Humans and Neandertals

I'm still read Science magazine while taking lunch and the latest tidbits to come from my browsing the last few days are to do with human migrations and Neandertals.

According to 26 October 2007 magazine, Neandertals had red hair and fair complexions (p. 546). And then recently I read (I can't remember where) that in a few years red hair will be non-existent. But according to Wikipedia, that fact is not true. There are lots of interesting facts and lore about red heads on their site. I suppose my interest was drawn to this snippet because my grandmother had red hair and several cousins on both my Welsh and Scots sides.

I just went to a computerized family history conference and one session included information on finding family members through DNA testing. So when I saw an article in Science magazine on migrations to the Americas through DNA testing, I scanned the article. What was interesting to me was that the people in the Americas were what is termed "modern" homo sapiens, only from 16 ka (16,000 years ago). Hmm. What does it all mean?

Enhanced Food and other anomalies

I received an email from a friend telling me about the problems of aspartame which set me to musing about the problem of enhanced food. In order to get some facts, I checked on this message on one of my hoaxbusters and urban legends website. (http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blasp.htm) Although it is partially true, it’s quite exaggerated. Its language alerted me to look this up. The email has been around since 1995. I’m not a fan of soft drinks anyway and rarely drink them but the information is a little over the top. Anyway, there’s a website on aspartame http://www.aspartame.org/ that gives more details about this product. (I actually don’t ever use sugar-free anything. I don’t trust man-made foods.) I also looked at Monsanto, the company that makes aspartame. Apparently they began in 1901 and their first product: saccharine! Hmm. And they also introduced Bst for milk products. They also seemed to be heavily involved in creating plants with built-in herbicides. I would consider this more subtle “poisoning.” I’ve developed an allergy to corn and perhaps it’s the “new and improved” corn that is the problem. (I also can no longer eat American beef because in this country cattle are corn-fed.)

I actually have had discussions with two of my bosses at work, one a chemist (associate dean for GE), the other a botanist and geneticist (dean of undergraduate education). Their work and research is involved in “improving” nature. I had one conversation with my boss (the chemist) who wondered why people were reluctant to use irradiated food. The purpose of this is to stop spoilage, give food more shelf life. He gave an example that you could have a bag of strawberries that would not spoil after a month or so. I had an image of a package of such “food” looking more like plastic rather real fruit. When I asked if there would be loss of nutrients, he said that it would lose a little. To me it was a weird conversation but he seemed perfectly OK with it. To me this research seems to help businesses rather than protecting the wholesomeness of food. I think freeze drying, canning, and dehydrating is great so I’m not completely opposed to food preservation. We live in a very complicated world. I know we can’t have completely organic food but I think there should be a better balance because I believe additives and “restructured” food is becoming the norm now and that, in my view, is a problem.

I’m not opposed to science and the good it can do, I guess I just don’t always see a balance in real life, especially when it filters down to corporations. I just skimmed an article in one of the science magazines in the office, “Science and Technology for Sustainable Well-Being” (Science, 25 Jan 2008), in which the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) President reports on what science is doing to help with such things as global mortality; land, water and terrestrial biota; world’s water; world’s energy supply, etc. If you want to read it it’s online at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol319/issue5862/index.dtl then scroll down to Association Affairs and click on link to text of Presidential Address.

I think I need to have a permanent link to this magazine. The Dean gets it delivered and a copy is always available in the conference room which is more like a lounge. I will sit in this room with its views of Timpanogos and campus from the windows and a Minerva Tichert picture hanging on one of the walls. As I eat my lunch, I read a few articles from this magazine. Most of it is way above my head but some articles pique my interest, like the one above. They set me to musing.

Musing on Musing

I decided I needed a blog in which to share thoughts and arguments and quirky, inconsequential bits of information. I had a hard time coming up with a name but I kept coming back to "musings." It seems so cliché until I read the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of musings. So here is the etymology of musings according to the OED:

[<>muser (12th cent.) prob. <>*mus face (see MUZZLE n.¹). Cf. Old Occitan muzar to gape (12th cent.; Occitan musar), Catalan musar to dream away the time, Italian (arch.) musare to idle, loaf around (13th cent.), to gape, wonder (c1300), (of an animal) to hold the snout up, sniff about (15th cent.), post-classical Latin musare to stare, waste time (1311 in a British source).
The widely divergent sense development in Old French app. has its origin in the description of different facial expressions: the sense ‘to ponder, reflect’ (c1170; cf. senses 1, 2) is perh. orig. descriptive of the contemplative look of a person deep in thought; the sense ‘to waste time, idle, loaf around’ (c1170, but prob. earlier: cf. musart absent-minded, foolish (1086)) is perh. orig. descriptive of a gaping, staring look; likewise the Anglo-Norman sense ‘to gape, stare, wonder, marvel’ (c1180; cf. sense 3); and the spec. sense ‘to play the bagpipe’ (c1120; cf. MUSE n.²) is perh. orig. descriptive of the puffed-up cheeks of the bagpiper.
With sense 4a cf. French regional (chiefly Walloon) muser to murmur, hum, howl. With sense 6 cf. Old Occitan muzar to wait in vain (12th cent.).

So this will be a place to gape and wonder, idle or loaf around, perhaps even sniff about testing the air of discussion or even hot air and it's certainly a place to stare and waste time!