T. Rex Soft Tissue Found Preserved. The only caution I would offer is that I recall claims that T-Rex DNA was extracted back in 1994…though the consensus now seems to be that that was contamination.

GFA adds: Here is Gary Hurd’s review of the last time rex molecules made headlines.

On a related note, the journal Acta Zoologica Sinca has a new issue devoted to dinosaurish things, including an astoundingly bad critique of the theropod hypothesis of bird origins by pseudoscientist Larry Martin. The entire issue can be seen here.

Posted by razib at 05:38 PM

Are you a director planning on filming your latest cinematic masterpiece up here in Sweden? Then you better stock up on women first.

In order to receive state funding, (which pretty much 100 percent of Swedish films depend on, go figure…), at least 40% of your producers, directors and script-writers better be women – otherwise there will be no cash forthcoming.

From “Göteborgs-Posten”:

The memo also lays out how to correct the distorted gender distribution of the movie industry. Among other measures, a gender clause is to be introduced into the contract, where the industry commits to having at least 40 percent women filling the three important roles of director, producer or script writer, for those movies which receive state funding.

So, if any of our female readers are interested in getting into the movie business, a move to Sweden might be advisable. Sure, you’ll be doing incomprehensible relational drama more than you would like, but demand for your services is certain to be brisk.

Via Stockholm Spectator and The Daily Bork

Posted by dobeln at 12:46 AM

Over the past few days I have addressed the topic of intellectual due diligence twice, first, in a somewhat esoteric evaluation of the “situation” in cognitive science in relation to the public’s perception of paradigm acceptance within the field being at variance with the opinions of professionals, then, I moved to a more concrete critique of the abuses of facts in the service of ideology & values.

In both of these cases quibbling matters can be important indicator values of due diligence. That is, if someone uses Evolutionary Psychology as a catchall for biologistic thinking about human nature, then you need to take a step back and evaluate the knowledge base the other individual is working with. If someone makes basic errors of chronology on matters of history it is a strong clue that their knowledge base is fragmented, incoherent, and driven by their need for confirmation of their hypothesis and so warped by selection bias.

So, when someone conflates abiogenesis and evolution, you know they are an idiot, so end the discussion. If you are inclined to expose yourself to such creatures of intellectual sloth, follow the trackbacks….

Posted by razib at 01:20 PM

Widespread Parallel Evolution in Sticklebacks by Repeated Fixation of Ectodysplasin Alleles (free registration):

Major phenotypic changes evolve in parallel in nature by molecular mechanisms that are largely unknown. Here, we use positional cloning methods to identify the major chromosome locus controlling armor plate patterning in wild threespine sticklebacks. Mapping, sequencing, and transgenic studies show that the Ectodysplasin (EDA) signaling pathway plays a key role in evolutionary change in natural populations and that parallel evolution of stickleback low-plated phenotypes at most freshwater locations around the world has occurred by repeated selection of Eda alleles derived from an ancestral low-plated haplotype that first appeared more than two million years ago. Members of this clade of low-plated alleles are present at low frequencies in marine fish, which suggests that standing genetic variation can provide a molecular basis for rapid, parallel evolution of dramatic phenotypic change in nature.

I stumbled on this research via a popular article which to me smells of neo-saltationist rhetoric. Interesting, certainly it seems a structural constraint of human cognitive architecture that variations in frequencies across populations are repackaged as essential typological jumps or jerks. If paleontologists examined fossils of sticklebacks they might conclude that they were two separate species with a common ancestor. In the open ocean whatever “costs” accrued by the generation of armor-plating are more than compensated for by the survival benefits that are conferred. It seems (on first glance) that the “low-plated” phenotype emerges as the dominant morph because of the release of functional constraint on that locus.

Related A Bird’s Eye View:Biological Categorization and Reasoning Within and Across Cultures. I don’t use the term “cognitive architecture” as a figure of speech.

Posted by razib at 06:58 PM

Over at my blog, I’ve made two postings regarding interesting trends in the growth of religious minorities in two countries on the European Union’s doorstep. It seems certain that Ukraine’s Muslims are rapidly growing in number through migration; Algerian Christians, while still rarer, may also be growing sharply in number, not through immigration but through conversions. Unfortunately, hard data on both situations is rare.

If anyone has any data on either situation, I’d be exceedingly grateful to see it, in the comments thread or via private E-mail.

Posted by randymac at 07:15 PM

Someone’s managed to damage the Homo floresiensis remains.

Recall that there was a dispute over the bones when Indonesian paleoanthropologist, Teuku Jacob, ‘borrowed’ them apparently without the permission of the Australian discoverers. Well, Dr. Jacob returned the bones and now the Autralian team have claimed that he damaged them whilst making casts of the bones. Dr. Jacob denies having damaged the remains — or even having made casts of them. He suggests the bones were damaged when being transported back to the Australian team.

In any case, they do appear to be pretty badly damaged — John Hawks has posted some before-and-after photographs. Appalling.

Posted by theresa at 12:18 PM

In the spirit of following up on my post in relation to Chris of Mixing Memory, here is his critique of Evolutionary Psychology.™ I added the “trademark” superscript because Chris is assailing the paradigm put forward by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. It is conventionally asserted that EP is just a rebranding of the sociobiological tradition, but in reality it is a specific cognitive orientation which focuses on human universals and assumes a particular paleoanthropological model as normative (Out-of-Africa-Replacement). Alternative sociobiological disciplines like Human Ethology and Behavorial Ecology, as well as the alphabet soup of fields explicitly associated with zoology but not necessarily disjoint with the human sciences, still flourish and do not necessarily imply particular positions about the architecture of the mind. In other words, a rejection of EP as bad science does not imply that by default the tabula rasa and its cousins as null hypotheses which must be accepted.

Addendum: If you are curious, my skepticism with Tooby and Cosmides model emerges from my concerns about the plausibility of the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation (EEA) and the concomitant prevelance of monomorphism in relation to complex behavorial adaptations.

Posted by razib at 01:13 PM

I have a diary over at Redstate.org as well as entry at Dean Nation on the need for those who revere and hew to the Western tradition to actually read history with a fidelity, depth and joy in keeping with the scholarship of that tradition. I’d appreciate if GNXP readers could “rate up” my Redstate.org entry.

Posted by razib at 02:30 PM

See this news report on research into ‘hard-wired’ behavio(u)r patterns among primates, some of which go far back into evolutionary history.

The headline describes this as ‘surprising’, but it is only surprising if you start from the position of a ‘blank slate’ dogma.

Posted by David B at 11:07 AM

My inital reaction to the virtual lesbian threeway depicted in the second edition of Masamune Shirow’s manga Ghost in the Shell, back when I first read it in January, was that it was just a throwaway scene aimed at a teenage male market. I’m not so sure now.

To be sure, the teenage-male demographic does play a major role. Consider the plausibility of a government that allows Motoko Kusanagi–an elite agent from a top-secret rapid response team–to prostitute herself in exchange for proscribed sensory technologies. The fact of her apparent heterosexuality isn’t such a major issue, considering the relative pliability of many people’s sexual orientations. The thing that redeemed this ménage à trois, even partially, was the reaction of an uninvolved fourth party to the affair. An onlooker, the male Bato, is sent to interrupt the virtual scenario, tapping into the mind-to-mind transmissions to and from Motoko, data streams which (of course) reflect the ways in which these three women feel and relate to their bodies. Bato finds himself sickened, since things aren’t supposed to feel that way, things feel wrong.

Descartes’ mind-body dualism–his separation of mind from body–seems radically untenable, given what we know in the 21st century about the ways in which human consciousness is determined by human physicality. The writings of Oliver Sacks, to name a single author of many, go into enough detail to make the Cartesian ideal of a mind detached from material reality certainly inachievable. The final failure of this ideal, though, leaves wide open the question of just how portable human experiences actually are, and how much for human personality is determined by the specific form of one’s physical self.

I’ve often wondered what it would be like to invert my sexual orientation with some future medical treatment, to shift from 5.0-5.5 on the Kinsey scale to 0.5-1.0. Four necessary qualifiers: reality-based (not be a simple redefinition like that of ex-gays); safe; inexpensive; and, reversible. What is it like to feel heterosexual? I wonder. Not the least interesting possibility would be the question of how I’d relate to previous homosedxual encounters and relationships.

Three questions for further debate.

How much empathy can we actually feel for other people? I’m an individual from the species Homo sapiens sapiens, I’m male, I’m white, I wear glasses to compensate for my poor eyesight, I’m mainly homosexual in orientation, I’m left-handed. Without living within the skin of another person–and how to do this, barring truly stupendous leaps in multiple technological fields, I leave to the science-fiction writer–how can we understand what it feels like to be them? We can make estimates, yes, but only estimates.If we can inject an individual of the species Pan troglodytes troglodytes with the SIV-cpz virus in order to gain insight into the origins and epidemiology of the HIV-1 virus, why not inject a mentally disabled individual of the species Homo sapiens sapiens with HIV-1 to study the progress of the disease? Yes, the latter would be a monstrous act: Lethal medical experimentation has been recognized as a crime against humanity since the Nuremberg Trials, and there is a clear responsibility. But why is it monstrous? In both cases, you’re dealing with individuals from tool-using, language-using species which manifest a certain degree of consciousness. Should physical forms determine so much about the treatment of conscious individuals?GURPS’ Transhuman Space RPG setting is one of a variety of fictional future settings that describes the proliferation beyond the expected artificial intelligences, with animals uplifted into sentience and human personalities copied over to computer storage. This diversity is all well and good for fiction, and perhaps it isn’t an impossible goal for a relatively distant future. How will we be able to relate to these new peers of ours, though, existing as they would in subjective states so different from those of human beings? Posted by randymac at 09:34 PM