Monday Science Links

This week's sciency goodness is late - I'm on vacation!:

• Mark Liberman at Language Log looks at two genes and their reporter: Nicholas Wade is an inveterate gene-for-X enthusiast — he's got 68 stories in the NYT index with "gene" in the headline — and he's had two opportunities to celebrate this idea in the past few days: "Speech Gene Shows Its Bossy Nature", 11/12/2009, and "The Evolution of the God Gene", 11/14/2009. The first of these articles is merely a bit misleading, in the usual way. The second verges on the bizarre.


• Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science looks at extinction secrets hidden in poop: Around 15,000 years ago, North American was home to a wide menagerie of giant mammals - mammoths and mastodons, giant ground sloths, camels, short-faced bears, American lions, dire wolves, and more. But by 10,000 years ago, these "megafauna" had been wiped out. Thirty-four entire genera went extinct, including every species that weighed over a tonne, leaving the bison as the continent's largest animal. In trying to explain these extinctions, the scientific prosecution has examined suspects including early human hunters, climate change and even a meteor strike. But cracking the case has proved difficult, because most of these events happened at roughly the same time. To sort out this muddled chronology, Jacquelyn Gill has approached the problem from a fresh angle. Her team have tried to understand the final days of these giant beasts by studying a tiny organism, small enough to be dwarfed by their dung - a fungus called Sporormiella.


• Brian Switek at Laelaps is hard on Nova's Becoming Human series, which I actually enjoyed: Though I might be a little more merciful on the producers of this documentary than Greg, he was right to point out that the opening segment of the [third part] is worn old tripe about how our species has fulfilled a kind of evolutionary destiny set in place millions of years ago. The entire hominin family tree can be split, the preface suggests, into our proud ancestors and the unimportant evolutionary "dead ends" that lived alongside them. The narrator references discoveries that are "shining light" on the "final stages of our evolution" as if our species is fulfilling some pre-ordained plan that has reached a stop. This is unfortunate, I would have thought better of an award-winning science program like NOVA, but when it comes to human our evolution our own hubris still obscures our view.
  
• Jonah Lehrer at The Frontal Cortex wonders why Tiger Woods affects other golfers' scores: Despite the individualistic nature of the sport, the presence of Woods in the tournament had a powerful effect. Interestingly, Brown found that playing against Woods resulted in significantly decreased performance. When the superstar entered a tournament, every other golfer took, on average, 0.8 more strokes. This effect was even more pronounced when Woods was playing well. Based on this data, Brown calculated that the superstar effect boosted Woods' PGA earnings by nearly five million dollars. Brown argues that this phenomenon is caused when "competitors scale back their effort in events where they believe Woods will surely win." After all, why waste energy and angst on an impossible contest? That hypothesis is certainly possible, but I'd argue that the superstar effect has more to do with "paralysis by analysis" than with decreased motivation. I'd bet that playing with Tiger Woods makes golfers extra self-conscious, and that such self-consciousness leads to choking and decreased performance. The problem, then, isn't that golfers aren't trying hard enough when playing against Tiger - it's that they're trying too hard.


• Carl Zimmer at Discover looks at doing math: The central role of numbers in our world testifies to the brain’s uncanny ability to recognize and understand them—and Cantlon is among the researchers trying to find out exactly how that skill works. Traditionally, scientists have thought that we learn to use numbers the same way we learn how to drive a car or to text with two thumbs. In this view, numbers are a kind of technology, a man-made invention to which our all-purpose brains can adapt. History provides some support. The oldest evidence of people using numbers dates back about 30,000 years: bones and antlers scored with notches that are considered by archaeologists to be tallying marks. More sophisticated uses of numbers arose only much later, coincident with the rise of other simple technologies. The Mesopotamians developed basic arithmetic about 5,000 years ago. Zero made its debut in A.D. 876. Arab scholars laid the foundations of algebra in the ninth century; calculus did not emerge in full flower until the late 1600s. Despite the late appearance of higher mathematics, there is growing evidence that numbers are not really a recent invention—not even remotely. Cantlon and others are showing that our species seems to have an innate skill for math, a skill that may have been shared by our ancestors going back least 30 million years.

Enjoy!