HENRY - The human evolution news relay
Entries written in April 2008
Written April 29, 2008 in Tree Tuesday, phylogenetics
(More on American Nervousness, thanks Fiona!)
In the midst of a crisis that may have reached a breaking, point Tuesday afternoon, linguists, and grammarians, everywhere say they are baffled, by the sudden and seemingly random, appearance of commas, in our nation’s sentences. The epidemic of errant punctuation…
Out in the AJHG, is the next in the National Genographic line of studies. This one, by Behar et al. assesses 624 mitochondrial genomes from Khoisan hunter gatherers in Africa (doi). The abstract says:
The quest to explain demographic history during the early part of human evolution has been limited because of the scarce paleoanthropological [...]
isn’t there anything that Wikipedia does not know? Phylogenetics, is, of course
the worst thing to put on a biology quiz for freshman, Mrs. Smigala
Keep up the good work, Mrs. Smigala! All joking aside, phylogenetics is a hard topic to pick up. Students tend to get swamped pretty quickly with jargon (synapomorphy? homoplasy? polychotomy? apomorphy? [...]
Jared Diamond in the New Yorker discusses what tribal societies can tell us about our need for vengeance:
In 1992, when Daniel Wemp was about twenty-two years old, his beloved paternal uncle Soll was killed in a battle against the neighboring Ombal clan. … Soll’s death demanded vengeance.
Daniel told me that responsibility for arranging revenge usually falls on the victim’s firstborn son or, failing that, on one of his brothers. “Soll did have a son, but he was only six years old at the time of his father’s death, much too young to organize the revenge,” Daniel said. “On the other hand, my father was felt to be too old and weak by then; the avenger should be a strong young man in his prime. So I was the one who became expected to avenge Soll.” As it turned out, it took three years, twenty-nine more killings, and the sacrifice of three hundred pigs before Daniel succeeded in discharging this responsibility.
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In a wonderful move, the Max Planck Institute and Michael Cysouw have placed their World Atlas of Language Structures online. WALS, for those who don’t know, is a large database of structural information about languages (e.g. phonological, grammatical, lexical).
Here’s the page of info for Maori, and, to choose a feature at random, here’s a map [...]
Phylogeny of Sabicea (Angiosperm) with American subspecies encircled. From Wernham (1914) and Lam (1936).
Wernham, H.F. (1914). A monograph of the genus Sabicea. London: British Museum of Natural History.
Lam, H.J. (1936) Phylogenetic symbols, past and present: Being an apology for genealogical trees. Acta Biotheoretica, 2:153-194.
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