Monthly Archives: November 2011

Svante Pääbo at the Society of Neuroscience Meetings

Posted on November 14, 2011 by Adam Van Arsdale

Carl Zimmer, writing at Discover, has a great piece on Svante Pääbo talking about Neandertals at a major neuroscience conference. Although I don’t agree with all of Zimmer’s characterizations, the piece is a nice primer on what we have learned … Continue reading →

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To Ph.D. or not to Ph.D.?

Posted on November 14, 2011 by Adam Van Arsdale

Larry Cebula, a history professor at Eastern Washington University, has a post at his blog titled, “Open Letter to My Students: No, You Cannot be a Professor” Your professors are the last generation of tenure track faculty. Every long-term educational … Continue reading →

Posted in Anthropology, Teaching | Tagged | 2 Comments

My “wildest dreams”

Posted on November 14, 2011 by Adam Van Arsdale

The NY Times has a story this morning on Google’s top secret lab researching high-risk, long-term ideas. Without thinking too much about it, the two areas I would hope we could come up with new technology involve transportation and food. … Continue reading →

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Saturday morning reading

Posted on November 12, 2011 by Adam Van Arsdale

Kids’ soccer in 30 minutes, but some early Saturday morning reading before that begins. This is from the introduction of Mel Konner’s voluminous (and excellent) 2010 volume, The Evolution of Childhood: 6. Human behavior and its development, including all of … Continue reading →

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Interviewing for a job

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Adam Van Arsdale

A week from now I will be at the AAA meetings in Montreal where, for the second time in three years, I will help conduct interviews of prospective job candidates. Having been on both ends of the academic job interview … Continue reading →

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Finding fossils online

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Adam Van Arsdale

The blog Hominid Hunting, a project courtesy of the Smithsonian, provides a list of places to find fossils online. They have a nice start. To their list I would add a few other handy fossil/bone sites: The eSkeletons project from … Continue reading →

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Your genome and you

Posted on November 10, 2011 by Adam Van Arsdale

More on personal genomics, as Razib Khan uses himself as an example of personal decision-making based on genomic data: It turns out that one locus determines most of the effect of this trait, and that locus has been genotyped in … Continue reading →

Posted in Genetics | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Nothing good happens after dark

Posted on November 10, 2011 by Adam Van Arsdale

The BBC has a story on a recent paper in Nature by Susanne Shultz and colleagues documenting major steps in the evolution of primates. One of them, not surprisingly (though it is nice to see it more clearly demonstrated), is … Continue reading →

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Energetic or expensive brains?

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Adam Van Arsdale

I have not had a chance to go through all the details of this paper, but University of Zurich PhD student, Ana Navarrete (along with Carel van Schaik and Karin Isler), has a paper out in Nature this week that … Continue reading →

Posted in Energetics, Evolution | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Fiona Apple: Evolutionary biologist?

Posted on November 7, 2011 by Adam Van Arsdale

This is what happens when I take a break from a long day of writing to take the dog for a walk. I find myself listening to the following lyrics from Fiona Apple and imagining she is talking about competing … Continue reading →

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