Why are humans such wimpy primates?

Chimps don't look so big. Size isn't everything ...

Why would a chimpanzee attack a human?: Scientific American

... The chimpanzee has strength for a human that is utterly incomprehensible. People watch pro wrestlers on TV and think they are strong. But a pro wrestler would not be able to hold a chimpanzee still if they wanted to. Chimpanzee males have been measured as having five times the arm strength as a human male. Even a young chimpanzee of four or five years, you could not hold it still if you wanted to. Pound-for-pound, their muscles are much stronger...

I don't think it's so much that chimps are exceptionally strong for a primate, it's that modern humans are really weak.

Why are we such runts? We look pretty big, and we still run pretty well, but in hand-to-hand combat we're hopeless.

My guess it's so that we don't damage each other when we fight. We're not a particularly peaceful primate (though we're becoming far gentler than we were), and we're very expensive to rear to adulthood. Maybe it's better for our hand to hand combat to be relatively harmless; a means to establish dominance rather than do harm.

For harm we have tools, fire, pits and cliffs, and we've killed anything that was ever remotely threatening.

We're the Potemkin primate -- at least so far as muscles go.

The rest of the article is worth a read. Briefly, chimps are not, shall we say, domesticated. Dogs are domesticated. Cats are sort of domesticated. Humans are domesticated. Chimps are not.

Tigers and chimps are playful prior to puberty, but unlike dogs or humans they're not playful as adults. Adult chimps are very aggressive, and, to us, unpredictably vicious.

Stay far away from chimps.

Update 2/20/09: Another explanation would be that chimp muscles take a lot of energy to run and produce a lot of heat. We need to feed and cool our hungry brains, tools mean our main problems are microbes, entropy and each other, so we sacrificed our muscles. I couldn't find any publications on this topic, but the energy balance idea isn't novel.

Update 3/1/2009: Aha! Chimpanzees aren't as strong as we've been thinking! They're stronger than we are, but not fantastically stronger. On the other hand, we're clearly wimpy primates. John Hawks mentions a couple of genes that may have been important in the loss of human strength. He doesn't mention his thoughts on what's going on, perhaps, based on his past practice, because he has relevant research underway. From what Hawks has taught us about evolution, I suppose some of those genes might have been knocked out in the cause of re-purposing them for something related to human cognition.

Reading and hand signals

The opening paragraph of an article on hand motions and representing arithmetic reasoning

The value of handwaving to arithmetic | A handwaving approach to arithmetic | The Economist

HUMAN language is the subject of endless scientific investigation, but the gestures that accompany speech are a surprisingly neglected area. It is sometimes jokingly said that the way to render an Italian speechless is to tie his wrists together, but almost everyone moves their hands in meaningful ways when they talk...

Is an excuse for me to again reference an old idea that doesn't seem to have caught on.

Almost thirty years ago, puzzling about why humans are able to translate written squiggles into concepts and thoughts, I wondered about evolutionary antecedents. I concluded that we humans are able to interpret letter and word forms because we already had the brain mechanisms to read hand shapes, and that we probably had those mechanisms before we could speak.

So it's not surprising that deaf persons can read; reading may be older than speaking.

Super science 2009: The Economist at the AAAS meeting

The Economist today highlights a few of the recent super science (AAAS) meeting.

Cooking is humanity's "killer app" (emphases mine) underscores that we are not natural, we are a creation of our own technology. Perhaps cooking is the oldest profession ...

...without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body’s energy) could not keep running. Dr Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity are coeval.

In fact, as he outlined to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in Chicago, he thinks that cooking and other forms of preparing food are humanity’s “killer app”: the evolutionary change that underpins all of the other—and subsequent—changes that have made people such unusual animals...

...even modern “raw foodists”, members of a town-dwelling, back-to-nature social movement, struggle to maintain their weight—and they have access to animals and plants that have been bred for the table. Pre-agricultural man confined to raw food would have starved...

...Dr Wrangham suspects the main cause of the modern epidemic of obesity is not overeating (which the evidence suggests—in America, at least—is a myth) but the rise of processed foods. These are softer, because that is what people prefer. Indeed, the nerves from the taste buds meet in a part of the brain called the amygdala with nerves that convey information on the softness of food. It is only after these two qualities have been compared that the brain assesses how pleasant a mouthful actually is....

What goes into a dog breed emphasizes how plastic our forms are, and how fungible ...

Dr Ostrander has already used dogs to track down the genes behind certain cancers that the species shares with people, and to work out the dog family tree. At the AAAS she described her search for the genes controlling three of the most important features of a breed: its size, its hair and the length of its legs...

... The size of water dogs, she found, is governed mainly by variations in a gene called insulin-like growth-factor 1—and that is probably true of other breeds as well...

...Short legs, a phenomenon known as chondrodysplasia, are characteristic of many dog breeds, perhaps most famously dachshunds and corgis. In people the condition is known vulgarly as dwarfism. Dr Ostrander’s work showed that in dogs it is caused by the reactivation of a “dead” version of a gene involved in the regulation of growth. Chromosomes are littered with such non-functional genes; they are the result of mutations favoured by natural selection at some point in the past. Here the gene in question has been reactivated by the arrival within it of what is known as a LINE-1 element. This is a piece of DNA that can jump about from place to place within a genome, sometimes causing havoc as it does so....

...Dr Ostrander found that 80% of the variation between breeds in coat form and furniture was explained by differences in just three genes. Different combinations of these result in different mixtures of coat and furniture...

Now that you're thinking about how a few gene variations can cause amazing changes to shape and size, you're prepared to contemplate another genome ... that of our brother Neandertal ...

Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, chose Darwin’s 200th anniversary to announce what would, until recently, have been thought an impossible discovery in evolutionary biology—a draft of the genome of Neanderthal man.

Dr Paabo made his announcement to the AAAS meeting via a video link from Germany, and followed it up by a lecture in person on the 15th. The Neanderthal Genome Project, as it is known, is the culmination of a career devoted to the examination of ancient DNA by a man whose work provided inspiration for Michael Crichton’s novel and film “Jurassic Park”...

...one-fold coverage gives you about 60% of the genome, and that is what Dr Paabo’s first draft has achieved...

...the Neanderthal line and that of modern humanity parted company only shortly before the oldest known Neanderthal fossils were alive...

...The team has also looked at a few genes of particular interest. The most famous of these is FOXP2, damage to which prevents speech in modern humans. Neanderthals turn out to have the same version of FOXP2 as Homo sapiens (and thus a different one from chimpanzees). Researchers are divided about how significant FOXP2 really is, because it is involved in the mechanics of speech production, not the mental abilities that lie at the root of language. But some regard this discovery as evidence that Neanderthals could speak.

Much more information should emerge as Dr Paabo increases his one-fold coverage to 20-fold, the point at which almost every base pair is represented. At that moment, science will have in its grasp the genetic details of what is probably modern humanity’s closest relative...

Min-pin and Newfie look less alike than Neandertal and us. They cooked, of course, but perhaps not as well as we did ...

Sanity timidly emerging eight years after 9/11

It took eight years for sanity and reason to begin to emerge after 9/11 ...

Schneier on Security: Terrorism Common Sense from MI6

... Refreshing commentary from Nigel Inkster, former Assistant Chief and Director of Operations and Intelligence of MI6:

I laughed at this one ...

"If I hear one more speaker suggest that the root of terrorism is poverty I'll probably become a terrorist myself," he joked. "But we have to acknowledge that it's a factor."

Read the excerpt and then the original. Obama and his team understand this. This by itself would have been reason enough to elect Obama and reject Palin/McCain -- though only one of many, many, reasons.

It has taken far too long for reason and sanity to emerge from the foxhole. It took the end of Bush and Cheney.

If only.

The netbook train rumbles onwards - heading below $200 this year

The NYT has been paying a lot of attention to the netbook* train -- the train that's going to run over the industry in the next year or two. They recognize this isn't about features, it's about hitting the $125 2011 Barbie b-smart netbook batteries-not-include price point. They haven't quite figured out that Google's advantage isn't merely Microsoft's (avoidable?) doom, it's Google's Chromestellation strategy, but they're getting there ...

Can Cellphones Grow Up to Rival PCs? - Saul Hansell - NYTimes.com

... Coming by the end of this year are a new crop of small inexpensive notebook computers, known as netbooks, based on the ARM microprocessor design and running one of several versions of Linux, including perhaps Google’s Android cellphone operating system. ..

... Netbooks have been a rapidly growing category of computers, mainly because they are more portable and typically cost $400 or less. So far they have been mostly based on Intel’s Atom chip, which uses its X86 instruction set and thus can run Windows. Some manufacturers, including ASUS and Hewlett-Packard have also offered versions of their netbooks that run Linux, but these have not yet been popular in the market.

Some argue this will change as the combination of an ARM processer and Linux may allow netbooks to be sold for $200 or less.

Earlier this week, Freescale, the chip company spun out of Motorola, announced a new high end chip, based on the latest ARM designs specifically for netbooks. This follows a similar announcement by Qualcomm last month...

... its chip will cost about $15 each when bought in large quantities, with about $5 of other chips that support the processor; the Linux operating system, of course, is free. The company estimates that a computer maker would need to spend $50 to $60 on an Intel Atom, related chips, and Windows.

Mr. Burchers said that the company figures that the $200 netbooks will not have a hard drive, but will have 4 gigabytes to 8 gigabytes of flash memory. The devices will mainly be used, he figures, by people to surf the Internet. A few, more expensive models will be able to connect to cellular data networks, but mainly they will be aimed at young people who connect through Wi-Fi networks.

... No manufacturers have announced they are building netbooks using the chips, but Freestyle was showing a prototype manufactured by Pegatron, a Taiwanese affiliate of ASUS, that makes notebooks for a number of brands...

... Freescale is working with Linux makers to make them easier to use. The chip is designed to be used with Linux versions made by Phoenix Technologies, Xandros, and Canonical, which makes Ubuntu. Freescale added support for Android to its plans this year because computer makers said they see a market for it...

Close, but just wide of the mark. Android is just a smokescreen here. The real story is Google Chrome for Linux, and Google's "Chrome OS" strategy -- aka "Chromestellation".

Of course, let's not forget China's Godson project.

* Since the NYT is still using the term, Psion's trademark battle might be hopeless.

Newsweek stakes future on ... George Will

Fifteen years ago The Economist was pretty good. It's pablum now, but it occasionally tosses off a few sparks. It also makes money; indeed, when it got dumber it also got richer.

There really ain't no justice.

Newsweek wants to emulate The Economist, and it's got just the team to do it ...

Newsweek Plans Makeover to Fit a Smaller Audience - NYTimes.com:

.... Newsweek also plans to lean even more heavily on the appeal of big-name writers like Christopher Hitchens, Fareed Zakaria and George Will...

George Will? A man who's been over the hill for at least 10 years? Author of a recent global warming denial essay that has been been itself denied by its own sources?

George Will?!! Christopher Hitchens?!

This is too sad to be funny.

Newsweek, RIP.

SciAm's quantum weirdness day: Nonlocality

Almost exactly two years ago a Wired magazine article inspired me to catch up on the past 15 years of popular physics. I've had a great time since then, but I particularly appreciated Gribbin's willingness to meet quantum weirdness head on.

I'm thus pleased to report that SciAm has an article and a few blog posts on one of my favorite topics -- non-locality ...

• Was Einstein Wrong?: A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity: Scientific American
• Bell's theorem and the physical world
• Nonlocality from Newton to Maxwell

To be clear, I'm over any childhood pretensions to novel insights into modern physics. I'm strictly a non-participatory fan, and very grateful to physicists who try to translate their world into our world.

Jon Udell's 21st century radio: SpokenWord.org

Jon Udell, one of my favorite deep thinkers, is championing community collaborated audio sources, a kind of 21st century radio service ...

Introducing SpokenWord.org - Jon Udell:

...Back in the good old days, circa 2006 or so, I was a happy podcast listener. During my many long periods of outdoor activity — running, hiking, biking, leaf-raking, snow-shoveling — I sometimes listened to music, but more often absorbed a seemingly endless stream of spoken-word lectures, conversations, and entertainment. Some of my sources were conventional: NPR (CarTalk, FreshAir), PRI (This American Life), BBC (In Our Time), WNYC (Radio Lab). Others were unconventional: Pop!Tech, The Long Now Foundation, TED, ITConversations, Social Innovation Conversations, Radio Open Source....

... From the FAQ:

Think of SpokenWord.org as a funnel. You collect streams (RSS feeds) of programs from all over the Web, then combine them into a singe collection on SpokenWord.org. Then in iTunes you subscribe to just one feed: the feed from your SpokenWord.org collection.

Managing feeds, in addition to (or instead of) managing items, is an aspect of digital literacy that’s only just emerging. I think it’s critical, so I’m a keen observer/participant in various domains: blogging, microblogging, calendaring, or — in this case — audio curation...

... I’m hoping that SpokenWord will become a place where curators emerge who lead me to places I wouldn’t have gone...

That hasn’t happened yet, of course, since SpokenWord.org just launched in beta this week. Meanwhile, the site offers a variety of lenses through which to view its growing collection of feeds and programs: tags, categories, ratings, user activity... the Active Collectors bucket on the home page has alerted me to a couple of feeds I hadn’t known about, notably BBC World’s DocArchive...

I can't believe Jon ran out of In Our Time podcasts. My personal collection goes back about five years, and it offers a lot of listening and re-listening.

Then there are the Teaching Company's lectures. Not free of course, but you can by a lot from the backlist for a bit of money.

Still, if Jon's into it then it's worth examining. I've signed up.

Staggering towards health care access ...

There's just a hint these days that Americans are, for the first time in about sixteen years, starting to think about health care semi-seriously ...

Managed Care Matters - Comparative effectiveness - what's left after the sausage-making process

... As the Gooz said;

"Based on the experience of the past few weeks, it's clear the U.S. is still many years away from having a rational discussion about limiting access to technologies that have been priced far beyond a societally-agreed upon benchmark for what constitutes affordable care." ...

The mere fact that anyone mentioned "affordable", even in the context of saying we're year away from a serious discussion, is progress.

Why?

I'm so glad you asked. Excuse me while I pull out the soapbox.

There are an infinite number of ways to deliver health care services, but since the dawn of time they have mostly fallen into two large bins

• Deluxe (luxury)
• Adequate (spartan)

The word "quality" doesn't come in here. The appearance of luxury might mask lousy quality (think the bad years of American cars). Spartan things can be very high quality (Honda Civic, 1990).

In health care, as with everything else, a new medication, procedure, lab test, or imaging study can be very expensive. There's not that much competition, and there's a lot of development costs that need to be recovered. Five years later the prices are often a lot lower (though modern IP absurdities can keep price high). Development costs have been recovered, the technology may be "obsolete", there's more competition driving prices down, cheaper ways have been found to deliver the service, etc.

Part of what makes care "Deluxe" is the availability of new stuff. A lot of what makes care affordable is avoiding the expensive new stuff. Sometimes the new stuff is really good, so affordable care is inferior care. Sometimes the new stuff is overrated or even harmful, so affordable care is (usually in retrospect), superior care.

Real healthcare access is about making "good enough care" available to every US citizen and taxpayer. Good enough, as in at least 88% of the benefit for 50% of the cost.

Good enough care is not not Deluxe care, it's adequate care. Waiting rooms with peeling plaster instead of plush carpet. Formularies with good-enough drugs. Lacerations repaired by relatively inexpensive family docs rather than plastic surgeons. Care that follows the best affordable standard practices, rather than the preferred practices of a cutting edge surgeon featured in USA Today. (Ironically the "standard" practices usually turn out to be better in every way than the unscientific whims of a single star performer).

So that's what to watch for in discussions of Health Care reform. Any "reform" discussion that doesn't involve delivering "inferior", but good enough care, doesn't really move the ball.

The humbling of Economics

Economists are very highly paid academics. They can easily earn several times what a comparably paid physicist earns.

This may change …

Dismal scientists: how the crash is reshaping economics - The Atlantic Business Channel

...The current recession has revealed the weaknesses in the structures of modern capitalism.  But it also revealed as useless the mathematical contortions of academic economics.  There is no totemic power.  This for two reasons:

(1) Almost no-one predicted the world wide downtown.  Academic economists were confident that episodes like the Great Depression had been confined to the dust bins of history.  There was indeed much recent debate about the sources of "The Great Moderation" in modern economies, the declining significance of business cycles…

… I myself was so confident of the consensus of the end of the business cycle that I persuaded by wife after the collapse of Lehman Brothers to invest all her retirement savings in the stock market, confident that the Fed would soon make things right and we could profit from the panic of a gullible public.  The line "Where is my money, idiot?" is her's.

(2) The debate about the bank bailout, and the stimulus package, has all revolved around issues that are entirely at the level of Econ 1.  What is the multiplier from government spending?  Does government spending crowd out private spending?  How quickly can you increase government spending? If you got a A in college in Econ 1 you are an expert in this debate: fully an equal of Summers and Geithner.

The bailout debate has also been conducted in terms that would be quite familiar to economists in the 1920s and 1930s.  There has essentially been no advance in our knowledge in 80 years…

.. Recently a group of economists affiliated with the Cato Institute ran an ad in the New York Times opposing the Obama's stimulus plan.  As chair of my department I tried to arrange a public debate between one of the signatories and a proponent of fiscal stimulus -- thinking that would be a timely and lively session.  But the signatory, a fully accredited university macroeconomist, declined the opportunity for public defense of his position on the grounds that "all I know on this issue I got from Greg Mankiw's blog -- I really am not equipped to debate this with anyone."…

My recollection is that Paul Krugman has done pretty well over the past few years, but he’s been the exception.

I don’t think this is a fixable problem. We don’t have the science to understand the real economic world. We need something like Asimov’s “psychohistory”, but I’m not holding my breath.

In the meantime though, it would be nice if economists would be a bit humbler.

Netbooks and the like: Nvidia's netphone project

I guess we need another word for the netbook now that Psion is enforcing their trademark.

Maybe the WeeBook? Or maybe the cellbook? (emphases mine)...

Smartphones Under Assault from Beige Box Bunch - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

... Intel and LG also showed off a mobile Internet device, which sits somewhere between a cellphone and a netbook. The product, expected to be released next year, will run on an Intel-financed version of the Linux operating system called Moblin and Intel’s Atom processor...

... Nvidia thinks it has a leg up on Intel on both graphics performance and power consumption with these small devices through its Tegra and Ion chips.

According to Nvidia, Taiwan’s Inventec Appliances and China’s Yulong will ship Tegra-based smartphones this year...

...The Nvidia-based devices will be able to connect to televisions at hotels or in the home via HDMI, letting people stream movies off their phones. Nvidia claims these high-definition devices will cost less than $100 each...

Moblin is open source btw.

I suspect they mean $100 with a 2 year mobile services contract, meaning they're about the cost of an iPhone. If they mean they're $100 cash that's much more interesting ...

The Obama difference

Obama visits a part of the country that voted for McCain. He accepts questions at a rally there ...

Obama goes bipartisan for real - Joan Walsh - Salon.com

...The president didn't screen his crowd or his questions...

Remember Bush? I know it's hard now. In the Bush era only loyalists could attend rallies, and only his questions could be asked.

Those were bad times.

How will history see Cheney?

I think we're going to be learning a lot of interesting things about Dick Cheney, none of them good.

An Oral History of the Bush White House | vanityfair.com

.... Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: We had this confluence of characters—and I use that term very carefully—that included people like Powell, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, and so forth, which allowed one perception to be “the dream team.” It allowed everybody to believe that this Sarah Palin–like president—because, let’s face it, that’s what he was—was going to be protected by this national-security elite, tested in the cauldrons of fire. What in effect happened was that a very astute, probably the most astute, bureaucratic entrepreneur I’ve ever run into in my life became the vice president of the United States.

He became vice president well before George Bush picked him. And he began to manipulate things from that point on, knowing that he was going to be able to convince this guy to pick him, knowing that he was then going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush—personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum...

I find it hard to believe he actually left the White House peacefully.

Crooked judges and the powerful emergence of corruption

[My original post is below, but the subsequent "update" is more interesting ...]

These guys might just qualify as evil. They had their full faculties (emphases mine)...

Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit - NYTimes.com

... At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stern lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke.

Prosecutors say Judges Michael T. Conahan, and Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., above, took kickbacks to send teenagers to detention centers.

Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment....

... the judge, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.

While prosecutors say that Judge Conahan, 56, secured contracts for the two centers to house juvenile offenders, Judge Ciavarella, 58, was the one who carried out the sentencing to keep the centers filled.

“In my entire career, I’ve never heard of anything remotely approaching this,” said Senior Judge Arthur E. Grim, who was appointed by the State Supreme Court this week to determine what should be done with the estimated 5,000 juveniles who have been sentenced by Judge Ciavarella since the scheme started in 2003. Many of them were first-time offenders and some remain in detention....

I assume they only got 7 years because they were plead guilty to secondary crimes (wire fraud) rather than the to far greater crimes sentencing unjustly for personal enrichment.

The civil suits will take whatever money they have left.

I'm opposed to the death penalty for many reasons, but it is possible to be tempted.

Update 2/15/09: I've been thinking about this. On reflection, the story is both more ambiguous and even more educational than I'd thought. Consider these stories (a lot have to do with health care conflicts of interest, but that might be because I am a physician and follow those stories) ...

• Orthopedic surgeons who own imaging facilities (MRI, CT) -- and earn millions from the imaging studies they order on their own patients
• Family physicians (my old tribe) who dispense their own medications
• Oncologists reimbursed for meds administered in the office
  
• Pharmacies (Walmart for instance) who employ their own Minute Clinic providers
• Former Senators who are chauffeured by the wealthy people who want them to head Health and Human Services
• The tangled and corrupt relationship between physicians, professional societies, researchers and pharmaceutical manufacturers
• The emergent scams when corporate benefits meet perverse incentive - corruption is the natural state of human affairs. It's social entropy, our natural "arrow of time". It takes constant work to fight it back. All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to take a break -- or something to that effect.
  
• Professional guardians who are paid out of the funds they "guard"
• Upton Sinclair’s Postulate: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

The real lesson is the old one -- who watches the watchers. Humans are very bad at managing our own conflicts of interest. Our self-judgments are easily warped.

We vary of course. Con men love marks who are certain of their sharpness. I'm guessing the men (it seems to be men, doesn't it) most sure of their probity, most certain they won't be so easily corrupted, are easily taken. One day, years from now, with nothing more to think of, maybe these judges will finally realize how far they fell. Maybe not.

Doubt yourself. Be skeptical of your integrity. Above all, be sure that others can see what you're doing, and be in a position to blow the whistle.

I walk out of Slumdog Millionaire

I've walked out of two movies.

I quit Dead Poets Society when it played up the romance of teen suicide. I was annoyed, and resented being manipulated.

I left Slumdog Millionaire, a currently fashionable movie, for two reasons. For one, my stomach hurt. I suppose that's a side-effect of not watching modern television. I don't have the stomach for the torture and mutilation of children.

For another, my exploitation alarm was ringing. I gather the movie becomes terrifically uplifting, but uplift is a relative thing. The director had set the stage very low when I gave up.

I now have sympathy for those Indians who are offended and irritated by the film.

Update: I'm not the only one.