CDarwin

I may as well share my anecdote. What at least partially inspired me to venture this question was an incident at a University of Tennessee visit a few weeks ago. I was meeting with an anthropology lecturer and mentioned an exhibit at the museum there that "Andrew Kramer" had designed. She referred to him again several times in the meeting but she seemed to make a point of calling him "Dr. Kramer" every time. I was wondering if I had made some sort of faux pas. It might be because he's her boss as head of the anthropology department there. It could be a southern thing, I suppose, or at least an East Tennessee thing. We tend to stick to our social conventions here. I've never had a teacher I called by the first name, for example.

This is a bit literary of me (I'll pretend its anthropological), but I just came across a quote in Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe that expresses that notion from the Ibo perspective quite interestingly: "A man's life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors." The Ibo notion is of "life" and "death" is not, as you said, binary states, but a continuum. I think that as the science emerges that might well turn out to be the most accurate way to view the phenomena.

Does anyone seriously think that Obama is a closet America-hating-black-nationalist? Really now? I just want to submit that question for consideration. This is definitely the least problem I have with Barack Obama.

What's with the MD, by the way? What will you learn at medical school vis-a-vis research that you wouldn't learn in a graduate program in biology? Maybe that's a stupid question.

Has this pastor said a thing that's any crazier than the crap Jerry Falwell had said? Pat Robertson? James Dobson? If anyone wants to crucify Obama for his wacky pastor, then they should probably look at who the Republican candidates have been worshiping at the altar of since the "Reagan revolution."

A true point. The Wallacean Effect occurs whenever an ecosystem is restricted into a relatively small, relatively isolated territory. When a population of elephant goes from mainland Asia to an island on the Sunda Shelf, then suddenly the number animals that island can support becomes much smaller. Large population size is still advantageous to maintain genetic diversity, so the selective pressure is for smaller individual size.

It would be a humiliation for the Chinese. They want a clean, totally legitimate Olympics.

That's a bit of an artifact of perception. When Europeans heard the Chinese stories of big reptiley things they thought, "Hey! Dragon!" That's like identifying Australian aboriginal stories about kangaroos with Brier Rabbit. There are lots of accounts of big, scary reptiles, that seems to be a phobia of humanity's, but few of them are consistent either with each other or with any creatures known from the fossil record. Dragons are usually massive, serpent-like things, for which there is no good analogue for in any known animal, living or extinct.

What you're referring to is the Wallacean Effect and it mostly only applies to mammals. Consider Komodo dragons or giant tortoises both of which are considerably larger than rabbit sized as a result of evolving on islands. That's obviously neither here nor there to you point; I just like being pedantic. The Wallacean Effect could certainly play a role to "shrink" humans in island environments. The preponderance of modern human pygmies on Indonesian islands demonstrate this. But the presence of those pygmies belies the notion that such island effects must result in speciation. I really think the anatomical studies are going to clinch this one. If more analyses come up with the same "primitive" features in the postcrania of floresiensis, I'll feel confident enough to believe that it is a separate species. I wish I had the technical acumen to be able to examine the studies already out there and come up with an opinion for myself.

I rather wish we could ban the phrase "politically correct" from all discourse. It serves no constructive purpose anymore, and is just an easy way to dismiss an argument (I'm not saying that's quite what's going on here, but it has certainly been the case on SFN before).

DNA isn't necessarily the end-all either. There are still people debating over whether-or-not Neanderthals and humans interbred even though Svante Pääbo's partial sequencing of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA found it made no contributions to modern DNA. I'm afraid people are getting this messianic picture of DNA and ignoring that it can be wrong just like anatomical studies can be wrong. But perhaps that's a bit off topic.

Ohohohoho Apparently some new finds are casting "Homo floresiensis," the vaunted "Hobbit" from the Indonesian island of Flores, as simply a pathological human. http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/human-evolution/dn13441-new-bones-suggest-hobbits-were-modern-pygmies.html I'm still not convinced either way, but I can recall hearing on a documentary some paleoanthropologist, it might have been Lee Berger, saying that "We all might look very foolish over this" and that's the sort of feeling I've had since I first started hearing about "H. floresiensis." But what are the thoughts of ye distinguished of SFN?

How many PhD's and MDs and likesuch are really insistent on being addressed "Doctor so and so"? Personally, I wonder how I would feel about it. I suppose I'd want to be addressed properly; you spent a decade of your life getting that degree after all. It seems a tad self-important, though.

Why thank you. When I think about it, it seems like in total cost, the Civil War would have to be the most expensive US war, though the figure for actual Confederate and Union expenditures is interesting.

Why thank you.

My blog seems to have slipped into 505 land as well. I'm not sure if that's related.

This is out of the stream of the current discussion but relevant to the OT: Does anyone have any figures on the real cost in today's currency of other US wars? I would be interesting to see how 3 trillion stacks up against, say Vietnam or World War II.

The argument seems a bit moot. Is there any universe in which letting the Middle East slide into regional war is good for America? It seems to me that the potential consequences of behaving (more) irresponsibly in Iraq are so dire that it is difficult to make the argument that anything that is definitely bad for Iraq can possibly be good for America.

Certainly. If the international community can step in as a peacekeeping force that would go take a lot of pressure off both the factions and the Iraqi army.

The only way to let the political progress happen is to keep the security situation stable for long enough to let it happen. The best way to do that is to maintain the current level of militarization, but with Iraqi troops carrying the brunt of the burden as they are less likely to inspire bitterness. I know that's not a very original proposal, but I still think it's the best one. Rebuilding a polity to stability/democracy/liberalism along Western lines (what we supposedly invaded for) takes a long time (it took the West, what, 1000 years?). Since occupation has proved untenable, internal militarization is the only course for the Iraqis for the next decade at least, probably. Maybe I'm a little pessimistic.

Humans might be though. That's the notion: We as a society love God so much that we're willing to sacrifice personal comforts to pay for these shiny cathedrals. I'm not defending it; I'm just stating the argument.

There absolutely is an hypocrisy. That's why Jesus preached against hording wealth in the first place. That "new sin" is probably the least new of the 7. The difference between "the excessive accumulation of wealth by the few" and "greed" is that the later is an individual sin while the former is a social ill. Thus, we sin not only through hording wealth, but from being silent in a society in which wealth is horded. I find that social message interesting, and pretty authentically Christian. As a Protestant, I see your point about the Church accumulating an awful lot of wealth, but I suppose the justification would be that that wealth is put to the glorification of God. And the Pope's Gucci slippers. I would argue that the Catholic Church is hardly an instrument for the unfair distribution of wealth in the manner that a large, ethically unburdened corporation might be, for example.

These aren't "new" by any measure. The Bible already condemns excessive wealth and activities which harm the community generally. This is just an awareness exercise. It's nothing to get your habit in a wad about. I'm surprised by how little a lot of people hear seem to understand basic Christianity. The pronouncements of the Vatican don't get "tacked on to the Bible." They exist as a parallel theology. And as Sisyphus has pointed out, the "Seven Deadly Sins" come from a cyclical by Pope Gregory I and were popularized in Dante's The Inferno. They are a condensation of Biblical teachings, not an addendum to them.

Just as "white" Australians will eventually "turn black." Lighter skin color is selected for in Europe just as darker skin color is selected for in Australia.

For one thing, the oxygenation of the atmosphere occurred considerably earlier than the Cambrian. That process was an untended consequence of photosynthesis, whose advantage I should think would be clear as a food source.