Pre-Columbian agricultural landscapes, ecosystem engineers, and self-organized patchiness in Amazonia. The circumstantial evidence is building that the Amazon is not a “pristine” and “virgin” wilderness. Rather, it may have been “re-wilded” after a massive die-off of the human population due to the spread of European diseases during the “Columbian Exchange.” Charles C Mann reports on this data in 1491.
How financial innovation causes crises. I’m willing to be convinced otherwise, but I strongly suspect that there’s really rapid diminishing returns to economic growth due to efficiencies of financial engineering. Even plainly useful ideas such as the joint-stock corporation aren’t necessary for economic takeoff; because of the South Seas Bubble they were banned in England during the period when the Industrial Revolution was occurring.
Monday Pets: Biological Evidence That Dog is Man’s Best Friend. This post reviews evidence that dogs predate agriculture. There have been enough circumstantial data that I accept this. But, there is new genomic evidence which implies that dogs may have radiated recently from the Middle East within the last 10,000 years, suggesting agriculture did play some role. So what gives? I suspect that one way to resolve this is that the Middle Eastern lineages replaced the others. Wolves are good candidates for domestication, and there’s no reason it couldn’t have happened more than once, with a recent monophyletic clade being due to replacement of other independent lineages.
Williams syndrome children show no racial stereotypes or social fear. That is, this form of mental retardation seems to produce kids who are not racially biased, at least to the level of statistical significance. Though they remain sex aware. I wonder if they’re able to understand theism? Well, I guess we’ve found a way to eliminate racism, and possibly religion and other phenomena not to our liking.
Planned Parenthood fights for freedom to spread AIDS. The title is tabloidesque, but basically like many groups Planned Parenthood is defending the absolute right of HIV positive people not to be forced to divulge their status to potential sex partners. It’s certainly un-libertarian to have a law stipulating you have to do this, but I guess that’s why I’m libertarianish. One can make slippery slope arguments, but I put HIV in a different class than herpes when it comes to the protecting public health at the expense of individual freedom to decide.
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