Nature is calling . . .

The Primate Diaries has now been picked up by the journal Nature's online network. Click on the RSS button below to update your feed and click the image above to see the new site.

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Dershowitz Responds

I received two rather interesting e-mails this morning in response to my post Bodyguard of Lies. In this post I critiqued Alan Dershowitz (left), professor of law at Harvard, for claiming that former Chief National Intelligence Council nominee Chas Freeman "was a 'zealot' and an 'ideologue' whose 'extremist views' can only be explained by claiming that he 'has been bought and paid for by lobbies that he does not wish to alienate.'" It's my view that this is a gross mischaracterization of Freeman's position and is little more than slander.

This morning I received two responses. The first was from Norman Finkelstein (right), a previous target of Dershowitz, who wrote simply:

The second e-mail was from Alan Dershowitz himself who was kind enough to let me know the following:


Which should I heed? While Finkelstein's note was sent thirteen minutes earlier (and would clearly preempt the second) Dershowitz sent his response via BlackBerry, a fitting coincidence considering his opinion is so deliciously ripe with irony.

Alan Dershowitz is the same person who took this:

As well as voicing our opposition to the illegal occupation and the consistent human rights violations of the Palestinian people, we as members of an institute of higher education see it as our moral responsibility to express our solidarity with Palestinian students whose access to education is severely inhibited by the Israeli occupation.

And characterized it as this:

Several months ago, a rabidly anti-Israel group on the Hampshire College campus began a campaign to try to get the college to divest from six companies that they claim helped "the Israeli occupation of Palestine." Those who came up with this formulation regard all of Israel, including Tel Aviv, Haifa and Ben Gurion Airport, as "occupied Palestine." In other words, their goal is to end the existence of Israel.

I now call on all decent people - supporters and critics of Israel alike - to make no further contributions to a school that now promotes discrimination and is complicit in evil. There must be a price paid for bigotry, and the actions of Hampshire College in singling out only Israel for divestiture is bigotry plain and simple. Silence is not an option. Inaction is not an option. Fighting back against the likes of Cynthia McKinney is mandatory for all people of good will.

Yep, I think I'll go with Finkelstein on this one.

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Tangled Bank #97

The latest edition of the net's best science blogs can be found at The Inoculated Mind. It looks like there are a few Open Laboratory 2008 entries already in the running.

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The Open Laboratory 2007 is HERE!

The best science writing on blogs now on sale

There are some fantastic entries in this year's collection, including one from yours truly. Sure, you could read that selection here. But then you would miss out on all of the other fantastic writing from the net's best science bloggers.

Many thanks to Bora and Reed for putting together a marvelous collection.

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And We're Back . . .

Sorry for the delay, there was much to do. I'm pleased to report that I will be presenting my bonobo research before the august body of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists at their annual conference this April. But, until that time, I'm feeling fresh and rejuvenated and ready to explore anew the great mysteries of life for your reading pleasure.

Thank you for all of your e-mails of support.

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Encephelon #35

Do you like brains as much as we do?

Image: The Man With Two Brains
Welcome to the 35th installment of the bi-weekly neuroscience blog carnival, Encephelon. You're in for a treat as bloggers from around the globe have put on their thinking caps and related the best of the brains.

Starting us off, Mo from Neurophilosophy has a fascinating (and highly colorful) post on the new technology that allows for multicolored 'brainbows'.

Ed from Not Exactly Rocket Science explains how even crucifixion can’t undermine the neuroscience of optimism. However, broken chains and faulty mirrors cause problems for autistic children.

Robert at Brain Blogger describes a new study showing that anxiety is increased when the immune system detects infection.

Sudip at Brain Blogger shows that finishing high school can help you avoid more than a dead-end job, it can also decrease your likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

Jake at Pure Pedantry shares his excitement over the new development in brain imaging technology. It involves high-tech photon microscopy with a mouse stuck to a styrofoam ball floating in the air. Following hard on the heels of one technological breakthrough, Jake is back with another in a video that shows a synapse in action.

Sandeep at The Mouse Trap discusses the new study which finds a right brain connection with creative thinking.

PsyBlog discusses the "halo effect" and how politicians and marketing hacks can manipulate you into seeing what they want you to see.

The Neurocritic has three terrific posts on how the brain effects hunger and reinforcement. He also explains how his amygdala is very optimistic but, alas, his subgenual cingulate is sad.

Alvaro at Sharp Brains details Darwin's self-reported lifelong neuroplasticity.

Isabelle at Medopedia discusses why children with Asperger's syndrome have a high incidence of certain sleep disorders.

Ben Hansen reviews the latest book on bipolar children in a piece entitled "Sick Children, or a Sick Society?"

Zachary at Distributed Neuron explains why neurons don't like sweets from the new report in Nature Neuroscience detailing the inhibition of glycogen synthesis in neurons.

Finally, I've included my own piece entitled Monkey See, Monkey Don't Remember about how neurogenesis declines in the aging primate brain.

Noam at Brain in a Vat will be hosting Encephelon #36 on November 19th. Make sure to get your posts in to encephalon{dot}host{at}gmail{dot}com as soon as possible.

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Please Stand By . . .

We are experiencing temporal difficulties.

Image: Tammey Stubbs
Actually I'm just extremely busy right now with this pesky grad school business. But don't worry, The Primate Diaries will be back to its regularly scheduled programming shortly.

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Four Stone Hearth #26

Net's best anthropology blog carnival begins its second year.

Welcome to the newest installment of the four field anthropology blog carnival Four Stone Hearth. As the carnival enters into its terrible twos there were many wonderful voices clamoring for attention. I've done my best to select only the choicest beans to make this blend a sensation you won't soon forget.

Cultural

Mango Girl at Kafr Al-Hanadwa discusses how fasting in Hinduism is perceived to have spiritual benefits, but only for women. Such is the romance of the self-denying woman.

Meanwhile, anthropologists working with the military are still raising controversy. Oh No a WoC PhD has her say about Anthro and the State while The Interrogation Diaries makes a few points about the little rituals of dehumanization. Marcus, From an Anthropological Perspective, puts it all into context by exploring the way politics affects how academics make a living (in a post which I’m not sure is a justification or an excuse).

Anthropologi reviews recent research showing that Islam and a secular society are not incompatible.

Tyson Yunkaporta at Aboriginal Rights brings our attention to the European indigenous Sami who are struggling for survival in their native land.

Peter at Indigenous Issues Today shows how indigenous people and aid organizations can work together to preserve the environment in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Linguistic

Speaking lucidly at Savage Minds, Kerim highlights a recent book that (surprise) finds the differences between how men and women communicate have been overblown.

Simon at Henry.simon.net.nz reviews the recent Nature article that shows how the less a word is used the faster it evolves.

Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science mines the classic texts to review new models for showing how verbs change over time.

Having the last word, Victor at Music 000001, explores the evolution of music and how primate vocalizations could be connected to the origins of melody.

Archaeology

Martin at Aardvarchaeology has turned up a new picture stone, with pictures no less.

Greg Laden at Evolution: Not Just a Theory Anymore, explores an 11,000-year-old wall painting from Syria.

Christopher at Northstate Science shows how Intelligent Design advocates don’t merely confine their bad analogies to evolution.

Tim at Remote Central critiques the recent Nature article that describes fishing populations showing “symbolic behavior” (they painted stuff red) in South Africa 164,000 years ago.

Leaving no stone unturned, Julien at A Very Remote Period Indeed reports Newsflash: Neanderthals could build stuff.

Biological/Evolutionary

In perhaps the most exciting thing to come out of neandertal DNA since we even had the stuff, John Hawks’ Weblog explores what the FOXP2 gene reveals about the evolution of language. Anthropology.net gives additional insight on the neandertal "language gene".

Following hard on the alleles of neandertal genetics, Anthropology.net offers their take on three recent papers exploring the diversity and structure of the human genome.

Just in case you didn’t have enough to worry about, Archaeozoo offers us something that's sure to be a big pain in the neck with the first in her new series Know Your Pathology: Osteoarthritis.

Rounding out the tour of hominin evolution, Scott at Dammit Jim! takes us home to the location of Peking Man during his recent visit to China.

Finally, to leave you all with a few warm fuzzies to carry you happily through your day, I offer these new findings of Adoption in Non-Human Primates and The Biology of a Mother’s Love.

That does it for this installment of Four Stone Hearth. The next edition will be November 7 at Sorting Out Science. Until then, keep evolving.

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Afarensis Celebrates His Third Blogiversary

What to get an anthropologist who has everything?

Talk about offering the clothes straight from your back.

Image: Joel Bentley
Famed ScienceBlogger Afarensis celebrated his third anniversary on the blogosphere recently. The traditional gift for year three is leather, so here's a suit that should serve him well.

Remember, as Tyler Durden says:

In the world I see -- you're stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You will wear leather clothes that last you the rest of your life. You will climb the wrist-think kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. You will see tiny figures pounding corn and laying-strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of the ruins of a superhighway.

Here's to another three years! According to tradition, appropriate gifts then would be iron and wood, perfect for our future hunter-gathering lifestyle.

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Anthropology Blog Submissions

We're waiting . . .

Image: Unattributed

Four Stone Hearth will be held right here on Oct. 24th. Send in your anthropology related blog posts (cultural, linguistic, archaeological or biological) to primatediaries@gmail.com now.

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Who Wants a Fabulous Prize?

How reading blogs can be better than watching Oprah.


Hint: the gift will not be a car (car's are everywhere, this gift is rare).

ScienceWoman is going to send me a gift (and it's not even my birthday).

By the end of the calendar year, I will send a tangible, physical gift to each of the first five people to comment here. The catch? Each person must make the same offer on her/his blog.

So in the spirit of "paying it forward" I will mail the first five commenters who do the same a real, fully-functional, three-dimensional gift just for letting me know you're out there. I already know what I'm going to get you too (I think you'll really appreciate it).

Thanks for reading!

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The Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme

This blog meme was created by Pharyngula as a means of demonstrating evolution in cyberspace:

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

* You can leave them exactly as is.

* You can delete any one question.

* You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is...", or "The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is...".

* You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...".

* You must have at least one question in your set, or you've gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you're not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

My great-great-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My grandparent is Flying Trilobite
My parent is A Blog Around the Clock

The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is:

Ilium by Dan Simmons

The best scary movie in scientific dystopias is:

Children of Men

The best sexy song in hip hop is:

"Mind Sex" by Dead Prez.

The best cult novel in beat fiction is:

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

I am propagating this meme on to:

Cafe Philos
Laelaps
Neurophilosophy
Afarensis
Thus Spake Zuska
Living the Scientific Life
The Other 95%
Remote Central
Conspiracy Factory
Planet Doom
Archaeozoo

It'll be interesting to see how this experiment ends up. Don't let it go extinct!

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May I Have the Envelope Please . . .

Intellectual Blogger Award recipients dazzle and inform

Thinking long and hard about the final decisions was not easy.

Image: Michael Nichols/National Geographic


After much anticipation the recipients of the Intellectual Blogger Award have now been released. As everyone is by now aware, the votes for this prestigious award are done in secret and escorted under armed guard until they’re finally released to the public. Only the executives of PriceWaterhouseCoopers and myself (and probably the NSA) know the results of this award in advance.


And so, without further ado, the recipients of the Intellectual Blogger Award are:

Laelaps


Brian is a paleontologist-to-be at Rutgers University. Founder of the paleo-carnival The Boneyard (which has been kind enough to include several of my own posts) Brian constantly inspires me with the passion he has for his subject. He can also be downright intimidating when he excels so well in combining disciplines to investigate the intersectionality of knowledge.

A great example of the latter (and why you’ll find him first on my list) is entitled Homo sapiens: The Evolution of What We Think About Who We Are. Brian has just joined the ScienceBlogs family (which I only just discovered), so double congratulations to him and make sure to follow his prodigious output at the new site.

Living the Scientific Life


Grrlscientist, the microbiologist, zoologist and science blogger extraordinaire, has a site that is fast rising to be one of the best science blogs on the net (look out PZ, this award could give her the bump she needs to take you down in the next Weblog Awards). If you ever check out the science blog carnivals you’ve probably encountered her work on, well, all of them. Seriously, I don’t know where she finds the time. Aren’t you supposed to be looking for a job? Leave some bandwidth for the rest of us please.

For a taste of her wonderful style and breadth of knowledge, try her post on cooperative behavior in wasps entitled Why Do Wasps Do That? The Molecular Mechanism of Eusociality.

Neurophilosophy


Mo of University College, London beautifully combines the complexity of neurobiology with the insight of a philosopher to create a blog that is fascinating to both the professional and lay person alike. Including frequent forays into the history of neuroscience, this is a blog that I frequently turn to for a liberal helping of brain food.

A great example is his post The Archives of the American Eugenics Movement.

Oh No a WoC PhD


Profbwoman, is an academic and social justice activist marooned in the wasteland of North America. Expertly navigating the vital issues of race, gender and sexuality (as well as how they impact politics and pop culture) her blog is a beautiful synthesis of complex issues that are broken down and reassembled so that the rest of us can make sense of this crazy, mixed up world.

For a terrific example of how she synthesizes these issues, see her post on the interplay of race and sexuality in a popular science-fiction show entitled Goodbye – Dr. Who, Some, Spoilers.

Woman of Color Blog


Brownfemipower is the kick ass, take no prisoners voice of the rage we all feel over current injustices in the world. Her blog is a powerful antidote to our temptation to remain apathetic and divorced from the solutions that we have the power to create.

For an example of the kind of post that will shake your perceptions and reveal the ongoing hypocrisy we all participate in, see her discussion of the selective public outrage over government repression entitled Oaxaca versus Burma.

I again want to thank Paul at Café Philos for initially selecting The Primate Diaries as well as Mahendra at An Unquiet Mind for creating this award. It’s an honor to be in your company and I look forward to learning where the baton will be passed on next.

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Happy Birthday Four Stone Hearth!

The best of net anthropology turns one year old.



The twenty-fifth installment of Four Stone Hearth is enormous with too many terrific articles for me to recommend. Go check them out at Remote Central, and while you're at it wish the organizers a happy birthday and a job well done.

The next edition will appear right here on October 24th so get those posts turned in to host@fourstonehearth.net or primatediaries@gmail.com as soon as you can!

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Intellectual Blogger Award

Like, uh, cogito ergo sum?

Many thanks to Cafe Philos for his wonderful blog and for awarding The Primate Diaries with the Intellectual Blogger Award. In the coming days I will be "paying it forward" to five other blogs that are in line with Mahendra's criteria of "An intellectual [blogger] is one who tries to use his or her intellect to work, study, reflect, speculate on, or ask and answer questions with regard to a variety of different ideas."

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They've Got a Bone to Pick

Boneyard #6 is up at Fish Feet


En garde, skin jobs!

Had a hankerin' to read up on the mysterious world of fossils? Well here is your chance.

GrrlScientist at Living the Scientific Life reviews the recent discovery that velociraptors had feathers. Steven Spielberg may need to add some CG effects to the 15th anniversary edition of his film.

Brian at Laelaps has a wonderful post entitled Of Feathers, Nests and Dinosaurs. Pour a tall cold one, sit back and prepare to be blown away.

Any fans of They Might Be Giants? Kevin and Christopher at The Other 95% have an amusing ditty called Receptaculites sung to the tune of "Particle Man".

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