Sleeping with the Enemy - What happened between the Neanderthals and Us?

Annals of Evolution
Elizabeth Kolbert - 15 August 2011

• "Leaky Replacement" - Before modern humans replaced the Neanderthals, they had sex with them and produced children who helped populate Europe, Asia and the New World; Offspring were functional enough to be integrated with human society.


• All non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between 1-4% of Neanderthal DNA.


• Leipzig performed tests on chimps, orangutans, and 2.5 year old children and found that they all preformed comparably on tasks involved in understanding the physical world.


• Apes grasped quantity as well as kids--choosing the dish that contained more treats rather than less treats which is rudimentary understanding of mathematics.


• Kids perfromed better in reading social cues--adults pointing to things to help the kids pick something whereas the apes didn't realize this as help.


• Apes seem to lack the impulse towards collective problem solving which is central to human society.


• From archaeological records, Neanderthals evolved in Europe or western Asia and spread out from there, stopping when they reached an obstacle like a body of water--only modern humans tried venturing out in the ocean when they don't see land---which suggests that there is some kind of adventuring or madness encoded in modern humans--the need to explore.


• Neanderthals and modern humnas share an ancestor that is about 400,000 years old whereas our common ancestor with chimps is 5-7 million years ago.


• People who have faulty copies of RUNX2 often develop conditions with Nenderthal like features including flared rib cages. Two genes that have been implicated in autism also appears to have changed substantially between Neanderthals and humans---interesting because one of the symptoms of autism is inability to read social cues

The Possibilian - What a Brush with Death Taught David Eagleman about the Mysteries of Time and the Brain

Burkhard Bilger - New Yorker
25 April 2011

• How much of what we perceive exists outside of us and how much is a product of our minds?


• Time is a dimension like any other, fixed and defined down to its tiniest increments....yet the data rarely matches our reality.


• Why does time slow down when we fear for our lives?


• A sense of time is threaded through everything we perceive. It's there in the length of a song, the persistence of a scent, the flash of a light bulb. The interesting about time is that there is no spot. It's a distributed property that rides on top of all others.


• The brain needs time to get its story straight. It gathers up all of the evidence of our senses and only then reveals it to us. If all our senes are slightly delayed, we have no context by which to measure a given lag.


• When something threatens your life, the amygdala in your brain kicks into overdrive and records every last detail of the experience. The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last.


• The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain records, and the more quickly time seems to pass.

The Efficiency Dilemma - If our machines use less energy, will we just use them more?

Annals of Environmentalism

David Owen - 27 December 2010

Efforts to improve energy efficiency can more than negate any environmental gains.

• Jevons Paradox (1865) - It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuels is a equivalent to a diminished consumption.
• If you increase the productivity of anything, you have the effect of reducing its implicit price, because you get more return for the same money.
• Rebound (current term)--increased energy consumption more than cancels out any energy savings as backfire.

As the ability to chill things has grown, so has the opportunity to buy chilled things--a potent positive feedback loop.

• Most of the electricity that powers refrigerators is generated by burning fossil fuels.
• The growth of American refrigerator volumes parallels American body-mass index.\

• New Yorkers throw out vegetable most often.
• When we throw away food, we discard the nutrients; we also throw away the energy required to keep it cold, as well as the energy that went into growing, harvesting, etc.
• According to a 2009 study, more than one quarter of US freshwater goes into producing food that is later discarded.

We now use as much energy to cool buildings as we did for everything in 1955.

The problem with efficiency gains is that we reinvest them in additional consumption---Paving roads makes travel easier, so we will drive further to get goods and live further away from work.

The Apostate - Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology

Lawrence Wright

21 February 2011

• Tommy Davis - the chief spokesperson for the Church of Scientology International.
• Church of Scientology mission - Transform individual lives and the world; a civilization without insanity, criminals, and war--where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where man is free to rise to greater heights.
• Scientology postulates that everyone is a Thetan--an immortal spirtual being that lives through countless lifetimes.
• ARC trinity - Affinity, Reality, and Communication. Affinity means the emotional response that partners have to one another; reality is the common agreement. Together, these contribute to the flow of communication. The three parts together equal understanding. Raising or lowering any one affects all three.
• Clear - comes from Dianetics; A person who becomes clear is adaptable to and able to change his environment.
• E-Meter--kind of like a polygraph; measures electric changes in a body based on a persons answers to the auditors questions. Once the E-meter jumped, the auditor would focus on this topic until the subject was free of the emotional consequences of the troubling experience. The goal is to uncover and neutralize the emotional memories that are plaguing one's behavior.
• An operating Thetan is one who can handle things without having to use a body or physical means
• Dianetics tries to identify the source of self-destructive behavior. The reactive mind, a kind of data bank that is filled with traumatic memories called engrams. The object of Dianetics is to drain one of all these engrams and to leave the person "Clear".
• History - A major cause of Mankind's problems began 75 million years ago. The planet Earth, then called Teegeeack, was part of a confederation of 90 planets under the leadership of the Despot, Xenu. The chief problem was overpopulation. Surplus beings were taken to volcanoes on Earth. These volcanoes were bombed, destroying the people, but freeing the spirits, called Thetans---which attached to one another in clusters. Over time, these spirits were implanted with the seeds of aberrant behavior. When people die, these clusters attach to other humans and keep on perpetuating themselves.
• A core concept in Scientology is that something isn't true unless you find it true in your own life.
• Hubbard recognized that if you want to inspire a culture towards peace an harmony, you need to respect and help the artist to prosper and flourish.

Annals of Economics - Prophet Motive

The economics of the Arab world lag behind the West. Is Islam to blame?

John Cassidy

28 February 2011

• The Wealth and Poverty or Nations (1998). With the rise of the West, Landes and other scholars say, the Islamic world developed an inferiority complex, rejecting European inventions such as the printing press and retreating into scholasticism.
• Setting aside the oil industry, the Middle East scores badly on basic economic measures, such as productivity, foreign investment and trade.
• In addition to selling spices and metals, Islamic entrepreneurs developed successful manufacturing industries, such as papers, carpets, etc---and all of this when much of Europe was in the Dark Ages. As the centuries passed, many Muslim regions fell behind the West, yet the most immediate explanation involves not Islam but predatory governance and colonialism.
• In the 16th Century, European ships were sailing around the Cape of Good Hope reducing their dependence on overland trading routes to Asia, which was the traditional economic base of the Arabs.

The Truth Wears Off - New Yorker

Is There Something Wrong with the Scientific Method

Jonathan Lehrer

13 December 2010

The test of replicability, as it's known, is the foundation of modern research. It's a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity.

Francis Bacon, early modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, declared that experiments allowed us to "put nature into question". But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.

Jonathan Schooler - University of Washington graduate in the 1980s.

• It was believed that the act of describing our memories improved them.
• Verbal Overshadowing - Schooler demonstrated that subjects shown and asked to describe a face were much less likely to recognize the face when shown it later than those who had simply looked at it.
• As he kept replicating these studies later on, there was a 30% decrease in results confirmed by other researchers.

Joseph Rines at Duke

• performed a similar experiment with ESP and trying to recognize cards. Most subjects correctly picked out 25% of 25 cards. One person consistently picked out 50%.
• Once there was a stack of 1000 cards, this subject's success rate was barely above chance.
• Rhine called this trend the decline effect which is more or less, a regression to the mean as statistical flukes get cancelled out.

Similar experiments correlating symmetry with attractiveness displayed the same trends as later experiments led to a decline effect. This study was known as fluctuating asymmetry.

After a new scientific paradigm is proposed, the peer review process is tilted toward supporting the earlier results. But after a few years, the academic incentives shift so that the most notable results are those that disprove the theory.

Michael Jennions at Australian National University argues that the decline effect is largely a product of publication bias, of the tendency of scientists to prefer positive data over null results.

Richard Palmer, a biologist at the University of Alberta

• suspects that an equally significant issue is the selective reporting of results.
• When a large number of studies with a large number of sample size results should cluster around a common value and those with a small sample size should be scattered randomly.
• When Palmer studied the results of fluctuating asymmetry, which had a small sample size, he found that the results skewed towards positive results.

Acupuncture studies in Asian countries always concluded a positive result and that it was effective. During the same period, there were studies in Western countries that found only 56% proved therapeutic. Palmer suggests that scientists find ways to confirm their preferred hypothesis.

Decline Effect

• Human fallibility of science, in which data is tweaked and beliefs shape perception.
• Many of our most exciting theories may just be fads.
• Reminds us of how difficult it is to prove anything.
• Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved and just because an idea can be proved, doesn't mean it's true.