HENRY - The human evolution news relay
Entries written in February 2008
Kenneth Chang in the NY Times talks about The Grim Story of Maya Blue:
The vibrant sky color can be seen on pottery, murals and other artifacts produced by the Maya people of Central America centuries ago and the unusual, durable pigment remains vibrant today long after other colors have faded away.
It was also the color of Chaak, the rain god, and of human sacrifice.
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In PLoS One - Singing in the Rain Forest: How a Tropical Bird Song Transfers Information:
How information transmission processes between individuals are shaped by natural selection is a key question for the understanding of the evolution of acoustic communication systems. Environmental acoustics predict that signal structure will differ depending on general features of the habitat. [...]
Oh this is going to be a scandal - a large-scale meta-analysis of anti-depressant medication has shown that Prozac, the third most prescribed antidepressant in the US, doesn’t work.
The paper (Initial Severity and Antidepressant Benefits: A Meta-Analysis of Data Submitted to the Food and Drug Administration) obtained all the clinical trial information from the [...]
The Encyclopedia of Life has gone online. Unfortunately, she’s currently dead in the water:
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Fortunately, Carl Zimmer has a nice shiny piece on it in [...]
Austronesian genetic signature in East African Madagascar and Polynesia
The dispersal of the Austronesian language family from Southeast Asia represents the last major diaspora leading to the peopling of Oceania to the East and the Indian Ocean to the West. Several theories have been proposed to explain the current locations, and the linguistic and cultural diversity [...]
Robert Epstein in Psychology Today:
The mental health fields have, now and then, spawned and nurtured some completely crazy ideas. Physicians in the 18th and 19th centuries, for example, inflicted strange and extremely cruel treatments on their mentally ill patients based on equally bizarre theories of human nature. To try to shock schizophrenics into “regaining consciousness [...]
Written February 21, 2008 in africa, anthropology, europe, evolution, genetics, papers-I-should-read
No time to read this now, but it looks very interesting: Proportionally more deleterious genetic variation in European than in African populations (doi). Abstract says -
Quantifying the number of deleterious mutations per diploid human genome is of crucial concern to both evolutionary and medical geneticists. Here we combine genome-wide polymorphism data from PCR-based exon resequencing, [...]
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