HENRY

A great list from Swarthmore College:

Here is the exhibit I want my zoo, the Philadelphia Zoo, to feature at the entrance:

Bronze replicas of a fish (in artificial pond), an early amphibian, an early mammal, an early primate, and several lineages of hominids, all arranged on top of bronze phylogentic “tree” inlaid into the sidewalk. Humans are not displayed, but their proper phylogenetic position is denoted by bronze footprints next to a plaque that says, “Stand here for photo op.” Such an exhibit would attract national attention, and would be loved by all. Of course, most visitors would stand next to the Neanderthal statue, looking dumb, but it would initiate “conversations” about human origins by every single visitor to the zoo, which means millions of people (especially school kids on field trips). The exhibit would help persuade people that humans are, indeed, evolved from non-human ancestors, a fact that is currently accepted by only 12% of U.S. adults. Sure, the exhibit would probably cost $120,000, but I bet it would pay for itself in 3 years.

Nancy Shute in USNews:

If you judge the progress of humanity by Homer Simpson, Paris Hilton, and Girls Gone Wild videos, you might conclude that our evolution has stalled—or even shifted into reverse. Not so, scientists say. Humans are evolving faster than ever before, picking up new genetic traits and talents that may help us survive a turbulent future.

Awww. The BBC Meads Anuta, where “Harmony thrives in Pacific Isolation“. I can’t believe we’re seeing “Noble Savage” rhetoric in 2008.

When I asked Joseph what the biggest changes have been in the last 20 years he said “young people playing ukuleles”.

Was this a problem? I asked rather jokingly.

“Well,” he replied more seriously, “before the ukuleles the younger generation would dance every evening. Now it is rare.”

I got the same response from at least half a dozen other adults.

As trivial as this sounds it does make one think about our own, supposedly advanced, society.

We worry about our children getting in with the wrong crowd, taking drugs, drinking, teenage knife crime. Anutans worry about their kids playing homemade ukuleles.

Today’s PRS.B sees the publication of a supertree of 600 Dinosaur species. Awesome. ScienceDaily has more information here. Here’s a picture of it (note: a full version is available here):

The abstract says:

The observed diversity of dinosaurs reached its highest peak during the mid- and Late Cretaceous, the 50Myr that preceded their extinction, and yet this explosion of dinosaur diversity may be explained largely by sampling bias. It has long been debated whether dinosaurs were part of the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution (KTR), from 125–80Myr ago, when flowering plants, herbivorous and social insects, squamates, birds and mammals all underwent a rapid expansion.

Although an apparent explosion of dinosaur diversity occurred in the mid-Cretaceous, coinciding with the emergence of new groups (e.g. neoceratopsians, ankylosaurid ankylosaurs, hadrosaurids and pachycephalosaurs), results from the first quantitative study of diversification applied to a new supertree of dinosaurs show that this apparent burst in dinosaurian diversity in the last 18 Myr of the Cretaceous is a sampling artefact. Indeed, major diversification shifts occurred largely in the first one-third of the group’s history.

Despite the appearance of new clades of medium to large herbivores and carnivores later in dinosaur history, these new originations do not correspond to significant diversification shifts. Instead, the overall geometry of the Cretaceous part of the dinosaur tree does not depart from the null hypothesis of an equal rates model of lineage branching. Furthermore, we conclude that dinosaurs did not experience a progressive decline at the end of the Cretaceous, nor was their evolution driven directly by the KTR

…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 researchers into the past. Modern graduate education parallels this shift in publication—shorter in years, more specialized in scope, culminating less frequently in a true dissertation than an album of articles

– James A. Evans, Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship.

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 speak today. Just try describing your mood with the Shakespearean terms allicholly and tetchy—you are more likely to get confused looks than sympathy for being unhappy and irritable. Four hundred years from now, English speakers will likely feel the same way about the language we speak today. Unless you are keeping up with the latest additions to the Oxford English Dictionary, you might already be behind the times: Do you know if you would be eligible to participate in a girlcott? Or whether you would want a job as a helmer? Or when it would be appropriate to wear a jandal?

The full-text is available at the EEO website here.

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 changed, or once abundant shellfish stocks vanished. But some things are fairly certain. Those first trekkers out of Africa brought with them the physical and behavioral traits—the large brains and the capacity for language—that characterize fully modern humans. From their bivouac on the Asian continent in what is now Yemen, they set out on a decamillennial journey that spanned continents and land bridges and reached all the way to Tierra del Fuego, at the bottom of South America.