Ridley discusses relaxed selection by bringing up an IVF technique, intracytoplasmic sperm injection, used help men with immotile sperm to father children. Firstly, since he didn’t mention the cause of immobility of the sperm, I must mention that in any given man a significant portion of sperm are immotile. The ratio of immobile sperm to motile sperm is critical, as is the volume of or sperm count. The WHO standard for motility of sperm is about 50% of the sample, any less than the risk of infertility rises. However, if the sperm count is high, then having less than 50% motility is not an issue.

There are certain circumstances where almost all sperm are immobile, such as Kartagener’s syndrome. Kartagener’s syndrome is a primary ciliary dyskenesia. This is an autosomal recessive genetic disruption in the arms of the motor protein dynein. Kartagener’s syndrome is approximated to be present in 1 out of 15,000 – 32,000 men., of which infertility is not a primary concern. I write this because main result of impaired ciliary function is the impairment of clearing mucous to the lungs. Chronic respiratory infections due to progressive damage to the respiratory system, leads severe diseases like bronchiectasis beginning in early childhood. Prevention of these complications is more important than using IVF.

Ridley weakened his argument on relaxed selection, because he failed to discuss the details of what sperm immobility is and means. Furthermore, in an example of true spermatic immobility, surviving to reproductive age when respiratory complications hit is low. Why didn’t he address the relaxation on selection with the increase use of C-sections?

In the next half of the article, I can’t tell if Ridley was playing Devil’s advocate with this excerpt,

“Now, thanks to pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, parents can deliberately choose to implant embryos that lack certain deleterious mutations carried in their families, with the result that genes for Tay-Sachs, Huntington’s and other diseases are retreating in frequency. The old and overblown worry of the early eugenicists—that “bad” mutations were progressively accumulating in the species—is beginning to be addressed not by stopping people from breeding, but by allowing them to breed, safe in the knowledge that they won’t pass on painful conditions.”

Parents are still giving birth to children with known and unknown deleterious mutations. Post-implantation diagnosis of genetic diseases with techniques like such as amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling are not offered to all expecting mothers, nor do all expecting mothers chose to these tests… Let alone pre-implantation! To say that these this practically non-existent option has directly caused a decrease deleterious traits to no longer be selected against is a bold and brash statement. The increase in admixture is a more impactful variable in the reduction of incidence in genetic diseases the pre-implantation diagnosis.

Ridley also brings up the differences of SNPs seen between people of European and African ancestry, attributing nothing of substance to the observation that Europeans have half as many SNPs as Africans. He implies, “larger population allow more variants [with] less severe selection against mildly disadvantageous genes,” and attributes the expansion of population in the last 5,000 years to this. But within a species, mutation rates are constant, regardless of the selective pressure.

Lastly, commenting on the slow rate of brain expansion and how modern advances in technology and culture will have an effect on evolution is akin to equating how the Kardashians will effect the Sun’s eventual implosion. The sum of the pressures of selection occur with drift. The time frames of history, in the thousands of years are too small to capture this phenomenon. A genetic example to outline this, is the Black Plague. European communities show much lower genetic diversity because of mass death that wiped out large populations, it had almost a nil effect on our genetic traits as a whole.

Like any progressing variable, time and culture offer different selective pressures upon the evolution of humans. While on one hand we maybe selecting for people with deleterious traits by offering IVF and C-sections to those who wouldn’t normally become parents, we on the other hand can prevent the births of offspring with such traits by early diagnosis. Additionally, as our population continues to expand and cultures admix, can we with certainty say we see an impact on the genetic and phenotypic makeup of humans?

These questions lead me to ask, “What Should Human Evolution Be?”

The flutes are made from bird bone and mammoth ivory, and look similar to the more younger examples that were announced in 2009. Tom Higham is the lead author, and the man who I presume dated the bones; the paper includes Nick Conard.

In their paper, the authors discuss the importance of the Danube River in providing a corridor to funnel humans and their technologies into central Europe during the dawn of the Aurignacian. To support this claim, the Geißenklösterle site has yielded more than just these flutes. The researchers have found personal ornaments, figurative art, mythical imagery and musical instruments from the cave, all dating to a period before the beginning of an ice age around 40,000 years ago. Highman writes,

“[Modern humans] were in Central Europe at least 2,000-3,000 years before this climatic deterioration, when huge icebergs calved from ice sheets in the northern Atlantic and temperatures plummeted… The question is what effect this downturn might have had on the people in Europe at the time.”

Higham, T., Basell, L., Jacobi, R., Wood, R., Ramsey, C., & Conard, N. (2012). Τesting models for the beginnings of the Aurignacian and the advent of figurative art and music: The radiocarbon chronology of Geißenklösterle Journal of Human Evolution DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2012.03.003

“We assume that during the digging of a hole in the ground for a person who had just died of the plague, the gravediggers cut off the ID 6 deposition. They noticed the shroud (its presence is suggested by the verticalization of the clavicle) and a hole, which corresponded with the mouth. As the body appeared as quite intact, they probably recognized in that body the so-called vampire, responsible for plague by chewing her shroud. As a consequence, they inserted a brick in her mouth. The sequence of those events (time since death) can be deduced by the lack of alteration on the skeleton joints, so that we can suppose that the gravediggers dealt with the corpse when it was not disjointed yet. The insertion of the brick into the mouth at the time of the primary deposition can be ruled out because we have no reference, even folkloric, for such a practice in that historical and cultural context.

It is not strange that superstitions concerning vampires were widespread in the 16th to 17th centuries even in a “cosmopolitan” and evolved city like Venice. It is surprising, however, that this exorcism ritual has been clearly recognized in an archaeological context: the ID 6 grave could well be the first “vampire” burial archaeologically attested and studied by a forensic odontological and anthropological approach.”

Minozzi, S., Fornaciari, A., & Fornaciari, G. (2012). Commentary on: Nuzzolese E, Borrini M. Forensic approach to an archaeological casework of “vampire” skeletal remains in Venice: odontological and anthropological prospectus. J Forensic Sci 2010; 55(6):1634-37 Journal of Forensic Sciences, 57 (3), 843-844 DOI: 10.1111/j.1556-4029.2012.02100.x

I’ll be following the project, but honestly I don’t have high hopes. I would love to be proven wrong. It seems lofty, using a lot of high yield buzzwords. My first impression was if this nothing more than a CV booster … Especially since it hasn’t been updated since last September. I guess it can’t be completely an empty shell because they have an impressive member on research team, Pardis Sabeti.

You can learn more about this project by checking out their site, watching the following video and following them on Twitter: @irangenes. If you want, you can participate in the project by filling out this survey.

A draft of the genome was released shortly afterwards in December, 2010. Today, after 30-fold coverage of the genome using Illumina GAIIx sequencing platform, the complete genome was released. It is free to download and use on Amazon Web Services… weighing in at 160gb.  I can imagine a lot of interesting comparisons can be made with this dataset and am happy the researchers made it available to the public.  There’s a caveat though, you can use the data but however agree that you cannot publish your findings until the researchers at Max Planck first get a stab at it.

Dopamine is an important neurotransmitter that functions in a lot of behaviors and reactions, such as movement, lactation, aggression, fear, etc. In diseases like Parkinson, dopamine levels lower and movement becomes uncontrolled. In other diseases like schizophrenia, either dopamine levels are high or response to dopamine is higher, and paranoia & hallucinations manifest. Treating schizophrenia involves blocking dopamine receptors. As you can imagine, a common side effect of antipsychotics is movement disorders — or Parkinsonism.

So why am I on this neuropsychiatric kick on an anthropology blog? Our cultural and behavioral predisopostions ultimately boil down to chemicals in our brain interacting and stimulating other areas. One of the most important functions of dopamine is in the reward system of the brain, an area called the nucleus accumbens that primes pleasurable behavior to repeat, such as sex, eating, and drugs.

In this video, Robert Sapolsky of Stanford Neurology makes the distinction between how dopamine levels rise in the anticipation of pleasure and not as a response to pleasure. I especially like that comment he made regarding reward and religion, “There’s no monkey out there willing to lever press because St. Peter is down the line.”

Cover via Amazon

June 12^th is the 30^th anniversary of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones remains the world’s most famous archaeologist.  How many real-life archaeologists are household names?  In honor of Indy‘s birthday, I’m posting a revised excerpt of an essay I wrote for the Society for American Archaeology’s Archaeology for the Public website several years ago (see  this link for the complete version):

In 1981 Raiders of the Lost Ark set the tone for virtually every action blockbuster that has been produced since, and it is easily the most well-known fictional film with archaeological content.  Its sequels Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) were also very commercially successful.  Despite the differences I’ve outlined (and there are many more), a large segment of the general public associates archaeology with the now legendary character of Indiana Jones.  When people find out you’re an archaeologist, their first question is often “Is it really like Indiana Jones?”  As a result, Indy gets a lot of criticism from professionals who get tired of explaining that archaeology is rewarding, is often full of adventure and excitement, but it’s not very much like Indiana Jones.  But archaeologists and educators can use the popularity of the Indiana Jones movies to their advantage.  These films, by depicting what archaeology isn’t, provide an entertaining opportunity for teachers and students to make comparisons and discuss what archaeology is.

Many of us, especially children and adolescents, are first exposed to the field of archaeology by viewing fictional adventurers like Indiana Jones.  Personally, I first heard the word archaeology when I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark as a kid.  While sitting in that darkened theater, I was so impressed by Indy’s intelligence and determination that I resolved to go to the school library and read more about this mysterious thing called archaeology.  Despite my initial disappointment that archaeologists didn’t carry bullwhips, I quickly became fascinated with real archaeology.  That was 30 years ago and I’m still fascinated.  The Indy movies don’t accurately reflect archaeology, but their popularity has the potential to spark public interest in finding out more about archaeology – the facts behind the fiction.  The archaeologists of tomorrow might very well be sitting at home or in class watching Raiders of the Lost Ark today.  In that sense, Indiana Jones is a hero to movie-goers, educators, and archaeologists alike.

So I argued then, and still believe, that Indiana Jones can help popularize real archaeology.  Evidently, the Archaeological Institute of America shares this belief since Harrison Ford is a member of their governing board.  What do you think?  Is Indiana Jones good for archaeology?  Please share your thoughts and memories of Raiders of the Lost Ark in the comments.

- Jay Fancher

Oil transformed Dubai in the 1970s. The city now boasts the world's tallest building, giant malls, and some two million residents, who depend on desalinated seawater and air-conditioning—and thus on cheap energy—to live in the Arabian desert. (Credit: Jens Neumann/Edgar Rodtmann/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC)

To paraphrase Carl Sagan, science has a way of deflating human conceits.  Anthropology reveals that humans are special – just not for many of the reasons proposed throughout our history.  Thanks to biology, astronomy, and geology, we now know that:

• Modern humans are one species among many, not the pinnacle of all creation.

• We’re not the center of the universe; our planet orbits a fairly average star.

• We haven’t been around since the beginning of time – far from it.

On a 4.5-billion-year-old planet, with a 3.5-billion-year history of life, anatomically-modern Homo sapiens only go back about 200,000 years.  We’re brand new, a tiny blip on the geologic time scale!  Despite this, a new National Geographic article explores the possibility that the “Anthropocene” may have already begun.  Here is a brief excerpt:

Enter the Anthropocene—Age of Man It’s a new name for a new geologic epoch—one defined by our own massive impact on the planet. That mark will endure in the geologic record long after our cities have crumbled…Probably the most obvious way humans are altering the planet is by building cities, which are essentially vast stretches of man-made materials—steel, glass, concrete, and brick. But it turns out most cities are not good candidates for long-term preservation, for the simple reason that they’re built on land, and on land the forces of erosion tend to win out over those of sedimentation.

The author of the article, Elizabeth Kolbert, graciously agreed to an interview with Anthropology.net.  The text of our discussion, conducted via e-mail, follows:

Fancher: The greatest strength of anthropology is its all-encompassing view of humanity.  We’re proud of this breadth, frequently describing our work as the study of all people, in all times, and all places.  But, as you state in your article, stratigraphers take an extremely long view – the entire 4.5-billion-year history of Earth.  How can students of the human past benefit from this geological perspective?

Kolbert: I’m not sure I have a good answer for this.  As all anthropologists know, we are a young species.  So human history doesn’t tell us much about earth history.  What is particularly alarming about a lot of recent discoveries in geology is that you have to go way, way back – i.e., tens of millions of years – to find analogues for some of the things we are doing today, like, for example, acidifying the oceans.

Fancher: I was surprised to read that our proudest technological achievements might not be easy to recognize in the geological record.  It’s humbling to think that urban centers will ultimately be as fleeting in the geological record as short-term hunter-gatherer camp sites are in the archaeological record.  Despite our human desire to leave huge, everlasting monuments, is it better not to be noticed in the geological record?

Kolbert: Well, it’s not clear that we will be noticed, because it’s not clear there’s going to be anything around to notice us.  But we will be noticeable.  And certainly from the standpoint of the other organisms on earth, it would be a lot better if our impact were not so obvious.

Fancher: Some issues of scientific classification appear to have little practical relevance.  For example, the debate over whether Pluto qualifies as a planet or not.  In your article, Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen concludes that the value of the Anthropocene classification goes far beyond textbook revisions.  Can you elaborate on the meaning of the Anthropocene?

Kolbert: Officially, we live in the Holocene, or “wholly recent” epoch.  The Anthropocene translates basically as the man-made epoch.  It’s an acknowledgment that humans, rather than what are sometimes quaintly called “the great forces of nature,” have become the driving force on the planet.

Fancher: How might recognition of a geological epoch called the Anthropocene influence human behavior?

Kolbert: I end the piece with a quote from Paul Crutzen, the Nobelist who coined the term.  Crutzen says, “What I hope is that the term ‘Anthropocene’ will be a warning to the world.”  I think what he means by that is: we are now in the driver’s seat.  Unfortunately, we don’t really know how to operate the vehicle.  So we’d better think about what we’re doing very carefully.

Many thanks to Elizabeth Kolbert for writing such a thought-provoking article, and for agreeing to this interview.  Enter the Anthropocene – Age of Man is part of National Geographic magazine’s year-long coverage of the global human population reaching 7 billion.

What do you think about the possibility of a geological epoch called the Anthropocene?

“Anthropologists Trace Human Origins Back To One Large Goat”
‘Wait, That Can’t Be Right,’ Scientists Say”

In addition to being funny, the article, by contrast, helps show the strict standards of evidence, interdisciplinary collaboration, and peer-review process of actual paleoanthropological research.  Also, our close relationship with other primates is highlighted when one fake Onion researcher observes that “…humans don’t look like goats.”  In other words, don’t expect any presentations on “goat people” at professional anthropological conferences anytime soon.  Enjoy!

- Jay Fancher

Anon vs. Scientology

Ars Technica has written up a 3 page account of the situation, which is absolutely fascinating. The tl;dr seems like its comes straight out of a B movie. Aaron’s ingenious plan was to ‘infiltrate’ Anon…He joined IRC channels in an attempt to sabotage Anon and get names of those in the organization.

His problems started here. Aaron failed to realize Anon is not a true organization. At its core, Anon is an anti-organization, as anarchist as you can be, with no leadership and an ever-changing membership. Aside from infiltrating the chat groups, Aaron attempted to flesh out members of Anon via a guilt-by-association method using something akin to 6-degrees-of-separation and social media. He revealed himself to the group, claiming to research them.

What ended up completely backfired on Aaron. Anon was pissed. In traditional hacking manner, they hacked his company’s site and replaced the front page. They also managed to get a hold of at least 44,000 of his emails and release them via torrents. They deleted 1 TB of his backups, wiped his devices and to top it all of, got a hold of his Twitter and LinkedIn accounts where they posted messages as him. For a company that was in the midst of a sale, Anon effectively ruined that.

This leads me to a open up a discussion regarding the Anthropology of Hackers, a timely piece that appeared in the Atlantic yesterday by NYU’s Gabriella Coleman. In her write up she outlines her 13 week curriculum on the culture of hacking, covering topics like open source, privacy & anonymity, and the dawn of the nerds. Ironically, almost all are relavent to HBGary Federal, given Aaron’s troubles. I wonder how they’d benefit from a crash course in Coleman’s class. Looking at Coleman’s course topics, there’s a lot to consider regarding hacking. The most relevant to this topic is the material covered in Weeks 11 & 12,

Week Eleven: Anarchism and the Politically Minded Hacker

Many hackers express some degree of ambivalence over the politics of hacking as Patrice Riemens has argued and as hackers themselves have raised. This is not the case with a small but well organized cadre of hackers located primarily in Latin America, Europe, and North America who havecharted collectives, many of them influenced by the political philosophy of anarchism. To grapple with anarchism as a political philosophy (which, similar to hacking, is plagued with a parade of misconceptions), we turn to David Graeber‘s fantastic pamphlet, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. We also read Jeff Juris’s ethnographic work about technology activists during the counter-globalization era Networking Futures.

Week Twelve: Trolls and the Politics of Spectacle

If anyone has been paying attention to the Internet in recent years, it has been impossible to miss a class of provocateur and saboteur: the Internet troll, whose raison d’être is to be as offensive as humanely possible via raunchy (but often humorous and quite esoteric) language, images, pranks, and tricks, basically, doing it for what they call the “lulz.” To get a sense of the cultural logic and exploits of trolls we read “The Trolls Among Us” by Mattathias Schwartz. To help us grapple with the nature of spectacle, we read a couple of chapters of Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy by Stephen Duncombe. We read excerpts from Lewis Hyde’s magnificent book on tricksters to consider whether the troll might be an example of these mythical creatures that have dazzled countless societies with their trickery. We watch a talk on a protest movement against the Church of Scientology whose roots lie in the act of trolling buteventually turned into a morally serious protest movement, which nonetheless retained the tactics of spectacle as part of its political arsenal.

This is a very interesting time to be looking at the intersection of technology and culture. There are anthropologists doing some fascinating work researching the sense of identity in online communities like World of Warcraft and Facebook… These groups share an online space, often with avatars and complex long-lasting interactions.

But with Anon there’s no identity.

Anon remains behind ever-changing screen names and masked localities behind proxies. I’m sure if you’ve ever taken an Intro to Cultural Anthropology course you would have touched on Erik Erikson’s theories of personality, We know what defines identity is a loose association of markers like behavior, language, dress, shared spaces, etc. Anon is disparate to any modern definition of identity. They do not share the same space, language, or any other measure of similarity except for behavior and ideology…

“We are Anonymous.  We are Legion.  We do not forgive.  We do not forget.  Expect us.”

I’d really like to get to hear Coleman’s take on this current event, or any cultural anthropologist for the matter. So if you’re interested, please chime in on your take on this all — What do you understand on Anon and how are they similar/dissimilar to other groups?