Evolang: Neandertals speak? BRCA: Martina Navratilova and Robin Roberts misspeak? iPhone: To speak is only the beginning.
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TALKING ABOUT THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE. Edmund Blair Bolles is in mid-conference, blogging about the goings-on at Evolang, the biennial meeting on the origins of language. His posts began Wednesday and are continuing as we speak at his blog on the origins of speech, Babel's Dawn. In his opening post he observes:
Although a conference like this one is sure to have surprises, the biggest contest is expected to be about whether the brain includes a module dedicated to processing language.
From which I infer that things haven't changed all that much since my last formal grad school linguistics class, which was A Very Long Time Ago. A pleasant contrast to the continuing whirlwinds in most other fields. Well, that's why we all chose science writing, right? Every day a seminar. The perfect career for the short attention span.
So, did Neandertals have language? Bolles reports on a paper by archaeologist Will Roebroeks concluding that we don't know and probably never will. Goody, then I will never run out of reasons to write about it.
A point of intrigue is that Neandertals had that language-related gene, FoxP2, just like ours. (And I learn from an earlier Bolles post that FoxP2 seems to be related to vocal learning in other species too, even ones as far distant from our own as birds.)
It's quite clear that Neandertals were smart enough to talk (and perhaps even smart enough to know when to keep their mouths shut, which would make them a lot smarter than we are.) That cleverness comes through in today's most fascinating fact, which I also picked up from this post, though it has nothing to do with language.
Roebroeks says Neandertals were using fire for complex weapon-making 200,000 years ago. They fabricated a strong glue from birch bark and with it were able to glue stones to a handle to fashion a bludgeon. But the fun part is that the process only worked if the fire temperature was held to a relatively narrow range, between 340-400 degrees C, and no oxygen was present. How did they accomplish it 200,000 years ago? No one knows that, either.
MARTINA NAVRATILOVA SPEAKS ABOUT HER BREAST CANCER. Laura Newman, thank you Laura, has directed me (and others) to an Eve Harris post taking tennis champ Martina Navratilova to task. (Harris calls her blog "A Healthy Piece of My Mind" but, regrettably, posts infrequently.) The tennis champ's sin was spreading misinformation about BRCA in going public — exclusively on ABC's "Good Morning America" — with her diagnosis. The "double fault" consisted of not explaining that free and low-cost mammograms are available and that the course of the disease is unpredictable.
I didn't see the broadcast, but from Harris's description I gotta say that the chatter struck me as at most what in my convent days would have been called venial — that is, not terribly serious — sins. Navratilova's comments don't appear any more misleading than most celebrity disease disclosures. Especially considering the appalling level of nearly all disease discussion in the media, especially on TV.
Yeah, we should all be aware that the world is full of people without money and resources and help is often available to them. I suspect that Navratilova's life includes few such people, however. That she isn't sensitive to their plight, or knowledgeable about their potential resources, is not particularly amazing. In fact, I would say that this is the point where the interviewer (ABC's Robin Roberts), had she been as well prepped as an interviewer ought to be, could have jumped in and noted that mammograms are available even to those who can't pay. I'm not sure we should expect more from celebrity athletes than we do from celebrity "news" interviewers.
And yeah, women ought to be more aware that a breast cancer diagnosis is not a death sentence. But Navratilova was scared to death and feared that's exactly what would happen. Which is normal, not nuts. We don't know what Navratilova's doc said to her or how other life experiences — and other misinformation promulgated by media — shaped her response to the diagnosis.
But one thing we do know is that, when the bad news happens to you, rationality vanishes into your panic. When my doc phoned to tell me that my mammogram results were suspicious and that we should schedule a biopsy, my frontal cortex pretty much shut down for a few days — and I'm a lot better informed than most women. (And lucky; it was a cyst.)
This was the time for well-prepped Robin Roberts to put her oar in again, uttering soothing statistics and speaking in measured tones about diagnostic uncertainties. Yes, the tennis great is less than great as a BRCA expert. I regret that, but I'm not convinced that breast cancer expertise is part of her job description. The person who should be spanked is the "news" interviewer who didn't take seriously her job description: presenter of factual information, dispeller of misinformation. Who didn't do her homework.
SPEAKING OF INFORMATION, CHECK OUT MOBILE MEDICINE APPS FOR iDEVICES. The SciAm blog Observations has a short piece by Katherine Harmon describing medical applications for the iPhone. (Turns out there's even a web site devoted to them, iMedicalapps. Oddly, it contains an April 12 article that would seem to be working against the site's commercial interests. The piece points out that medical apps may be Not a Good Thing because they can turn patients into healthcare consumers.)
There are now an amazing 2K or so medical iApps, some of which apparently work on other smartphones as well. Some apps are aimed only at docs or researchers, but others are intended for people with specific diseases. To say nothing of hypochondriacs.
Also science writers. One app that looks indispensible is a mobile version of PubMed that, in addition to literature searches, will summon full-text PDFs and take you to full text at journals where you have access. There's an app that pinpoints disease outbreaks too, and self-help apps potentially useful for writing aimed at consumer audiences. During leisure breaks one can consult an app that finds legal local marijuana dispensaries. For medicinal purposes only, of course.
A lot of the apps will work on the iPod Touch too, but apparently developers must do more tweaking to adapt many to the new iPad. The blogpost includes a Nature video describing that journal's Top Ten list of iPhone med apps.
