Mindy Pitre forwarded me a video done by her undergraduate students at St. Lawrence University, and I just had to share it. It is about as adorable as caveman lovin' can be!
"I Believe in Gene Flow"
She writes: "It was for my Intro to Human Origins at St. Lawrence University. I made them do group raps/songs. They were super creative!"
Talking to my clones today during their St. Patrick's Day preparations:
Me: (skeptical) So you've filled your leprechaun trap with lots of food?
Lucy: Yeah, there's lots to eat in there.
Sadie: We don't want him to escape, but we can't really hold him in there, so we want him to decide to stay all night.
Lucy: Yes, he won't want to leave.
Me: So won't he need a potty?
Both: OOOOOH! WHAT A GREAT IDEA!
Sadie: I'm going to make an outhouse so he will go outside and then come back in to eat more!
Lucy: Mine is going to be an INSIDE toilet.
Sadie: Hey, we could collect his DNA!
Both: *laughing*
Sadie: Thanks, Daddy, you have the greatest ideas!
Lucy: Yes, you're brilliant, Daddy!
Sadie: (walks away with evil laugh) We're going to get leprechaun DNA!
I have to drive some more traffic to this post on Forbes' website ("The least stressful jobs of 2013"), because it has me laughing out loud. Number one on the list is "University Professor". The comments section already has the author of the post backtracking away from what she wrote, which is ludicrous:
University professors have a lot less stress than most of us. Unless they teach summer school, they are off between May and September and they enjoy long breaks during the school year, including a month over Christmas and New Year’s and another chunk of time in the spring. Even when school is in session they don’t spend too many hours in the classroom. For tenure-track professors, there is some pressure to publish books and articles, but deadlines are few. Working conditions tend to be cozy and civilized and there are minimal travel demands, except perhaps a non-mandatory conference or two. As for compensation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median salary for professors is $62,000, not a huge amount of money but enough to live on, especially in a university town.
Another boon for professors: Universities are expected to add 305,700 adjunct and tenure-track professors by 2020, according to the BLS. All of those attributes land university professor in the number one slot on Careercast.com’s list of the least stressful jobs of 2013.
I'm so glad I don't deal with all the stress of being paid over the summer, and I'm now looking forward to the stress-free prospect of having my colleagues replaced by adjuncts over the next few years. Those non-mandatory conferences are so awesome I'm glad to pay my own way. Thanks, Forbes!
More seriously, it is possible to be a university professor without a lot of stress. I feel great about my work for exactly the reasons the Forbes post suggests -- for me it is important to operate independently, being in control of my own work. But many other professors don't respond to that opportunity by reducing their internal stress level, and pre-tenure is highly stressful for everyone.
And beyond research, all the other demands of the job are increasing greatly as administration grows and teaching staff shrinks. Definitely not a job that is decreasing in stress over the next year.
Let no one say that I'm an uncritical voice about the many advantages of releasing preprints. They do have their downsides. Lack of editing is one.
Here's a passage from a new preprint from Peter Waddell and Xi Tan, "New g%AIC, g%AICc, g%BIC, and Power Divergence Fit Statistics Expose Mating between Modern Humans, Neanderthals and other Archaics":
The apparent lack of Denisovan alleles on the X chromosome suggested that some of these archaic interbreeding events were male biased, that is archaic males mating with modern females (Waddell, 2011). This was formerly dubbed the “archaic Ron Jeremy” hypothesis, after the well-known American thespian. Formerly known, because a journal editor has recently urged us to alter our manuscript, to avoid confusion with a “Ron Jeremy Event”, which they referenced to the Urban Dictionary. The new synonymy is the “lecherous archaic man” hypothesis.
I'll return to the argument in the paper later, I just wanted to consider the question of Neandertal similarity to well-known thespians. This is a followup to another preprint from last 2011, which addressed the question of male-biased gene flow into the ancestry of Papua New Guinea from Denisovan peoples ("Homo denisova, Correspondence Spectral Analysis, Finite Sites Reticulate Hierarchical Coalescent Models and the Ron Jeremy Hypothesis"). From that preprint:
While the origin of the unusual features of the NSYFHP pattern is just a hypothesis at this stage, it is testable and deserves a name, so we call it the “Ron Jeremy hypothesis” (after the accomplished American thespian Ron Jeremy, who is adroit at debauching modern young women, whose father’s might well call him a Neanderthal or a Denisovan, and who looks remarkably like reconstructions of these archaic humans in museums, including being very big boned).
Big boned.
Similarly, we may refer to the low frequency of the NSYFHP on the X chromosome as “Ron’s Grandfather hypothesis” which is the mixing of the Denisovan lineage with an even more ancient hominid lineage due to a male biased infusion.
Obviously we badly, badly need a better system of terminology to discuss the relationships of archaic human groups, including MSA and earlier Africans, which we now understand to have been subject to recurrent gene flow. Male-biased gene flow has often happened in human groups, sometimes due to warfare or the dominance of elites, sometimes as a simple function of greater male dispersal. Male-biased gene flow also appears to characterize orangutan population history, but not chimpanzees, so it depends on species-specific aspects of population structure and dispersal strategies.
We unfortunately have a 150-year history of looking at Neandertals, and secondarily at other archaic human groups, as strange evolutionary dead-ends. When faced with the evidence that these ancient people are among our ancestors, some scientists have turned first to the idea that mating among ancient people was exotic and strange. Hence the "Ron Jeremy" angle.
Highly recommended for Friday: Michael Eisen on "Is the NIH a cult?"
The NIH has several national indoctrination programs, but the most dangerous and effective is something known as the “Training Grant”. These NIH cells, found on most university campuses across the country and always led by an established “grantee”, prey on impressionable youths just out of college and eager to shed the structure of their parents’ worlds. The NIH takes them under its wing and gives them a generous personal stipend and a structured program of research and experimentation. They dangle the carrot of one day becoming a “grantee”, but they do not tell them about the lonely, grueling years to come, or that only a handful of them will actually make it to the point where they are even allowed to submit their first application for membership. By the time they are done with this program, most have drunk the NIH Kool Aid, and can think of nothing they want more than to become a grantee. And those who do not feel they have sunk too much of their time and energy into these first steps along the grantee path to give up.
The "charismatic leader" section is not to be missed.
Brian Palmer: "Who Would Win in a Fight: a Modern Human or a Neanderthal?"
It would also depend on training. There’s no telling how a reanimated Neanderthal would attack or defend himself in a fight against a Homo sapiens.
No, I don't endorse the taxonomy. But this has me thinking: what if we tried to compile the ultimate Doc Savage team of hominins? You know, a fossil fantasy league. Five ancient individuals, to bring together the strengths of lost races.
I suppose the problem with that idea is that many of the best fossils really don't preserve the charismatic parts. Like SK 12 - one of the most impressive specimens of Australopithecus robustus, but it's a mandible. How do you cast a mandible in an action movie?
The headline of this Guardian story really says it all: "Priceless Tibetan Buddha statue looted by Nazis was carved from meteorite".
The 1,000-year-old carving, which is 24cm high and weighs 10kg, depicts the god Vaisravana, the Buddhist King of the North, and is known as the Iron Man statue.
It was stolen before the second world war during a pillage of Tibet by Hitler's SS, who were searching for the origins of the Aryan race.
I can have only one reaction to that, really: "It is something that man was not meant to disturb. Death has always surrounded it. It is not of this earth."
Razib Khan raises the question whether Neandertal cloning could be ethical, and a varied comment thread quickly ensues.
People seem to confuse "ethics" with "ick factor". My favorite line from the discussion so far:
also, though i do think it is legit to argue that resurrecting neandertals is not ethical, it is instructive to note that many of the objections being made here (e.g., “oh so ugly!”) can apply to ‘normal’ modern humans. e.g., “that couple be 00glee, they shouldn’t breed and produce 00glee kids….” to me that doesn’t nullify the objection, but it strikes me that these aren’t qualitative issues with neandertals as such.
I wonder how much Neanderhating could be set to Randy Newman lyrics?
I've been offline for the past several days on a family vacation. So I get back and what do I find in my feed reader?
The unsuccessful end to one of the briefest but most eagerly hyped trysts in conservation history was announced with a short statement from Edinburgh zoo: their giant pandas had failed to mate. The press release headline said simply: close but no cigar.
Nice to know the world never changes...
Barbara King joins the Neandertal Anti-Defamation League with her new post at NPR: "Giving Neanderthals Some Respect (Especially In An Election Year)".
"Knuckle-dragging Neanderthals!" Every election year, political candidates of all stripes are tarred with this epithet. In a recent column, Washington Post pundit Kathleen Parker asks if it's fair that many U.S. women see the Republican party in precisely those terms. My question: Is that fair to the Neanderthals?
Well, one thing is for sure: If one of the political parties really was Neandertals, they'd do better than the ones we have now!
