A binder full of hominids

Today, students in my Physical Anthropology class did their hominid phylogeny lab.  They were confronted by this cast of characters (from left: Australopithecus afarensis, A. africanus, Paranthropus aethiopicus, Paranthropus boisei, Homo habilis, and H. erectus):

The students' task was to make a series of observations on these skulls, record them, and then use their results to create hypotheses about the phylogenetic relationships among them: how closely or distantly they're related, and who is most likely ancestral to whom.  The observations involved were:

Presence or absence of sagittal crest
Presence or absence of nuchal crest
Rounded or angular occipital area
Overall length of skull
Overall width of face
Maximum width of premolars
Maximum width of molars
Maximum height of brow ridge

It was nice to see the students going around the lab, moving from skull to skull, making their observations and helping each other out.  The real point of the exercise is not whether they come up with the "right" answers (do even the experts know them?).  It's that for a little while, they are engaged with real-world data, or at least as close as we can to it.

And they discover that the real world can be messy. Some of the measurements are fairly straightforward, such as the length of the skull.  But some, such as molar width, are not always so easy, due to the condition of the fossils.  Some of the observations are about deciding whether a feature is present or not.  Sagittal crests are pretty easy to spot, but nuchal crests seem to give them more trouble and I could hear them arguing about it.  Perhaps most perplexing of all is the occipital region: is it rounded, or is there some angularity to it?

I tried to help them by putting out a male orangutan with very clear sagittal and nuchal crests, but it didn't sound like it helped much.  I also suggested that if they find themselves looking at a skull and wondering whether some feature is there or not, it probably isn't.  That may not have helped much either.

For all the above reasons, this is my favorite lab exercise.  We'll see what happens when they turn in their completed assignments next week.

Matthews: Republicans using the Cold War playbook

In the "Let Me Finish" segment of his MSNBC program Hardball last night, host Chris Matthews put a name to the Beast in a way that I cannot recall seeing on the mainstream media.  Matthews drew a parallel between the way the Republicans constantly block virtually anything President Obama tries to do, sometimes including things they themselves had previously supported, and the way the US brought down governments they didn't like (Guatemala, Chile, the Dominican Republic, etc.) during the Cold War.

During the Cold War, when the people of a country elected a leader that the US was not comfortable with, the CIA and other agencies went to work to bring down that leader.  As Matthews puts it, this is what is happening with Obama.  Many Republicans in high places see him as elected by mistake, like Chile's Allende, and so their job is to make him fail, as we did with Allende.  Just as the Chilean people had the temerity to elect for themselves a socialist leader, the American people have elected (twice!) a relatively progressive leader who also just happens to be African American.  This situation must be corrected.

My additional take: Since Obama can hardly be called a "socialist" in any meaningful sense of the term, we are left with the impression that what bothers Republicans the most is that he is African American. 

Charles Darwin, again...

Another nice Darwin image:

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

Today is Charles Darwin's 204th birthday!

Wait. What?

This may be the weirdest story I've heard in a long time.  I have not yet seen the new documentary Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, about attempts over the years by high-ups in the Catholic church to hide the church's rampant pedophilia.  But, according to a review in the San Francisco Chronicle, the makers of the film claim that:

In 1965, the Rev. Gerald Fitzgerald, who had co-founded the Servants of the Paraclete, advanced a plan to have the church buy the Caribbean island of Carriacou and even put a down payment on the island. His plan was to move all the pedophilic priests to the island to keep them from harming other children - like some kind of sexual deviant version of an old-fashioned leper colony. While the idea seems absurd, the fact that it was even considered shows how committed the church was to the cover-up.

 Wow.  Can this be true?  Carriacou is where I spent my Peace Corps service (1971-74) and also where I have, over the years, carried out linguistic research on the English and French Creole languages spoken there. Due to its French colonial past, Catholicism has been a fixture of Carriacou culture for centuries.  But this, really?

If it is true, what was supposed to happen if the "sale" went through, I wonder?  Would the local people be allowed to continue living there, and if so, what sort of safeguards would have been put in place to protect the island's children from these repugnant "priests?"  And if the idea was to move them, where would the 3,000 or so people have been moved to?  Or were the descendants of African slaves on a little Caribbean island sufficiently unimportant that nobody really cared? 

 

And what role might the Grenadian leader of the time, Eric Gairy, have played in this?  Given that Carriacou was typically the center of political opposition to Gairy, and remembering what sort of leader he was, it's not hard to imagine him selling off the people of Carriacou, especially if enough money were involved.

 

I'm no fan of religion, especially Big Religion, but it's hard even for me to believe that a religion could foster such obscene callousness.

CNBC: University professor is the "least stressful job"

According to Careercast.com, and as reported by CNBC, university professor is the "least stressful job" for 2013.  Here's what Tony Lee, publisher of Careercast.com, says about it:

"If you look at the criteria for stressful jobs, things like working under deadlines, physical demands of the job, environmental conditions hazards, is your life at risk, are you responsible for the life of someone else, they rank like 'zero' on pretty much all of them!" Lee said.
Plus, they're in total control. They teach as many classes as they want and what they want to teach. They tell the students what to do and reign over the classroom. They are the managers of their own stress level."

Let's go through some of this and see how it holds up.

Working under deadlines.  Hmmm...  I am always under some kind of deadline:  deadline for ordering textbooks; deadline for posting my syllabuses; deadline for posting office hours (coming up soon); deadline for entering midterm grades for freshmen; deadline for posting final grades online; and so on.  And those are just the teaching deadlines.  There are deadlines for applying for things, deadlines for signing things, deadlines for...  well, you get the picture.

Physical demands of the job.  Ok, in general this gig is not too physically demanding, but you can get pretty tired mentally and physically by the time you finish teaching for a day.  And try moving back and forth in front of 30 or 40 or a couple hundred students, lecturing and at the same time fielding some of the most off-the-wall questions you can imagine.  When you walk into a class and confront a group of college students, you really never know exactly what is going to happen, and you have to be able to think on your feet.

Environmental conditions hazards.  Yeah...  We actually had our social sciences building demolished because it was "sick," and making the people who inhabited it sick.  And, a few years ago I stood on a chair to put a video in a classroom VCR; the chair collapsed under me and I came away with a broken little finger, which required a trip to the emergency room so the good doctor could put the finger back together.

Is your life at risk?  Do I even have to say anything about standing up in front of dozens of people and telling them something they don't like to hear, in this day and age?  Especially when some of them are failing?

They teach as many classes as they want and what they want to teach.  No, not really.  At UNF we teach three classes per semester (in addition to performing service and research).  Those classes are dictated largely by what will put seats in the classroom chairs.  I'd love to teach a course on Caribbean Creole languages (my research specialty), but I'll likely never get to as long as I am where I am, because not enough people will sign up for it. What classes we teach is also dictated by our curriculum, which includes core courses that have to be taught, every semester.

They tell the students what to do and reign over the classroom.  "Reign" over the classroom, do we?  It doesn't feel that way to me.  One reason is the cultural attitudes students bring toward higher education and faculty.  We, the professoriate, are probably the most reviled class in America.  Articles like this one are a major reason why.

I'm guessing that Tony Lee never had to put together a tenure and promotion dossier, or an application for a summer research grant, or, well, whatever.

God's grade inflation, and more...

Tomorrow is the start of classes at my school.  I'll be doing Linguistic Anthropology (36 students), Physical Anthropology (28 students), and an Introduction to Anthropology (127 students signed up, but the cap is 200).  These are all undergraduate classes: we have no graduate program in Anthropology.  And thus, no teaching assistants for grading, etc.

Meanwhile....  A couple of days ago a small plane carrying three people crashed into a home south of here.  The only survivor was the person who was at home.  She came out pretty much unscathed and declared "God is good."

Uh huh.  God puts four people in extreme jeopardy, kills three of them, and is pronounced "good."  I wouldn't give a student a "good" if they made 25% on a test. God must be benefitting from grade inflation.