http://henry.simon.net.nz Rampaging across the world of human evolution for, oh, a good 18 months now.. Sat, 19 Jul 2008 05:36:12 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en ...one of the chief values of print library research is poor indexing. Poor indexing—indexing by titles and authors, primarily within core journals—likely had unintended consequences that assisted the integration of science and scholarship. By drawing researchers through unrelated articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and led ... http://henry.simon.net.nz/stories/2008/07/19/one-of-the-chief-values-of-print-library-research-is-poor-indexing/ In today's, Evolution: Education and Outreach, Anastasia Thanukos takes A Look at Linguistic Evolution: Anyone who has ever tackled a Shakespeare play knows that English has changed substantially in the 400 years since Elizabeth I ruled England. In fact, Elizabethan English can seem like a completely different language from the one we ... http://henry.simon.net.nz/stories/2008/07/13/a-look-at-linguistic-evolution/ Scientific American covers the human diaspora in a nice broad-brush overview: Fifty or sixty thousand years ago a small band of Africans—a few hundred or even several thousand—crossed the strait in tiny boats, never to return. The reason they left their homeland in eastern Africa is not completely understood. Perhaps the climate ... http://henry.simon.net.nz/stories/2008/07/09/the-migration-history-of-humans-dna-study-traces-human-origins-across-the-continents/ ....and the award for the stupidest science story I've seen in months goes to LiveScience.com for "Cave Men Loved to Sing", in which we're told that our cave-dwelling ancestors used echo-location: With only dull light available from a torch, which couldn't be carried into very narrow passages, the ancient hunters had ... http://henry.simon.net.nz/stories/2008/07/04/the-singing-cavemen/ Today's Science sees the publication of a phylogenomic study of 196 bird species, which has some rather marked differences to the traditional phylogenies of bird species. Abstract says - Deep avian evolutionary relationships have been difficult to resolve as a result of a putative explosive radiation. Our study examined ~32 kilobases ... http://henry.simon.net.nz/stories/2008/06/27/a-phylogenomic-study-of-birds-reveals-their-evolutionary-history/ & in P.N.A.S. - Is an eclipse described in the Odyssey? Plutarch and Heraclitus believed a certain passage in the 20th book of the Odyssey ("Theoclymenus's prophecy") to be a poetic description of a total solar eclipse. In the late 1920s, Schoch and Neugebauer computed that the solar eclipse of 16 ... http://henry.simon.net.nz/stories/2008/06/25/is-an-eclipse-described-in-the-odyssey/ Paul Ehrlich talks about his recent study of Polynesian canoes, and whether human culture evolves via natural selection: Biologists have a pretty good idea of both how flies become resistant to DDT and how humans and primates have diverged over time. That's because the mechanism underlying these processes is the same. ... http://henry.simon.net.nz/stories/2008/06/24/does-human-culture-evolve-via-natural-selection-as-our-genes-do/