From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Fri May 2 20:20:45 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 16:20:45 -0400 Subject: [language] [Fwd:A Humanist's Sojourn Among Scientists] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> >From the issue dated May 2, 2003 OBSERVER A Humanist's Sojourn Among Scientists By LEONARD CASSUTO If academe is like a village, it's a voluntarily segregated community. Most residents stay in their disciplinary neighborhoods and work where the surroundings are comfortable and familiar. Recently, however, I left my humanities neighborhood for an unlikely destination: A foray into journalism took me to the community of condensed-matter physics. I needed to talk to laboratory scientists about their work, and the prospect was intimidating. I was reporting on a scandal involving allegedly fabricated data in some influential superconductivity experiments at Bell Labs. A blue-ribbon panel of the elder statesmen of physics was investigating, and I was investigating the investigation. Although I'm more scientifically literate than the average English professor, superconductivity research is, shall we say, rather technical. I get the concepts, but fall short of understanding anything beyond them by, oh, approximately one bachelor's degree in physics. So imagine my surprise at how easy my interview subjects made it for me. Just about everybody I called took time to talk to me at length. Interview subjects ranging from assistant professors to Nobel Prize winners were shockingly courteous as I peered into an embarrassing event in their field. One of the first scientists I spoke to, a highly decorated nanochemist, confessed in the most forthright way that he felt he had been duped. It turned out that his candor was typical. But these physicists were more than helpful. They were downright friendly. They often had to stop to explain concepts that were elementary to them, but obscure to me. Though they were talking down to me, they made generous efforts to make it look like they weren't. I attribute that good feeling not to my own charms or journalistic skill, but rather to a sense of genuine collegiality toward a stranger in town. That collegiality extends to physicists' dealings with their own. One physicist told me: "The process of doing physics involves a lot of communication. It's highly interactive and collaborative. Even theorists don't write on their own." Indeed, all of the physicists working in a given subfield usually know each other. What about competition? When there's a well-defined scientific milestone, there's usually a race to reach it. The competition can take years, and, while it's usually cordial, it is a race. For example, about a dozen laboratory groups each worked for over 10 years to demonstrate a quantum phenomenon called the Bose-Einstein condensation effect. The first group to reach the finish line won the 2001 Nobel Prize for physics. But direct competition is infrequent in practice. More typically, there's room for everyone. Rare is the physics subfield that gets completely played out, and considerable rewards can come to scientists who build on an initial discovery by someone else. Getting funds, on the other hand, is a zero-sum game. Money is the lifeline of the research scientist, and there's only a certain amount of it available in a given area. The answer seems to be that physicists (and others in the hard sciences) have a strong faith in the peer-review system. More important, they trust in the evaluative process that underlies it. Physicists told me that peer review in the sciences has an ethical code built into it. There can be personality conflicts, of course, but the scientists share the belief that the peer-review system can deliver trustworthy assessments of their work. That enables them to relax and treat each other with respect. The peer-review system in the humanities and social sciences inspires no such confidence. Humanists pursue vastly different goals, even within the same field, and their work is inherently subjective. Consequently, judgment is bound to lack some of the concreteness that attends scientific peer review. Glitches in the peer-review system in physics are rare enough to make news -- like the story I wrote about. Humanities peer review gets attacked all the time. Edmund F. Byrne, an emeritus professor of philosophy and philanthropic studies at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, recently wrote in The Journal of Information Ethics that peer review is so riddled with bias that "anyone committed to such democratic values as fundamental fairness, equal opportunity, and equal respect should have ethical concerns about the process." A physicist reading Byrne's article might wonder what on earth he is talking about. It's no coincidence that "softer" fields are notable for their social hierarchies. One of my former graduate students described a typical conference encounter: "the glance at the name tag and the look away -- 'Oh, you're nobody.'" A few years ago at a party, I approached a well-known member of my field, with whom I shared a mutual friend. He didn't even bother to reply after I introduced myself. I can still see his dismissive glance. I must confess that I've been guilty of such status consciousness myself. I recall with shame how, after one of my presentations, I realized that the person congratulating me wasn't an anonymous admirer (I'd been treating him with unconscious condescension), but rather the author of a book I admired. I think he heard the grinding of gears as I lurched into a more generous tone. He's been cool to me since, which is no more than I deserve. This is more than impoliteness. It's unfriendliness. Naturally, it's no absolute rule. I've certainly encountered generosity from colleagues over the years, but I find it significant that almost every humanist I've spoken to can easily summon up recollections of mean-spirited treatment at the hands of our own scholarly community. Such intramural unpleasantness is "a special result of status anxiety," Clare Eby, a professor of English at the University of Connecticut and a scholar of Thorstein Veblen (who, a century ago, analyzed status consciousness), recently told me. "What we do isn't valued by our students, the world at large, or even within the university," she said. Surely there's something to that. Humanists have long been engaged in a rear-guard action against students who want to know, "How is this going to help me get a job?" The public-sector debates over academic responsibility routinely target humanists, many of whom find themselves caricatured as radical leftists engaged in a seditious rebellion against Western culture. Setting up humanists as straw men for the fall of the Western world is as easy as shooting literati in a barrel. But that ease may result more from the form than the content of humanists' beliefs. In the humanities, scholars usually do their research alone. Scientists, on the other hand, are trained to work in groups. Little wonder, then, that the humanities now features a full-blown academic celebrity culture. In order for celebrities to exist, people have to be willing to look up as well as down -- and looking both ways can promote insecurity. There's also a certain kind of anxiety that attends the study of the lives and works of others. One communications professor explained that to me with a scientific metaphor: "Humanists are continually chafing over the fact that they are but pilgrims at the shrine of art, and they find it difficult to forgive not only the artists, whom they diminish by splaying them across the literary glass slide, but also their fellow scrutinizers the next microscope over." The same could apply to a biographer, or any scholars whose work places them in the position of acolyte. Then there's the issue of the specialist's relationship with the general public. One of the editors I worked with on my physics assignment told me repeatedly that she wanted my article to explain "how some of the smartest people in the world got hoodwinked." The smartest people in the world? Perhaps. But the point is that you rarely hear a historian or a literary critic described that way. The technical work of experimental physicists is inherently unapproachable, except by other physicists. It's the job of a popularizer to simplify it and open it up, and physicists know that. The work of a historian is to tell stories. The work of a literary critic is to interpret them. It's inherently approachable -- until recently. The last two generations have seen the pursuits of humanists take on their own quasi-scientific aspects, complete with highly technical jargon. Attempts to popularize have often been met with the special hostility that attends defense of hierarchy -- consider the philosopher Judith Butler's assertion on the op-ed page of The New York Times that her ideas were so complex they couldn't be expressed in away that regular people might understand. The story of the Bell Labs physics scandal initially intrigued me because I thought it might turn out to be a scientific version of the culture wars, with scientists coming under attack from groups that help finance them. It didn't turn out that way. The data turned out to be faked, the perpetrator was fired, and the ripples from the scandal were contained within the physics world. But humanists have long been embroiled in their own conflicts with the society that finances them -- and one of the reasons lies in the way that we raise roadblocks and bar the world from entering our neighborhood. That's the opposite of what we ought to be doing, and it's all the more shameful because humanists are in an unusual and enviable position: The nature of our work makes it easy to open our doors and share that work. We can start doing so in the simplest way: by being nicer. Leonard Cassuto is an associate professor of English at Fordham University. His science reporting, which recently appeared on Salon.com, was selected for inclusion in the forthcoming Best American Science Writing 2003 (Ecco Press). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 34, Page B5 -- Mark Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Wed May 7 20:08:44 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 13:08:44 -0700 Subject: [language] [Fwd: Re: Sensationalism in Science and Philosophy] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: Sensationalism in Science and Philosophy Date: Mon, 20 May 2002 12:18:57 +0000 From: linguist at linguistlist.org To: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu I'm sorry, but we must return your posting on this topic, because the moderators have closed this thread to further discussion at this time, and notice of this decision has been announced to the list. We sincerely regret having to return your message. Perhaps you can continue the discussion privately. Regards, LINGUIST From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Mon May 20 01:25:56 2002 Delivered-To: linguist at linguistlist.org Date: Mon, 20 May 2002 00:57:48 -0400 From: "H.M. Hubey" Subject: Sensationalism in Science and Philosophy To: The LINGUIST Network , ploch at languages.wits.ac.za, dan_everett at sil.org MIME-version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.73 [en]C-CCK-MCD BA45DSL (Win95; U) Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-9 Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT X-Accept-Language: en,pdf I would like to thank Dr. Ploch for his long post clearing the air and clarifying the confused state of matters. I would also like to add a few comments which are germane. First of all, these discussions are extremely important for linguistics. Around the 1930s people like Paul Samuelson were known as "mathematical economists". Today "economist" means "mathematical economist". And the term "literary economist" is reserved for those who would like to litter the landscape with tossed word salads. To me a person is a "literary economist" like Jules Verne is a "literary physicist". Obviously, Verne was a science fiction writer. One day there will also be "literary linguists". The times are changing, and they always did. Around 1950 "computer" was a human, like an engineer, or accountant. Hence the words for machines had the adjective "automatic" in front of it e.g. EDVAC, UNIVAC etc, because at that time sophisticated-machines were called "automatic". One day, the adjective "mathematical" will not be necessary when using the word "linguist". Over the last 300 years or so strange things have happened and strange ideas have become sold as 'truth'. I was shocked to find one of my students put on her web page that she 'practices wiccan'. All this is due to lack of knowledge about what science is. And it is not really very recent, but has been going on for centuries. The great [anti] hero of movies and films moved into the science field and usurped it. The earliest such event was the ridicule heaped upon Isaac Newton and his "mathematics" by the philosopher Berkeley (and his cronies who called Newton to their "court" and [allegedly] demolished his whole edifice) who today is not known for much more than what can best be explained as "what I don't see does not exist." The story of science has been told incorrectly by those who had a lot to lose from its successes. Let us not forget that Newton did "natural philosophy" (not "physics"). The best explanation of why science developed the way it did and why it had to essentially this deterministic path is in August Comte's book. (Unfortunately, I could only read the English translation by Andreski, not the original French.) But he too was put away by those who had much to lose, and who did not understand what was written. Then during this century we had Feyerabend who "proves" that witchcraft is science. When he gave this talk at Stanford a student asked him why he does not fly brooms instead of airplanes, and his answer was "I understand planes but not brooms."! How can this con-artist even show is face anywhere? Then finally, the dam burst when that ignoramus Searle decided to do one better and wrote his little work on why there will never be intelligent machines. There was a companion article in the Scientific American by the philosopher couple Mr/Ms Churchland. It is only too painfully clear that Searle does not even understand what was written, and has no ability to even think of complex issues in that article of his in Scientific American. But this is all what post-everything movement is about. There was a great deal of ridicule of Searle, which like a true con-man he merely termed "hostility". But it looks like the tide has turned. The big attack was launched by two physicists, Sokol and Bricmont, and it was the hoax article which they got published in a prestigious journal. In fact, one can find the website where there is a "postmodernism generator". It creates a new postmodernist article automatically everytime you click on the button. That is how much gibberish there is in that movement which, to me, includes people like Feyerabend, Searle, and Kuhn. Nothing succeeds like success, and it looks like things are going back to sanity. All of this is not much more than earlier replays of what Bill Gates did to the world (mostly America). A much more reliable operating system Linux is available for free. Just think a minute. If there were free cars outperforming Lexus, Benz, Infiniti and BMW, how long would these manufacturers stay in business? The WebServer Apache was so good that there is even a version of it that runs on Gates' Windows operating systems and yet he still sells his IIS. Why? Most people say that they use Windows only because they have to use MS-Office and that because their old files are in these packages. But there is Star-Office, which is probably still free and it produces basically MS-Office compatable files. So why does Bill Gates still hold the world by its testicles? That is the same reason why Feyerabend, Kuhn, Searle are still enjoying a kind of [anti] hero fame. Who are they fighting and why are they so popular? Obviously, I recommend reading Popper, Comte, and others who wrote on science like Mach, Frank, Paulos, Schroedinger, etc. Their works are less "heroic" than those of Feyerabend, Searle and Kuhn but they are much closer to the mark on how science is and was really done. And that is why linguists should broaden their readings to others than those who are greatly popular in the "mainstream". Look at Gates' Windows and Office? Free products are better than those. That speaks volumes about the mass marketing of products and ideas. -- M. Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu /\/\/\/\//\/\/\/\/\/\/http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey -- ... M. Hubey ... hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Wed May 7 21:59:06 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 14:59:06 -0700 Subject: [language] World's Farmers Sowed Languages as Well as Seeds Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> This is a multi-part message in MIME format. -------------- next part -------------- http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/06/science/06LANG.html -- ... M. Hubey ... hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Thu May 8 11:44:39 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 07:44:39 -0400 Subject: [language] [Fwd: [evol-psych] Earliest Domesticated Dogs Uncovered] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [evol-psych] Earliest Domesticated Dogs Uncovered Date: Thu, 08 May 2003 08:56:27 +0100 From: Ian Pitchford Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Organization: http://human-nature.com To: evolutionary-psychology at yahoogroups.com Earliest Domesticated Dogs Uncovered By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News Skull of a Stone Age Dog Skull of a Stone Age Dog April 7, 2003 -- The skulls of two Stone Age dogs believed to be the earliest known canines on record have been found, according to a team of Russian scientists. The dog duo, which lived approximately 14,000 years ago, appear to represent the first step of domestication from their wild wolf ancestors. Mikhail Sablin, a scientist at the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, along with his colleague Gennady Khlopachev, analyzed the dog remains, which were found at the Eliseevichi I site in the Bryansk region of Russia's central plain, according to an Informnauka press agency release. Full text: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20030505/earlydog.html News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences - Issue 94 - 3rd May, 2003 http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue94.html Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service . -- Mark Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Wed May 28 08:31:55 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 04:31:55 -0400 Subject: [language] [Fwd:Chimp Study Yields Clues to Evolution of Human Speech] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Scientific American May 27, 2003 Chimp Study Yields Clues to Evolution of Human Speech chimp Image: COURTESY OF THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES We humans are nothing if not talkative. Indeed, it's one of our most salient characteristics as a species. But exactly how we came to be so chatty is less obvious. Despite decades of research into the subject, anthropologists are still struggling to reconstruct the chain of events that produced our unique oral capabilities. Now the results of a new study suggest that one part of the story they thought they had nailed in fact needs revision. Conventional wisdom holds that the repositioning of the human larynx that occurs during infancy--a key morphological prerequisite to speech--is particular to our kind. But Takeshi Nishimura of Kyoto University in Japan and colleagues have discovered that this southward migration of the larynx to a spot between the pharynx and the lungs occurs in our speechless relative the chimpanzee, too. The team employed magnetic resonance imaging (see image) to track development in three chimps during the first two years of life. Full text http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=00018313-7C84-1ED3-8E1C809EC588EF21 News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences - Issue 96 - 19th May, 2003 http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue96.html Human Nature Review http://human-nature.com/ Evolutionary Psychology http://human-nature.com/ep/ Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service . -- Mark Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Wed May 28 08:34:50 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 04:34:50 -0400 Subject: [language] [Fwd: [ Scientists use DNA fragments to trace the migration of modern humans] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Public release date: 27-May-2003 Contact: Mark Shwartz mshwartz at stanford.edu 650-723-9296 Stanford University http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/ Scientists use DNA fragments to trace the migration of modern humans Human beings may have made their first journey out of Africa as recently as 70,000 years ago, according to a new study by geneticists from Stanford University and the Russian Academy of Sciences. Writing in the American Journal of Human Genetics, the researchers estimate that the entire population of ancestral humans at the time of the African expansion consisted of only about 2,000 individuals. "This estimate does not preclude the presence of other populations of Homo sapiens sapiens [modern humans] in Africa, although it suggests that they were probably isolated from one another genetically, and that contemporary worldwide populations descend from one or very few of those populations," said Marcus W. Feldman, the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor at Stanford and co-author of the study. The small size of our ancestral population may explain why there is so little genetic variability in human DNA compared with that of chimpanzees and other closely related species, Feldman added. The study, published in the May edition of the journal, is based on research conducted in Feldman`s Stanford laboratory in collaboration with co-authors Lev A. Zhivotovsky of the Russian Academy and former Stanford graduate student Noah A. Rosenberg, now at the University of Southern California. "Our results are consistent with the `out-of-Africa` theory, according to which a sub-Saharan African ancestral population gave rise to all populations of anatomically modern humans through a chain of migrations to the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Oceania and America," Feldman noted. Ancient roots Since all human beings have virtually identical DNA, geneticists have to look for slight chemical variations that distinguish one population from another. One technique involves the use of "microsatellites" - short repetitive fragments of DNA whose patterns of variation differ among populations. Because microsatellites are passed from generation to generation and have a high mutation rate, they are a useful tool for estimating when two populations diverged. In their study, the research team compared 377 microsatellite markers in DNA collected from 1,056 individuals representing 52 geographic sites in Africa, Eurasia (the Middle East, Europe, Central and South Asia), East Asia, Oceania and the Americas. Statistical analysis of the microsatellite data revealed a close genetic relationship between two hunter-gatherer populations in sub-Saharan Africa - the Mbuti pygmies of the Congo Basin and the Khoisan (or "bushmen") of Botswana and Namibia. These two populations "may represent the oldest branch of modern humans studied here," the authors concluded. The data revealed a genetic split between the ancestors of these hunter-gatherer populations and the ancestors of contemporary African farming people - Bantu speakers who inhabit many countries in southern Africa. "This division occurred between 70,000 and 140,000 years ago and was followed by the expansion out of Africa into Eurasia, Oceania, East Asia and the Americas - in that order," Feldman said. This result is consistent with an earlier study in which Feldman and others analyzed the Y chromosomes of more than 1,000 men from 21 different populations. In that study, the researchers concluded that the first human migration from Africa may have occurred roughly 66,000 years ago. Population bottlenecks The research team also found that indigenous hunter-gatherer populations in Africa, the Americas and Oceania have experienced very little growth over time. "Hunting and gathering could not support a significant increase in population size," Feldman explained. "These populations probably underwent severe bottlenecks during which their numbers crashed - possibly because of limited resources, diseases and, in some cases, the effects of long-distance migrations." Unlike hunter-gatherers, the ancestors of sub-Saharan African farming populations appear to have experienced a population expansion that started around 35,000 years ago: "This increase in population sizes might have been preceded by technological innovations that led to an increase in survival and then an increase in the overall birth rate," the authors wrote. The peoples of Eurasia and East Asia also show evidence of population expansion starting about 25,000 years ago, they added. "The exciting thing about these data is that they are amenable to a combination of mathematical models and statistical analyses that can help solve problems that are important in paleontology, archaeology and anthropology," Feldman concluded. ### The research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research. By Mark Shwartz CONTACT: Mark Shwartz, News Service: (650) 723-9296, mshwartz at stanford.edu COMMENT: Marc Feldman, Biological Sciences: (650) 725-1867, marc at charles.stanford.edu EDITORS: The study, "Features of Evolution and Expansion of Modern Humans, Inferred from Genomewide Microsatellite Markers," by Lev A. Zhivotovsky, Noah A. Rosenberg and Marcus W. Feldman, appears in the May 2003 edition of the American Journal of Human Genetics. A copy can be obtained from Professor Marc Feldman. His photo is available at http://newsphotos.stanford.edu (slug: "Humans_Feldman.jpg"). Relevant Web URLs: http://www-evo.stanford.edu/ http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2003/january8/genetics-18.html http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/november8/chromosome-1108.html http://www.neanderthal-modern.com/genetic1.htm News Service website: http://www.stanford.edu/news/ Stanford Report (university newspaper): http://news.stanford.edu Most recent news releases from Stanford: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/html/releases.html To change contact information for these news releases: news-service at lists.stanford.edu Phone: (650) 723-2558 http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-05/su-sud052703.php News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences - Issue 96 - 19th May, 2003 http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue96.html Human Nature Review http://human-nature.com/ Evolutionary Psychology http://human-nature.com/ep/ Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ -- Mark Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Fri May 30 00:53:52 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 20:53:52 -0400 Subject: [language] (no subject) Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> This is a multi-part message in MIME format. -------------- next part -------------- http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/J/J94/J94-3004.pdf -- Mark Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: acl.ldc.upenn.edu/J/J94/J94-3004.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 2140241 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Fri May 2 20:20:45 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 16:20:45 -0400 Subject: [language] [Fwd:A Humanist's Sojourn Among Scientists] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> >From the issue dated May 2, 2003 OBSERVER A Humanist's Sojourn Among Scientists By LEONARD CASSUTO If academe is like a village, it's a voluntarily segregated community. Most residents stay in their disciplinary neighborhoods and work where the surroundings are comfortable and familiar. Recently, however, I left my humanities neighborhood for an unlikely destination: A foray into journalism took me to the community of condensed-matter physics. I needed to talk to laboratory scientists about their work, and the prospect was intimidating. I was reporting on a scandal involving allegedly fabricated data in some influential superconductivity experiments at Bell Labs. A blue-ribbon panel of the elder statesmen of physics was investigating, and I was investigating the investigation. Although I'm more scientifically literate than the average English professor, superconductivity research is, shall we say, rather technical. I get the concepts, but fall short of understanding anything beyond them by, oh, approximately one bachelor's degree in physics. So imagine my surprise at how easy my interview subjects made it for me. Just about everybody I called took time to talk to me at length. Interview subjects ranging from assistant professors to Nobel Prize winners were shockingly courteous as I peered into an embarrassing event in their field. One of the first scientists I spoke to, a highly decorated nanochemist, confessed in the most forthright way that he felt he had been duped. It turned out that his candor was typical. But these physicists were more than helpful. They were downright friendly. They often had to stop to explain concepts that were elementary to them, but obscure to me. Though they were talking down to me, they made generous efforts to make it look like they weren't. I attribute that good feeling not to my own charms or journalistic skill, but rather to a sense of genuine collegiality toward a stranger in town. That collegiality extends to physicists' dealings with their own. One physicist told me: "The process of doing physics involves a lot of communication. It's highly interactive and collaborative. Even theorists don't write on their own." Indeed, all of the physicists working in a given subfield usually know each other. What about competition? When there's a well-defined scientific milestone, there's usually a race to reach it. The competition can take years, and, while it's usually cordial, it is a race. For example, about a dozen laboratory groups each worked for over 10 years to demonstrate a quantum phenomenon called the Bose-Einstein condensation effect. The first group to reach the finish line won the 2001 Nobel Prize for physics. But direct competition is infrequent in practice. More typically, there's room for everyone. Rare is the physics subfield that gets completely played out, and considerable rewards can come to scientists who build on an initial discovery by someone else. Getting funds, on the other hand, is a zero-sum game. Money is the lifeline of the research scientist, and there's only a certain amount of it available in a given area. The answer seems to be that physicists (and others in the hard sciences) have a strong faith in the peer-review system. More important, they trust in the evaluative process that underlies it. Physicists told me that peer review in the sciences has an ethical code built into it. There can be personality conflicts, of course, but the scientists share the belief that the peer-review system can deliver trustworthy assessments of their work. That enables them to relax and treat each other with respect. The peer-review system in the humanities and social sciences inspires no such confidence. Humanists pursue vastly different goals, even within the same field, and their work is inherently subjective. Consequently, judgment is bound to lack some of the concreteness that attends scientific peer review. Glitches in the peer-review system in physics are rare enough to make news -- like the story I wrote about. Humanities peer review gets attacked all the time. Edmund F. Byrne, an emeritus professor of philosophy and philanthropic studies at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, recently wrote in The Journal of Information Ethics that peer review is so riddled with bias that "anyone committed to such democratic values as fundamental fairness, equal opportunity, and equal respect should have ethical concerns about the process." A physicist reading Byrne's article might wonder what on earth he is talking about. It's no coincidence that "softer" fields are notable for their social hierarchies. One of my former graduate students described a typical conference encounter: "the glance at the name tag and the look away -- 'Oh, you're nobody.'" A few years ago at a party, I approached a well-known member of my field, with whom I shared a mutual friend. He didn't even bother to reply after I introduced myself. I can still see his dismissive glance. I must confess that I've been guilty of such status consciousness myself. I recall with shame how, after one of my presentations, I realized that the person congratulating me wasn't an anonymous admirer (I'd been treating him with unconscious condescension), but rather the author of a book I admired. I think he heard the grinding of gears as I lurched into a more generous tone. He's been cool to me since, which is no more than I deserve. This is more than impoliteness. It's unfriendliness. Naturally, it's no absolute rule. I've certainly encountered generosity from colleagues over the years, but I find it significant that almost every humanist I've spoken to can easily summon up recollections of mean-spirited treatment at the hands of our own scholarly community. Such intramural unpleasantness is "a special result of status anxiety," Clare Eby, a professor of English at the University of Connecticut and a scholar of Thorstein Veblen (who, a century ago, analyzed status consciousness), recently told me. "What we do isn't valued by our students, the world at large, or even within the university," she said. Surely there's something to that. Humanists have long been engaged in a rear-guard action against students who want to know, "How is this going to help me get a job?" The public-sector debates over academic responsibility routinely target humanists, many of whom find themselves caricatured as radical leftists engaged in a seditious rebellion against Western culture. Setting up humanists as straw men for the fall of the Western world is as easy as shooting literati in a barrel. But that ease may result more from the form than the content of humanists' beliefs. In the humanities, scholars usually do their research alone. Scientists, on the other hand, are trained to work in groups. Little wonder, then, that the humanities now features a full-blown academic celebrity culture. In order for celebrities to exist, people have to be willing to look up as well as down -- and looking both ways can promote insecurity. There's also a certain kind of anxiety that attends the study of the lives and works of others. One communications professor explained that to me with a scientific metaphor: "Humanists are continually chafing over the fact that they are but pilgrims at the shrine of art, and they find it difficult to forgive not only the artists, whom they diminish by splaying them across the literary glass slide, but also their fellow scrutinizers the next microscope over." The same could apply to a biographer, or any scholars whose work places them in the position of acolyte. Then there's the issue of the specialist's relationship with the general public. One of the editors I worked with on my physics assignment told me repeatedly that she wanted my article to explain "how some of the smartest people in the world got hoodwinked." The smartest people in the world? Perhaps. But the point is that you rarely hear a historian or a literary critic described that way. The technical work of experimental physicists is inherently unapproachable, except by other physicists. It's the job of a popularizer to simplify it and open it up, and physicists know that. The work of a historian is to tell stories. The work of a literary critic is to interpret them. It's inherently approachable -- until recently. The last two generations have seen the pursuits of humanists take on their own quasi-scientific aspects, complete with highly technical jargon. Attempts to popularize have often been met with the special hostility that attends defense of hierarchy -- consider the philosopher Judith Butler's assertion on the op-ed page of The New York Times that her ideas were so complex they couldn't be expressed in away that regular people might understand. The story of the Bell Labs physics scandal initially intrigued me because I thought it might turn out to be a scientific version of the culture wars, with scientists coming under attack from groups that help finance them. It didn't turn out that way. The data turned out to be faked, the perpetrator was fired, and the ripples from the scandal were contained within the physics world. But humanists have long been embroiled in their own conflicts with the society that finances them -- and one of the reasons lies in the way that we raise roadblocks and bar the world from entering our neighborhood. That's the opposite of what we ought to be doing, and it's all the more shameful because humanists are in an unusual and enviable position: The nature of our work makes it easy to open our doors and share that work. We can start doing so in the simplest way: by being nicer. Leonard Cassuto is an associate professor of English at Fordham University. His science reporting, which recently appeared on Salon.com, was selected for inclusion in the forthcoming Best American Science Writing 2003 (Ecco Press). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 34, Page B5 -- Mark Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Wed May 7 20:08:44 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 13:08:44 -0700 Subject: [language] [Fwd: Re: Sensationalism in Science and Philosophy] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: Sensationalism in Science and Philosophy Date: Mon, 20 May 2002 12:18:57 +0000 From: linguist at linguistlist.org To: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu I'm sorry, but we must return your posting on this topic, because the moderators have closed this thread to further discussion at this time, and notice of this decision has been announced to the list. We sincerely regret having to return your message. Perhaps you can continue the discussion privately. Regards, LINGUIST From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Mon May 20 01:25:56 2002 Delivered-To: linguist at linguistlist.org Date: Mon, 20 May 2002 00:57:48 -0400 From: "H.M. Hubey" Subject: Sensationalism in Science and Philosophy To: The LINGUIST Network , ploch at languages.wits.ac.za, dan_everett at sil.org MIME-version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.73 [en]C-CCK-MCD BA45DSL (Win95; U) Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-9 Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT X-Accept-Language: en,pdf I would like to thank Dr. Ploch for his long post clearing the air and clarifying the confused state of matters. I would also like to add a few comments which are germane. First of all, these discussions are extremely important for linguistics. Around the 1930s people like Paul Samuelson were known as "mathematical economists". Today "economist" means "mathematical economist". And the term "literary economist" is reserved for those who would like to litter the landscape with tossed word salads. To me a person is a "literary economist" like Jules Verne is a "literary physicist". Obviously, Verne was a science fiction writer. One day there will also be "literary linguists". The times are changing, and they always did. Around 1950 "computer" was a human, like an engineer, or accountant. Hence the words for machines had the adjective "automatic" in front of it e.g. EDVAC, UNIVAC etc, because at that time sophisticated-machines were called "automatic". One day, the adjective "mathematical" will not be necessary when using the word "linguist". Over the last 300 years or so strange things have happened and strange ideas have become sold as 'truth'. I was shocked to find one of my students put on her web page that she 'practices wiccan'. All this is due to lack of knowledge about what science is. And it is not really very recent, but has been going on for centuries. The great [anti] hero of movies and films moved into the science field and usurped it. The earliest such event was the ridicule heaped upon Isaac Newton and his "mathematics" by the philosopher Berkeley (and his cronies who called Newton to their "court" and [allegedly] demolished his whole edifice) who today is not known for much more than what can best be explained as "what I don't see does not exist." The story of science has been told incorrectly by those who had a lot to lose from its successes. Let us not forget that Newton did "natural philosophy" (not "physics"). The best explanation of why science developed the way it did and why it had to essentially this deterministic path is in August Comte's book. (Unfortunately, I could only read the English translation by Andreski, not the original French.) But he too was put away by those who had much to lose, and who did not understand what was written. Then during this century we had Feyerabend who "proves" that witchcraft is science. When he gave this talk at Stanford a student asked him why he does not fly brooms instead of airplanes, and his answer was "I understand planes but not brooms."! How can this con-artist even show is face anywhere? Then finally, the dam burst when that ignoramus Searle decided to do one better and wrote his little work on why there will never be intelligent machines. There was a companion article in the Scientific American by the philosopher couple Mr/Ms Churchland. It is only too painfully clear that Searle does not even understand what was written, and has no ability to even think of complex issues in that article of his in Scientific American. But this is all what post-everything movement is about. There was a great deal of ridicule of Searle, which like a true con-man he merely termed "hostility". But it looks like the tide has turned. The big attack was launched by two physicists, Sokol and Bricmont, and it was the hoax article which they got published in a prestigious journal. In fact, one can find the website where there is a "postmodernism generator". It creates a new postmodernist article automatically everytime you click on the button. That is how much gibberish there is in that movement which, to me, includes people like Feyerabend, Searle, and Kuhn. Nothing succeeds like success, and it looks like things are going back to sanity. All of this is not much more than earlier replays of what Bill Gates did to the world (mostly America). A much more reliable operating system Linux is available for free. Just think a minute. If there were free cars outperforming Lexus, Benz, Infiniti and BMW, how long would these manufacturers stay in business? The WebServer Apache was so good that there is even a version of it that runs on Gates' Windows operating systems and yet he still sells his IIS. Why? Most people say that they use Windows only because they have to use MS-Office and that because their old files are in these packages. But there is Star-Office, which is probably still free and it produces basically MS-Office compatable files. So why does Bill Gates still hold the world by its testicles? That is the same reason why Feyerabend, Kuhn, Searle are still enjoying a kind of [anti] hero fame. Who are they fighting and why are they so popular? Obviously, I recommend reading Popper, Comte, and others who wrote on science like Mach, Frank, Paulos, Schroedinger, etc. Their works are less "heroic" than those of Feyerabend, Searle and Kuhn but they are much closer to the mark on how science is and was really done. And that is why linguists should broaden their readings to others than those who are greatly popular in the "mainstream". Look at Gates' Windows and Office? Free products are better than those. That speaks volumes about the mass marketing of products and ideas. -- M. Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu /\/\/\/\//\/\/\/\/\/\/http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey -- ... M. Hubey ... hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Wed May 7 21:59:06 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 14:59:06 -0700 Subject: [language] World's Farmers Sowed Languages as Well as Seeds Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> This is a multi-part message in MIME format. -------------- next part -------------- http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/06/science/06LANG.html -- ... M. Hubey ... hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Thu May 8 11:44:39 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 07:44:39 -0400 Subject: [language] [Fwd: [evol-psych] Earliest Domesticated Dogs Uncovered] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [evol-psych] Earliest Domesticated Dogs Uncovered Date: Thu, 08 May 2003 08:56:27 +0100 From: Ian Pitchford Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Organization: http://human-nature.com To: evolutionary-psychology at yahoogroups.com Earliest Domesticated Dogs Uncovered By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News Skull of a Stone Age Dog Skull of a Stone Age Dog April 7, 2003 -- The skulls of two Stone Age dogs believed to be the earliest known canines on record have been found, according to a team of Russian scientists. The dog duo, which lived approximately 14,000 years ago, appear to represent the first step of domestication from their wild wolf ancestors. Mikhail Sablin, a scientist at the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, along with his colleague Gennady Khlopachev, analyzed the dog remains, which were found at the Eliseevichi I site in the Bryansk region of Russia's central plain, according to an Informnauka press agency release. Full text: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20030505/earlydog.html News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences - Issue 94 - 3rd May, 2003 http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue94.html Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service . -- Mark Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Wed May 28 08:31:55 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 04:31:55 -0400 Subject: [language] [Fwd:Chimp Study Yields Clues to Evolution of Human Speech] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Scientific American May 27, 2003 Chimp Study Yields Clues to Evolution of Human Speech chimp Image: COURTESY OF THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES We humans are nothing if not talkative. Indeed, it's one of our most salient characteristics as a species. But exactly how we came to be so chatty is less obvious. Despite decades of research into the subject, anthropologists are still struggling to reconstruct the chain of events that produced our unique oral capabilities. Now the results of a new study suggest that one part of the story they thought they had nailed in fact needs revision. Conventional wisdom holds that the repositioning of the human larynx that occurs during infancy--a key morphological prerequisite to speech--is particular to our kind. But Takeshi Nishimura of Kyoto University in Japan and colleagues have discovered that this southward migration of the larynx to a spot between the pharynx and the lungs occurs in our speechless relative the chimpanzee, too. The team employed magnetic resonance imaging (see image) to track development in three chimps during the first two years of life. Full text http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=00018313-7C84-1ED3-8E1C809EC588EF21 News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences - Issue 96 - 19th May, 2003 http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue96.html Human Nature Review http://human-nature.com/ Evolutionary Psychology http://human-nature.com/ep/ Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service . -- Mark Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Wed May 28 08:34:50 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 04:34:50 -0400 Subject: [language] [Fwd: [ Scientists use DNA fragments to trace the migration of modern humans] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Public release date: 27-May-2003 Contact: Mark Shwartz mshwartz at stanford.edu 650-723-9296 Stanford University http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/ Scientists use DNA fragments to trace the migration of modern humans Human beings may have made their first journey out of Africa as recently as 70,000 years ago, according to a new study by geneticists from Stanford University and the Russian Academy of Sciences. Writing in the American Journal of Human Genetics, the researchers estimate that the entire population of ancestral humans at the time of the African expansion consisted of only about 2,000 individuals. "This estimate does not preclude the presence of other populations of Homo sapiens sapiens [modern humans] in Africa, although it suggests that they were probably isolated from one another genetically, and that contemporary worldwide populations descend from one or very few of those populations," said Marcus W. Feldman, the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor at Stanford and co-author of the study. The small size of our ancestral population may explain why there is so little genetic variability in human DNA compared with that of chimpanzees and other closely related species, Feldman added. The study, published in the May edition of the journal, is based on research conducted in Feldman`s Stanford laboratory in collaboration with co-authors Lev A. Zhivotovsky of the Russian Academy and former Stanford graduate student Noah A. Rosenberg, now at the University of Southern California. "Our results are consistent with the `out-of-Africa` theory, according to which a sub-Saharan African ancestral population gave rise to all populations of anatomically modern humans through a chain of migrations to the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Oceania and America," Feldman noted. Ancient roots Since all human beings have virtually identical DNA, geneticists have to look for slight chemical variations that distinguish one population from another. One technique involves the use of "microsatellites" - short repetitive fragments of DNA whose patterns of variation differ among populations. Because microsatellites are passed from generation to generation and have a high mutation rate, they are a useful tool for estimating when two populations diverged. In their study, the research team compared 377 microsatellite markers in DNA collected from 1,056 individuals representing 52 geographic sites in Africa, Eurasia (the Middle East, Europe, Central and South Asia), East Asia, Oceania and the Americas. Statistical analysis of the microsatellite data revealed a close genetic relationship between two hunter-gatherer populations in sub-Saharan Africa - the Mbuti pygmies of the Congo Basin and the Khoisan (or "bushmen") of Botswana and Namibia. These two populations "may represent the oldest branch of modern humans studied here," the authors concluded. The data revealed a genetic split between the ancestors of these hunter-gatherer populations and the ancestors of contemporary African farming people - Bantu speakers who inhabit many countries in southern Africa. "This division occurred between 70,000 and 140,000 years ago and was followed by the expansion out of Africa into Eurasia, Oceania, East Asia and the Americas - in that order," Feldman said. This result is consistent with an earlier study in which Feldman and others analyzed the Y chromosomes of more than 1,000 men from 21 different populations. In that study, the researchers concluded that the first human migration from Africa may have occurred roughly 66,000 years ago. Population bottlenecks The research team also found that indigenous hunter-gatherer populations in Africa, the Americas and Oceania have experienced very little growth over time. "Hunting and gathering could not support a significant increase in population size," Feldman explained. "These populations probably underwent severe bottlenecks during which their numbers crashed - possibly because of limited resources, diseases and, in some cases, the effects of long-distance migrations." Unlike hunter-gatherers, the ancestors of sub-Saharan African farming populations appear to have experienced a population expansion that started around 35,000 years ago: "This increase in population sizes might have been preceded by technological innovations that led to an increase in survival and then an increase in the overall birth rate," the authors wrote. The peoples of Eurasia and East Asia also show evidence of population expansion starting about 25,000 years ago, they added. "The exciting thing about these data is that they are amenable to a combination of mathematical models and statistical analyses that can help solve problems that are important in paleontology, archaeology and anthropology," Feldman concluded. ### The research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research. By Mark Shwartz CONTACT: Mark Shwartz, News Service: (650) 723-9296, mshwartz at stanford.edu COMMENT: Marc Feldman, Biological Sciences: (650) 725-1867, marc at charles.stanford.edu EDITORS: The study, "Features of Evolution and Expansion of Modern Humans, Inferred from Genomewide Microsatellite Markers," by Lev A. Zhivotovsky, Noah A. Rosenberg and Marcus W. Feldman, appears in the May 2003 edition of the American Journal of Human Genetics. A copy can be obtained from Professor Marc Feldman. His photo is available at http://newsphotos.stanford.edu (slug: "Humans_Feldman.jpg"). Relevant Web URLs: http://www-evo.stanford.edu/ http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2003/january8/genetics-18.html http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/november8/chromosome-1108.html http://www.neanderthal-modern.com/genetic1.htm News Service website: http://www.stanford.edu/news/ Stanford Report (university newspaper): http://news.stanford.edu Most recent news releases from Stanford: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/html/releases.html To change contact information for these news releases: news-service at lists.stanford.edu Phone: (650) 723-2558 http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-05/su-sud052703.php News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences - Issue 96 - 19th May, 2003 http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue96.html Human Nature Review http://human-nature.com/ Evolutionary Psychology http://human-nature.com/ep/ Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ -- Mark Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Fri May 30 00:53:52 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. 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That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu