency is so variable that it counts as a pattern in itself.” That might help explain their evidence of mobile males and sedentary females.

Despite the above, this is truly a creative and promising approach to investigating long-past movements, and the addition of more cases might well establish the authors’ explanation beyond a reasonable doubt – and possibly for species that are more clearly in our ancestral line.

On March 23, 2010, I gave a presentation at Nerd Nite in Washington, DC. The promo read: “No matter how funky Justin Timberlake is, races are not genetic categories. As the great sociologists Rodgers and Hammerstein averred, ‘You’ve got to be carefully taught.’ Hurray for education in the USA! Racial stereotypes seem to be one of the few things that almost every American learns, making race socially but not genetically ‘real.’ We’ll consider all that, including who can jump.”

My wife spontaneously recorded the proceedings using her camera, and I mixed the recording with the slideshow. To meet YouTube’s specifications, I’ve sliced four minutes from the original epic. Alas, the audio takes a turn for the worse around 11:41, but it’s still intelligible.

The situation depicted to the left is horrible.  The roll is backwards. Under what conditions would it be preferable for defecators to reach across the roll, potentially straining their backs or slipping from the toilet seat, to obtain the lead tissue?

Note that, by placing the roll properly, as shown below, defecators are able to use the dispenser’s lid-cum-blade to full advantage, thus separating sheets confidently and with a minimum of strain.

A further, but no less vexing, problem concerns the misalignment of plies, as seen in the final photograph. Too often, laziness or incompetence leads defecators who find themselves charged with initiating a new roll’s usage to accept this chaotic situation, leaving it to their successors to suffer or rectify the disorderly deployment of tissue.

Let us remember that the task at hand is to remove excrement from an unseen area around one’s anus: an organized and predictable implement is essential.

This situation is easily rectified. Simply pull on only the top ply for approximately one rotation of the roll, until the beginning of the second ply aligns with the perforations of the top ply. Then tear away the part of the top ply before this point of synchrony. Fold it neatly for use and begin to clean your anus. Henceforth the plies will unroll in tandem.

Finally, never place a trash basket directly beneath your toilet-paper dispenser. This arrangement forces guests to peer into and smell your garbage while leaning over to manage the bathroom tissue. It also forces defecators who have inadvertently unrolled the tissue in an over-zealous fashion either to extract the unused tissue from the garbage or to never use it, in the latter case furthering the receptacle’s status as a “waste” basket.

Indeed, this study reminds me of research that I performed years ago among salsa dancers at a club in Tucson. No, I didn’t study how ovulation influenced their moves. But I did come to similar conclusion: Dancers couldn’t accurately tell whether their partners were flirting with them – or disrespecting them – unless they had a baseline for comparison.

Without this baseline, miscommunications abounded. For example, many Anglo women failed to notice that many Latino men held them much more closely than they held Latino women. Anglo women typically told me that, while they found the pelvic rubbings unpleasant, Latino men were ‘just like that.’ And some women thought that the dance itself required this kind of contact.

Likewise, men of all sorts frequently misunderstood women’s signals, especially those of relatively friendly women. Men often misinterpreted women’s attempts to be polite as romantic reciprocation. Perhaps if they had noticed that these women were at least as friendly with absolutely everyone else, they would have moved on to another potential mate.

After much further investigation and contemplation, I’ve come to this conclusion: The best clue that Person A has nascent romantic interest in Person B is if A shows an active interest (asking questions, making eyes, stalking, etc.) in B beyond A’s normal level of interest in a similar acquaintance. If A is shy, his or her romantic interest might be less apparent than merely polite interest from an extrovert. So, as with macaques, it helps for humans to have a baseline for comparison.

Mosques not only contain books of the Quran; holy verses often adorn their walls. So, to bomb or burn a mosque is to bomb or burn the Quran.

Yet a Sunni Muslim mobs have attacked and burned Ahmadiyya Muslim mosques in Indonesia recently. An Ahmadi man was arrested for stabbing, he says, an armed attacker in order to protect the mosque and its Qurans. It’s the same Quran as other Muslims use. And the Ahmadiyya mosques apparently are equivalent to Sunni mosques: a local government in Indonesia has ejected the Ahmadis from one and opened it to other Muslim worshipers. In the voluminous news reports about these incidents, I have yet to see even opponents of the attacks (and there are many) lament the destruction of the Quran – much less in the terms used against Jones’ reprehensible acts.

The same goes for bombings of mosques by rival groups of Muslims in Pakistan, Iraq, and Iran. Plenty of people are angry or saddened, but where is the extraordinary concern for the Quran per se? And how can these groups attack mosques in the name of Islam? The attention paid to destroying the Quran seems selective.

We’ll Paint Tomorrow Green:  download or click below to play:

My approach was that an alma mater written today should have a more contemporary sound than one written a century ago and that it should have a melody that people will be able to sing (unlike the national anthem), enjoy singing (unlike most alma maters), and sound good singing en masse. Basically, “Hey Jude” was my model.

An alma mater’s lyrics should reflect the mission and vision of the institution and characteristics of the campus. Green is GGC’s color, its slogan was “The Campus of Tomorrow,” and it’s set on clay in front of some extensive woods. Further, the lyrics should not shy away from imagery that colleges teach students to understand. As a few examples, my composition used ‘clay’ to represent creativity, ‘mirrors’ for self-knowledge, and ‘telescopes’ for knowledge of the world. Finally, it should be open-hearted.

Maybe the committee preferred a different approach, or maybe my song fails to meet my goals (i.e. it sucks). I gave myself only a day to write and record it, so that may be part of the problem.

Here are the lyrics. The rules limited me to one verse and one chorus:

Clay on our boots wherever we walk. Your words in our minds with every thought. Sweet forest air with every breath – though we cross the world.

Brothers and sisters, our hearts fill with hope. We’ve peered in mirrors and telescopes. On sunny days and stormy nights, chart the stars in our eyes!

We’ll paint tomorrow green. We’ll plant and care for dreams as they grow. The season of service is always spring – learning and loving wherever we go. We’ll paint tomorrow green. We’ll paint tomorrow green!

Reporters should avoid this lazy attribution. Leaders obtain followers through persuasion, inspiration, and exemplification. In contrast, rulers and bosses use force or bribery (e.g., wages) to obtain others’ cooperation or mimicry. Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi were leaders, perhaps presidents in democratic societies are leaders, but Qaddafi?

If reporters are searching for a neutral term, why not ruler, head of state, or chief? But please don’t automatically call anyone in charge of a country or organization a leader. It cheapens the term while subtly legitimating domination.

I do not automatically oppose everything that gets called terrorism, since groups with legitimate aspirations might otherwise lack the resources, such as military might, to end longstanding, brutal oppression. But, to get my support, the violence has to be less destructive than the oppression it opposes, and it has to have a decent possibility of success in ending that oppression. The former criterion is in the eye of the beholder, but the second now has about forty years of evidence showing that modern terrorism rarely, if ever, works.

Terrorists in Indonesia have the aim of replacing the officially secular, democratic government with a conservative, strictly Islamic state, much like Afghanistan under the Taliban. When has terrorism resulted in the desired change in government? It certainly hasn’t worked out in Palestine. In Latin America, leftist terrorist activity actually led to more-conservative military regimes in the 1970s and 1980s. European leftist terrorists hardly incited the proletarian revolution they sought; ETA in Spain and the IRA in Ireland likewise have failed to come close to their nationalist goals. And so forth. If anything, terrorist campaigns to change governing systems most often prompt a long trend away from their goals.

Maybe today’s terrorists will consider the many examples of successful revolutions in the past few decades. Some have resulted from large-scale military struggle – like the United States, long ago – but many of them have resulted from sustained, nonviolent mass protest. (In either case, material support from powerful countries and from at least part of the military certainly helps.)

I sometimes have negative fantasies of being kidnapped by a terrorist group. In my perverse daydreams, I convince them that the evidence clearly shows that their tactic has almost no chance of success. If only such arguments were convincing! Instead, terrorists here seem incapable of such global reassessments. Apparently, if the bombs work, that’s good enough; fortunately, sometimes they don’t.