HENRY

This week in Science - The inappropriate use and protrayal of Chimpanzees:

In 2005, a survey (see the table, left side) was conducted at the Regenstein Center for African Apes (RCAA) at the Lincoln Park Zoo (Chicago, IL). (…) The final question of the survey asked respondents to select which of three great ape species (chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans) were considered endangered in the wild. Of those choices, 95% of respondents thought gorillas were endangered, 91% thought orangutans were endangered, but only 66% believed chimpanzees to be endangered. (…) Respondents were informed that, in fact, all three great apes were classified as endangered and then asked for a reason why they thought a particular ape was not considered in this category. No prompting with answers was provided, and all responses were recorded by the interviewer. Of the 250 respondents who were willing to provide explanations for their choice, the most common reason for the category chosen (35%) was that chimpanzees were commonly seen on television, advertisements, and movies and, therefore, must not be in jeopardy.

“Ancient humans, venturing across the ice bridge to North America, got
lost quite often. They found it very hard to keep their Bering Strait….” (I’m sorry, so very sorry).

Through the magic of the internet (via), I’ve come across this posting where “DarkSoul” posts some photos of a modern day skirmish between the Kalenjin and Kisii tribes in Kenya. There’s an associated news story here, but I think the pictures can speak for themselves:

Alexander Small reviews On Deep History and the Brain by Daniel Lord Smail in the New York Times:

Taking Paleolithic man seriously, Smail argues, requires us to understand that history and biology always shape each other — there is no ascent from the tyranny of brute instinct to the freedoms of civilization. Some evolutionary theorists stress that cultural innovation allows human beings to overcome the blind stumblings of natural selection: we deliberately solve a problem and pass on that solution to our descendants, who improve on it in turn. Smail takes a different tack. The imperfect copying of past behavior and small, often unconscious preferences can push a society in a new direction, even without anyone aiming toward a particular goal. It’s possible, for instance, that early men decided to make sharper spear points with the intent of drawing more blood from their prey; Smail would rather suppose that these spear points were created by accident, and then spread because the hunters who used them proved to be better hunters, even if they didn’t know why. Cultural evolution can be rapid and it can help human beings adapt to their environment, but it needn’t be intended or progressive.

R (yes, the letter) is a seriously powerful statistics programming language. A recently announced project, R-Phylo has been started to help people use R for phylogenetic work:

All organisms are linked together by the tree of life. We can use this tree along with trait data, to understand many aspects of biology: does specialization lead to increased speciation? do body size and brain size coevolve? how have genome sizes changed over time? and more. R has many functions to address such questions. This website has tutorials on how to do these analyses in R and an overview of what is available in R. There is also a mailing list for asking questions about using and developing comparative methods in R

There’s already been some interest in R and phylogenetics already (e.g. APE and a book), so it’s great to see that continuing. There’s a short list of tutorials/how-to guides already up on the site, and they look good so far. (via).

From Ed Boyden’s blog: How to think:

When I applied for my faculty job at the MIT Media Lab, I had to write a teaching statement. One of the things I proposed was to teach a class called “How to Think,” which would focus on how to be creative, thoughtful, and powerful in a world where problems are extremely complex, targets are continuously moving, and our brains often seem like nodes of enormous networks that constantly reconfigure. In the process of thinking about this, I composed 10 rules, which I sometimes share with students. I’ve listed them here, followed by some practical advice on implementation.

Now, I’m really skeptical of the six-degrees of freedom stuff, and mildly skeptical of small world network things in general (lots of shiny, little usefulness). However, I may be swayed by some new research coming out of Microsoft (?!) who tracked a metric crap-tonne of instant messages traveling through the MSN network:

Eric Horvitz, at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, and Jure Leskovec, who was an intern at the time, crunched through masses of data, logging a month’s worth of global ‘instant messaging’ conversations using Microsoft Messenger — software that facilitates chat, in a similar way to e-mail, but in a more instantaneous and less formal fashion. The researchers then counted how many messages were sent and from where: in total they tallied up a whopping 255 billion messages sent in the course of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people during June 2006.

They found that the average path length is just over the Kevin Bacon gold-standard, at 6.6 nodes between any person. The full paper is available here.