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First the link to this week's complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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Cinner is one more of those studies that scare me. Undoubtedly environmental conservation – at least those parts of it that are not just conspicuous window dressing actually making things worse – is a good thing. But the methods for subtly and clandestinely influencing people developed here will work just as well for far more nefarious purposes. Of course all this has long been known intuitively to all successful salesmen, con-tricksters, and demagogues, but providing a scientific base makes it a much more available and much more reliable tool for all kinds of totalitarianism and thought control.
On the other hand this article is a nice list of reminders about what to be aware of. All these mechanisms are currently being abused on a massive scale by politics and the state controlled media, so there is a huge need to make understanding them as wide-spread and general as humanly possible.
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As so often happens in biology, group differences only become conspicuous at the extremes. In Greenberg et al. the mode of all indicator distributions for diagnosed autistics falls well into the normal range. But there is another result of this large and meticulous study that the both Geary and Greenberg et al. preferred not state too clearly: We see an undeniably large difference between males and females, about as large in the cumulative score as that between autistics and controls.
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It used to be the accepted truth, that culture is the main distinction between humans and other animals and that only cetaceans, other primates, and some birds possessed primitive pre-forms of it. After Whiten and Danchin et al. we have been dethroned by the humble fruitfly.
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Perhaps it's the spectre of Lyssenko ominously lurking in the murky background, but biologists are absolutely determined that, however much he may be vindicated by facts, Lamarck must not be right! Looking back to his time, of course many of his hypotheses are wrong in their suggested mechanisms. Darwin too had no idea about cellular nuclei, genes and their mutations and expressed his ideas in rather general terms, that, if you refrain from nit-picking, have stood the test of time. I submit that, if you accord Lamarck the same level of generality and do not go into the finer details of his purely speculative mechanisms, his theory can be shown to be as true and as valid as Darwin’s. Some of these elusive mechanisms are just coming to light in the many examples Pennisi has collected for us.
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A single and singular exception should not suffice to overthrow our view of the cultural capacities of a well studied species in the first place, but the unexpected and extraordinary merit close scrutiny before uncritical acceptance. Aubert et al. ask crucial and essential questions about Hoffmann et al.'s very early dating of the Ardales rock art. As always secure and precise dating is worthless unless you're sure just what it is you're dating.
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The real result of Bobe & Carvalho and Faith et al. is neither mentioned, far less discussed by them. It was not few and puny humans that started the decline of African megafauna five million years back, but a rather catastrophic collapse of the carbon dioxide level and the resulting rise of C4 vegetation. Climate and aridity seem to have played a secondary role, so maybe we're just witnessing the beginning of Africa's regreening.
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Piecuch et al. take a closer look at sea level rise and land subsidence on the North American Atlantic coast. These data were rather uncritically used by Kemp et al. (list of 2011-07-08 and 2011-10-08, see also 2014-02-25) as an absolute measure for global sea level rise. I already criticised them then on grounds of internal consistency, assuming just what has been confirmed now.
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Alright, what do we have in Zhang and Zhang et al.? A good stratigraphy, a sound age model and well over 3 500 tools distributed over all three layers. There are good arguments for all the tools to be of more or less the same age. And then there is the well known Brazil nut effect whereby larger bits in a fine grained substrate – like tools in sand – always tend to move to the top if they move at all. Thus all tools derive from the bottom layer and are surprisingly old.
Or are they? We find about 10 % in situ in the bottom layer, less than that in the intermediate one and a whopping 85 % right at the top. And these near-surface ones are not the largest but skewed toward the smaller bits. Yes, there may be a threshold at work, where the very largest ones don't move, but that's just one more ad-hoc explanation piled on top of the others.
If this really is a totally new result, going against everything that has been considered proven fact in all the textbooks for quite some time now, then I require better proof than this to accept it.
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