fishing, voyaging, and personality

Putting together cross-cultural information on the sorts of fishing that men and women did is interesting. Oceanic women were much more involved in fishing than I had realised. The typical pattern is for women to fish along the reef or by line/net in the lagoon. Spear-fishing, deep-sea diving, offshore fishing and other beyond-the-reef activities seem to be the province of men if these sorts of fishing are present.

Bengt Danielsson's "Work and Life on Raroia", a chatty ethnography of a Tuamotu atoll, mentions that torch fishing is not men's work, as on Ifaluk in Micronesia, but the province of both sexes. Called "rama", this is when fish on the outer reef flat are blinded by some form of lantern and then whacked over the head with big knife. Good times.

Discussing the difficulty of comparative studies and their further complications by individual variations within cultures (with respect to acculturation proceses, but the point is wider), Danielsson quotes Spoehr:

Amyone who has been in an outrigger canoe out of sight of land, with a tropical front approaching, knows that it takes a very particular personality type to cope with these conditions. We could very possibly reconstruct the personality type that was a necessary and sufficient condition for the migrations into the Pacific.

This is a neglected point to think upon, possibly because it drives you mad: the influence of individuals and their decision-making on the course of cultural differentiation. But, the Benedictine "culture is personality writ large" aphorism is kinda worth unpacking when thinking about Oceanic voyaging and the disappearance of the horizon. I don't know if there's a personality type that is necessary for long-distance voyaging–possibly more a type that's unsuitable and thus gets left behind–but there are quite likely to be a certain set of values and behaviours that predominate in a voyaging population. And possibly when the population lands and expands, and Boyd-Richersonian types of cultural processes like prestige bias etc are going to be active upon them.

Of course this is all idle speculation. Time for lunch.

PS: Fun interview with David Botstein in PLoS. His approach to the value of teaching is great to hear. 

bugs!

I used to be one of those annoying girly types who hated bugs. I still am phobic about ants en masse, but this can be tied to my dreadful teenage habit of leaving glasses of sweet drinks by the bed, and one day waking up to nearly swallow a mouthful of ant picnic. I also don't like wasps and hornets but that's cos I'm a bit allergic to them.

But other bugs are COOL. A weta once ran across my keyboard in the office I had at UoA; I like to think it was intellectually curious. One of my favourite places in London is the Syon Park Butterfly House (sadly under threat). I bore people silly with those bee-displays at the zoo, going WAGGLE DANCE! WAGGLE DANCE! and the tarantulas at London Zoo are of the awesome.

&tc.

So, Pestival! I imagine no-one I know will fancy accompanying me, but BUGS. Also, Zac Goldsmith is the patron. It's not right that he's hot.

hard bloggin’ scientist

an inconvenient truth

Presentation Zen, my favourite blog on the art of presentation, links to the site for Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", the film derived from Gore's "travelling slideshow" on climate change and global warming. The trailer itself is (as with all cinema trailers) isn't sparing with the drama, but the presentations and visuals linked therein are impressive.

*waves*

Kiaora!

There was an almighty spike in readership yesterday, but I can't figure out where you've all come from. Sorry it's been so quiet lately. Have seven months to go and feeling the pressure, but this blog is a good outlet for non-thesis intellectual curiosities.

Which is all to say, don't be afraid to say hello!

out of body experience from cortical activation

Monday and Tuesday I attended Social Intelligence: from Brains to Culture at the Royal Society. Lots of interesting talks around the theme of social intelligence, but one tangental note popped up in a neuroanatomy talk by Vittorio Gallese (he of the mirror neurons or “monkey-see-monkey-do cells”).

I always love crazy paranormal “phenomena” being debunked, and this was a brain substrate explanation for “out of body” experiences. The brain area in question (the temporal-parietal junction) is to do with alternative-perspective taking – our ability to put ourselves in another’s shoes and see the world from that angle.

This study by Blanke et al demonstrated that the TPJ was activated when people imagined themselves in typical OBE states, and that the ability to do so was impaired when transcranial magnetic stimulation was aimed at the same area. They also report an epileptic patient who experienced OBE’s when the focus of her seizures was in the TPJ.

More on the speakers at the RoySoc event later.

Gavin Menzies rewriting Polynesian origins, neat!

Via Savage Minds, who have reproduced the article from the Dominion. Gavin Menzies (author of a book called 1421: The Year China Discovered The World–which I have not read) claims all sorts of interesting selective stuff about Chinese exploration of the Pacific (transcript of a speech, here) and most mindbogglingly, that the Maori were not actually Polynesians but result of "Melanesian slaves raping Chinese prostitutes".

Reading the speech linked above it seems clear to me that Menzies is relying heavily on selective-to-the-point-of-distorted interpretations of genetic work. Yes, East Asian lineages appear in Polynesian and South American populations. But this is because they share common East Asian ancestors a good, oh, 6000 years ago, in the case of the Polynesians, and likely twice that for South Americans. Not because they're descended from a Chinese/Japanese "fleet" from 600 years ago.

More from the speech above:

M. Hertzberg and Colleagues found an Asian specific delection of mitochondrial DNA in Polynesians – notably, Niueans, Tongans, Samoans and Maoris. Shinji Harihara and colleagues produce startling pie charts – it appears the Niueans, Tongans, Samoans and Fijians had ancestors from the Shizoka province of Japan. To this day Niueans share close linguistic similarities with Mainland Chinese.

I'd expect this in a second-year anthropological genetics paper (which I would subsequently give a C). The whole point about the 9bp deletion is that it tracks (roughly) the Austronesian expansion, of which all those Polynesian populations were the end result. I can't even begin to stop laughing at "startling pie charts" and hope one day to get a review which praises MY startling pie charts. And Niueans sharing close linguistic similarities with Mainland Chinese (uh, what are we calling Mainland Chinese?)… okay. I would like to see the statistical comparison there that demonstrates more cognates between Niuean and Mandarin than Niuean and Tikopian, or Niuean and Mekeo, or Niuean and freakin' MALAGASY, and then I might listen.

Yup. Might be waiting some time for that.

Back to the Dominion report:

Menzies said his book had been well-received around the world but had drawn hostile criticism in New Zealand — because academics were government servants out to protect their pensions.

"People just don't believe them any more. I think they live in boxes and their whole way of teaching history is fundamentally flawed, from the bottom up."

Well, it is always a big clue when the academic pension is regarded as the carrot by which scores of anthropologists/historians/biologists conspire to fraudulently rewrite history, and a lone voice carries the truth, right?

I am quite tempted to read this book as a bit of rage is sometimes quite healthy, but like Oppenheimer's Eden in the East, I fear it might sit nicely alongside a bit of Graham Hancock.

edited to add: A quick tour of 1421exposed and links therein reveals right-thinking folk have gone ahead and thoroughly demolished this rubbish. Well done, learned peeps. 

Have a more interesting link instead, (beautiful) photos of the Columbian Nukak. 

paper: phylogenetic classification and the universal tree

Doolittle, W.F. (1999) Phylogenetic classification and the universal tree. Science, 284, 2124-2128. [link]

Interesting review discussing recent findings which question a strict tree model for the universal tree of life. Lateral gene transfer is non-trivial, especial in archaeal and bacterial genomes. Doesn't dismiss the usefulness of molecular phylogenetics as a tool, but questions it as an end-goal (producing classifications).

If there were believable genealogies of all genes… one could then ask which genes have travelled together for how long in which genomes, without an obligation to marshal these data in the defense of one or another grander phylogenetic scheme for organisms.

Nifty figures, also.

ethical dilemmas

A nifty set of philosophical and moral thought experiments from the Beeb.

please leave a msg, the aliens are on myspace

Geoffrey Miller writes in SEED Magazine about Why We Haven't Met Any Aliens.

Basically, I think the aliens don't blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot.

According to GM, the best and brightest minds get seduced by fancy entertainment technologies that mimic our evolutionary go-to impulses: fast-food, porn, iPods. There'll be no-one left to run NASA, and maybe–like the aliens–there'll just be no-one left.

Uh, I don't think so. As a bright spark in our discussion group said, Miller deflates his own argument later on:

Some individuals and families may start with an "irrational" Luddite abhorrence of entertainment technology, and they may evolve ever more self-control, conscientiousness and pragmatism.

That is, natural variation will contain strategies that will outcompete the Sims-addicted entertainment-happy phenotypes. This happens to me all the time because other people read journal articles when I read Batman. 

It's provoking, this piece, and I suspect not entirely serious–although the last remarks concerning the rise of  fundamentalism(s) need to be unpacked with respect to evolutionary motivations ALSO. I do like the term "creative class", but it irks me because it comes from a place of privilege. Someone's gotta be out there running the hamster wheel that makes the internet go. Someone's soldering the chip in your VR goggles. And that someone will quite likely be more than motivated to take your place in the great quest for knowledge if you're just slouched on the couch.