Resorting to jigsaw puzzles?

Like science?

Then you are in luck! Try the new Dr. Livingston’s Anatomy Jigsaw Puzzles, based on art created by Mesa Schumacher, a Certified Medical Illustrator from Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Livingston’s Human Anatomy Jigsaw Puzzles come in three volumes so far, a head, a thorax, and an abdomen. The maximum dimensions of each puzzle would make this a 1000 piecer for sure, but since they are not rectangles they run closer to 500-600 pieces. They are also not terribly hard. Some of the puzzle perimeters have a double edge: the actual edge of the puzzle, and the edge of the illustration (ie., skull) running close and in parallel, so that 12% or so of the puzzle practically does itself. Also, you can’t really be a good anatomical drawing and ahve the kind of vagueness that a harder puzzle tends to have. But that’s OK because you will want to do all of them in a short time anyway.

I believe there are plans to make a total of seven puzzles, but at the moment there are only the three mentioned above available.

This is a perennial question. For some reason, which I do not understand, the feminist perspective (note: I’m a feminist) is often to belittle the question, but really, that isn’t fair. It is not that difficult to imagine how anyone would come to a question about whether or not a particular organ of the body, the head, the breasts, the butt, the thumb, is somehow out of proportion. The penis is just one of many body parts that people may obsess over, and the larger scale issue of the intersection between physical and mental health should not be put aside for the penis, even if it is the Organ of the Patriarchy.

__________
See also: Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?: And Other Reflections on Being Human
__________

This is also a question that typically results in a plethora of jokes. That is understandable. “Dick jokes” as they are called may or may not be funny but there is no shortage of them. In fact, here, I’ll provide a space for you to write in whatever “dick joke” you happen to be thinking of at the moment:

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OK, are we done? Thanks. That was very funny, I’m sure.

A large penis size study

Interestingly, it has been hard to get a handle on the question of average penis size for humans, and even more importantly, the range. The range is more important because it is actually possible for a person to suffer what is generally called “dysmorphic disorder.” This is where a perceived disproportion of mis-shapennes of some body part causes psychological problems of some sort. In order for medical practitioners to place a person’s penis in the proper perspective, it is necessary to have an idea of what the range and nature of variation is. Partly to this end, a study looking at penis size across 20 separate studies involving over 15,000 males has been conducted by a team of medical scientists in London, and it was just published. The abstract of “Am I normal? A systematic review and construction of nomograms for flaccid and erect penis length and circumference in up to 15?521 men” by David Veale, Sarah Miles, Sally Bramley, Gordon Muir, and John Hodsoll reads in part:

To systematically review and create normograms of flaccid and erect penile size measurements….Study key eligibility criteria: measurement of penis size by a health professional using a standard procedure; a minimum of 50 participants per sample. Penis size nomograms may be useful in clinical and therapeutic settings to counsel men and for academic research.

The results? Here:

Flaccid
9.16 +/- 1.57 cm
3.51 +/- 0.62 in
n=10,704

Stretched
13.24 +/- 1.89 cm
5.21 +/- .74 in
n=14,160

Erect
13.12 +/- 1.66
5.16 +/1 0.65 in
n=381

There are a lot of details in the paper, which is available on line. The samples were collected by medical professionals (as opposed to some other studies which were self-reported) and under a variety of conditions.

The most important result, for clinical use, is a nomogram that allows one to check where a particular value is typical or atypical across the general population. This one shows penis length for flaccid, stretched, and erect penises.

There are similar data for circumference, you can check the paper out for that.

Does hand size or foot size predict penis size?

Some will find it interesting that there was a reasonable (but small) correlation between penis length and index finger length in one of the studies reviewed here. This is potentially interesting because the timing of hormonal conditioning in utero is thought to affect the growth pattern of various body parts. Also, there is an “urban belief” (I’d rather not call it a myth unless it is shown to be false, and I’m not sure I’d say that based on this study) that there is a correlation between “hand size” and “penis size.” At present, the penis-hand link is not exactly hard science.

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Check out our new science podcast, Ikonokast.
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You’ve heard, I’m sure, that there is an urban belief that a man’s foot size predicts penis size. This is not supported by the present research.

Does penis size vary by “race”?

If you are a regular reader of this blog you probably know about the “science of race” problem. Numerous studies, mostly done quite a few years ago, seemed to demonstrate racial differences in things like intelligence, criminality, etc. These studies have largely been debunked on two main grounds. First, the definition of and biological validity of the “races” is poor; humans really just don’t have races, even if you happen to think they do. Second, the studies themselves tended to be deeply flawed, sometimes to the point of absurdity. For example, one study found that “blacks” have smaller brains than “whites” but to obtain this result each estimated brain size for the “black” data points was reduced by a standard value.

Penis size as a race thing was also looked at in those studies, and there are plenty of cultural and social tropes surrounding this issue. If there was a “black”, “white”, and “mongolid” (so called) set of races, earlier work done by some of those racists scientists ranked penis size in that order (from largest to smallest) and some researchers wrongly linked that to level of evolution; as penis size gets smaller brain size gets larger, humans grade from animalistic to civilized, that sort of thing. The penis-brain relationship is, of course, absurd, but it is possible that humans vary in penis size across geography just as humans vary in other physical traits like skin color (not by race but by space). The present study showed no such relationship, so if there is a difference across humans in penis size it is not very striking. Having said that, this study was mostly done of white males (320 “Negroids” as the study uses the term, and 445 “Mongolids”)

Do men exaggerate their penis size?

Herbenick et?al. [32] found from their self-report data of 1661 men, a mean erect penile length of 14.15?cm and a mean erect penile circumference of 12.23?cm. This is about 1?cm larger than the mean erect length and 0.6?cm larger than that the mean circumference from our nomograms. This might be dismissed as the unreliability or bias of self-report but they argue that their sample was more accurate, as the data were reported anonymously over the internet and were motivated to obtain a condom that fitted their erect penis. Their data also suggest that the mode of getting an erection may influence erect penile dimensions (e.g. being with a sexual partner at the time of the measurement) and that this may be more accurate than self-stimulation especially in a clinical setting.

So, maybe they do, maybe the don’t, but if the do, they are not doing it by much. I suppose that when it comes to lying about penis size, one does not want to get caught with one’s pants down. As it were.

Note: Robert Martin has quite a few posts on penis size, which you can look over here.

(Originally posted on scienceblogs March 5, 2015. But still topic that comes up a lot.)

The fossil was found while University of Michigan paleontologist Iyad Zalmout was busy looking for dinosaur fossils in western Saudi Arabia. He found the monkey, from a much later time period, instead. Ooops.

“I didn’t know whether to be disappointed or not, but I thought, well, maybe something interesting will pop up here, so I started looking around. Within minutes, I found teeth sticking out of the ground, and when I realized what they were I was shocked. I had worked with Phil [Gingerich] on terrestrial mammals in the Bighorn Basin, and my first look at the size and shape of these teeth told me I had found a primitive primate.”

Zalmout sent a photo to Philip Gingerich, top monkey fossil expert, who confirmed its primate status and potential importance.

Major early Oligocene to early middle Miocene Afro-Arabian catarrhine primate sites. Key: 1, Harrat Al Ujayfa, Saudi Arabia; 2, Thaytiniti, Oman; 3, Taqah, Oman; 4, Fayum, Egypt; 5, Gebel Zelten, Libya; 6, Lothidok, Kenya; 7, Meswa Bridge, Kenya; 8, Koru, Kenya; 9, Songhor, Kenya; 10, Buluk, Kenya; 11, Moroto, Uganda; 12, Napak, Uganda; 13, Kalodirr, Kenya; 14, Rusinga, Kenya; 15, Loperot, Kenya; 16, Ryskop, South Africa; 17, Wadi Moghara, Egypt; 18, Ad Dabtiyah, Saudi Arabia; 19, Malembe, Angola. Map and caption from original paper.

The time period in question, the Oligocene, is circled on this time chart from the USGS.

African “higher” primates, the Old World Monkeys and the Apes, are collectively known as the Catarrhini. The Catarrhini split from the New World monkeys at least 40 million years ago, though this date is subject to revision. That would be somewhere in the middle of the Eocene. Later on during the late Eocene and subsequent Oligocene, around 20-something mya to 30-something mya, Catarrhini gave rise to populations that would have been the ancestors of the major living groups as well as some lineages that have gone totally extinct. The split between living Old World Monkeys and the apes would have been somewhere in the middle of this time range.

Saadanius hijazensis in situ. The fossil, found in 2009, preserves most of the face, the front upper portion of the skull, the temporal bone, and the palate, with some of the left and right upper teeth. The specimen was found with the palate and teeth facing upward, imbedded in an iron-rich clastic conglomerate in the middle part of the Shumaysi Formation. Credit: Iyad S. Zalmout, University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology

Frontal view of Saadanius hijazensis (holotype SGS-UM 2009-002). source

Within a relatively short time span, several ape lineages arose, causing much subsequent confusion among palaentologists. The short version of the story is that some four major ape lineages emerged between the middle Oligocene and the end of the Oligocene (around 23 mya), most of which we tentatively refer to today as “Apes of ancient aspect,” with all of those being extinct, and one lucky lineage that is not extinct, the “Apes of modern aspect.” (The latter get to be “modern” because they are more derived than the others.) You would be safe thinking of the latter as the “hominoids” and the others as “Miocene apes” since they mostly lived in the Miocene and the “hominoids” kept it simple by leaving very few fossils behind. Today, when we try to piece these apes together into a coherent pattern, to understand what form of ape gave rise to what other form of ape, we become confused and argue. If only we had a better idea of what the ancestral species of all these apes looked like, in order to test hypotheses about ape evolution in the early days.

Videoscan of the face of Saadanius hijazensis, a new genus and species of primate that lived in the Arabian Peninsula during the late Oligocene epoch, 29-28 million years before present. nsfnsf

Meanwhile, over on the Old World Monkey lineage, there was much less diversification and a relatively straight forward body plan easily represented by macaques or baboons persisted to modern times (though it is a bit more complex than that).

Thick solid vertical lines indicate known temporal ranges of taxa; thick dotted vertical lines show intervals of occurrence or possible extension for temporal ranges of taxa. Diagram and caption from original paper.

Now, here’s the rub: We have some fossils (Propliopithecoidea)from around 30-35 mya that show us what the ancestor to this complex series of developments look like, and we have what are essentially modern Old World Monkeys and Apes, and a fairly large collection of Miocene apes (of ancient aspect) post dating 23 million years ago. For the monkeys specifically, there are bits and pieces but mainly fossils that look pretty much like modern moneys and date to the last 5 mya or so.

In order to understand the evolution of a set of species, it is necessary to know about the nodes … the common ancestors of various sets of species. Ideally, we would have a good understanding of the population that gave rise to the Old World Monkeys and the Apes, so we could sort out differences among subsequent lineages with a knowledge of what specific traits are expected to be present in given animal because its ancestors had it. In other words, is a certain trait seen in one species and not another, sister species, because it was added by the first species, or lost in the second species?

There is a major difficulty in figuring this out with primates: The primates, with respect to untangling fossils, have three overwhelmingly important characteristics. First off, Many of the lineages are extinct and left incomplete fossil records. DNA can’t help us with them an the scrappy fossil are not exactly coming to the plate.

Second, the physical form of Catarrhini (many of the living and extinct apes and monkeys of the old world) is highly selected to adapt to arboreal lifeways. All species have selective forces working on them, but some selective forces are stronger and more overwhelming than others. The key characteristic of birds is flight. There are few features of flying birds that are not shaped directly or (barely) indirectly by the requirements of flight. The key characteristic of a moose is that it eats aquatic vegetation seasonally and lives in the snow the rest of the year. So it has long legs. Big whoop. The shape of, say, the top of the head of the moose is not adapted to this characteristic, but for birds, every part is shaped by the flight adaptation. Large mammalian arboreal species are not as constrained as vertebrates that fly, but they are fairly constrained. (I do simplify … some primates are not as arboreal as others, and the constraint I mention here is more severe in the New World where arboreality is much more intense.) The result of this constraint is that some features are either very conserved (once they emerge) or are converged on over time from multiple directions. This confuses us.

Third, we are talking about a long period of time with a spotty fossil record. Any kind of confusing convergence or random loss of a feature or other complexities that might occur over time is more likely in a very time-deep fossil record. Think of it this way: Monkeys and apes are evolving (from monkeys and apes) over and over across vast periods of time. In enough time to see the evolution of monkeys or apes from non-monkey or ape ancestors occur several times, the same lineages are traveling the adaptive landscapes altered by both random and adaptive forces that themselves are changing over time.

So, imagine a family tree with prosimians and New World Monkeys represented as lower branching events, and then two focal living groups, the Old World Monkeys and the Apes as two additional tips that we presume to join subsequent to the split with Old World Monkeys, but with no real fossil record at the point of that split. We can’t be sure of much of what is going on there. For instance, if a fossil that looks ape like (but this is only one bone or some teeth) is found from a deposit around 25 million years ago, does a particular feature of that fossil indicate that it post-dates the monkey-ape common ancestor (because it is novel, not seen in the last common ancestor) or does it indicate nothing other than membership in the Catarrhini (becuase the feature is seen in the last common ancestor)? Without a detailed set of information about the last common ancestor, we can’t say, and can thus not be sure of this fossil or what it tells us about the timing and nature of the ape-monkey split or other important questions.

So, Saadanius hijazensis is a missing link right? It represents the last common ancestor of Old World Monkeys and the Apes. Problem solved!

Well, no, unfortunately not, but Saadanius hijazensis is close to the last common ancestor and is thus very helpful. Saadanius hijazensis is considered to be close to the base of the ape-human clade. Not “the missing link” but very very helpful in understanding what the ape and monkey lineages we know of for later periods evolved from.

Saadanius hijazensis has a tubular ectotympanic (the bone that contains the canal runnig to the ear from the outside). This is a features that separates the Old World Monkesy from the earlier-split-off New World Monkeys, shared by the Old World Monkeys and living and Miocene Apes. So Saadanius hijazensis is a Catarrhini. Miocene apes have frontal sinuses, palates that are less uniform in size front to back than monkeys, really large male canine crowns, a few other esoteric tooth-related features, and are typically large. Saadanius hijazensis lacks these features, making it not an ape. Compared to the above mentioned really early primate fossils (from the Eocene), Saadanius hijazensis is similar but different in the ways one would expect if it was an Old World Monkey. And, the fossil seems to date from prior to, but just prior to, the monkey-ape split.

These facts together put Saadanius hijazensis near the common ancestor of Old World Monkeys and Apes, in both time and morphology. The fossil is found in the Arabian Peninsula, which at the time was part of Northeast Africa (the Red Sea did not exist yet) which places the fossil in space within a region (a very large region) thought to be the location of the evolution of these monkeys and apes. And, although this could quite accidently turn into a tautology, Saadanius hijazensis helps to pin down the timing of the split to about 23 to 25 million years ago, simply because it fits nicely with a morphology representing the pre-split form and dates to that period. This does not rule out an earlier split, of course, because Saadanius hijazensis could certainly represent an earlier evolutionary event. With respect to the timing of the monkey-ape split Saadanius hijazensis also provides hope that more fossils of this time period can be found, and although a single species may be hard to place in fossil space-time, a set of species can reveal a pattern that may make for interesting study.

Given this position, Saadanius hijazensis can help resolve conflicts regarding early Miocene apes, since Saadanius hijazensis approximates the ancestor from which they evolved, and help to understand (given further analysis) the behavioral biology of the Old World primates of that period. For instance, did the ancestor of the living apes have a flat face (like a gibbon) or a long snout (like many monkeys including baboons). According to my old friend and schoolmate, Laura MacLatchy, this fossil should cause us to lean towards the baboon-face model.

Here’s a Nature video about the fossil:

Zalmout, I., Sanders, W., MacLatchy, L., Gunnell, G., Al-Mufarreh, Y., Ali, M., Nasser, A., Al-Masari, A., Al-Sobhi, S., Nadhra, A., Matari, A., Wilson, J., & Gingerich, P. (2010). New Oligocene primate from Saudi Arabia and the divergence of apes and Old World monkeys Nature, 466 (7304), 360-364 DOI: 10.1038/nature09094

A University of Michigan press report on the find is here.

An oystercatcher is a wading bird of the family Haematopodidae, distributed in one genus, Haematopus. As is the case with many coast loving birds, there has been confusion about the limits of the 11 or so species known to exist worldwide. That itself is an interesting story (Hocke 1996), but one we will not go into now.

Adult coastal oystercatchers (some species are not coastal) eat all sorts of animals found in the intertidal zone, including shellfish of all sorts, depending on availability. They get their name from their tendency to prey on bivalves (including oysters). Oystercatchers have long heavy beaks which allow them to open these bivalves using various methods (de Hoyo, 1996). At least one method they use for this is to jam the beak into the bivalve and cut the muscle that normally would be used by the bivalve to “clam up.” This strategy is thought to be dangerous, because if the bivalve closes on the beak, then you’ve got this damn bivalve attached to your beak for the rest of the day. If the bivalve in question happens to be attached to the substrate (as are oysters and mussels, typically), then the Foraging Fail is more serious; The bird may have shoved its head under water to get at the bivalve. If not, the tide may be on its way in anyway. Either way, the bird may drown.

Here’s the interesting evolutionary story, which has to do with development.

Adult oystercatcher photo by Steppeland Click here for attribution

Adult oystercathers have a long beak and long legs to facilitate intertidal feeding behaviors, including wading and bivalve predation. But one method of bivalve predation is potentially deadly. So, baby oystercathers have to learn how to do this. Trial and error is not an option. The very first error a baby oystercatcher makes may be its last earthly act before going off to oystercatcher heaven (and there is no oystercatcher heaven). Instead, they must learn using some other learning method. One might expect oystercatcher genes to be selected to make oystercatchers automatically good at this dangerous act. The problem here is that the neural mechanisms underlying the process are higher order integrative systems using a wide range of sensory inputs and motor commands. Organisms with brains can’t evolve pre-programmed genetically tuned neural mechanisms that operate at any level of detail. The brain that runs this finely tuned process must be shaped by experience (learning).

What we see in nature is this: Baby oystercatchers follow their mothers around all day, every day, for many days, watching, watching, constantly watching. They internalize what they are observing, and after many instances of observing the bivalve predation technique, are able to do it.

Baby oystercatcher Photo by Haukur H. Click here for original

That part is interesting; Oystercatchers are an example of evolution NOT solving a complex behavioral problem by pre-programming neural circuits at a fine level of detail. This conforms to what we know about how brains develop (Deacon 1997). It is very difficult or impossible to pre-program complex cortical functions such as language, general intelligence, mathematical abilities, or even something simpler like catching an oyster using genes coding for neural connections. Rather, experience (learning, environment, culture) shapes the brain during development.

And, this part is also interesting (and in relation to oystercatchers, most interesting): The baby oystercatchers, while following around their mothers with their brains being shaped by experience to attain the appropriate skill level, retain a small and ineffective juvenile beak. The babies are incapable of trying what may well be fatal until some time in their development when a hormonal shift occurs, causing their beaks to grow to adult size. It did not have to be this way: It is not true that baby birds typically have non-adult beaks until the last minute (though there is a wide range of developmental trajectories for bird beaks). The long-retained small beak, caused by the timing of hormonal development, facilitates learning in the particular way that conforms to the overall oystercatcher adaptation.

Well, that certainly is a nice story, but it is also based on common knowledge of bird behavior, development, and ecology. How do we really know that oystercatchers actually risk death while foraging for bivalves? Well, we know this because we know this. This is probably one of those pieces of knowledge that is generally known by natural historians, is written down as a generalization in a number of authoritative or semi-authoritative books, and for which there is a handful of anectdotal examples buried somewhere in the pre-PDF, pre-Google, pre-Medline ancient literature. And therefore, lost in obscurity and of no possible value.

But wait, there are scholars who still read actual books and printed journals! And it turns out, this can be useful and interesting. There is indeed an ancient, obscure anecdotal case, and it is brought to us via Tetrapod Zoology Blog. In Clam attacks and kills oystercatcher, Darren Naish describes a publication from 1946 in The Auk (a classic bird journal) in which a brief account is provided of an oystercatcher having got its beak stuck in the clam, as it were.

In this case, an adult Haematopus palliatus (American oystercatcher) got its beak stuck in a Mercenaria mercenaria (hard shelled clam) in South Carolina, in 1939.

It drowned, and the soft tissue of its neck was scavenged by crabs. What a way to go.

Baldwin, W. P. (1946). Clam catches oyster-catcher The Auk, 63, 589-589

Deacon, T. (1997) The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. Norton.

Hockey, P (1996) Family Haematopodidae (Oystercatchers) in del Hoyo, J.; Elliot, A. & Sargatal, J. (editors). (1996). Handbook of the Birds of the World. Volume 3: Hoatzin to Auks. Lynx Edicions. ISBN 8487334202

del Hoyo, J., Elliott, A. and Sargatal, J. (1996) Handbook of the Birds of the World. Vol. 3: Hoatzin to Auks. Lynx Edicions, Barcelona.

For these reasons, a human evolution TOE will generally evolve into a zombie that won’t die and can’t be killed, potentially eating the brains of science geeks and graduate students for decades. Another example of a human evolution TOE is bipedalism. Here, the idea is that bipedalism explains everything. For a long time that TOE ate the brains of graduate students and the general public and even senior scientists. It no longer does for this reason: We now know that bipedalism evolved millions of years before many of the key human traits that we wish to explain. But the zombie is not completely dead. Many human evolutionists still make the claim that bipedalism was a very important step in human evolution, even though a) we can’t explain why it happened and b) there is no solid link between bipedalism and anything else. The fact that we are increasingly realizing that bipedalism evolved in many hominoid lineages may make this TOE go away eventually. So, for now, the Bipedalism Zombie doe not consume brains wholesale. It just scoops out a tablespoon here and a tablespoon there now and then.

The AAT is different from the Bipedalism TOE for a couple of reasons. For one, it was rejected a long time ago by almost all serious paleoanthropologists. It is quite possible that the fact that the theory was being promoted (but not originally generated) by a Welsh non-academic female and that she was being aggressive about it probably influenced more scientists (negatively) than many aspects of the theory. That would be unfair, and it probably was unfair. But after a while, the AAT began to demonstrate other reasons for its rejection.

The AAT, in its various forms over time, has addressed almost every general aspect of human anatomy and behavior and made the claim that an aquatic ancestry is the best explanation for that feature. Some of these claims were absurd. For instance, the “fact” that females have long hair was an adaptation to living in the water, where the long flowing locks of females would be used as life lines for her babies and toddlers (‘paddlers’?) floating around her.

One of the best possible forms of evidence for an aquatic phase would be to find other mammals that are not presently especially aquatic (or at least no more than humans), look for physical evidence of that adaptation, and then check for that evidence, surviving as physiological atavisms, in humans. Not finding such atavisms is meaningless, but finding them would be spectacular evidence.

For example, elephants may have gone through an aquatic stage, and this is in fact seen ontogenetically in their kidneys. Do human kidneys also show this kind of evidence? Well, no, sorry, they don’t. The fact that elephants would have gone through their aquatic phase much longer ago than humans does not help the AAT here.

When the AAT was first proposed, we had a murky view of human evolutionary history. At that time it was possible to suggest a single phase of evolution during which certain conditions prevailed, and from which a long list of human traits emerged. But since that time our understanding of human evolution has become more detailed and many of the human traits are now seen as having emerged at very different times over a multi-million year period of time. For the AAT to continue to explain all of these traits (hairlessness, bipedalism, large brain, head hair, body fat distributions, body size, leg length and form, atavistic webbed feet, seafaring, intense use of coastal resources such as shellfish, etc. etc.) it would have to be the case that our ancestors were ‘aquatic’ for millions of years.

For the entire time that the AAT has been extant, the theory itself has been rather murky. Just how aquatic? Were the babies born under water or on land? Was mating done under water? Was aquatic lifestyle facultative or did all hominids do this? All day every day? Was all the food aquatic? On top of this, only a few of the usual candidates for typical mammalian aquatic adaptations are seen in humans. Hairlessness and subcutaneous body fat were, of course, considered early on to be hallmarks of the aquatic adaptation. The fact that aquatic mammals do not vary in hairlessness (very much) and humans do is a problem. The fact that body fat distributions are sexually dimorphic seems to have been missed by the AAT. Or maybe not. Maybe there is a version where the females are aquatic and the males are not. They meet on the beach for romance. Thus, the link our species makes, psychologically, between beaches and romance!!! Aha!!! It explains everything!!!!!

Oh, sorry, … I’ve got control now, didn’t mean to go off like that…

So, you can see where the theory goes, and how in fact it can’t be stopped. The AAT is a zombie theory, untestable because so much of what it proposes has not been framed in a testable way. The AAT remains capable of consuming many more, still untapped “connections” and “explanations.” The AAT has consumed many brains, and not all of them particularly susceptible. Just recently, I heard from an excellent, unimpeachable source that a very famous person whom you have heard of is an AAT ‘believer.’ I found it hard to believe, but it is apparently true. Some day I hope to have a little conversation with this person!

AAT: The theory that keeps giving. And eating brains.

UPDATE: See this video just in.

Gallup’s work is written up an an all-too-sophomoric Scientific American article by Jesse Bering which just barely falls short of explaining this important biological phenomenon in terms of a pair of headlights, a flashlight, and a little red waagon.

Here’s the money quote:

Magnetic imaging studies of heterosexual couples having sex reveal that, during coitus, the typical penis completely expands and occupies the vaginal tract, and with full penetration can even reach the woman’s cervix and lift her uterus. This combined with the fact that human ejaculate is expelled with great force and considerable distance (up to two feet if not contained), suggests that men are designed to release sperm into the uppermost portion of the vagina possible. Thus… “A longer penis would not only have been an advantage for leaving semen in a less accessible part of the vagina, but by filling and expanding the vagina it also would aid and abet the displacement of semen left by other males as a means of maximizing the likelihood of paternity.”

The other component of the work is the intriguing possibility that penises have evolved to carry semen previously left in one female’s vagina from another male to be deposited hours later in the vagina of a second female. Which I suppose could be called facilitated cuckoldry.

I’ve not read the original paper yet. I’m not quite up to it. But if I do, I’ll let you know if it is truly a seminal work, or if Gallup is just jerking us around.

The writeup is here.

Much is made of the early use of stone tools by human ancestors. Darwin saw the freeing of the hands ad co-evolving with the use of the hands to make and use tools which co-evolved with the big brain. And that would make the initial appearance of stone tools in the archaeological record a great and momentous thing. However, things did not work out that way.

It turns out that up-rightedness (bipedalism), which would free the hands, evolved in our ancestors a very long time (millions of years) prior to our first record of stone tools. The earliest upright hominids that are definitely human ancestors probably emerged either close to five million years ago or close to seven million years ago, depending on which of the current evidence you like and how you interpret it. The earliest chipped stone tools are a little over 2.5 million years ago.

Furthermore, at that time there was not necessarily any real increase in brain size. Maybe a little in one or two hominid lineages, but it is not clear which hominid lineage(s) were making stone tools in relation to the brain size and the increase in size is unimpressive to the extent that it is probably safe to say that as more fossils are found and more data analyzed it could go away.

It is true that about the same time stone tools show up (give or take a couple/few hundred thousand years) there may have been an increase in species of hominds, and/or an increase in some of the features that they shared, such as whopping big teeth and the skeletal and muscular aparatus to use those teeth. But it is also true, as Alison Brooks and I have shown in various analyses, that it is just as likely if not more likely that the appearance of stone tools in the archaeological record at that point in time is a function of how the arcaheoligcal record is formed. We beleive that it is fairly likely that chipped stone tools were already in use and simply became visible to us at this point. Maybe.

Which brings us to some very serious speculation, but what the heck: I think that what it takes, mentally or neurologically, to make this early, relatively simple stone tool technology is well within the range of capacities I can imagine for a chimp-like hominid. True, modern chimps have a hard time making stone tools, but their “hands” are not “freed” like a more bipedal hominids’ hands would be. The mental/neurological part is not so hard. In a series of experiments some years ago, started by Glynn Isaac, we had many dozen Harvard Undergraduates, who had no prior exposure to stone tool manufacture, bang rocks together (in isolation) for the sole purpose of making sharp edged pieces. All of them managed to replicate most of the products in a typical Oldowan industry in just several minutes. The collection of any dozen or so of these students’ produce includes all of the Oldowan “tool” forms.

The Oldowan is the outcome of breaking rocks.

As to the impact that Oldowan style technology would have on the life of a chimp-like human ancestor? This would probably be as important as any other single aspect of foraging strategy. I imagine they were mainly making sharp edges in order to sharpen sticks, or to cut into things (or both), which would have increased the range of possibilities for accessible foods at the same level that, for instance, cooperative hunting that we see in the Tai chimps of West Africa. Important. Not necessarily overwhelmingly important.

This finger needs a ring! (soure)

The couple walked into a Norfolk courthouse on a spring day, exchanged a few words, and within 10 minutes, were seemingly husband and wife.It was an unremarkable ceremony – except that several weeks later, officials realized the shapely bride might not have been a woman.Now authorities in Virginia, where same-sex marriages are illegal, are weighing whether to file misdemeanor charges against the couple, Antonio E. Blount, 31, and Justin L. McCain, 18. An announcement is expected this week.

Read the whole story here.The people who are insisting that marriage is only valid if it is people of different sexes are asking for it. It might, in many states, be easier to recognize gender orientations beyond hetero male and female as additional ‘sexes’ (in courts) than to get legislatures to pass non-discriminatory bills.Just as interesting would be the reaction in some legislatures….Imagine this scenario. Imagine a couple where one person is roughly male or female and the other is too, but ‘transgenders’ … (yes, I’m using that as a verb here).They get married. They get arrested. They get a lawyer.Eventually, a court is convinced (by arguments made by a dream team consisting of Maggie Cassella, William Rubinstein, Benjamin Schatz and Tom Stoddard) that XX or XY plus same, transgenderd (that was a formula, of sorts) is a marriage between people of “opposite” sex (this will ultimately depend on what you mean by “opposite” of course). And thus legal.Then, the fun starts when the legislature debates the wording of the new bill that makes sure that this does not happen again.”The Commonwealth of Virgina herein defines members of the biological gender typically associated with two X chromosomes and in the absence of any discernible Y chromosomes by whichever means of discernment is common practice, who may also happen to present as or claim orientation towards or as femme lesbian, butch dyke, or straight trans crossdresser, not inclusive of surgically trangendered (see section 9 paragraph 4 of this code) or non female regendered transexual individuals, non-lesbian female clitoral hypertrophic individuals (to the exclusion of chicks with dicks, see section 14 paragraph 9 of the penal code), shall be deemed a woman in relation to laws, codes, or regulations pertaining to matrimony.”… or words to that effect. Perhaps under these circumstances the legislature of such a state might just leave this issue alone and give up.One can only hope.

Philip Guston’s “Sea,” a lithograph on handmade paper from 1980, the year the artist died.

“In contemporary art right now, there are no limits, no boundaries,” Hirsch said. “We wanted to show contemporary work, and show that art can be anything, maybe even vulgar.”The title and concept refer to the Exquisite Corpse, a Surrealist exercise in which three artists independently draw a section of a body: head, torso and legs. In “Exquisite Corpus,” viewers are also welcome to play.

Now, you now what this is, right? It’s that pallor game where you pass around the paper, each person draws a body part (in order from head to feet) folding their contribution out of sight and passing it on to the next person. …Meanwhile, in Austria, Cristo With Flesh artist Spencer Tunick has gone ahead and draped a major sports stadium in Austria with naked human bodies.

The latest work by New York photographer Spencer Tunick gathered 1,840 people, baring it all in Austria’s Happel Stadium on Sunday.”Stay very still. Don’t move,” the Austria Press Agency quoted Tunick as telling the crowd as he went to work.Much of the hours-long photo shoot had little to do with soccer, with naked volunteers assuming different poses at the behest of the artist. But at least one of the photos had them with the ball, men first and then the women.The stadium will host seven of the Euro 2008 soccer championship matches being staged by Austria and Switzerland, including the June 29 final.Tunick has made a name for himself with his works featuring hundreds of naked people at unusual venues. He described Sunday’s shooting on his Web site as combining “the spirit of sports, the grand sweeping waves of stadium architecture and the abstract relation of the human form to modern structures.”[source]

But there are social limits to what the human body can be used for. Even if artistically done, robbing graves is generally frowned upon.

Authorities in Texas have filed corpse-abuse charges against two men who allegedly removed a skull from a grave and used it as a bong.The Harris County District Attorney’s Office confirmed on Thursday that misdemeanor abuse of corpse charges have been filed in the case.One of the men allegedly told police they dug up a grave in an abandoned cemetery in the woods, removed a head from a body and smoked marijuana using the skull as a bong.[source]