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!