Whacky idea?

Search for the prevalence of myopia in different populations. A connection to brachiomanual gestural language?

Still making the headlines

Moe, the missing chimp from SoCal, is back to old time fame. Now, the Washington Post has a story about him. More factual information and quite touchy-feely. A sample:

Because maybe chimpanzees aren't really supposed to wear short pants and live in suburban houses with humans who treat them as their child. It never really ends well, does it? Because even though the humans love them dearly, cute baby chimps grow into big adult apes, who can bite, which can have a tragic trajectory, as we shall see.

But then again, who are we to judge, those of us who have never put a pair of pajamas on an ape.

Soon, somebody will start selling t-shirts: "Live free".

Adding insult to injury?

Continuing to report o nthe Saga of Moe, the missing chimp from CA, now the headlines try to capture the reader's attention this way:

Toilet-trained chimpanzee goes missing in Californian forest

And a touching story at the end:

The couple broke down in tears at a press conference in Los Angeles. "What am I going to do?" said Ms Davis. "He meant the world to us," said her husband. "He was the best man at my wedding."

Well, I guess he had to be toilet-trained and he is a nice chimp, otherwise he might have started to throw crap at everybody, as sometimes they do. I wonder how he was dressed...

Born to be wild

In the news today: Celebrity chimp missing in Southern California. Probably not very good for Moe (his name) and everybody in the area, I think he deserves a break. From the LA Times article:

Moe showed up at local ribbon-cutting ceremonies and helped sell Girl Scout cookies, dressed sportily in the latest fashion.

Very abusive, if you ask me, but probably not entirely without his consent, or otherwise hell could break lose. From the same article, here is what a gang of chimps can do to a person:

The 65-year-old former NASCAR driver lost all of his fingers, an eye, his nose, parts of his cheek and lips, and pieces of his torso to attacking chimpanzees in 2005. The animals pounced after apparently becoming jealous that Davis was preparing to present a birthday cake to Moe at their refuge.

Sometimes docile, sometimes nasty. Kinda like us, huh? Luyckily we have advanced culture to put some break when our instincts show up.

Can parasites influence the language we speak?

Can parasites influence the language we speak?

What do parasites and mountains have in common? They both keep populations apart and drive evolution, say researchers.

In the absence of geographical barriers such as mountains and oceans, parasite "wedges" keep populations of the same species apart, say Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill of the University of New Mexico in the US. They claim this can provide the opportunity for populations and even new languages to evolve separately.

Of course, it is ore of a correlation, but interesting nonetheless. Down in the the NewScientist report, Mark Pagel suggests where the causation might come from:

But rather than parasites driving linguistic diversity, Pagel believes the explanation lies in an intrinsic human tendency to wage war. "I believe humans will separate and split whenever they can," Pagel told New Scientist.

"You've got all these people wandering around the Amazon all doing more or less the same thing – hunting and gathering – so why do they all speak different languages?

"There must be some ecological force driving them to live in separate groups. We are intensely competitive and when the environment will support a small group living separately I believe humans will do that," he says.

Now it might start to get really interesting: language diversity as a the result of cultural factor behind geographical isolation. I might go for that when the simulation gets complex enough.

On the emergence and evolution of religion

On NewScientist yesterday: Religion is a product of evolution, software suggests

Kinda off-topic, but it interests me because of the software (published with the study). Of course, as an atheist, explanations for why we created religion are always interesting. A short quote from the NewScientist report:

The model assumes, in other words, that a small number of people have a genetic predisposition to communicate unverifiable information to others. They passed on that trait to their children, but they also interacted with people who didn't spread unreal information.

The model looks at the reproductive success of the two sorts of people – those who pass on real information, and those who pass on unreal information.

Under most scenarios, "believers in the unreal" went extinct. But when Dow included the assumption that non-believers would be attracted to religious people because of some clear, but arbitrary, signal, religion flourished.

The full paper can be read here.

NOT recommended

The Origin of Speeches: Intelligent Design in Language by Isaac E. Mozeson

What a horrible pun. Of course I am not wasting my time wih this one, but it makes one wonder what on earth could be the argument. A nice review from Amazon:

" I feel like a mosquito in a nudist colony...I'm not sure where to start. This book is full of idiocy. Yeah, that sums it up." - Tsee Lee "FRRF.org"