What to do with the dead? This timeless problem took extra urgency in Victorian London. Excerpted from the book Dirty Old London, by Lee Jackson, in the Guardian. The existence of such gases was undisputed – sextons and undertakers were often called up to “tap” coffins in church vaults, drilling a hole to prevent them […]
Continue reading →One of my favorite things this week: John Hawks on the magnificent open-science real-time-science excavation of a newly discovered human fossil dig going on right now in South Africa. Do read the whole thing; what they’re doing there is radical, disruptive, inspiring, and wonderful: In my last post (“In the hot seat”), I explained how […]
Continue reading →John Hawks, the funny, fearless, adventurous anthropologist who writes one of the richest blogs in all academia, recently read an editorial at Current Biology that, “wishy-washing its way through a non-opinion about the value of blogging in science,” worries that blogging opens the door to “criticism [that] can be harmful.” Better, the editorial writer suggested, to […]
Continue reading →Evolutionary anthropologist John Hawks, eagle-eyed as ever, calls out a common mistake made by one expert in a response to findings in the gorilla genome: The Nature News story on the gorilla genome includes this section relevant to the evolution of hearing in gorillas and humans: [from the Nature story:] Some of these rapid changes […]
Continue reading →[Note: Major second thoughts at bottom; post retitled (formerly “Cutting to the Chase on the Arsenic Circus”)] Popular Science has run what strikes me as a nicely nuanced profile on Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the young scientist who, along with senior collaborators, made strong claims last December that they induced Mono Lake bacteria to substitute arsenic for […]
Continue reading →Guest post by Eric Michael Johnson The following guest post by Eric Michael Johnson is part of the Primate Diaries in Exile blog tour. You can follow other stops on this tour through his RSS feed, through his Facebook page, or by following @ericmjohnson on Twitter. Thanks. – EMJ & DD ___ The Allure of […]
Continue reading →Is sharing a technology? These may seem an odd question. But over at John Hawks’s Weblog, of all places, John Hawks is spinning an intriguing argument that the social context supporting behaviors such as sharing and counting plays such a vital role that it amounts to a sort of technological infrastructure — and its outcome […]
Continue reading →John Hawks ponders the day, very soon to come, when high school students will run their genome sequences in bio lab instead of their blood types. He’s riffing off an article by Ronald Bailey in Reason about Bailey’s experiences with his own genomic knowledge (“I’ll Show You My Genome. Will You Show Me Yours?”) Some […]
Continue reading →A week ago, evo biologist heavyweight E.O. Wilson and others published a paper in which they challenged the standard explanation for why animals do nice things for one another. Nice behavior is a big deal, so the paper raised a big flap. Let’s say you want to read just two things about this paper. Though my own […]
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