The term “alpha male” is one of those designations we hang on people without much thought of its origins or its true implications.

It’s kind of like describing someone as a “Type A personality” or saying a particular behavior is “passive-aggressive.” What we really mean, in the case of the guy labeled Type A, is that he works hard and gets a lot done. If we say someone’s passive-aggressive, as often as not we’re slapping a pathology on someone who just doesn’t care enough to give us whatever we need at the moment we need it.

But calling someone an alpha male is both more specific and, in most cases, more respectful. It implies that the guy has fought his way to the top of whatever group he leads. Moreover, it suggests he could fight his way to the top of any organization he chooses, and breed…

Tags: Tags: fallacies, family, leadership, personality, science

If vampires really existed, they’d replace the entire human race in 30 months, according to a paper written by physicists at the University of Central Florida and analyzed at the Collision Detection blog here. (Here’s the PDF of the study; hat tip to Rachel Sklar.)

Here’s the argument:

Anyone who has seen John Carpenter’s Vampires or the movie Blade or any of the host of other vampire films is already quite familiar with how the legend goes. The vampires need to feed on human blood. After one has stuck his fangs into your neck and sucked you dry, you turn into a vampire yourself and carry on the blood-sucking legacy. The fact of the matter is, if vampires truly feed with even a tiny fraction of the frequency that they are depicted to in the movies and folklore, then the human race would have been wiped out quite quickly…

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Newsweek‘s cover story has two fun facts I didn’t know about human evolution.

The first is kind of a head-scratcher:

Head lice live in the hair on the head. But body lice, a larger variety, are misnamed: they live in clothing. Head lice, as a species, go back millions of years, while body lice are a more recent arrival. [Mark] Stoneking, an evolutionary anthropologist, had a hunch that he could calculate when body lice evolved from head lice by comparing the two varieties’ DNA, which accumulates changes at a regular rate. (It’s like calculating how long it took a typist to produce a document if you know he makes six typos per minute.)

That fork in the louse’s family tree, he and colleagues at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology concluded, occurred no more than 114,000 years ago. Since new kinds of creatures tend to appear when a new habitat does,…

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Is it my imagination, or was this a big week for news from the animal kingdom

First up is the iguana who needs sexual healing:

Mozart, an iguana with an erection that has lasted for over a week, will have his penis amputated in the next couple of days.

Veterinarians at Antwerp’s Aquatopia had sought to treat the animal’s problem, but decided removal was the only solution because of the risk of infection. The good news for Mozart and his mates is that male iguanas have two penises.

Mozart, sitting on the shoulders of his keeper as camera crews focused on his red, swollen erection, seemed unperturbed by the news.

“It doesn’t bother him. He doesn’t know what amputation means,” said vet Luc Lambrecht, adding that Mozart’s sexual activity should be undimmed by the operation.”I don’t think so. That’s all in his head.”

Then there’s the prodigal golden retriever:

Cujo was a frisky 7-year-old when…

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I’ve made no secret of my occasional obsession over Neanderthals, particularly the question of whether modern humans and their big-shouldered cousins ever succumbed to the love that dare not reveal its DNA. So I thought I’d share this, in case you missed it:

A skull found in a cave in Romania includes features of both modern humans and Neanderthals, possibly suggesting that the two may have interbred thousands of years ago. Neanderthals were replaced by early modern humans. Researchers have long debated whether the two groups mixed together, though most doubt it. The last evidence for Neanderthals dates from at least 24,000 years ago. The skull bearing both older and modern characteristics is discussed in a paper by Erik Trinkaus of Washington University in St. Louis. The report appears in Tuesday’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To see a Neanderthal…

Tags: Tags: neanderthals, science

Continuing with my Neanderthal obsession (see here and especially here), a new study reopens the debate over whether Brutus and Olive Oyl got their freak on.

Here‘s how the New York Times describes it:

In research being published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists reported that matings between Neanderthals and modern humans presumably accounted for the presence of a variant of the gene that regulates brain size. …

In previous research, Dr. Lahn and associates discovered that a gene for brain size called microcephalin underwent a significant change 37,000 years ago. Its modified variant, or allele, appeared to confer a fitness advantage on those who possessed it. It is now present in about 70 percent of the world’s population.

The new research focused on the two classes of alleles of the brain gene. One appeared to have emerged 1.1 million years ago…

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I’ve written a lot about human metabolism over the years, particularly the biological forces and personal choices that make it speed up or slow down. That led me to studies from Eric Poehlman, which I may not have cited directly but usually at least considered before I completed whatever it was I was working on.

So when Poehlman was exposed as one of the most audacious frauds in U.S. academic history a year and a half ago, I was caught off guard, as I wrote here.

Now the New York Times Magazine has a long feature on the student who first exposed Poehlman.

It starts with lab technician Walter DeNiro’s suspicions about data that mysteriously morphs from disproving one of Poehlman’s theses to supporting it. Then he looks more deeply into the problem:

DeNino spent the next several evenings combing through hundreds of patients’ records in the lab and university hospital, trying…

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This reads like the plot of a sci-fi novel, but I have to assume the guy is serious:

Social division might split humans into two sub-species 100,000 years from now, an evolution expert has claimed. The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative.

They would be a far cry from the “underclass” humans, who will have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat, goblin-like creatures.

The forecast was made by Dr. Oliver Curry, who spent two months investigating the ascent and descent of man over the next 100 millennia.

He said, within a thousand years, humans will evolve into coffee-coloured giants between 6 and 7 feet tall. But Dr. Curry said centuries of sexual selection — being choosy about one’s partner — was likely to create more and more genetic inequality. The logical outcome would be two sub-species, “gracile” and “robust” humans.

Dr. Curry said: “Things could get…

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Before I get into the bit about the scientist who cured hiccups with a finger in the rectum, I want to pause to point out my favorite news from the frontiers of scientific observation:

Julia R. Fox, assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University isn’t joking when she says [The Daily Show with Jon Stewart], which last week featured Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf as a guest, is just as substantive as network coverage.

While much has been written in the media about The Daily Show‘s impact, Fox’s study is the first scholarly effort to systematically examine how the comedy program compares to traditional television news as sources of political information.

The study, “No Joke: A Comparison of Substance in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Broadcast Network Television Coverage of the 2004 Presidential Election Campaign,” will be published next summer by the Journal of Broadcast and Electronic Media, published by the…

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The bass swimming near our nation’s capital are, increasingly, showing signs of gender confusion:

Abnormally developed fish, possessing both male and female characteristics, have been discovered in the Potomac River in the District and in tributaries across the region, federal scientists say — raising alarms that the river is tainted by pollution that drives hormone systems haywire.

The fish, smallmouth and largemouth bass, are naturally males but for some reason are developing immature eggs inside their sex organs. Their discovery at such widely spread sites, including one just upstream from the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, seems to show that the Potomac’s problem with “intersex” fish extends far beyond the West Virginia stream where they were first found in 2003.

The cause of the abnormalities is unknown, but scientists suspect a class of waterborne contaminants that can confuse animals’ growth and reproductive systems. These pollutants are poorly understood, however, leaving many observers with questions…

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