One of the most popular blogs in Biological Anthropology belongs to John Hawks, a biological anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan under Milford Wolpoff. John writes interesting posts on all sorts of subjects of Anthropological interest, with an emphasis on human genetics and human evolution. Check out his blog and report back here on some interesting piece or pieces that you read there (include a link to the article or articles you comment on). Also, find some other blogs by anthropologists or other scientists or social scientists that interest you and send us the URLs with a brief description of each.
This is a fun blog. It is from a prof from UH Manoa (the Hawai'i connection is an accident, I promise.) He blogs about many things including Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog)
ReplyDeletehttp://alex.golub.name/log/about/
I really like the blog by Hawks regarding human evolution stopping. I am surprised (maybe not that much) that people, yes even scientists believe that evolution is stopping. If it was stopping it wouldn't be evolution.
ReplyDeletehttp://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/evolution/selection/jones-evolution-stopping-2008.html
Weird that I picked that same article to check out too. I don't know why the headline for 'Evolution Stopping' caught my attention more than the others. Most likely because I don't believe in it...well...I suppose that's not true to some extent. I believe in God and all that, creation and what-not but I do see "evolution" happening with races being mixed and all the other crap the guy was talking about. I guess I'm mixed on the subject.
ReplyDeletehttp://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/evolution/selection/jones-evolution-stopping-2008.html
Now let's see if I know how to post this...something about not registered to the blog or something?
Oh look it went through!!
ReplyDeleteNow I just gotta remember to keep up on this...it's kinda like checking my mail...never do it....
Wow, the guy spends a lot of time on his weblog which is great for the rest of us. After scanning the articles I found one on Ashley Montagu and since we studied him a bit in the bio seminar I decided to try it out.
ReplyDeleteIn the article John Hawks proceeds to take Montagu to town on the idea of a constant social environment enacting slow evolutional change on individuals. Hawks believes that new mutations that affected the social and cognitive characteristics would immediately be strongly selected. Radical change Hawks argues occurred within 10,000 years as well.
Although an important part of the article I found Hawks discussion of racial equality more compelling. Hawks writes that he has one pair of identical twins and two non-identical kids. Hawks then makes the point that although two of his kids are genetically the same he would'nt treat them any differently from his other kids based soley on genetic similarity! Arguments that someones genetics determine intelligence, inherent social abilities and so are fallacies and as Hawks says, " I hope it doesn't take much reflection to realize that their genetic identity should not determine their equality."
here's the link to the article I read about Montagu
ReplyDeletehttp://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/race/montagu-recent-selection-cognitive-social-2009.html
Here are some other blogs written by anthropologists: http://anthropology.net/
anthropology.net is a blog contributed to by a number of anthropologists, with mostly cultural articles written
http://savageminds.org/about-savage-minds/
Here is a neat blog written by a group of Ph.D. students and professors teaching and studying anthropology.
http://averyremoteperiodindeed.blogspot.com/
Written by Julien Riel-Salvatore a Canadian archaeologist this blog has a quote of the day, and tons of articles on Paleolithic archaeology, paleoanthropology, lithic technology, hunter-gatherers and archaeological theory.
Nice work Ian...I look forward to checking out the blogs you mention. Glad to see that Tonya's got things figured out, both here and in the wiki. Good work and keep up with it.
ReplyDeleteSo I started reading about the Mayan axe with an eye toward archaeology just to find out it is supposed to be 1.8 million years old and dated with a fictional technique. Its provenience is very questionable and the whole thing is pretty much a mess.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.acagle.net/ArchaeoBlog/?paged=4
ReplyDeleteI have been looking through archaeology blogs for things other than random brain droppings and I ran across this post. It is a short description of the status of the job market for social sciences and archaeology. The best advice I have ever seen for trying to get an academic job.
http://vimeo.com/1896694
ReplyDeleteNow this is what Im talking about. No more pesky wear marks from constant remeasuring, no more best guess surveying and no more crappy drawings that don't even look like the artifact. Laser beams. This is the Tech blog from Wessex archaeology in England. Some of their techniques and equipment is already out of date but that just shows how we need to be on top of this or we will get run over by it.
A little off topic, but this brings back memories of when I was in the Air Force ROTC program at Kent State. My Colonel asked me about what job I would like in the Air Force, because they blew stuff up and didn’t really need an archaeologist to go and dig stuff up. However with the growing amount of conflict and the need to better understand a group of people, anthropologists were actually being put into field units along with journalists, translators and geographers. I found this site while looking up other anthropologists blogs:
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wordpress.com/tag/network-of-concerned-anthropologists/
If you scroll down, there is a blog about anthropol0gists in the military and how it circulated through the net via a Muslim website. If you couldn't find it, her is the exact link: http://culturematters.wordpress.com/2007/10/31/news-of-anthropologists-in-the-military-starts-circulating-on-muslim-websites/
Another thing that was really neat about that first link was that they had blogs about research ethics and plagiarism!
Here is an archaeological blog: http://purescience.wordpress.com/2009/01/07/german-battlefield-yields-roman-surprises/
It talks about how the German battlefield discovery could re-write history. This was a location that saw a huge battle between a Roman army and Barbarians.
http://scienceblogs.com/afarensis/2008/07/15/archaeologists_refuse_to_help/
This blog talks about the refusal of archaeologists to help with the Iran strike and the political stickiness of giving aide.
I read two articles on his blog, one concerning the Amish and their fat storing abality, and one talking about how yawning cools the brain down. The Amish are always a fascinating topic. From an evoultionary perspective the amish are subjected to genetic drift since they have a small founding population, and they do not marry outside of their community. This practice has lead to the occurance of several rare genetic condtions to become visible in their popultion. The one I was most familiar with prior to reading the blog was polydactyly. The yawning blog was interesting since I remember back in high school, my biology teacher told us yawning occurs when the brain is not recieving enough oxygen. In contrast the blog reported yawning probabaly occurs when the brain is too hot.
ReplyDeleteHere is another blog I found:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.anthroblogs.org/anthroblogblog/
As it states in the top left corner: It is a community of anthropologist-bloggers and covers a wide range of topics and links to other personal blogs.
One of the blogs I enjoy reading is this one http://killgrove.blogspot.com/. She is a bioarcheaologist working in Italy. Also http://anthropology.net/ has a nice mix of information from all subfileds of anthropology.
ReplyDeleteThe last blog I'm going to post is Cave Man's corner, this blog deals mostly with human origins. http://blogs.scienceforums.net/evoanthro/
Ok, so I kind of cheated for this week. I went to John Hawks weblog and searched in the search box for blogging. I wanted to read about his take on blogging and tenure, since the previous article we read about dealt with the science community frowning upon blogging. Anyway it is a 4 part series of his on blogging and tenure. Here is the first part: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/meta/tenure-blog-prosper-2008.html . He covers the controversial fight between blogging and tenure. He weighs the pros and cons and informs people of the benefits of having a mentor.
ReplyDeleteHis next blog was about graduate students and blogging. Here is the address: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/meta/graduate-students-blogging-2008.html
I loved how he addressed the readers fear of dissertation committees viewing blog-writing as wasting valuable research time and blogging your dissertation. It really touched base with some of the stuff we were talking about in class-i.e. scooping.
I personally liked reading about the early iron working in Africa, seeing as though my focus is on metallurgy in the Near East. It's amazing how a discovery in a particular location could change theory about another location (i.e. iron metallurgy did not actually develop first in the Near East, as was the belief). What baffles me, though, is why did they stagnate afterward in technology? Why, then, was it the Europeans millennia later that colonized sub-Saharan Africa and subjugated its people and not vice versa? I know that sounds militaristic of me, but once the Near East caught on to iron metallurgy, people like the Persians, then the Greeks, then the Romans were able to conquer an area not to be rivaled until the Mongol Empire of the 13th c A.D.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing is the diffusionist theory of sub-Saharan Africa metallurgical development or the local development. I'm more in favor of local development if they did have iron working before the Near East, simply because the best route at that time to Africa was through the Near East, and the latter did not have such a technology circa 2000 B.C. Local development is possible, given the right technology to fully utilize iron to its potential.
Pre-Incan metallurgy in South America. They found metal artifacts including copper and silver in the Andes that could be from the Wari. If so, it's definitely pre-Inca.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.livescience.com/history/070419_metal_andes.html
Wow check this out...this is a blog about archaeometry and a link cache of other anthropological blogs.
ReplyDeletehttp:http://thearchaeometryblog.blogspot.com/
Reading Dr. Hawks blog was surprised me was that he seems to spend a lot of time devoted to blogging. professors times seems to be in high demand especially considering this economic climate. Does a professor get a teaching reduction for such online activities? If he doesn't, should he? We have already discussed the lack of credit given to academics for online activities...I think blogging should be no exception.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that Malaysian hand axes can be found encased in stone created by meteor...
As for finding a blob of my own...check this one out http://www.alexandriaarchive.org/blog/ Digging Digitally is produced by the Society for American Archaeology digital Data Interest Group . The downside is the it is not updated regularly. It looks like it is a research that is not being utilized properly.
Our own blog platform, blotspot has an archaeology section. Mostly site specific they offer the newest information available. Check it out: http://www.archaeologydigs.blogspot.com/
Because we are rapidly approaching Darwin Day (which is February 12 for all you archaeologists) and are celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of "Origin..", I felt compelled to choose Hawk's blog "Darwin the Abolitionist"(http://johnhawks.net/node/1835). Aside from the geeky holidays that I probably get way too into, I feel as anthropologists that one of the greatest tasks of our generation is promoting a comprehensive understanding of evolutionary theory in general, and Darwin's mechanism of natural selection specifically.
ReplyDeleteDr. Anemone and I were just discussing the other day a conversation I found myself in with a coworker who was, and unfortunately remains, convinced that Darwin's theory of natural selection is the sole cause of racism in America. This is absurd! Hawk's blog reflects on an article he read that claimed that Darwin was an abolitionist. Hawk takes a few lines from Darwin's work to highlight phrases that depicted some of the indigenous people he encountered in an unflattering light. I have read elsewhere, however, passages where Darwin has written about the unfortunate circumstances that whites have put natives in through colonialism. One passage talked about how sad it was for him to foresee the horrible, and very short, future some of them unknowingly faced at the time Darwin was visiting.
The point is that we as anthropologists must come to Darwin's aid, partly because he is dead and cannot, but also because nothing in our science makes sense without his work. It is our unifying theory, regardless of your subdiscipline.
Some blogs I found:
http://primatology.net/
a good one for all you other ape enthusiasts as well as the rest of you who want to be.
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/
This one is definitely for the advanced, I can't really wade through a lot of it yet, but if you have an interest in the genetics side of physical anthropology you will definitely find your fix here.
http://en.wordpress.com/tag/public-anthropology/
This blog discusses a field of anthropology that don't get NO respect! Hopefully that will change because I am a big supporter of public anthropology.
Wow, everyone found so many links to other blogs! I only read one blog on a regular basis and since it has nothing to do with anthropology (actually it may have a cultural theme to it...), I'm going to have to start searching for some others. I really enjoyed reading through Hawks' blog. It's amazing how organized, well written, and interesting everything is on it. How does he find the time? I can't even return emails. After skimming through the different topics and days, the blog that caught my eye the most was the one from January 1st, 2009 with the link to the article on how top NSF staffers are surfing the internet for porn while at work. It made me laugh.
ReplyDeleteIn a reply to Andy B's comment about a possible teaching reduction, etc., I did notice on Hawks blog that he asks for donations to support the site.
ReplyDeleteI am itching to blog...I feel like I haven't had a chance to rant and let the world know my thoughts on any random subject... perhaps I must start a blog of my own...
ReplyDeleteAndy, I would be interested in your blog.
ReplyDelete