The Millennium Shrimp

How do we define what it means to be human? I like John Hawks answer.

From John Hawk’s Weblog

It is our history that connects us to our distant relatives, not our genes. Even with a close relative like a twentieth cousin, there is a decent likelihood that you will share no genes at all because of your shared kinship from your most recent common ancestor. By the fiftieth generation, it is a virtual certainty. You are a genetic stranger to your ancestors…

Only history defines humanity, and will continue to define us no matter what we become in the future… History is additive, inclusive — not subtractive.

…You can see why this answer to the question may be unsatisfying — it is not predictive. You can’t take our shared history and make a prediction about the human future. You can’t predict which genes or traits two people may share. You can’t take this notion and apply it directly to a fossil hominid to tell whether it is a human.

But I don’t see why that it is a weakness. The fact is, you can’t place a statistical confidence interval around humanity based on a gene or a trait without leaving some people out. Unless the confidence interval is so wide that it includes some non-humans — and it is not hard to define “human” in a way that leaves out many children but draws in Kanzi, the stone-tool-making and logogram-using bonobo. Our shared history brings us close to Kanzi, too — but not the human part of our shared history.

(With apologies to Marvin Harris)

From the New Yorker (via Boing Boing)

Surprisingly to outsiders, most Highland wars start ostensibly as a dispute over either pigs or women. Anthropologists debate whether the wars really arise from some deeper lying ultimate cause, such as land or population pressure, but the participants, when they are asked to name a cause, usually point to a woman or a pig. Any Westerner who knows the story of Helen and the Trojan War will not be surprised to hear women named as a casus belli, but the equal importance of pigs is less obvious. However, New Guinea Highlanders, whose main food staples are starchy root crops like sweet potato and taro, are chronically starved for protein, of which the island’s dark, bristly pigs traditionally furnished the only large source. As a result, pigs are prized symbols of prestige and wealth. Peaceful competition and ostentatious displays involve pigs, and they are also used as currency for buying women. Pigs are individually owned and named, and, as piglets, they are sometimes nursed at one breast by a woman nursing an infant at her other breast.

Jared Diamond is one of those people I love to hate. He’s an ornithologist (actually he’s a biogeographer who teaches geography at UCLA, but his academic research is is in studying the geographical distribution of birds), but he feels the need to write about human culture. Nonetheless, the Boing Boing comments section has a good discussion of him and some of the criticism that anthropologists have of his work.

I’m not a particular fan of hardcore Atheism, but I’m even less a fan of Creationism. Here’s a good example why:

PZ Myers, an evolutionary biologist who blogs and engages Creationists in debate over evolutionary theory reports that the producers of the Creationist film Expelled kicked him out of the theater a few days ago:

They singled me out and evicted me, but they didn’t notice my guest. They let him go in escorted by my wife and daughter. I guess they didn’t recognize him. My guest was …

Richard Dawkins.

He’s in the theater right now, watching their movie.

Now, technically, they are within their rights not allowing someone to watch their movie. A Movie theater is private property and you can kick someone out for parting their hair the wrong way if you want to. But (a) it’s not very Christian to throw someone out just because they disagree with you. (b) It just makes you look like a ham-fisted moron when you can’t even do it right.

In case you don’t know who Richard Dawkins is, he’s a rather prominent evolutionary biologist who’s also firmly anti-Creationism. The fact that the producer wanted to kick out a blogger and not the author of “The God Delusion” just makes you wonder.