I have interviewed Vanessa last year so you can learn more about her there.

I received a review copy recently and am halfway through. Once I finish I will post my book review here.

From Publishers Weekly:

Devoted to learning more about bonobos, a smaller, more peaceable species of primate than chimpanzees, and lesser known, Australian journalist Woods and her fiancé, scientist Brian Hare, conducted research in the bonobos’ only known habitat—civil war–torn Congo. Woods’s plainspoken, unadorned account traces the couple’s work at Lola Ya Bonobo Sanctuary, located outside “Kinshasa in the 75-acre forested grounds of what was once Congo dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s weekend retreat. The sanctuary, founded in 1994 and run by French activist Claudine André, served as an orphanage for baby bonobos, left for dead after their parents had been hunted for bush meat; the sanctuary healed and nurtured them (assigning each a human caretaker called a mama), with the aim of reintroducing the animals to the wild. Hare had only previously conducted research on the more warlike, male-dominated chimpanzee, and needed Woods because she spoke French and won the animals’ trust; through their daily work, the couple witnessed with astonishment how the matriarchal bonobo society cooperated nicely using frequent sex, and could even inspire human behavior. When Woods describes her daily interaction with the bonobos, her account takes on a warm charm. Woods’s personable, accessible work about bonobos elucidates the marvelous intelligence and tolerance of this gentle cousin to humans.”

The main idea of the meeting is that evolutionary theory has something to offer in the realm of understanding human societies and thus shaping policies governing aspects of human activity. In the domain of economics, for example, it appears that the classical economics (i.e., the Chicago School) is unbeatable in the corridors of power. Yet, it is essentially faulty and this has been shown many times, including by numerous Nobel Prize winners in Economics. The idea that humans are rational (and perfectly informed) economic players is just plain wrong. Yet our economic policy is built upon that error. Perhaps developing and using models from evolutionary theory can finally bring the well-past-due overturn of the faulty economics and become the basis for smart, modern economic policies. The work is just beginning.

Perhaps the insights from the study of social and eusocial animals, mainly insects, can inform the discussion about social behavior of humans. How do simple rules for simple brains result in complex behaviors of, for example, bee swarms? Perhaps if we used such simple rules, instead of relying on every individual human being highly intelligent, impartial and rational, we can devise policies that will actually work, in various domains of human activity.

Taking into account multi-level selection models of evolution one can start understanding the differences between small-group societies (e.g, in rural areas) and large-group societies (e.g., in large cities), why those result in diefferent behaviors of individual humans living there, and why the differences between the two types of groups often lead to civil wars (often wars we usually do not see or describe as civil wars due to our own myopia, not realizing that a war between two adjacent regions may, in fact, be a war between the city and the country “mentality” – something quite obviously applicable to the US red vs. blue states, really small-town conservatism vs. big-city liberalism). Why imposing large-group organization (i.e., a President and a Parliament, i.e., a ‘centralized government’ of a unified country) may not work in a country like Afghanistan in which the society was always organized via local kin-and-friend networks – evolutionary theory can open our eyes on such questions.

This group of people, coming from a variety of backgrounds including history, anthropology, ecology, economics, psychology, political science, ethology and evolutionary biology, will try to tackle these and similar questions over the years to come. Interestingly, the meeting was apparently an Unconference (though they have never heard of the term before), with discussions starting some months before the event (I presume online), leading to the choices of topics actually discussed in sessions which were free-style discussions, not speeches.

One of the panelists noted that interdisciplinary meetings are usually excercises in misunderstanding, as each participant brings in different language and different axioms, but not this meeting – people actually made an effort, in advance, to study and learn other people’s perspectives before encountering them in the sessions in real life. This made the meeting, judging from the enthusiasm of all panelists, a resounding success.

This was the first time I ever visited NESCent (though I was excited when I first heard about its founding five years ago) and it was really nice to see Craig McClain and Robin Ann Smith again, as well as to meet, for the first time in real life, John Logsdon who blogs on Sex, Genes and Evolution and has come to NESCent for a nine-year sabbatical.

What is a projectile weapon? It is something that can be thrown far away – more than just a couple of meters – and with sufficient power to seriously injure or kill a large animal. A non-projectile weapon, even if it can be thrown with force to a shorter distance of a couple of meters, requires either ambush hunting or chasing the prey into a corner or a bog where it can be approached and stabbed from a close distance. A projectile weapon allows hunters to hunt out in the open, perhaps just hiding in the tall grass. Thus two types of weaponry target different kinds of prey.

But inventing projectile weapons requires refinement in technical skills of making them, technical skills in throwing them, and changes in anatomy to make projectile weapons effective. And once invented, projectile weapons have novel ecological impacts, including impacts on further cultural evolution of humans.

This is what Dr.Churchill is studying. He is focusing on Europe, the invention of projectile weapons by modern (“Cro-Magnon”) humans and lack of such invention in Neanderthals, how that impacted the ecological relationship between the two species, and how that contributed to Neanderthal extinction as well as extinction (through competitive exclusion, as well as direct competition by killing) of all the large European carnivores except wolves.

In the talk, Dr.Churchill surveyed several different aspects of his research. He is approaching the question from several different angles. One is the study of spear tips in the archaeological record – their shape and size, the weight, the aerodynamics of the shape, etc. all tell something about their use as either close-contact or projectile weapons. Some (rare) spear handles and spear-throwers tell their own stories.

Then there is the fossil record of humans, Neanderthals and other large carnivores that show numbers and geographical distributions, migrations and dates of extinctions.

Next, there are anatomical cues – skeleton is malleable during development and bones in the upper arm develop differently in cultures that use contact weapons versus those that use projectile weapons as the stabbing technique is different from the throwing technique – throwers have different torsion angles in the humerus and also the humerus of one arm gets thicker than that of the other arm – this pattern is found in humans, but not in Neanderthals.

Finally, the general shape of Neanderthals would make them strong stabbers but poor throwers, so even if they tried throwing (perhaps by seeing the spears used that way by modern humans) they would not have been effective hunters with that technique.

Then, there are wounds in the bones of some fossil humans and Neanderthals. By conducting an experiment – throwing spears into pig carcasses at various speeds, powers and distances (yes, throwing done by a machine) and analyzing the effects on bones – Churchill and his students could conclude that the wounds in the fossil bones were indeed the result of projectile weapons thrown from a distance.

The talk was, as is usually the case on these occasions, a quick survey of various studies. I did not read all the papers by him or his competitors, so I cannot write anything from a position of my own expertise. But my feeling is this: Each piece of evidence he showed is weak on its own, but put together they make a strong case. And the strength is not purely additive, i.e., in the sense that more data is stronger than fewer data. The strength comes from consilience. Let me try to explain how that works.

Let’s call his preferred hypothesis ‘Hypothesis A’. One piece of evidence he shows is consistent with Hypothesis A, and weakens (or eliminates) an alternative Hypothesis B, but is also strongly vulnerable to alternative Hypothesis C. Another piece of evidence is consistent with his Hypothesis A, and weakens an alternative Hypothesis C, but is also strongly vulnerable to alternative Hypothesis D. Yet another piece of evidence is consistent with his Hypothesis A, and weakens an alternative Hypothesis D, but is also strongly vulnerable to alternative Hypothesis B. When you look at all of his evidence together, all of it is consistent with Hypothesis A and all alternatives look weak. Thus with all pieces being individually weak, the whole edifice still looks very powerful.

Now, to make clear, Dr.Churchill pointed out several times that the research he focuses on, his Hypothesis A, is not the one and only explanation for the extinction of Neanderthals (and other large predators). He just asserts that it is an important component of the process that led to this result and perhaps a more important component than some other people in the field are ready to admit. Of course, that’s how science works: different people focus on different aspects of a problem, and the strength of each person’s data will determine how the whole picture is built in the end.

This was definitely an interesting talk on a topic I never thought about before. DeLene was also there and wrote her thoughts about the lecture on her blog Wild Muse as well as on the Science In The Triangle blog.

What dawned on me was the beginning of an understanding how the Internet can be so ephemeral and yet so powerful.

I realized that we can follow the nematode’s example and adapt to emerging technologies to further our knowledge exponentially or we can dig in and watch idly while cellphones, Facebook and Twitter change how society works. It’s all a matter of mindset, which we as humans can change thanks to evolution.

Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in New York University’s graduate interactive telecommunications program, lays out how the Internet is disrupting the hirarchical flow of knowledge. With cellphones, Facebook and Twitter everybody becomes a consumer and a producer. That means, information no longer is passed on from a producer to a select group of middlemen, such as journalists, who then distribute it to the consumers. Instead, information originates from multiple sources – including television, newspapers and magazines – and is distributed on the Internet. The multiple sources can then connect with each other and create more information.

To illustrate how different this Internet network of information producers and consumers is from the linear, top-to-bottom model, Shirky points out a successful Internet effort to monitor voting irregularities in the 2008 presidential election. In a reversal of technology transfer trends, the U.S. copied the idea from a less developed country, Nigeria, where it was deployed during an election a year or so earlier.

It seems to me that such a network of producers and consumers would perfectly suit science, which always struggles to solve more problems the more scientists know.

There is, of course, the pesky question whether an exploding amount of information automatically translates into better information. That’s where the book comes in.

Published last year by the California University Press, “Natural Security: A Darwinian Approach to a Dangerous World” is not only a novel approach to gathering scientific information, it also provides some astonishing insights.

The book was edited by Raphael D. Sagarin, associate director for ocean and coastal policy at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, and Terence Taylor, a former United Nations chief weapons of mass destruction inspector for Iran. In the book, Sagarin and Taylor bring together experts from different walks of scientific life, including marine biologists, an anthropologist, a paleontologist, security experts and a virus researcher, who look at ways nature has developed over millions of years to defend itself against ever-present dangers and what humans can learn from natural defense mechanisms.

The nematode, a worm of about 1,000 cells, is featured in the book, because it has a highly efficient and adaptive immune system that appears to be capable of protecting the worm from all known viral parasites. The nematode’s cells do that through RNA interference, a method that many researchers are currently trying to tap for drug development.

The book’s authors argue that natural defense mechanisms work because nature never puts all of her eggs in one basket. The nematode’s way is different from the ways of bacteria, which are different again from how bony fish or birds do it.

When nature has been able to advance its knowledge base by using multiple methods simultaneously, shouldn’t humans then be able to do the same? In that context, the Internet should reduce the risk of misinformation and improve human knowledge.

Afterall, humans are part of nature and its evolution – a point that is bolstered by brain research.

As the WSJ’s Hotz points out in his blog post, the human brain works better when we’re not single-minded. Brain scans show, he writes, that “our brain may be most actively engaged when our mind wanders and we’ve actually lost track of our thoughts. Left to its own devices, our brain activates several areas associated with complex problem solving, which researchers had previously assumed were dormant during daydreams. Moreover, it appears to be the only time these areas work in unison.”

Aha!