First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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Woodley adds to my criticism of Beauchamp’s result in the list of 2016-07-17. In his answer Beauchamp admits the main underlying fact that he had done his best to hide in the original article.
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Cooney et al.’s interpretation of their results mainly focus on the reactions of those disadvantaged by the outcome. They do indeed value the fairness of the process less than expected. What the authors fail to comment on is the other side of the spectrum. Those on the winning side value their outcome less than expected and still less when they doubt its fairness. This means that manipulating outcomes to gain favour will turn out less effective than those trying it are led to expect.
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I don’t agree with nature’s editorial. SI units are perfect for making calculations in and for those trained in them they are indispensable. But where it comes to estimates and gut feelings of size, it doesn’t matter which units you’re thinking in. A six foot athlete evokes just as strong an image as a 180 cm model. Nobody even in Germany has any problems buying trousers in inches and they are immeasurably better than meaningless and dimensionless size numbers. Asking for the amount of sausage or cheese I want to have cut off to buy I also use inches, Zoll in German, as cm or mm invoke a ridiculous sense of precision. This is especially true for radiation measurements. Those trained in them are used to both systems and for those not so trained, both are equally meaningless. In a text aimed at the general public you always have to give a reference like the natural background or the dose for the first onset of radiation sickness and for the comparison between measurement and reference it’s immaterial what units you do it in.
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There is a well-founded hypothesis that beer was at the root of food production before bread and before the domestication of grain. So one might expect the domestication of yeast to go back a comparable expanse of time. Not so, say Gallone et al., it only began with year-round brewing in the 17th century.
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Scheffer’s comments and deliberations are salient if not new. But as they are based on wholly spurious results (see Downey et al. in the list of 2016-09-01) they don’t add anything new to our understanding.
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Andrew Wang et al. once more confirm the reliability and validity of the traditional adages of folk medicine. My parents’ generation embraced and venerated modernity and took my less schooled grandparents for fools. Today I’m somewhat ashamed by how I was taken in by this stance and rue the missed chances to listen to and learn from them. They were the ones who witnessed the rise of totalitarianism as adults and their experience is sorely missed today. Those who were taken in and impressed as children were of little help and just as blindly followed today’s politically correct ideologies.
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I have long suspected, that the forced egalitarianism of foraging societies, that has resonated so well with the Hippie zeitgeist in the second half of the 20th century, was a recent innovation enforced by being driven into the most marginal environments. Hunter gatherers like all humans have preferentially settled the richest environments while they could and out gene-culture coevolution was driven under those favourable and more competitive conditions. This view is now being confirmed by the results of von Rueden et al. This said there is also valid criticism voiced by Smith.
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Orlando, Lalueza-Fox and Caramelli draw far reaching, population-level conclusions from single mtDNA specimens. With mitochondrial DNA being handed down linearly, unmixed and in a direct line any inference drawn from a single individual about its surrounding group seem unwarranted. Because of this Excoffier’s inference about admixture is wholly unjustified, any mtDNA found will always be either wholly Neanderthal or wholly modern.