John Horgan’s latest post on Cross-Check, his Scientific American website, is called “Defending Stephen Jay Gould’s crusade against biological determinism.” There he defends Gould against recent charges (documented in a PLoS Biology paper) that Gould was sloppy in his reanalysis of the cranial measurement of human ethnic groups made by Samuel Morton in the nineteenth […]
The meetings so far have gone very smoothly; the organizers have done a terrific job (despite us having to live out in the middle of nowhere), and there have been few glitches. What a great idea it was, too, to have a free happy hour from 5:30-7:30 every day after the last session, with all […]
David Sloan Wilson is best known for his vigorous defense of the evolutionary importance of multilevel selection, a variant of group selection. His ideas haven’t yet become a part of mainstream evolutionary biology: although multilevel selection must operate in some instances (in evolution, every type of selection must have happened at least once!), I’m not […]
Today’s New York Times, contains, of all things, an editorial, “Bias and the beholder,” about Steve Gould’s ham-handed analysis of Samuel Morton’s skull-volume data. Yes, it sure does look like Gould screwed up, and we don’t know the reasons, but why on earth would the Times publish an editorial about it? The editorial, in fact, […]
I always thought that among Steve Gould’s “real” (non-essay-collection) books, The Mismeasure of Man was the best. Yes, it was tendentious, written to show that scientists could be as biased and racist as anyone else, but it rang true. And the two-page epilogue, about the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck, a “feeble-minded” black woman, is […]
David Brooks, New York Times columnist and author of The Social Animal, has never met an evolutionary psychology argument he didn’t like. I haven’t read his book, but I did read a long excerpt in The New Yorker and found it credulous, tedious, and lame. P.Z. Myers, who reviewed the book, had the same opinion. […]
by Greg Mayer At least since Socrates explored the meaning of the Greek maxim “Know thyself”, and Alexander Pope added that “the proper study of Mankind is Man”, we have been interested in knowledge about ourselves. But who are we? A paper in press in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Ron […]
No, this isn’t about Neil Shubin’s wonderful book about fossils, fishes, and evolutionary remnants, but a an article by Dr. Michael Mosley on, oddly, the BBC News “health” page. You must see it, if only to watch the 30-second time-lapse video (made from high-quality scans) of the development of the embryonic human face up to […]
The short answer: probably southern Africa. As I note in Chapter 7 of WEIT, it was Darwin who first pointed out, in The Origin, the similarity between the evolution of languages and the evolution of species. Languages evolve in a straight line, like some lineages of plants and animals, and they sometimes split, so that […]
You all remember the Laetoli footprints from Tanzania: footprints from what were probably three individuals of Australopithecus afarensis, made 3.6 million years ago as they walked across soft volcanic ash. Those proved indubitably that our early ancestors were fully bipedal, and were a poignant snapshot of hominins long gone. Scientific American now reports on another […]
