First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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At first glance I liked Scudellari a lot. Looking closer it’s a good idea badly executed. Myth 3 contains two glaring mistakes. First for a value that can only be roughly estimated and for which the current best guess is 86 milliards (billions in American) 100 milliards is a reasonable round number. Calling it wrong instead of rounded is just nit picking. Secondly the brain masses of all placental mammals closely follow a power low from their body masses with an exponent of around 3/4. Not all are exactly on it, the primates follow a line slightly shifted to higher values but with the same slope. Of all mammals included humans and dolphins are clear outliers beyond the normal range (Martin 1981, nature 293, 57–60). Myth 5 is just wrong. For several centuries now human population growth has not only been exponential but overexponential with continually falling doubling times. True, it seems to have slowed down in recent decades but let’s wait and see if the optimistic projections will come true and if so how.
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The first impression of Stern et al. is just another example of same old same old – just regressions, no data, and not even the coefficients for the fit. Looking closer it gets worse. We are not even shown those meaningless graphs for three of the seven experiments. A regression along just two independent values only tells us that the means of two sets of data are not exactly the same – hardly surprising. What fraction is this difference of the spread of data in each of those two clusters? Does it mean anything at all? We are not told. But even the little speck of information we are given is open to quite another possible interpretation. It seems that when liberals are asked if they like or dislike a person shown, they tend to give the same noncommittal, middle of the spectrum answer for all, but slightly higher for the aggressive group always demanding extra rights for themselves and attacking everyone not humbly deferring to them. (Look at the favouritism towards aggressive looking individuals from a known aggressive group in figure 4a.) This can be seen as cowardice, fear of expressing any personal opinion at all, and unresisting mindless following of the currently popular and fashionable majority view. Conservatives OTOH tend to take a personal and individual stance and stand by it while granting the same right to everybody else instead of shouting them down.
Do the data support my alternative interpretation at all? Possibly not, we do not know – we are not given any data at all.
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Monte Verde in Chile used to be a very special setting with finds preserved beneath a locally accumulated peat layer. As Gibbons relates, Dillehay now claims to have made more finds in a 2 ha area around this one, single, and singular find spot, the new ones even older and dating back 19 ka. In a recent seminar in Cologne we concluded that Monte Verde was probably not man-made. For the time being I stand by that conclusion.
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Of Petrov et al. I barely understand the significance statement but if the results reported actually uphold what is said there, then it is a great advance towards understanding the evolution of life itself.
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German engineers used to be at the forefront of safe and modern reactor design, before it was all willfully destroyed by uneducated career politicians following an agenda inspired by East Germany and the KGB. By now we have sunk so low in public perception, that a whole article on thorium reactors can be written by Bagla without mentioning the THTR 300 in Hamm-Schmehausen once. German reactors would have been immune to the failures seen in Chernobyl, Fukushima and Harrisburg. Worldwide reactors are still being built and in rising numbers and what are the designs chosen? Thank you very much Frau Dr. rer. nat. Merkel!
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Mu et al.’s certainly is an interesting and relevant result. Unfortunately the two populations compared are very badly chosen. One has been a single unified and closed off people with a common set of basic values and rules of conduct for several millenia while the other is a new country and the result of an intense, recent, and ongoing mixture from many diverse source populations. So is the difference seen here the individual result of being raised and educated in a given culture or is there a partly genetic fixation from a long history of breeding as has been demonstrated for some European traits by Clark (2007, list of 2012-09-01) and made plausible for writing by Frost (2008, list of 2014-01-04)?
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I’m not sure but it seems that all Thothathiri & Rattinger are saying is, that when you specially emphasize certain statements you concentrate more and use different brain regions than when you’re just talking.
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Wißing et al. claim that Neanderthals occupied a very specific, narrow and distinct ecological niche. Maybe so. But then their twelve samples from Goyet probably come from only four individuals who probably lived together at the same time and shared their food, so a tight cluster of their isotopes is unsurprising. The two other samples from Spy are spaced far more widely.