Christine Kenneally

Words in mind

Faced with pictures of odd clay creatures sporting prominent heads and pointy limbs, students at Carnegie Mellon were asked to identify which “aliens” were friendly and which were not... New York Times.

Human uniqueness is not what it used to be

Ever since Galileo argued that the sun was the center of the solar system, the idea of Earth as the universal hub has been the classic example of scientific arrogance. It's certainly a foolproof example of the way humans consider themselves the rule by which everything else should be measured, but when we use it, there's a sense that we don't make that kind of mistake anymore. Yet even today scientists are swayed by the notion that humans stand at the center of the biological universe, especially when it comes to what we care about most: our minds.

Is it end of days for Roget's?

When you are searching for a word that is more precise than another though similar in meaning, you don't browse Piozzi's. Yet British Synonymy, the first English book of synonyms, was written by Hester Lynch Piozzi. Nor do you grab your Girard's. Published 76 years before Piozzi, the 1718 book of French words appears to be the first collection of synonyms in any language. What you reach for is your Roget's. Originally published in 1852, having been compiled over the course of more than four decades by the eponymous but strangely anonymous Peter Mark Roget, the thesaurus we know and love was not the first of its kind... Slate.

Also at Slate, a brief look at overwhelming anxiety.

The rise and rise of Indo-European

The first and most intimate affiliations we have are the genetic ties we share with our family and the language we speak. In the first case, the links are pretty straightforward. Without exception, everyone is created by two parents, who each had two parents, who themselves had two parents, and on and on, so that behind every reader of this review, thousands of mothers and fathers fan out and multiply in a completely predictable way.

Linguistic inheritance, by contrast, is a story of irreducible patterns and historical contingencies... NYT Book Review.

Los Angeles Times Books Prize Nomination

The First Word got a nod in the LA Times Book Prize nominations! Winners will be announced in April.

Do monkeys like Mozart?

Here is my recent piece for New Scientist about animals and music. It begins with an excellent experiment that asked how monkeys distinguish between different musical styles.

Language resuscitation

Can a language really be raised from the dead? I don't think so, but this piece has some good information about what it looks like to try.

Wonderful winter reading

Check out Slate's winter picks. I chose fiction for a change.

A young accent grows up and disappears

Scrunchies, minimum chips, and a streaker's defence in The Age.

Best of 2007

I've been distracted with journalism and will inaugurate the first post of 2008 with a books round-up of 2007. Possibly this is the last "best of" list for '07 or, at least, the most belated. 

Here are my picks for Slate.

In addition to those excellent volumes, it's been a productive year for my friends. Deborah Siegal published Sisterhood Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild. Harriet Washington brought forth the NBCC-nominated  Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. The paperback of The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire by Tom Zoellner came out in June. Alissa Quart's Hothouse Kids: How the Pressure to Succeed Threatens Childhood was released in paperback one month later. Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World came out in paperback in October.

The just-released, and I believe very bestselling, The Sweet Far Thing was written by the ingenious Libba Bray.

Looking ahead, the paperback of Josh Prager's The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World will be published on March 11 and Gary Bass's Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention is coming out in hardback on August 19. Happy reading!

The stuff of Steven Pinker's thought

With his characteristic flair ("verbivores," "whimperatives," "malefactive verbs," "momentaneous events"), Pinker picks language apart to reveal the conceptual scaffolds and preoccupations that underlie it, including pervasive beliefs about the workings of time, space, and motion, as well as the human body. Slate.

Neandertal FoxP2, human too

It was announced today that Neandertals had the same version of the FoxP2 gene that humans do. Because it's thought that our particular version of FoxP2 is involved in speech and language, it may be that Neandertals also had these skills. It'll be interesting to see if Neandertals get an upgrade accordingly, or if the significance of FoxP2 is now downgraded because it turns out to not be so uniquely human after all. National Geographic, Current Biology, Anthropology.net.

Bat FoxP2

Finally, I'm catching up on the bat FoxP2 news. The FoxP2 gene appears to be crucial in humans, quite possibly for the role it played in language evolution. It looks like human FoxP2 changed as a result of adaptation, and so now does FoxP2 in bats. FoxP2 in bats may have changed because of echolocation. A simple link here and more to come. PLoS One.

It's all in the wrist

More evidence that the hobbit, a newly discovered human-like species that grew to only a meter in adulthood, is actually a separate species. Critics suggested that the hobbit, found on the Indonesian island of Flores, was not a separate species but a deformed human. A recent analysis of the tiny people's wrist bones shows that they are more primitive than those of modern humans, in fact they are very like chimpanzee's. It seems likely that the hobbit split off from the hominid lineage quite some time before humans cropped up. New Scientist, NatGeo.

Neandertals in China?

More news from one the teams sequencing the Neandertal genome. Our large cousins traveled at least 2000 miles further than thought. Mitochondrial DNA analyses carried out by Svante Paabo and colleagues show that Neandertals traveled to central Asia and Siberia, and may even have reached Mongolia and China. Nature.

Men and women are from Earth

A great review of Deborah Cameron's new book, "The Myth of Mars and Venus." From the reviewer, Susannah Herbert:

[Cameron] cites the slew of news reports last year claiming that women on average utter 20,000 words a day, while men on average manage only 7,000. This “fact”, from a popular science book called The Female Brain, turned out to be based not on research, but on a self-help book, which itself cited other self-help books, each featuring wildly varying figures. As Cameron concludes, “All the numbers were plucked from thin air. The claims were so variable because they were guesswork.” The invented figures were quietly deleted from reprints of the book — without headlines.

  

What you notice when you're not trying to notice anything

I've had my head down with some journalism--posts to come. But it's been a busy month for Neanderthals. hobbits, language, and evolution in general. First up: humans seem to have a special knack for noticing animals--they're much better at it than noticing inanimate objects, like cars, for example. Second, researchers show that we are quicker to detect fear in someone else's face than we are to see their smile.

When speciesism is good

Chimpanzees are smarter than humans. Orangutans are smarter than chimpanzees. Humans are smarter than chimpanzees. Which of these statements is true? More at Huffington Post.

More Yangtze

Mark Cawardine, who co-wrote Last Chance to See with Douglas Adams, has a piece in this week's New Scientist on the Yangtze river dolphin. The overall picture remains grim, though Cawardine does mention a possible recent sighting in August. New Scientist.

Surgery changes accent

A young boy who underwent lifesaving brain surgery wakes up with a different British accent. The Age.

Weather didn't kill off Neandertals

Of the many possible explanations for the demise of the Neandertals (competition with humans, sex with humans and being folded into our genome, infection from humans, climate), researchers say in this week's Nature that climate can now be ruled out. A massive project at The University of Leeds examined three possible extinction dates for our sister species. They compared the dates with a deep-sea core drilled from the Cariaco Basin in Venezuela and found that in two cases there was no change in the weather, and in the last case, an encroaching cold change was 1000 years in the making--not the kind of cataclysmic event that would extinguish a species overnight.

A beautiful Neandertal smile

Neandertals took care of their teeth. Two molars over 64,000 years old show signs of regular cleaning. Reuters.

Isn't it romantic?

Male chimpanzees in West Africa raid fruit from farms and orchards to share with females. In most cases, the males shared their booty with reproductive females in a food-for-sex swap. PLoS One.

Alex

Alex is dead. The 31-year-old African gray parrot was a resident of Irene Pepperberg's lab at Brandeis University, and for decades Pepperberg taught Alex elements of English. As a result, he had the language capabilities of a two-year-old and the cognitive capacity of an older child. The famous bird was filmed by camera crews from all over the world, he appeared in stories in major newspapers, Pepperberg wrote a book about him, and he was featured on Scientific American Frontiers ("He loved Alan Alda," said Pepperberg)... More at The Huffington Post.

Intentional design

Human-animal embryos have been given the go-ahead by the British government. Guardian.

Thank you, Rod Stewart. Seriously.

Earlier this year, Rod Stewart married model Penny Lancaster, promising to love and honor the latest version of his eerily uniform young-blonde-wife prototype. The new Mrs. Stewart is younger than Stewart's own young daughter, and at this rate, it's hard to believe the deeply lined rocker won't end up dating his own distant, blonde descendants. But it turns out, Rod, you are to be thanked. And the pre-menopausal ladies you callously jilted? They should thank you most of all. No, not because they don't have to sleep with you anymore, but for something much more important. Scientists say, in not exactly these words, that it is the old goats who keep the human race alive for longer...  More at The Huffington Post.

Sometimes climate change is good

Between 135,000 and 70,000 years ago, the east African climate was highly unstable and subject to megadroughts. In the worst droughts, Lake Malawi had less than 15% of the water it has today. Crucially, around 70,000 years ago, the climate changed and became wetter and more stable. Surely it's no coincidence that this is when the human species underwent a rapid expansion and began to leave the continent to eventually colonize the rest of the world. PNAS.

Only connect, Superman

The intricate ways humans connect with one another to co-create reality help explain the origin of language and culture in some very interesting ways. Most recently, Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney published Baboon Metaphysics, exposing the layers of social hierarchy in a baboon group in Botswana. The way the baboons parse their society is like a basic syntax. This week's New Scientist points to a funny account of the social connectedness of superheroes and villains in the Marvel universe. Guess who has the better social network?

Neandertal genome project hits snag

Over the last year, two separate groups of researchers have been trying to sequence the Neandertal genome using DNA from the same fossil. An independent team assessed both group's analyses and announced this week that there were worrying inconsistencies between the two sets of findings. It's possible that at least one of the samples has been contaminated by modern human DNA. PLoS Genetics, Science.

Wisdom teeth

Nine teeth from an ancient gorilla have been unearthed in Ethiopia. The ten-million-year-old molars and canine suggest that the human line split from these apes even longer ago than we thought. The newly discovered gorilla fills a gap in the otherwise blank primate fossil record in Africa between 8 and 14 million years ago. New Scientist.

Not-quite-suspended animation

How do bacteria survive encased in ice for millions of years? Scientist used to believe the genetic material was essentially frozen in stasis. New studies suggest that in order to stay viable the bacteria must undergo continual DNA repair over the many long years of preservation. PNAS. If life is to be found on Mars or Europa, they suggest, the best place to look will be in ice.

Imperfect pitch

Those with perfect pitch perception misidentify the G# note most often, recognizing it only 52% of the time. Perfect pitch also declines with age. PNAS.

Do the waggle dance-smell

The honeybee waggle dance has long been considered an amazing example of symbolic communication in insect life. Bees use the dance to signal the location of faraway food to other bees in the hive. This week researchers show that the dance is not only symbolic. Dancing bees also emit a smell that is appealing to other bees. The scent may encourage watcher-bees to the dance floor so as to help recruit more foragers for the food. PLoS Biology.

The origins of bipedalism in Natasha

A black macaque called Natasha walks like a human after surviving the flu. LiveScience

Monkey baby mama talk

LiveScience brings together two fascinating studies on motherese--the swooping, exagerated way that mothers speak to their babies. In the first study, scientists played different examples of English baby-talk to a group of non-literate, hunter-horticulturalists in Ecuador who speak Shuar. The Shuar-speakers could tell what the English mothers intended over 70% of the time. But baby-talk isn't just human. It turns out that rhesus monkey mothers also speak to their babies with exagerated, musical pitch.

Chimpanzee favors

Alpha males reward their buddies by giving them sexual access to the most desirable females. Is anyone surprised by this? Current Biology

How much does your baby know?

Young babies don't do a lot, but every year we discover there is a lot more going on inside than you can tell. The latest news is that four-month-olds already have an idea about the shape of a word. EEG measurement showed that infants this young recognize patterns of word stress that are specific to language, and they are better at recognizing words from their own language. Previously, only 6 to 12-month-olds had been shown to have knowledge about their language. Current Biology.

More to crow about

There's a lot relevant to language evolution in the latest Current Biology. First up: crows. The First Word reports on Betty the New Caledonian crow who worked out how to build a hook so as to snare some hard-to-reach food. The most remarkable part of Betty's feat was that there was no trial and error, she just sized the problem up and went to work. The ability of New Caledonian crows to use common sense is confirmed by a recent experiment where a number of birds had to work out how to use a short stick to get a long stick that would then reach food. The researchers say that the crow's ability to reason through a problem rivals even that of apes. Current Biology, LiveScience.

Warm tails

Mice, elephants, and other animals hear and make sounds that are well outside the range of human hearing. It was discovered only very recently, for example, that mice sing in frequencies much higher than we can perceive. It's been known for longer that animals, like birds, are decorated in, and can see, colors outside the human spectrum. This week scientists announce that when squirrels are faced by rattlesnakes which can see infrared, the squirrels heat their tails, making them seem larger in the infrared than they actually are. PNAS. I haven't come across any other examples of mammals selectively heating a part of their body in order to repel a predator.

Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes, and she's gone

"...[W]hat is the benefit of taking one of the most iconic examples of the human story from Africa to parade it around in second-level museums in the United States?" asked Richard Leakey in an Associated Press interview. Leakey is protesting the controversial decision to take the famous Lucy fossil and tour her in the United States for six years. Damage to the 3.5 million-year-old bones is, he says, inevitable. Washington Post, BBC, LiveScience.

Gene popsicles

In the Dry Valleys of the Transantarctic Mountains there are pockets of ice up to 8 million years old. Last week, scientists announced that they resuscitated microbes from this ice. If the microbes are as old as the ice, they were around long before humans split from the chimpanzee/bonobo line, approximately 6 million years ago. The scientists call their sample a "gene popsicle" and speculate that in periods of the Earth's history when ancient ice melted, microbes in samples like theirs might have been reincorporated into current populations--which might be something like dating your great- great- great- to-the-1000th grandmother. They also wonder if the preservation of microbes in icy comets may have seeded planets with genetic material as distant in space as well as time. PNAS, National Geographic.

Dynasty drama

The discovery of a jawbone and skull from two ancient hominids by mother and daughter team Maeve and Louise Leakey suggest that the human family tree may need rewriting. Unearthed in Kenya, the remains of Homo habilis and Homo erectus indicate that the two lived side-by-side in Africa for at least half a million years. Previously it was thought that they lived one after the other, Whether H. erectus evolved from H. habilis or whether they each arose from a common ancestor is yet to be discovered. National Geographic.

So long, and thanks for all the fish

The Yangtze River dolphin, so memorably sought by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine in Last Chance to See, has been declared extinct. A 2000-mile survey of the river in December didn't sight any of the delicate mammals.  Noise and other pollution from humans is thought to be responsible. Time, Slashdot.

Pregnant pauses

Brain imaging reveals a big shift in activity when music plays and then pauses. The brains of subjects listening to symphonies with frequent pauses erupted into a flurry of processing whenever the music stopped. Neuron, San Jose Mercury News.

They want you to know what they know

An ingenuous experiment announced last week shows that orangutans communicate with intention. When the orangutans were shown food (delicious items, like bananas and bread, and less appealing food, like celery) that could only be reached with human help, they clearly communicated their desire to be passed the food by using various gestures (blowing raspberries, spitting, pointing). When the researchers pretended to misunderstand the requests by offering only half of the food, offering the wrong food, or pretending to not get the request at all, the apes tried various familiar strategies to be understood. If completely misinterpreted they would devise a new gesture, if half-understood, they would reiterate their gesture with vigor. Current Biology. Mike Tomasello and colleagues have shown similar results with chimpanzees. Live Science, BBC, SciAm.

When language explodes

Children typically acquire a few words very slowly and then around 2 years of age undergo a 'word explosion.' A cognitive scientist at the University of Iowa has built a mathematical model which suggests that this amazing phenomenon is not genetically controlled, as has long been thought. Instead children experience a burst in learning because language consists mostly of words that are medium-hard to learn. There are many fewer easy and hard words. The word spurt is just a byproduct of the learning process and the nature of language. The pattern of slow growth up until a crucial threshold is, apparently, true for many domains in which children learn, such as music, art, and athletics. Why Files, New Scientist, Bob McMurray.

Vowel geography

Young infants can distinguish subtle contrasts that exist in speech sounds of all languages of all the world. English babies, for example, hear the difference between Zulu clicks, something that untrained English adults are hopeless at. This ability is lost as children zoom in on the distinctions made in their native language. Researchers at Stanford have built a model that suggests children learn vowel contrasts in their own language because of general, innate biases. These inborn tendencies allow young language-learners to work out how many different vowels exist in their language and where they lie with respect to each other.  Moreover, the swooping, exaggerated way that parents speak to their children makes it easier for them learn the differences between vowels in their native language. PNAS.

Accidental beauty

The difference between the hulking heads of our Neanderthal cousins and our more graceful selves is merely a matter of chance, say scientists in the Journal of Human Evolution. The difference between our skulls and theirs probably results from genetic drift--meaning that our head shape was not selected by nature or in any sense 'intended' but only accidentally came to be. At least we got the nice skulls... the authors of the study say, "Neandertal and modern human crania may simply represent two outcomes from a vast space of random evolutionary possibilities." Anthropology.net, Science Direct/Journal of Human Evolution.

Wake up!

In a minimally conscious state, people show a random, intermittent awareness of themselves and their environment. In the August 2 issue of Nature, scientists announced that for the first time they were able to improve the responses of such a patient. Electrical stimulation from electrodes planted deep inside the man's brain resulted in him showing more control of his limbs, eating with his mouth more often, and understanding more communication.  The Loom, Medical News Today.

Powells.com essay

I wrote a short essay, "A path to language," for the good people at Powell's book store. Checkout Powells.com for all of their excellent author interviews, essays and Q&A's.