John Hawks

Hawks has a great blog at http://johnhawks.net/ And Cochran and Harpending, the "Utah colleagues" mentioned in the article, have already written a book about this accelerated human evolution: http://www.amazon.com/000-Year-Explosion-Civilization-Accelerated/dp/0…

the scans are actually of a retarded person with hydrocephalus, and are not scans of the near-mythical never-verified anecdote from Lorber (https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/1980-lewin.pdf) of the 126 IQ guy (Hawks gives a couple reasons why that might not have been as impressive as it seems: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/brain/development/ten_percent_brai… ). So the best example doesn't have hard fMRI scan evidence, and the documented cases of hydrocephalus going along with an IQ of 70 or whatever are much less impressive - if you think the brain is doing something, you would expect profound deficits like that! More interesting is a recent paper: "Miniature spiders (with miniature brains) forget sooner", Kilmer & Rodriguez 2019 https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/2019-kilmer.pdf

I'd appreciate comments from someone who follows this research about what John Hawks says about ancient DNA studies and their recent findings. I get the impression that he is reaching some different conclusions from the author whose essay was kindly submitted here. http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_dna/neander…

This article is ancient (pun intended) in terms of paleoanthropology research and apparently comes with some criticism from people in the field: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boskop_Man#Criticisms http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/brain/paleo/return-amazing-boskops… Recommend this story and discussion instead: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6849223

"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.…

Citation needed. I found the following after a quick search: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/life_history/age-specific-mortalit… 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. …

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/neander… 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…

you want to be a little careful. genetic bottleneck does not imply population loss. it is about unavailability of large gene pool. this can be population loss, but can also, be a loss of compatability between individuals, due to genomic modification, such as but not limited to chromosomal fusion. https://www.johnhawks.net/p/when-did-human-chromosome-2-fuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robertsonian_translocation

No, there isn't such evidence. My comment was mostly based off DNA left by interbreeding between Neanderthal and Sapiens. Modern humans do carry a small but significant share of DNA inherited from our Neanderthal ancestors [1]. My point was that Genes left by these ancestors were heavily filtered by natural selection for brain-related regions. That being said, loking it up again now, it seems that more recent publications draw more nuanced conclusions [2]. So maybe my knowledge is out of date, and it's time to pick up the books again :) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genetics [2]: https://www.johnhawks.net/p/many-people-have-a-little-neandertal-in-th…

John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist, regularly makes the point [0] that human evolution has accelerated enormously in the last 50k years. Lactase metabolism is new, in the last 19k years. European skin colours and blue eyes appear to be very recent too, maybe 3.5k years. Almost certainly there are all kinds of super interesting human evolutionary changes that are occurring now, with our huge population that won’t be visible for thousands of years… [0] at least since this https://johnhawks.net/weblog/our-new-paper-on-why-human-evolution-acce…

Yes. If we consider genealogical rather than genetic inheritance, then incredibly you only have to go back 5,000 years or so to find a common ancestor. https://johnhawks.net/weblog/when-did-humankinds-last-common-ancestor-…

I'm reminded of the story about Henry Ford asking which part never broke down, and then using that to cut costs -- maybe evolution is like that too, and once we fix one problem we'll find the next isn't far behind? Except now that I've searched for a link for that, one of the first results actually questions that story, ha! https://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/urban_legends/henry_fords_king_pin…

I've read that the variable number of wisdom teeth could have thrown Aristotle off when he was measuring what was likely a small sample of people. https://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/history/aristotle_wisdom_teeth.htm…

This kingpin story is not likely to be true. http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/urban_legends/henry_fords_king_pins…

For a somewhat skeptical take: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/fossils/miocene/graecopithecus/graecopithe…

Adult mortality was still quite a lot higher than it is today. There have been some attempts to study hunter gatherers that existed in recent times: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/life_history/aging_evolution/hill_… The group there isn't necessarily going to be representative, but mortality for young adults was ~2% per year. In the US it is something like 0.1%.

In 2007, John Hawks criticized[1] Lorber's claim. [1]: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/brain/development/ten_percent_brai…

We aren't apes or monkeys. http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/phylogeny/taxonomy/humans-arent-ape…

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/behavior/game_theoretic/game_theor… Playing chicken with an opponent who time after time demonstrates highly rational, self-dealing behavior is the opposite of insane.

I've read this report before, mainly it was used as a reference doc when debating others about the 10% brain myth. See here, as it directly references the 126 IQ example under "John Lorber and hydrocephalus": http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/brain/development/ten_percent_brai… It appears the amount of white matter in the brain can vary wildly without having a large effect on cognition (as with the 126 IQ example). Usually it's the cerebral cortex, the outer, wrinkled brain layer that matters most. Humans have more neurons in this region than any other mammal by far. This squares with the original article, which argues the absolute number of neurons in the cerebral cortex is more accurate for measuring cognition than sheer brain size. So we might derive that brain mass lost due to hydrocephaly is not nearly as important as the cortex neurons retained.

Left-out of this article is that the Denisovans seem to be one of the ancestors of the Melanesian peoples living in and near Papua New Guinea: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_dna/denisov… More about the Melanesians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanesians

Job interviews aren't for the purpose of predicting future achievement? Say again? there's a lot of ugly historical baggage where science has met race in the past. There is indeed: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/meta/gould-morton-lewis-2011.html If that isn't ugly, what is?

The Toba eruption leans heavily toward the 'interesting thought experiment' category as well at this point though. I'm in a paleoclimatology class right now and we spent a couple weeks on it. The John Hawks post[0] cited under #Criticism on Wikipedia is a pretty good summary of the current research as I understand it. The short argument against it is that the genetic signature corresponds to either an extremely tight short bottleneck, ie all living humans are descended from a group of <1000 which lived through Toba, or a looser bottleneck (tens of thousands of humans) which lasted centuries. The tight bottleneck version requires almost all of Earth to have become briefly uninhabitable which strains belief since we've found several sites which were a-ok throughout, and the loose version is unworkable because Toba didn't have centuries long effects. http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/climate/toba-bottleneck-didnt-happ…

I can see two very clear trends when it comes to where new jobs are created. One is the shift from industry jobs to service jobs. Did you know that globally, farming has been the most common profession since basically the dawn of civilization up until about a decade ago? [1] Now it's service jobs. Humans helping other humans, this is a type of jobs that will never go away because humans have qualities that machines can never possess regardless of if they pass Turing tests or not. The second is the bleeding edge of innovation and super-brands that have shorter and shorter lifespans. The share of the economy belonging to the mega-corps is decreasing. Smaller and faster is the way of the future. This is the era of the startup economy. So there you have it: services, super-brands and startups. That's what the economy will look like the next 50 years. Heck, it's what it looks like today! At least the part that's working. [1] http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/social/farming_bypassed_as_leading_…

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-k… or http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/evolution/theory/inclusive-fitness-… 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-… 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… And now you're up to date, at least on the "inside science" aspects of this.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/03/your-genes-your-rights-… ^ Watch that video. You don't even need to postulate insurance as the hidden hand behind this. In the span of four short minutes, FDA head honcho Jeffrey Shuren manages to commit perjury before Congress while explaining that "traditional manufacturers" will be helped by the new regulations. Who woulda thunk? Truly blood boiling clip. The entire genomics blogosphere exploded over this guy back in March. No one has any idea why he's still employed. Some links: http://massdevice.com/news/fda-device-chief-under-fire-did-dr-jeffrey-… http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/26499/?p1=A4 http://reason.com/blog/2011/03/10/fda-regulation-of-direct-to-co http://www.fdablog.org/2011/03/controversy-grows-around-fdas-shuren.ht… http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/biotech/testing/fda-dtc-meeting-pro… http://www.genomesunzipped.org/2011/03/why-dtc-genetic-testing-is-good… http://blogs.plos.org/genomeboy/2011/03/09/making-movies/ http://www.harappadna.org/2011/03/your-genes-regulated/