John Emerson hypothesizes that the term "kayak" is of Turkic origin and reached Scandinavia from both the east and west ~1700. Under this model the Thule Inuit culture borrowed the term from neighboring Siberian peoples. The reality of circumpolar travel reminds us that though there are broad general trends in intercontinental separation (World Island vs. New World), and though the Inuit served as a very efficient bottleneck in many ways, it is plausible that certain cultural features did "diffuse" from Old World to New. In The Seven Daughters of Eve Bryan Sykes reaffirms the Southeast Asian origin of the Polynesian peoples, but, offers that there is some evidence of South American mtDNA lineages on some of these islands. The presence of Polynesians on Easter Island suggests that it is likely that isolated seafarers did wash up on the South American coast, only to be absorbed into the local population if they managed to stake out a new life.

Posted by razib at 08:23 PM

Women in Science. The guests are Nancy Hopkins (you know her), Marianne Bronner-Fraser (biology, Caltech), Meg Urry (physics, Caltech) and Nicole Weekes (psychology, Pomona). Should be archived at the above URL soon.

Related: Over at his fMRI blog Aziz comments on the different uses of gray and white matter by men and women. Meghan O’Rourke in Slate slams Summers for his tactlessness. She makes a good point about the “blind audition” isssue, but tends to talk about average differences (even though she acknowledges that the tails are what matters) and uses value laden terms like superiority.

Posted by razib at 11:58 AM

We all know that there’s a cost to doing business – you know what I mean – you take the cost of your material inputs, your labor, and your overhead and try to sell you widget for more than you’ve paid. This is what makes the world go round. Now take this principle of cost accounting and marry it with the principle from Tort Law of making the injured party whole – you don’t want to punish the offending party by adding punitive damages so you limit their financial obligation to simply restoring the injured party to where they normally would have been without the harm that has been caused by one’s action.

For a recipe of the bizarre take these two principles and add a dash of Dutch justice and you get:

It is often said that crime doesn’t pay, but a Roermond man might beg to differ, having recently been refunded EUR 2,000 for the pistol he used to commit an armed robbery.

In sentencing the 46-year-old man to four years jail last week, Breda Court also ordered him to repay the EUR 6,600 he stole from a bank in the Brabant town of Chaam. But the man had the price of the pistol he bought for the robbery deducted from the amount he was forced to repay.

The director of the public prosecution’s dispossession division, Gerard Sta, said it is possible for criminals to have the cost incurred in committing a crime deducted from their sentences, newspaper De Telegraaf
reported on Monday.

[ . . . . ]

Sta said the costs must have a direct relationship to the criminal offence, and be costs that a criminal otherwise would not have incurred. “A second condition is that the criminal offence must be carried out,” Sta said.

He said the law stipulates that the financial situation of the bank robber after the sentence is imposed must be the same as what it was prior to the crime. “It sounds a little bit strange, but that is the law,” he said.

Another example would be the costs a criminal incurs in a cannabis plantation. If the plantation is seized by police, the criminal can identify to authorities what costs were incurred in setting up the crop and gain compensation.

Ironically, Dutch Foreign Minister Ben Bot announced on Monday that he would work this year to counter the image of the Dutch as “whore-mongering, coke-snorting child murderers” — a description uttered by a commentator on Fox News recently.

I think that the Dutch are a little confused about who is supposed to be made whole from the criminal transaction – hint: it’s not the criminal. The victim shouldn’t be forced to pay for the gun that was used in the robbery that victimized them.

Please leave your clever quips in comments.

Posted by TangoMan at 12:26 PM

I was sent this working paper today from the NSCDC about early childhood emotion. Usually, I need to ingest some type of analgesic compound before I can make it through these things, but this one smacks nicely of the hb-d theme of this blog. Of course you have to, somewhat, read between the lines, but not too much. For example, here is one of their main points:
We now know that differences in early childhood temperament — ranging from being extremely outgoing and adventurous to being painfully shy and easily upset by anything new or unusual — are grounded in one’s biological makeup. These variations lead to alternative behavioral pathways for young children as they develop individual strategies to control their emotions during the preschool years and beyond. They also present diverse challenges for parents and other adults who must respond differently to different kinds of children. When it comes to finding the “best” approach for raising young children, scientists tell us that one size does not fit all.

I really don’t think Scarr & McCartney, or Galton himself, could have put it much better.

Posted by A. Beaujean at 02:41 PM

The latest issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society B (biological sciences) has a paper with evidence that chimpanzees have a sense of ‘fairness’ dependent on whether the parties already know each other. Here’s the abstract from the Royal Society’s website:

Tolerance for inequity increases with social closeness in chimpanzeesby SF Brosnan, HC Schiff and FBM de Waal

The evolution of the sense of fairness may have involved the strength of social connections, according to researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal observed variability in chimpanzees’ responses to inequity depending on the strength of their social relationships. Chimpanzees in a close, long-term social group were less likely to react to unfair situations than were chimpanzees in short-term social groups. This is the first demonstration that reactions to inequity in nonhuman primates parallel the variation in the human response to unfair situations that is based on the quality of the relationship.

Similar findings have previously been reported in capuchin monkeys. Note that ‘unfairness’ in these experiments is primarily unfairness to the animals themselves whose response is being studied, not to other animals. If they don’t get their ‘fair’ share they sulk, but this new reseacrh indicates that they are more likely to tolerate unfairness (to themselves) if the beneficiaries are regular social partners.

Whatever the details, this research does indicate that at least the rudiments of a sense of ‘justice’ are found in non-human primates, which makes it difficult to argue that this is entirely a product of human cultural evolution.

Addendum from Razib: Article in Nature.

Posted by David B at 04:18 AM

In The Symbolic Species Terrence Deacon argues that “marriage” was an ancient homonid response to the conundrum of group living as a monogamous species, that is, a socially constrained contract given meaning and force by symbolic concepts. The Ancestress Hypothesis: Visual Art As Adaptation Kathryn Coe also suggests that marriage is an old feature of our genus, and points out that the “ideal” time of marriage for females in most traditional cultures is prior to their reproductive peak years, indicating long term investment on the part of males. Of course, monogamy and polygyny are stark dichotomies which do not capture the full range of behavioral norms of humans and our near kin, though I think it can be asserted that humans fall somewhere closer to the monogamous end of the spectrum.

Posted by razib at 02:35 PM

OK, so some of you may have noticed recently that I’m a bit peeved at the state of education, what with Anti-Racist Math, a feminist curriculm that focuses on reading about domestic violence, alcoholism and other domestic ills, (see this article and see Randall Parker’s take on the issue) which seems to thoroughly turn young boys off from reading, and let’s not forget the pablum they serve up as content for graduate students in education. It’s all enough to make a parent consider outsourcing their child’s education to someone who is actually competent – perhaps to a private school, if one could afford it, or to take on the task oneself, provided of course, that one can afford the time. However, when I wrote outsource, I actually meant outsource. Now you can have your child tutored in math by a professional in India for a fraction of the cost charged by local tutors:

Twice in a week, Ann Maria, a sixth grader at Silver Oak Elementary School, California logs on to the internet from home after school hours. Ann is not chatting up her friends. She is connecting to her personal tutor, already online, armed with headset and a pen mouse sitting in a call centre like cubicle almost a timezone away in Panampillynagar, Kochi, Kerala. Your neighbourhood tuition teacher, riding on the Information Technology Enabled Service (ITES) wave, has gone global and his monthly pay packet turned meatier __ the 17 teachers who work with the Growing Star Infotech (P) Ltd would testify. The firm a subsidiary of California-based Growing Stars Inc went online in January last year. “We started with three teachers and around 10 students. There are 17 teachers now and around 160 students,”” says Bina George, Manager HR and Administration. The service is for students from grade three to grade twelve and those who take the Scholastic Aptitude Test for college admission. The business, a brainchild of US-based NRKs Biju Mathew and Saji Philip, is rapidly expanding and is in a hiring mode. Growing Stars currently has a 57-seater facility, but feels it may need more space as they expand. The shift starts at 4.30 in the morning and ends by 12.30 pm. One reason for the high growth rate could be that personalised tuition in US is highly expensive. “We started of with Indian students. But we have now around 60 American students and every one is happy because they are bettering the grades,”” says Bina. The only hitch is the accent of the tutors which is being taken care of with help from a language trainer. The approach to the students and teaching is also different. “We have asked them not to shout at or scold the students,”” says Lila Bai Nair, Academic Director. here is a huge demand for Mathematics and recently for English. tuition in science subjects started recently. The whiteboard software interface that is installed at the student and tutor ends help in easy exchange of voice and data. The pen mouse along with the writing tablet offers an interactive atmosphere where teachers can view and correct what a student writes.

And before you think about hiring a local teacher to tutor your child in math, read this harrowing account of how math phobic many teachers really are:

As I may have mentioned before, one of the sections I teach is Math for Elementary Education. Anyone who is arguing about the best way for elementary school teachers to teach math should talk to my students: a very large fraction of them can’t do elememtary-level math. Don’t think that it’s just this section of my students this semester; this is a systemic problem.

Most of my students are undergraduates who plan on becoming elementary school teachers. I struggle with this class: what I’m supposed to be doing is teaching my students the why behind the math, explaining how the algorithms work and proving things that are normally just stated in school mathematics. About half of them want no part of this. For these students, their goal is to learn the material at the level at which their future students will be asked to perform. They tell me which grade they think they’re going to be teaching, and explain that they don’t need to know the material past that level.

Be sure to read the comments for even more insight into how the fall of our civilization began. Thankfully we have the internet and tutors in India to which we can turn for salvation from social constructivist pedagogy aligned with the lowest IQ students in university.

Posted by TangoMan at 07:11 PM

Fundamentalism begins at home is an article which reviews the theories of a French sociologist. I don’t buy the whole thesis, primarily because there is so much complexity in decomposing a construct like “Islamic fundamentalism.” Nevertheless I think it is a step forward to acknowledge that “religions” or “ways of life” do not simply flow transparently from injunctions that exist in a holy book, rather, they are surface manifestations of a dynamic process of interpretation and reformulation shaped by many interacting variables in a constant state of flux. That is, Islamic fundamentalism is simply a metastable condition.

John at Discriminations posts a transcript from last Sunday’s Meet the Press, where the host, Tim Russert, interviews the House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas on the issue of adjusting Social Security payments on the basis of race and gender.

RUSSERT: “A gender adjustment–what does that mean?”

REP. THOMAS: We also need to examine, frankly, Tim, the question of race in terms of how many years of retirement do you get based upon your race? And you ought not to just leave gender off the table because that would be a factor.

RUSSERT: Do you think Congress, Mr. Chairman, would accept any formula that said that people would be treated differently because of their gender or their race?

OK, I checked the calendar and it’s not April 1st. So what planet is Russert really from and do you think he might be in the market for a bridge that I’m selling?

Posted by TangoMan at 11:58 PM

I sure many of you have seen the study reported in the Washington Post on AA beliefs concerning HIV. Here’s the breakdown of data:

These beliefs are explained in the article as being based on

“This is not a bunch of crazy people running around saying they’re out to get us,” Akbar said. The belief “comes from the reality of 300 years of slavery and 100 years of post-slavery exploitation”

Akbar cited the Tuskegee experiment conducted by the federal government between 1932 and 1972. In it, scientists told black men they were being treated for syphilis but actually withheld treatment so they could study the course of the disease.

I have my doubts. In my reading of HIV/AIDS research conducted in Africa I continually find examples of similar beliefs in goups that have little connection to the slave trade or the Tuskegee experiment, as this abstract details. So to me this is less an artifact of the American experience than of a cultural remnant from Africa.

Posted by scottm at 03:48 PM