Post Taste of Thai

Taste of Thai: wonderful food for a moderate price. Try it!

Sports and humans: is the achilles tendon the real reason that humans can walk and run better than chimps can? Perhaps, but not everyone is convinced. Still runners will find this article to be interesting. The point was that one researcher hypothesized that humans developed this tendon 2-3 million years ago (way before homo-sapiens evolved) and the reason he made this claim was because there was solid evidence that these early humans were bipedal. The authors of this article (the article which reviews the hypothesis) say:

Bill Sellers is saying that he’s studied the fossil record and that what he found out is the Achilles tendon would have allowed early humans to move nearly twice as fast as before. Do you catch the mild adaptionist tone with this claim? He uses the lack of an Achilles tendon in the chimpanzees and gorillas as a reference point… or in other words, because those apes don’t have an Achilles tendon, that’s why they can’t run bipedally. That’s partly true and partly false. These apes have an Achilles tendon, but it’s very small. But, there’s a lot more to why non-human apes can’t run bipedally.

Our lineage’s ability to move around bipedally, be it running or walking, is not because of one anatomical feature over another. No one part is more significant.

I’m not doubting that the Achilles tendon isn’t important, what I’m saying is that almost the whole hominid body has an important role in allowing us and our like to walk around on two. I’ve said this before, and I don’t think people get it. From our femora to our tibiae, from our vertebrae to our pelvis, each bone and muscle involved in bipedal locomotion is unique when compared to a non-bipedal animal. [...]

The point to take home, when studying human evolution, is that the entire body needs to be analyzed. Parts of our body did not evolve in a void from the others. The Achilles tendon, the long femur, the wider pelvis… all these parts and other parts are why are bipedal.

Various topics:

Religion: wonderful pithy cartoon.

Religion: Kathy Griffin doesn’t thank Jesus for her success. Thank god.

Privacy: bundling things like television, the internet and the telephone can be economical. But it can come at a cost to one’s privacy.

Fred Thompson: a man’s candidate, by Jove!

Religion: why do creation myths have such a hold on people?

I listened recently to a fascinating radio broadcast where Adrian Shine was discussing how, to date, he had failed to find the mythical watery monster of Loch Ness (Saturday Live, BBC Radio 4, 18/08/08).

Two things made this conversation interesting for me and took it above the realms of the usual “the-monster-must-exist-coz-I’ve-seen-pictures” story. First, this man was no fool. He was a serious naturalist who had spent over thirty years exploring and collaborating in over 200 university projects on the loch. He writes in learned journals and can do the science.

Secondly, when asked why he hadn’t found the leviathan, he simply stated that it didn’t exist. At least, there wasn’t a shred of scientific evidence that it did. And he should know, because he has spent the best part of a working life doing the sonar, going in the submarines, looking in the mud, sampling the plankton, testing the photographs, and analysing the data.

“But what about all the people who are convinced that it does?” pleaded the interviewer. “There are over 1000 reported sightings?”

At this point Adrian argued that if put in a court of law he could present supposed evidence and that might convince some people, but there was nothing that would stand up before a much more rigorous investigation. If the data were discussed in ‘normal’ human interaction, some would say that the monster existed, but that data would not survive the greater demands of science.

His point was a simple one that any psychology student would understand: in order to get on with life we need to process vast amounts of information very quickly. In order to help us to do that we use meaning-templates so that we can make guesses about what we are seeing on the basis of very little data (we see a door-knob, for example, and assume that it is attached to a door without having to study all the data about the door.) When we face puzzlement and don’t understand what we are seeing, we instinctively look for a template that will fit, and we interpret that data in the light of that template. As human beings, we find it very difficult to tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity. But the interpretation that we may have hastily adopted may prove to be wrong.
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Politics: the Moveon.org ad that incensed Republicans (pdf file). The facts that back up the ad’s claims.