Monthly Archives: June 2012

Australopithecus sediba: still very interesting

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

Nature released the latest Australopithecus sediba paper today, this one attempting to reconstruct the diet of sediba based on phytoliths extracted from the dental calculus of two individuals, the carbon isotope composition based on laser ablation isotope ratio mass spectrometry, … Continue reading →

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The neuroscience of race

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

Nature Neuroscience has a review article by Jennifer T Kubota, Mahzarin R Banaji and Elizabeth Phelps in the current issue on how the brain functions in the context of racial interactions and decision-making processes. The article is accompanied by an … Continue reading →

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Interspecies perception

Posted on June 26, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

Having just re-read Michael Tomasello’s great book, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, on my flights back from Europe, I found this post from Greg Downey and his graduate student, Paul Keil, fascinating. Paul and Greg describe the interaction and … Continue reading →

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Meat and the paleodiet

Posted on June 25, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

I was making lunch for my kids this morning when I happened to hear this NPR piece on the radio. The issue, similar to what I commented on a few weeks ago, is the paleodiet. This time, the story is … Continue reading →

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Science: It’s a girl thing

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

In response to this terrible European Commission video “promoting” women in science, here are a few shots of what actual female Anthropology students look like doing field work at Dmanisi. By chance, our field school was almost entirely female students … Continue reading →

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Selling fossils is bad…

Posted on June 20, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

…and almost always exploitative, taking advantage of countries that do not have the resources to police such transactions. The N.Y. Times reports on the attempt to auction off a complete Tyrannosaurus bataar skeleton: Mr. Norell believed there was almost no … Continue reading →

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Misha Angrist on genomic privacy

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

Misha Angrist, Duke University geneticist, speaking at the National Cancer Institute: My position is this: genetic privacy is a red herring. That’s not to say that it’s not important or that it should be abolished, but let’s look at it … Continue reading →

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My life on the web: peer review, conferences and work abroad

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

By coincidence, my current to-do list is finding itself replicated in other people’s blog posts today. First, Bonnie Swoger, writing for Scientific American, sings the praises of the peer review system. This is why peer review has become the standard … Continue reading →

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More on the Hungarian racial purity story

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

Anne Buchanan, writing at The Mermaid’s Tale, has more on the Hungarian racial purity story I commented on earlier in the week: It’s important to note that the testing did not precede the racial hatred, but it does serve to … Continue reading →

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Weekend wag the dog: 6/15/12

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

I am still on the road. This view is the front of the Georgian parliament (soon to be the former Georgian parliament building), just down the road from the Simon Janashia Museum in Tbilisi.

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