Now if we can just get a few more women and dark-skinned people on the research team

It isn’t at all surprising that ancient Britons were dark skinned — we know the genes behind pigmentation, we have sequenced genomes from skeletons that are thousands of years old, and we know that light skins were the result of a mutation that swept through Europe about 6,000 years ago. So when a reconstruction of Cheddar Man, a 10,000 year old skeleton found in England, is made from the skull plus genomic information, we should expect that he’d be found to have been dark-skinned.

The first modern Britons, who lived about 10,000 years ago, had “dark to black” skin, a groundbreaking DNA analysis of Britain’s oldest complete skeleton has revealed.

The fossil, known as Cheddar Man, was unearthed more than a century ago in Gough’s Cave in Somerset. Intense speculation has built up around Cheddar Man’s origins and appearance because he lived shortly after the first settlers crossed from continental Europe to Britain at the end of the last ice age. People of white British ancestry alive today are descendants of this population.

It was initially assumed that Cheddar Man had pale skin and fair hair, but his DNA paints a different picture, strongly suggesting he had blue eyes, a very dark brown to black complexion and dark curly hair.

The discovery shows that the genes for lighter skin became widespread in European populations far later than originally thought – and that skin colour was not always a proxy for geographic origin in the way it is often seen to be today.

Here’s the reconstruction in a BBC video. Cheddar Man is as we ought to have expected. Actually, the only thing that made me raise my eyebrows is that the research team consists of 6 white men and 1 white woman, kind of like how the SpaceX rocket team was mostly white men, too.

It would be nice if the research effort that is revealing the genetic diversity of our recent ancestors at least reflected a bit of that diversity today.

By the way, the comments on this reconstruction also reveal a tremendous amount of denial from the usual racists who think this is an invention cobbled up by scientists to appease radical leftists. This, also, is not surprising.

I’m skipping class for a few days…what will my poor students do?

I’m flying away to give a talk on Moscow, Idaho this week, and early next week I’m going to be a consultant on an NSF grant awarded to the Science Museum of Minnesota, so I’m missing a few class days soon. Oh, the wailings and lamentations of my students! They howled with grief at missing out on my sparkling presence for any length of time! Or I might have imagined that, but it was pretty vivid.

Fortunately, I found a babysitter. I’m having them attend the 2017 Evolution conference in Portland last June. That’s something technology lets you do nowadays — the Society for the Study of Evolution recorded all the session talks and uploaded them to YouTube, so you can attend, too, sans the hallway schmoozing and the arguments at the bar (we can only hope technology progresses to that point someday). I’m telling them to watch with a critical eye and report back when I get home about which of the subset of talks they enjoyed, and why, and to summarize the questions that were asked and methods that were used.

I remember getting the opportunity to attend Western Nerve Net and Friday Harbor Development meetings when I was a senior in college, and they impressed me greatly…but I was just lucky, getting to tag along with advisors at these events. We couldn’t bring along a whole class to a 3-day meeting back then, but now I can do it virtually, which is pretty cool.

Vegetables will kill you!

A new study, as reported by the Independent, finds that vegetarians are less healthy than meat-eaters.

Vegetarians are less healthy than meat-eaters, a controversial study has concluded, despite drinking less, smoking less and being more physically active than their carnivorous counterparts.

A study conducted by the Medical University of Graz in Austria found that the vegetarian diet, as characterised by a low consumption of saturated fat and cholesterol, due to a higher intake of fruits, vegetables and whole-grain products, appeared to carry elevated risks of cancer, allergies and mental health problems such as depression and anxiety.

It’s a classic example of confusing cause and effect. In other news, people who are sick with chemotherapy treatments are more likely to have cancer — therefore, chemotherapy causes cancer. The statistics can’t lie!

Alternatively, it could be a situation like mine. I was diagnosed with heart disease, so then I reduced consumption of saturated fat and cholesterol, and went with a vegetarian diet to help reduce the damage of a lifetime of indulgence and maybe squeeze out a few more healthy years. I also took up an exercise program. I’m going to have to inform my wife this morning that we’re skipping the gym today because it’s going to shorten my life.

Except — and this is an odd thing — the end of the article that happily mongers fear about vegetarian diets includes a disclaimer from the investigators.

Study coordinator and epidemiologist Nathalie Burkert told The Austrian Times: “We have already distanced ourselves from this claim as it is an incorrect interpretation of our data.

“We did find that vegetarians suffer more from certain conditions like asthma, cancer and mental illnesses than people that eat meat as well, but we cannot say what is the cause and what is the effect.

“There needs to be further study done before this question can be answered.”

Why would you publish a bullshit article that includes a clear statement from the researchers that your interpretation of the work is bullshit? Are readers of this newspaper so reliably stupid that the publishers can trust that they’ll only read the bullshit headline and never get to the disclaimer, which is buried at the very end of the article? As an experiment, I wonder how many people will read only the title of this article, and not get to the substance, which says the exact opposite? If you actually read the whole thing, and decide to comment, be sure to include the word “taradiddle” in your reply. This is a test.

Mary’s Monday Metazoan: The feminist crayfish

What else can you assume they are? The marbled crayfish are triploid, they’re all female, they only produce daughters, and they’re taking over the world.

Before about 25 years ago, the species simply did not exist. A single drastic mutation in a single crayfish produced the marbled crayfish in an instant.

The mutation made it possible for the creature to clone itself, and now it has spread across much of Europe and gained a toehold on other continents. In Madagascar, where it arrived about 2007, it now numbers in the millions and threatens native crayfish.

I don’t know whether to bow down before our new crustacean masters or prepare for an awesome crawfish boil.

Back to Moscow with me!

This Friday I’ll be speaking at Darwin on the Palouse, in Moscow, Idaho. All you Eastern Washington/Idaho people should show up, it’s free!

I’ll be talking about “On the Edge of Evolution: A Critical Evaluation”, looking at some of the hullabaloo over the last few years about a new synthesis, all that evo-devo/accommodation/epigenetics/etc. stuff, trying to put it into a more reasonable context. My message, in case you can’t make it, will be that of course in a lively and active science, we’ll be uncovering new stuff all the time, but it’s more of an evolution of evolution than a revolution of evolution, and people need to master what’s already known before announcing that it’s all wrong. It’ll be fun!

I actually read the youtube comments on my own videos

I made a video a while back titled The Deceptive, Dishonest Logic of Intelligent Design, and it got a bunch of comments from irate creationists. I decided to follow up with responses to a couple of representative comments with a rebuttal.

Stuff cited:

The 12-mer peptide with specific binding to naphthalene.

The only CSI paper you need to read:

Elsberry W, Shallit J (2011) Information theory, evolutionary computation, and Dembski’s “complex specified information”. Synthese 178:237–270.

Charles Darwin and every scientist ever

I have a long day ahead of me and lots of annoying little responsibilities to take care of and am feeling a little overwhelmed — there’s even more to do next week — so this was a perfect start to my day. I am not alone!

I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders. I am going to write a little Book for Murray on orchids & today I hate them worse than everything so farewell & in a sweet frame of mind, I am

Ever yours”

—Charles Darwin, 1861

You can pick up a copy of The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects right now. It’s a little book, only … 338 pages? Suddenly filled with a sense of failure and despair again.