John Hawks

Stephen Jay Gould, expert on snails, eminently radical political scientist and master polemicist, mistaken by many for a knowledgeable evolutionary biologist because he was a very good writer.

If you want some critiques of him you can look at this explanation of his at best extremely shoddy and more likely deliberately deceptive statistical analysis here.

http://johnhawks.net/taxonomy/term/700

It's a commentary on the paper the WSJ is talking about.

Money quote

"Here is the most sympathetic reading I can give to these facts. Gould systematically selected data from Morton's tables that tended to inflate the measured volumes of Native American crania. He did so by averaging some group means instead of overall means (although Lewis and colleagues show that Morton himself had used group means for many comparisons, contrary to Gould's claims), by excluding some small-skulled groups entirely (claiming sample size as a criterion), and by omitting crania that had not been measured in the earlier, seed-based analysis. There is no logical reason for these choices other than selection bias -- Gould began with a conclusion about Morton's unconscious motivations, and worked to confirm that conclusion by selecting some data and omitting contrary data."

Paul Krugman's takedown of Gould

http://www.pkarchive.org/theory/evolute.html

"What I encountered were quite a few references to Stephen Jay Gould, hardly any to other evolutionary theorists. Now it is not very hard to find out, if…

It is true that once in a million a fertile mule is born, but that mule's offspring are not fertile, or its grandchildren are not fertile. Mules have been bred throughout history, but I know of no line of mostly donkey or horse hybrids with a fertile mule parent, or gand, or grand-grand-grand parent, or any mule linage.

I had not looked enough into mule genetics. It is much odder than either of us had thought. See http://www.lovelongears.com/faq and search for "Fertile mules". It turns out that frequently a complete set of maternal genes get passed along. So there are recorded cases where a mule bred to a horse, and the result was a normal, fertile horse! There are also cases where she bred to a donkey, and those seem to come out either mule or 3/4 donkey.

In cat breeding female fertility is more resilient than male fertility. First generation females are fertile, but it is not until the third generation of breeding back to domestic cats that you get fertile males. If those two species are next to each other in the wild you could get some cross-breeding, but you'd never get significant gene transfer.

That said, the amount of gene transfer is more than this particular article had led me to think. See http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_dna/neandertals-live-genome-sequencing-2010.html for a much better description of what was actually discovered. The estimate there is that non-Africans have 1-4% of our ancestry from Neanderthals.

In that…

Citation needed. I found the following after a quick search: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/life_history/age-specific-mortality-lifespan-bad-science-2009.html

That seems to indicate that age specific mortality rates _have_ decreased across the board, not just infant mortality. And it also backs up that our in-city lifespans used to be ~30-35 after juveniles. To be clear, that's exactly the figure I'm interested in, not maximum lifespan. If, on average, most adults die around 30-35 2000 years ago and today most adults die around 70, then that, to me, is a clear indication that human driven engineering/science is succeeding on average compared to evolution and that our technologies (in particular, our synthetic chemicals) are more trustworthy than nature's.

> While quality of life wasn't always great

We've eliminated or nearly eliminated a great number of diseases in the modern age. These are diseases which don't reduce quality of life; they kill. You don't go from a bacterial infection to "Well, I'm alive, but my quality of life is worse". You just die. You don't get tetanus and have a sore jaw for the rest of your life; you die. You don't get diabetes and just live the rest of your life with high/low blood sugar. You pass out and die one day. These are all diseases which have existed through all of human history which by necessity of their mortality rates and incidences of occurrence must have increased the age specific mortality rates for all ages. …

"He first caught the scent that something was off as an economics student in India, wondering why, despite his mastery of the mathematics and technology of the discipline, the logic always escaped him. Then one day he had an epiphany: the whole thing was “cockeyed from start to finish.” To his amazement, his best teachers agreed. “Then why are we studying economics?” demanded the pupil. “To protect ourselves from the lies of economists,” replied the great economist Joan Robinson."

Well, the first part is kinda true and the second is reasonable.

"Kanth realized that people are not at all like Adam Smith’s homo economicus, a narrowly self-interested agent trucking and bartering through life."

"Narrowly self-interested agent" is a pretty good model. A problem is the prescient, hyper-intelligent part.

"For every benefit we received, there came a new way to pit us against each other."

Because prior to the Enlightenment, everything was rainbows, butterflies, and puppies?

"He notes that when we replace the vital ties of kinship and community with abstract contractual relations [...] we become alienated and depressed in spirit."

Or perhaps we realize that someone who isn't related to us might not be the enemy.

"Kanth points out that the Bushmen do not have a Mars rocket, but they do have a two-and-a-half-day workweek — something that most modern humans can only dream of."

Speaking as someone who would be dead in a hunter-gatherer society, I'm not sure about that.…

The simple answer in most cases is that group selection is vulnerable to free-riders. A free-rider gene that didnt help out would out-compete altruists and spread.

The group of cells in a body is not a group of unrelated individuals - they are all perfectly related!

Non kin-related altruism usually requires mechanisms of enforcement like reciprocal altruism ("you scratch my back, i scratch yours, and if you dont play along you'll be ostracized").

Historically, naive group selection was commonly held until the 1950's and 60's, when George Williams forcefully argued against it in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation_and_Natural_Selection.

Then Hamilton, John Maynard-Smith and other developed mathematical models showing how kin selection and group theoretic models (like a repeated Prisoner's Dilemma) could allow for altruism to evolve even though genes are really "selfish".

E. O. Wilson's late attack on kin selection is odd and misguided, see a response here - http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/big-dust-up-about-kin-selection/ or http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/evolution/theory/inclusive-fitness-nowak-wilson-2010.html. There were several replies in Nature as well but of course those are paid.

Having 11 papers at once in Science is almost unheard of (especially when they're all by the same group of authors!). It's reserved for Human Genome Project level efforts.

So what's the big deal?

A prof at Berkeley (Tim White) and his team discovered a fossil (Ardipithecus) more than 15 years ago. It's a rare partial skeleton which sheds light on a branch of primate evolution (the human/chimp common ancestor) that we haven't had much direct physical evidence about. Seems they have opposable big toes among other interesting features.

Over the last 15 years, White & co. only allowed their collaborators to look at it, and others in the field have gotten annoyed and accused him of hoarding the find. See a representative dustup from a few months back:

http://anthropology.net/2009/08/25/science-suffers-from-the-idiots-at-scientific-american/

Fast forward to a few days ago. Science publishes this monster issue dedicated to the find. It sets the whole paleoanthropology world atwitter.

http://www.sciencemag.org/ardipithecus/

Here's some further commentary:

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/fossils/ardipithecus/ardipithecus-faq-2009.html

And now you're up to date, at least on the "inside science" aspects of this.