Teaching human evolution to the public

I convinced my friend and colleague Briana Pobiner to come down to Greensboro from Washington, D.C. to present on her education and outreach work with the Smithsonian. Briana's major research interests focus on the evolution of the human diet, but recently she's become deeply involved in public outreach and the teaching of evolution, particularly human evolution. Her presentation "Communicating Human Evolution" drew a good crowd (including a couple of university donors) and outlined the efforts of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian to explain human evolution to the public. A couple of salient points/observations:

• Briana presented a bunch of data on public attitudes to science, scientists, evolution, and human evolution. Perhaps the most surprising number was 42. This is the percentage of Americans that do not accept organic evolution as an explanation for biological diversity. Even more troubling is the fact that this number has not really changed much since 1982! A sobering realization given how much time, effort, and money has been devoted to improving science education in the U.S. 
• One of the most important points that Briana made was that convincing people of the fact of evolution requires open dialogue−brow beating simply causes people to dig in their heels. One of the things that the Smithsonian is doing is to make their scientists available to the public. 
• The last thing that I found to be interesting was the reason why so many folks view science, and human evolution in particular, with such circumspection: when you see headlines announcing the latest find, it often reads something like "new fossil find overturns all previous models of human evolution." This sort of stuff garners readership, no doubt, but is also inaccurate. (If we're constantly overturning everything we know, it's no surprise that the public views the science behind it with some suspicion!) The fact is, even the most incredible find simply fills in the gaps of a well-established body of knowledge.

If you have not seen the National Museum of Natural History's human evolution exhibit (it opened in 2010), go visit! It is top-notch.

MABIG 2014

You may be wondering, "What does MABIG" stand for? Well, it is short for Mid-Atlantic Bioanthropology Interest Group, and I attended the first meeting a couple of weekends ago in Richmond, Virginia (Oct. 25). This event was deftly orchestrated by Amy Rector Verrelli at Virginia Commonwealth University and Kristi Lewton at Boston University. One of the major drawbacks to the big conferences like AAPA or SAA is that, while there are tons of folks and papers, there are, well, TONS of folks and papers, which makes it difficult to see everything and interact with colleagues. With this in mind, Amy and Kristi very generously organized this little get-together for people from the region to present their work to others close by with similar interests. I was surprised to see how many of "us" (biological anthropologists, that is), many of whose work I am familiar with but few of which I had actually seen and/or met, were to be found within such a small area. Some of the highlights for me:

• Steffen Foerster from Duke presented some really interesting data on female chimpanzee associative behavior. It is well known that female chimps form weaker relationships than do males, who tend to be related to each because they typically remain in their natal group. However, this does not mean that females are always alone−they do hang out with other individuals (albeit infrequently) and, it turns out, that when they have male offspring they tend to associate more often with  females that also have male offspring. Foerster speculated that this may be because males have more need for socialization given the importance of male-male bonds in chimpanzee society.
• Theodore Schurr of Penn spoke about his team's work on the genetic history of the Caribbean. This area is exceedingly complex in a demographic sense, with populations first arriving from the American mainland during prehistoric times and the influx of African and European populations during the colonial era and, indeed, into modern times. Schurr and his colleagues are studying mtDNA (passed down only through the maternal line) and Y-chromosome DNA (inherited only through the paternal line) to track the population history of the region. The most significant finding was the almost total lack of indigenous, and near dominance of European and African, Y-chromosome DNA in modern Caribbean populations. This is a sad reminder that many of the indigenous males were killed or otherwise prevented from reproducing in colonial times. 
• Perhaps the most interesting talk in my view came from Callum Ross at Chicago. He and his team have strapped various primates into mechanisms that allow them to measure how forces are put on the mandible during feeding. What they found was that most of the variation in chewing forces exist within chewing episodes of the same food type (e.g., while chewing a fruit) and not between different food types (e.g., chewing a fruit vs. chewing a leaf). This is really important, since we've always thought that mandible shape should reflect the forces imposed by different food types: this is the basis for inferring diet from bone shape. Perhaps we're wrong....

These are the presentations that really stuck with me, but there were many others (I presented on our recent work at Olduvai Gorge). Amy and Kristi imposed a 10-minute limit on talks, which worked really well (in fact, there was also a "lightning round" of 5-minute talks, too...UNCG's department head Bob Anemone presented his work with drones in this session), and Richmond is a really cool town: pretty, good food, tons of history. There are already plans to organize a meeting for next year!

Bookmarks Festival 2014

So, this past weekend (9/6) Noell and I went to Winston-Salem to check out the 2014 Bookmarks Festival. This is our second visit (I posted on last year's event here), and this year's events were housed in some shiny new buildings and very nice auditoriums. What drew us this time around was the presentation by Sam Kean, who talked about his newest book, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, which presents stories of individuals suffering brain damage and what they can tell science about how the brain works. Kean is an insightful and witty writer, the perfect sort to present science to a popular audience. I was about 3/4 of the way through the book when we saw him speak (I've since finished it, and it was great). Some interesting points:

• Kean said that what originally interested him in the topic was skepticism: he simply didn't believe some of the stories he had heard about. For example, neurologists reported that some people simply could not recognize plants, while others had no idea how to deal with animals. It turns out, however, that there are in fact particular areas of the brain that deal with different types of things, and damage to these areas can compromise our ability to recognize those objects, and only those objects. 
• The main irony is that, in order to study how the brain actually works, neurologists, because it is in many cases unethical to operate on healthy brains (although this was not always the case), often had to wait for an accident or disease to knock out particular areas to determine their function. One example from the book is the case of S.M. (initials are used in the medical literature to protect patients' identities), who suffers (she is alive and well and living in Iowa) from a rare condition that leaves her with a non-functioning amygdala. This part of the brain, among other things, helps to process our fear response. Neurologists have been studying S.M. for many years now (with her informed consent), and she is not afraid of snakes, death threats, assaults, or robberies. (Actually, a recent paper suggests that she did experience the fear of suffocation, which suggests that while the amygdala controls our response to external fears, other pathways must process fear associated with internal threats like suffocation or heart attacks.)
• Noell asked a question about amnesia and whether or not Kean ran across any examples of people who completely lost track of their own identity. He responded, in an echo of one of the book's major points, that it seems as if someone's identity or sense of self is an extremely difficult, if not impossible, aspect of the mind to wipe out completely. 
• Kean also talked about his writing style, which is story-focused. He said that people seem to learn best when issues are presented as stories: a beginning, a middle, and an end, all populated with characters. Perhaps this can be a lesson for those of us trying to teach science.   

After lunch at one of the many food trucks, we went to see Karen Abbott talk about her new book Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War. Abbott is a former journalist who contributes to the Smithsonian Magazine's history blog. The book is the story of four women, two from the North and two from the South, who lied, slept, seduced, and killed their way into spy networks. One of the most interesting points that Abbott made was that these (and other) women were able to exploit 19th century notions of femininity to conceal messages and contraband. Hoop skirts, for example, which most males would never search, were regularly used to smuggle items like guns. I have not yet read the book, but after her presentation I will definitely add it to my "to-read" list on Goodreads.

References:

Kean, S (2014). The tale of the dueling neurosurgeons: the history of the human brain as revealed by true stories of trauma, madness, and recovery. Little, Brown and Company, New York.

Abbott, K (2014). Liar, temptress, soldier, spy: four women undercover in the Civil War. Harper, New York.

Field dispatch: Back from the gorge

We just got into Arusha this evening after breaking camp at Olduvai and having a great visit through Ngorongoro Crater. I am very happy to report that the 2014 University of North Carolina at Greensboro Olduvai Gorge Paleoanthropology Field School was a fantastic success, and so was this year's campaign. The students, pictured below, were absolutely fantastic. I'll provide more specifics later once I get settled back in North Carolina...

The 2014 UNCG Olduvai Gorge Paleoanthropology Field School. Top row (from left): Victoria Johnson (Teaching Assistant, NYU), Kathryn Dunn (Berea), Rachel Burroughs (Western Michigan), Meaghan Davey (Ohio State), Curran Fitzgerald (UNCG), Jim McClanahan (Miami-Ohio), Adam Darkow (Akron); Bottom row (from left): Andy Ritz (UConn), Cindy Teears (UNCG), Heather Easterbrook (South Florida), Alexa Uberseder (UNCG), Zach Pierce (Texas-San Antonio).

Field dispatch: Off to the gorge!

I am sitting in Amsterdam's Schiphol International Airport waiting for my connection into Kiliminjaro International Airport so we can begin the 2014 field season at Olduvai Gorge. This will also be the inaugural year of the Olduvai Gorge Paleoanthropology Field School, which I am directing through UNCG. We have 11 students from all over the U.S. participating, and we are looking forward to a productive work season over the next month.

Internet access is, of course, spotty at best out at the gorge, but I will try and post a couple updates over the course of the next month... 

Kansas is, in fact, flatter than a pancake

I'm enrolled in a GIS course here at UNCG (faculty get three free credit hours a semester), and we were talking about vertical profiling today. One of the case studies, from the journal Annals of Improbable Research, actually compared the vertical profiles of the state of Kansas (using a DEM) with that of a cooked pancake (using, incredibly, a confocal laser microscope) to test whether or not said state is, in fact, "flatter than a pancake." One can quibble with their selection of pancake (all pancakes, after all, are probably not equally flat), but they found that Kansas is the flatter of the two.

A couple of great quotes from the study:

Barring the acquisition of either a Kansas-sized pancake or a pancake-sized Kansas, mathematical techniques are needed to do a proper comparison.

The importance of this research dictated that we not be daunted by the 'No Food or Drink' sign posted in the microscopy room.

I am laughing out loud in my office as I write this...

Preliminary results from Bagratashen 1

I returned from Yerevan on Sunday night, having been forced to sprint to my last connection into Raleigh/Durham because Air France was unable to get the cargo hold open to release our baggage. This was my first experience with an Armenian spring, and there were some brisk days at ~3,000 feet (I'm usually there in the summer, when it can be broiling, particularly in the arid north where we work).

As I mentioned in my previous post, the goal of this trip was to conduct a preliminary analysis of the stone tools from Bagratashen 1 and, after having looked at them over the past two weeks, it appears as if they are going to be very interesting indeed. My colleague, Boris Gasparian, and I examined over 500 pieces from our excavations.

The Bagratashen 1 lithic material laid out for analysis.

While it's obviously going to take some time to sort out what's going on (not to mention additional excavations to recover a larger sample size−this stuff came from a small 6m² excavation), I can relate some observations:

• There's definitely (and unsurprisingly) Levallois technology represented. 
• We've got quite a few points and point fragments in the assemblage (over ten). What's interesting is that we have both unretouched and retouched Levallois pieces and non-Levallois pieces. So, MP folks used different techniques to produce stone tools with the same characteristic; i.e., pointy ends. I took some measurements on tip cross sectional area, which can, according to John Shea (2006) and others, help determine whether a point could have been used as an effective projectile (note that this attribute cannot say that a point definitively was used as such). A couple of these points look, at least in a general morphological sense, very similar to the elongated retouched points found in Levels 1 and 2 at Djruchula Cave (Georgian Republic) and Lower E at Hayonim (Israel). This is potentially significant for us, since we have yet to successfully date the Bagratashen 1 sediments and Djruchula and Hayonim have been dated to between about 300,000 and 150,000 years ago. We have to be careful here, though: morphological similarity does not necessarily mean temporal similarity, since technology, especially lithic technology, is subject to independent development. 
• Boris and I noticed that a number of the artifacts, most of which are dacite, display a "rotted" surface texture, and some even feel lighter, as if they've been leached somehow. Boris suspects that this may be related to thermal damage and, sure enough, another colleague of ours, Dmitri Arakelyan, told us that he has tossed dacite into fire before and it does indeed show this sort of modification. More systematic experiments are of course in order, but we may have some indirect evidence for fire at the site (whether its natural or anthropogenic is also another issue).
• Nearly all the pieces were covered by carbonate crust, likely imparted well after the materials had been buried. We recorded what face of each artifact was facing skyward before it was pulled out of the ground and, because carbonates tend to form on the "downward" faces of clasts, we should therefore get an idea of whether or not they moved around in the sediment post-depostionally.
• There also appears to be quite a bit of truncation going on. In essence, this means that after knocking off a flake, hominins chose to subsequently remove, either through a single, massive blow or finer retouch, one or both ends of the piece. Why one would bother to truncate a seemingly well-made flake is another question. One possibility is that this truncation provides a new platform for the removal of smaller flakes from the original piece. The knappers may have wanted to remove the old platform and/or the bulky bulb of percussion to artificially thin the piece, for instance. Whatever the reason, people were doing it at Bagratashen 1.

Alright, enough chatter, let's get to the analysis....

References:

Shea, JD (2006). The origins of lithic projectile technology: evidence from Africa, the Levant, and Europe. Journal of Archaeological Science 33, 823-846.

Off to Armenia

I just arrived in Yerevan yesterday evening. As part of my spring research leave, I will be here studying the lithic collections from sites that our team excavated between 2010 and 2011. I'll concentrate on Bagratashen 1, which is an open-air site discovered during our 2009 survey. Excavations in 2011 and 2012 recovered several hundred well-preserved Middle Paleolithic artifacts from a discrete find horizon. Unfortunately, no fauna has yet been uncovered; we are pretty excited about it the site nonetheless, since geological work suggests that the assemblage is largely undisturbed. So, we hope to extract some fine-grained behavioral information.

Look out for more updates as the analyses proceed....

Ashby Dialogue, Part 3

Our third Ashby meeting was held this past Monday (March 24). The theme for this meeting was disasters, in particular the adaptations of contemporary humans populations to disasters, and was mediated by UNCG's Eric Jones and Art Murphy from Anthropology and Steve Kroll-Smith from Sociology. Another interesting discussion with great student participation. We started off with a veiwing of Trouble the Water, a documentary about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Some of the more salient points that arose:

• Steve argued that the term "natural disaster" is actually a misnomer: including the word "natural," he said, actually furnishes nature with far too much agency and, in doing so, makes culture and human organization less culpable. In other words, and to quote Anthony Oliver-Smith (1994: 74):

...that is, disasters [are] interpreted less as the result of geophysical extremes such as storms, earthquakes, avalanches, droughts, etc., and much more as functions of an ongoing social order, the structure of human environment relations, and the larger framework of historical processes that shaped these phenomena.

Disasters are seen to be far more characteristic of societies than they are of simple physical environments.

• Disasters can also provide an incisive window into capitalist relationships. While it is of course important to make sure that relief makes it to people after a crisis, it is interesting to see which organizations are awarded contracts to do so; oftentimes they have ties to important government personnel or their close friends. 
• Eric Jones made the important point that, in terms of human social adaptation, there is a big difference between expecting a disaster and being prepared for one. One criticism that is often floated around after a disaster is "well, why didn't these people leave the area?" As Eric pointed out, there are several reasons, including (1) a lack of family or friends outside of the area that would facilitate a move; (2) a lack of transportation (public or personal); and, even if the former two are present, (3) fear of theft in peoples' absence. This highlights the fact that an important component of human adaptation to disaster is rooted in social relationships, or, as Eric's research refers to it, social networks.
• In a similar vein, Art made the distinction between preparedness and recovery, arguing further that race and class effects seem to be much stronger in the latter. The structure of social organization (i.e., how we determine the haves versus the have-nots) determines how recovery proceeds. This in turn tends to put certain types of people (usually poorer folks) into more susceptible positions.
• One of our best students, Jessica Haynes, brought up the issue of indigenous knowledge and how it is often ignored at our own peril. Art mentioned that drought conditions in California may eventually cause growers to move their operations to states with climates more conducive to particular crops. Jessica saw this as a case in point−why not grow indigenous plants that are adapted to their respective environments?

This was, overall, another really successful get-together, and we're looking forward to our last session, which will look at human adaptation from the perspective of interior architecture...

References:

Oliver-Smith, A (1995).Peru's five-hundred-year earthquake: vulnerability in historical context. In (Varley, A Ed) Disaster, Development and Environment, pp. 74-88.

Ashby Dialogue, Part 2

So, this past Monday (February 24), we had our second Ashby meeting. This session's theme was Human Adaptation to Sedentism and Urbanism. Gwen Robbins Schug and I moderated the session, although Gwen did most of the heavy lifting. We had a great student turnout this time as well.

As an organizing theme for the session, we used Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel (henceforth GGS), which attempts to explain why Europe and her descendants came to dominate today's world. We watched PBS's video adaptation of the book, and Gwen assigned several articles that critiqued Diamond's arguments there and in his other popular book, Collapse. The latter explores the effects of anthropogenic environmental degradation and how this has led to the fall of past societies. One of Diamond's major goals with GGS was to discredit the idea that Western domination was the result of racial superiority. He argued that societies were forced to deal with the hand that geography dealt them and some areas were more conducive to the development of "complex" societies than others based on factors such as the length of the growing season and the presence of domesticateable plants and animals, most importantly draft animals, wheat, and barley. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Diamond has been heavily criticized for what many perceive to be an environmentally deterministic perspective (you can see one of his rebuttals to that charge here).

So, using this as a backdrop, several prominent points arose in our discussions, thanks mainly to Gwen's guidance:

• The first, and probably one of the most infuriating to anthropologists, is that in both GGS and Collapse, Diamond appears woefully out-of-date on his characterization of human societies. His use of terms like "band," "chiefdom," "state," and even the concept of "complexity" are based on decades-old anthropological paradigms. While useful for organizing variation, in practice they unrealistically pigeonhole the vast amount of diversity out there. I wonder how Diamond's definition of "complexity" would change if he were not a Western researcher?
• Collapse also fails to cite the latest archaeological research, which is, after all, the best record we have for the development of past societies. The best example of this comes from his discussion of Easter Island (known to those that live there as Rapa Nui). In Diamond's scenario, reckless Polynesians chopped down thousands of trees in order to transport those iconic stone statues (known as mo'ai). While this story certainly raises the issue of how fragile ecosystems truly are and how destructive humans can be, the archaeology tells a very different version. Gwen had us read a fascinating article by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo that demonstrates (1) deforestation was largely the result of introduced rats that ate palm nuts and thus prevented forest regeneration and (2) the huge statues were not moved on tree rollers anyway (they were probably dragged, upright, with ropes).
• Diamond's books are attractive because they provide unicausal explanations for very complex phenomena. In GGS, for example, it was all about agriculture: the raising of crops (wheat and barley) created food surpluses, which encouraged the domestication of draft animals, which led to social stratification and, ultimately, to the "complex" state-level societies that came to dominate the world today. However, these sorts of explanations, even when they work for a particular time and place, rarely apply to ALL times and ALL places. The native peoples of North America's Pacific Northwest, for example, developed very complex societies based largely on a fishing, not a farming, economy. 
• This whole issue of societal "collapse" is also problematic. Several people brought up the fact that societies rarely, if ever, fully collapse but, rather, undergo a long decline where people typically move away from the population centers into the hinterlands. 
• We also agreed that, while Diamond's arguments have their flaws, he is doing what many an anthropologist has failed to do: bring these "big picture" issues to a popular audience.  

References:

Diamond, J (1997). Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W.W. Norton, New York.

Diamond, J (2005). Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Penguin Books, London.

Hunt, TL, Lipo, CP (2010). Ecological catastrophe, collapse, and the myth of "ecocide" on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). In (McAnany, PA, Yoffee, N, Eds) Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire, pp. 21-44.  

Osteology in the Carolinas

I attended the first meeting of the Osteology in the Carolinas Interest Group (OCIG) this past Saturday (2/8). The event was organized by Gwen Robbins Schug (Appalachian State) and Dale Hutchinson (UNC-Chapel Hill) and was held at UNC-Chapel Hill. The purpose of the group is to be "a gathering focused on the analysis and interpretation of human skeletal remains from contexts pertinent to bioarchaeology, forensic anthropology, and paleoanthropology." In his introductory remarks (after showing off a hilarious t-shirt ode to syphilis), Dale noted that most researchers with these interests often fall between traditional disciplinary boundaries, so the group was meant to fill that gap.

Thirteen papers were given, and I would say that there were between 20-30 attendees. I was only able to stay for part of the morning session, but those papers that I did see were very interesting. Some snippets from my notes of the meeting:

• Chin-hsin Liu (Appalachian State) presented on the bioarchaeology of Bronze and Iron Age burials from Thailand. It was nice to hear from an area and time period about which I know almost nothing. Chin-hsin did say that many of the skeletons could not be analyzed in detail since they are left exposed by the state for tourism. Isotopic data indicate that populations tended to eat more-or-less the same diets even as they experienced a number of techno-sociological changes from the Bronze to Iron Ages.
• Sara Juengst, a PhD student from UNC-Chapel Hill, spoke about her research in the Titicaca Basin of Bolivia. She discussed how strontium isotope data can be used to identify the geographic area where individuals grew up and lived. Using this data, she found that a couple of the analyzed burials contain "non-local" individuals that were, perhaps, she suggested, pilgrims from other regions.
• Chuck Hilton, our colleague at UNCG, gave a really interesting talk on his research with human remains from Alaska. Essentially, he is interested in tracking skeletal changes associated with the shift from caribou- to whaling-based subsistence economies among Alaskan foraging populations a couple thousand years ago at a site called Point Hope. Chuck noted that data on the skeletal health of forager populations tends to be limited, as they are highly mobile and do not typically produce large cemeteries. Luckily, there are around 400 skeletons from this site, and Chuck found, intriguingly, that the folks practicing whaling were much less healthy than the earlier, caribou-hunting, people. Tuberculosis was especially prevalent in the former population (Chuck suggested that this could be linked either to increased marine mammal consumption or contact with infected NE Asian populations). The question becomes, of course, if whaling had such negative repercussions for health, why practice it? I was wondering if this isn't an example of costly signaling−whaling is, after all, a dangerous and, as Chuck put it, "boom or bust" proposition, so perhaps the individuals that engaged in it gained added prestige (and, thus, mating opportunities). I'll have to get his take on this.
• Megan Perry (East Carolina) talked about her team's work at the very famous site of Petra (you may recognize the picture below from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade−this is the city's treasury building). Orthodox thinking tells us that as a large, cosmopolitan urban center, Petra would have been ridden with diseases. However, preliminary analyses of the human remains suggests a surprisingly healthy population, and Perry and her team plan on testing this hypothesis further. 

  

  The treasury building at the ancient Nabataean city of Petra (courtesy of UNESCO).

• The last talk that I was able to hear was from Dan Temple (UNC-Wilimington). He was looking at human life history trade-offs with a collection of Jomon skeletal remains. Some background: bodies only have so much energy to delegate to various tasks like growth, maintenance, and reproduction, and life history theory is interested in understanding how the body uses these limited resources. Almost all individuals undergo some sort of stress early in development (low birth weight, disease, etc.), and human physiology is plastic enough to devote extra energy to combat these. The question is how does this impact the rest of an individual's life? Temple tested two models: (1) that these early stressors actually better prepare individuals for other setbacks later on; and (2) that the extra energy used early on in development actually makes those individuals more susceptible to later insults (a "borrow now, pay later" sort of idea). Using linear enamel hypoplasias, which are imperfections in the formation of tooth enamel that reflect episodes of stress, Temple found that those individuals affected by hypoplasia earlier on in their lives had more pathological conditions later on and lower life expectancy. This supports the "borrow now, pay later" hypothesis.

There were a number of other talks that I'm sorry I missed, including our department head, Bob Anemone, who talked about his predictive geospatial modeling, Steve Churchill (Duke), who discussed new hominin discoveries in South Africa, and Mark Teaford (High Point University), who talked about the latest in dental microwear. Looking forward to attending this get-together in the future.

The ironies (and absurdities) of slavery in the early American republic

I just finished with Alan Taylor's The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832. The "internal enemy" is a term that whites often used to refer to the slaves in their midst since, as Taylor demonstrates, slave insurrections were a nearly constant fear among Virginia's slaveholders. I would highly recommend the book for those of you who are interested; here I just wanted to mention a few tidbits from the book that stuck out for me and, at the same time, highlight the sometimes highly paradoxical viewpoints that Virginia's slaveholders were forced, either intentionally or not, to maintain in order to preserve an economic system that was a large part of their cultural identity:

• The elimination of primogeniture and entail. These refer to the practices of, respectively, the inheritance by the firstborn child of the entirety of a family's estate and the restriction of inheritance to the family heirs only. When practiced, as they were in colonial America, these laws served to concentrate wealth among a small number of families and, within those families, a small number of powerful individuals. After the American Revolution, these laws were struck down in many of the former colonies, including Virginia. While American lawmakers (including most prominently Thomas Jefferson) felt that the elimination of such laws was more consistent with a republican form of government, it was actually devastating for slave families. In essence, primogeniture and entail prevented wealthy plantation owners from scattering their estates after their deaths. For slaves, this significantly reduced the likelihood that family members would be sold off. With the suppression of these laws after the revolution, wealth was more evenly distributed among whites but, at the same time, the breakup of slave families became easier and much more common.
• Blacks' lack of rights. In 1816, George Boxley hatched a plot to lead about 30 or so slaves (some of which were his own) to freedom in the North as revenge for being passed over for a militia promotion and a seat in the state legislature, both of which he blamed on the state's wealthy, slave holding elite. The plan never materialized, however, and Boxley was eventually arrested. Here's the catch, though: all the witnesses to the treasonous plot were black and therefore barred, by Virginia law, from testifying against a white man! I'll let Taylor (2013: 399) finish the story: "[u]ncertain what to do with Boxley, the authorities kept him in jail until...he escaped after breaking his irons and cutting a passage through the ceiling of his cell...[s]uspicions arose that some powerful local people wanted Boxley gone rather than risk an embarrassing trial that would acquit for lack of evidence." How's that for irony?

References:

Taylor, A (2013). The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832. W.W. Norton, New York.

Ashby Dialogue, Part 1

So, this semester (Spring 2014), the Department of Anthropology at UNCG, along with the Departments of Biology and Interior Architecture, are organizing and hosting an Ashby Dialogue, which, through an endowment from the College of Arts and Sciences, "provide the opportunity for informal but focused inquiry into some topic or issue" of interest to university faculty and students. I helped a bit in the planning and organizing, but the lion's share of the work was done by our own Joel Gunn and biology's Malcolm Schug. Our theme for this semester is "Human Adaptation: Past and Future," and you can see the full schedule of events here. This is the first of several posts I'll provide throughout the semester as we progress through our program.

To kick off the schedule, we had hoped to have a talk from Greg Wray, a top-notch evolutionary biologist from Duke University who is interested in the evolution of gene regulation. Unfortunately, the winter storm (defined in North Carolina as a threat of snow or, in our case, an inch or so of snow) we had last week shut down campus and we had to cancel. Nevertheless, we did go forward with our first discussion session on Monday, February 3, and I'll recap that here.

The theme of our first session was How do Biologists Study the Question: What is the Evidence for Adaptation in Humans? There were a total of 10-11 people, including students from both anthropology and biology. We had posted a reading about next generation sequencing of genomes and two videos, one from Evan Eichler (Washington University) about structural variation in the human genome, and another from Sarah Tishkoff (University of Pennsylvania) about variation among modern African populations and evidence for the evolution of lactose tolerance, all of which served to focus our discussion.

We started off with an introduction from Malcolm, who gave us a great overview of the issue of genetic adaptation. He noted first that although "adaptation" can be viewed somewhat differently by anthropologists and biologists, Darwin's theory of natural selection and its focus on reproductive success serves to unite both fields. Biologists traditionally thought that because organisms appeared so well adapted to their environments that very little genetic variation would be present. This idea was blown apart by the work of Richard Lewontin and John Hubby, who in the 1960s documented a surprising amount of inter-individual variation in various proteins (this work was done first with flies and then, later, with humans). Further work by Martin Kreitman found tons of variation in DNA. All of this raised an important question: why the heck is there so much genetic variation between individuals if populations are supposedly well adapted to their environments?

Well, two answers emerged. One, which I'll dub the "adaptationist camp," thought that most of this variation was driven by natural selection (in this sense, inter-individual variation it is actually an adaptation in itself, since this variation will provide natural selection with something to work on). The issue then became to find the specific genes that were being selected for. The other side, which I'll call the "neutral camp," felt that most variation arises by random drift and alleles that have little or no effect on the survivorship of individuals. The debate was pretty acrimonious, but it seems like most folks recognize that both forces are probably at play.

To complicate matters further, Allan Wilson later suggested that perhaps it wasn't the genes themselves that were being selected for, but rather their regulation (i.e., when they are turned off and on, or how strongly they are expressed). Their is, for example, evidence that the human opposable thumb (the length of which permits us to manipulate small objects with ease) evolved not because of some structural change in a specific gene, but rather a change in when (and for how long) the genes responsible for the development of the hand were "turned on."

As Malcolm and our reading pointed out, the rapidly progressing genomic sequencing technology (it took years to sequence the first complete human genome about 15 years ago; we can now sequence entire genomes for everything from bacteria to human in DAYS) now permits huge amounts of data to be mined for evidence of natural selection. Now, geneticists can fish through whole genomes looking for gene that have undergone, or currently are undergoing, selection. I asked Malcolm how one goes about doing this, and he said that, essentially, geneticists scan the genomes of many individuals looking for allele frequencies that are higher (or lower) than expected (this can be determined statistically). I wonder if the technology is outpacing our ability to actually analyze it in a systematic way? Very interestingly, Malcolm told us about a study that simulated the evolution of a fruit fly genome and went back and identified "selected" genes with these statistical methods. Many were found, but the simulation did not include natural selection! So, it is by no means clear in every case whether or not genes have undergone natural selection.

Anyway, the clearest evidence for natural selection among most studies comes from genes identified with pathogen pressure and/or immune function and gametogenesis. Some other genes that appear to have been under selection over the course of human evolutionary history are FOXP2 (development of speech and language areas of the brain) and EDAR (development of several body tissues, including skin and sweat glands). We had additional conversations and discussions over pizza, including the issue of genetic determinism and how we define and analyze "traits."

Overall, a great start to our dialogues. I, along with Gwen Robbins Schug of Appalachian State, will be moderating our second session, which deals with past human adaptations to sedentism and urban life.