Peter N. Peregrine, courtesy of Alice Domurat Dreger:
Dear Supporters of Anthropological Science,
I write as President of the Society for Anthropological Sciences (SAS) to inform you of a troubling development that occurred at the Executive Board (EB) meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) this past weekend. The EB adopted a new [...]
The concept arises from the tedious modern worship of even the most minor celebrities, paired with the idea that standing next to somebody cool can make you cool – a hypothesis comprehensively debunked by Tony Blair in 1997. From that, GQ extrapolate that making scientists pose awkwardly in the background of photos of rock stars, [...]
Language evolution is traditionally described in terms of family trees with ancestral languages splitting into descendent languages. However, it has long been recognized that language evolution also entails horizontal components, most commonly through lexical borrowing. … Here, we infer the frequency of hidden borrowing among 2346 cognates (etymologically related words) of basic vocabulary distributed across [...]
Uto-Aztecan.org, a website devoted to the comparative study of the Uto-Aztecan (UA) language family. Located in the southwestern United States and western Mexico, UA consists of some 30 related Native American languages descended from a common parent language that linguists now call Proto-Uto-Aztecan (PUA). Hopi, Ute, Pima, and Aztec/Nahuatl are among the better known of [...]
In the late 1950s, three men who identified as the Son of God were forced to live together in a mental hospital. What happened?
Like so many ill-educated people of my generation, I knew no scientists personally and assumed they were all like Spock. I mean, who wants to grow up to be Spock? Men don't follow him, women ignore him, and, according to Vulcan custom, he only has a wife/girlfriend for one weekend every decade or so—not the [...]
There’s a simple reason that phylogenies have become increasingly prevalent in textbooks and now even appear in middle school texts: phylogenies have become increasingly important in biological research and in shaping how scientists look at the natural world. To grasp modern biology, students must understand the basics of phylogenetics.
The transition from a hunter–gatherer existence to a sedentary farming-based lifestyle has had key consequences for human groups around the world and has profoundly shaped human societies. Originating in the Near East around 11,000y ago, an agricultural lifestyle subsequently spread across Europe during the New Stone Age (Neolithic). (…) Here, we compare Neolithic haplogroups and [...]
Instead of a "preserve everything" approach to scientific data, the people running the [Large Hadron Collider] are now taking a "preserve the interesting stuff and a random sample of the rest" approach. As collision intensities continue to ramp up, that random sample will be an ever-shrinking slice of the full complement of events taking place.
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