Global7 the new Millennial Renaissance Vision for the Globe
Features - November 26, 2008
What Would Blackbeard Do? Why Piracy Pays
Q&A with economist Peter Leeson
By John Matson
In the so-called golden age of piracy, spanning the late 17th and early 18th centuries, pirate captains such as Blackbeard and Bartholomew Roberts roamed the seas in search of plunder.
Their fearsome exploits became the stuff of lore, inspiring countless films, books, amusement-park rides and, ahem, more films. But those same exploits also fed a reputation that facilitated their activities—a sort of brand name that was widely known and was instantly recognizable by its logo, the Jolly Roger (a black flag with a skull and crossbones).
In a new paper, "Pirational Choice," and in the forthcoming book The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, economist Peter Leeson of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., examines the inner workings of pirate organizations.
He makes the case that pirates, far from being the unrestrained barbarians of legend, were actually shrewd businessmen who carefully calculated their actions to increase their haul while minimizing risk and expenditure. Leeson spoke to us recently about his research and how modern-day pirates stack up against their golden-age counterparts. An edited transcript follows.
Your central thesis seems to be that pirates are not the roving ruthless barbarians that they've been portrayed as but instead are very conscious and rational money-maximizers.
That's right. Piracy is an employment, and I think that we should think about sailors' decisions to enter piracy as opposed to, say, the legitimate merchant service as an employment decision just like anybody else's. The same features that are driving pirates' behavior drive our behavior when we think about employment options. And they are rational again in the traditional economic sense, which is that they respond to incentives and they consistently act to achieve their goals.
You discuss strategies that pirates employ to brand themselves and to develop the image of barbarians not to be trifled with. And you highlight this by citing the example of the Jolly Roger.
At the time that pirates of the early 18th century were operating in the Caribbean, there were other potential attackers that a merchant crew might confront. The reason that's important is because those other potential attackers were less fearsome than pirates, because they were constrained by the law. Pirates could do whatever they wanted to you if you resisted them, but these guys were, at least in principle, somewhat limited.
So if pirates wanted to take the prey with as little resistance as possible, which they did because they wanted to keep costs down, what they needed to do was to somehow indicate that "I'm a pirate and I will kill you if you resist me," as opposed to one of these legitimate attackers. And in response to that need, which is again a profit-driven purpose, pirates developed the Jolly Roger.
Can you please clarify the term "separating equilibrium" that pops up in your chapter on the Jolly Roger?
A separating equilibrium is to be contrasted with what's called a pooling equilibrium. It's part of signaling theory, the idea that people want to engage in various behaviors to communicate something about themselves that isn't directly observable. What makes for a successful signal is if it's more costly for some types to send than it is for others.
Think about it this way: if the Jolly Roger was so effective at facilitating merchant ship surrender, then why didn't the legitimate belligerents, the other guys attacking merchant ships, also want to hoist the Jolly Roger? Because it could have facilitated easier surrender for them, too. My point is that they did want to.
A pooling equilibrium was threatened but was largely prevented by what is called the single-crossing property in economics—the fact that it's more costly for the one type than for the other. And it was more costly for a privateer ship, which was legitimate, because if they raised the Jolly Roger, all of a sudden their status moves from legitimate ... to criminal—they could be caught and hanged. So that's an added cost for them. But pirates, since they were already outlaws, they had already incurred that cost.
In terms of establishing the pirate brand, you discuss cruelty as a means of achieving that notoriety.
That's exactly right. Again, if we think of piracy as a business, as I think we should, their reputation was just as important as it is for any other business. So in order to institutionalize the brand name that they wanted to cultivate, what they needed to do was first work diligently in creating it. The way that they did that was through ruthlessly adhering to this idea of torturing people if they didn't comply with them once they had boarded their ship.
We normally think about pirates as sort of blood-lusting, that they want to slash somebody to pieces. [It's probably more likely that] a pirate, just like a normal person, would probably rather not have killed someone, but pirates knew that if that person resisted them and they didn't do something about it, their reputation and thus their brand name would be impaired. So you can imagine a pirate rather reluctantly engaging in this behavior as a way of preserving that reputation.
In fact, you point out that to be bloodthirsty would undercut the desired result, because it would signal to potential targets that they might as well resist.
The reason that cruelty was effective is because it constituted a cost of a behavior that pirates wanted to deter. If you're a merchant crew and you know that pirates, no matter what you do, are going to try and slaughter you once they board you, well then of course there's no cost to you resisting them.
You might as well try; you'll probably lose, but you're no worse off than if you had just surrendered to them peacefully in the first place. So it was critical for pirates that they only applied heinous tortures when, in fact, they were using it to penalize behavior.
And this is part of this idea of what I call the "invisible hook." It's analogous, in some ways, to Adam Smith's invisible hand [a hypothesized force by which a free-market economy naturally benefits the greater good] in the sense that, of course, pirate prey are worse off as a result of pirates attacking them, but a profit-motivated pirate crew is likely to behave better toward the people they're attacking than one that in fact was truly sadistic and didn't care about money at all. And this is a case where we can see that.
Is that how you're able to separate cause from correlation? What's to say that these pirates weren't just, say, bands of bloodthirsty marauders that lucked into this strategy?
One of the things we can do is look at testable implications of the rational-choice theory. If in fact pirates were truly madmen, we would not expect them to only display that madness in particular cases. Especially, it would be a great coincidence if it happened to be those cases in which it stood to make them money. And that's pretty much precisely what we observe.
Notice the sort of piratical paradox, if you will, that we confront. You've got these depraved and feral sea bandits living somehow by a strict pirate's code, holding judicial sessions, and regulating alcohol use and gambling. The two things just don't seem to match up. First of all, that undermines the claim that pirates were simply crazy, because when it was in their interest, they seemed to be able to behave perfectly rationally.
And the rational-choice framework can really allow us to resolve that piratical paradox, in that you can take one basic core assumption about human behavior and explain two things that seemingly are at odds with each other, as opposed to positing ad hoc pirate motives as we go from practice to practice.
One example that you point to in demonstrating the efficiency of pirate behavior is that, according to at least one pirate historian, Blackbeard didn't kill a single man.
That's a perfect illustration of what we're talking about here and another actual prediction that comes out of the rational-choice theory to a certain extent. The actual instances that we have of pirate brutality—and there are a number of them—an economist would characterize as out-of-equilibrium play, not the norm. Those cases are recorded precisely because something really nasty happened.
And the fact that Blackbeard didn't have to actually kill anybody is an indication of what we would call equilibrium play. The reputation that he'd created was so effective that he didn't have to actually ever carry through on the threat that lay behind that image.
One thing that I thought was interesting is the fact that some of these pirate ships had institutionalized a form of worker's compensation.
They did, and I talk about that in-depth in a different paper I wrote. But that's exactly what they had. And one of the things that's marvelous about the system is, first of all, its earliness. That was not a common thing in the 17th- and 18th-century world.
Merchant sailors, for example, didn't have access to something similar through the state until after pirates had already adopted this. But in any event it was a highly detailed scheme, so if you lost your right arm it would be worth x number of pieces of eight, and if you lost your left leg it would be worth y number of pieces of eight in compensation. So it was quite a developed system.
In this paper you focus primarily on the "golden age" of piracy. But what do you make of piracy today, especially with the Somali pirates in the news of late?
Modern-day pirates … are similar to old-school pirates in the sense that they are plundering on the sea and that they are engaged in plunder on the sea where government is weak.
Other than that, when it comes to their institutional organization, for example, overwhelmingly they seem to be just not that interesting. Now—and as far as I know this is the only case we have of this—when the French government took a pirate crew earlier this year, they did find an actual pirate's manual that laid out rules about how they would treat prisoners. It points again to the profit-seeking idea—it's not because they're nice people, it's because the prisoners are valuable as hostages.
But it's still nowhere near as elaborate or as interesting. The constitutions that 18th-century pirates had ... created a true system of social governance on the pirate ship. Seventeenth- and 18th-century pirates were pioneers, in a certain way, of constitutional democracy. They had checks and balances aboard their ship, they had an early form of quasi-judicial review, and they were democratic, which was virtually unheard of in the Western world at that time.
The reason modern pirates don't have that, I think, is because 18th-century pirates spent lots and lots of time together at sea. It could be months on end. And they lived and worked and operated apart from legitimate society for long periods of time, which meant that the pirate ship was a kind of floating society. And that society, like any other one, required rules in order for it to be functional.
If you look at modern pirates, they tend to spend very little time together on their ships. Modern pirate expeditions tend to be in-and-out operations. And since they aren't really together in the same way that 18th-century pirate crews were, they don't really constitute floating societies.
Therefore they don't face the same kinds of social problems, at least to the same extent, that the 18th-century pirates did, and so that's why they don't have elaborate rules. No society, no rules.
They still seem to be turning a pretty nice profit.
Oh, absolutely. They seem to be doing well. I don't think that they're inferior predators. It's just that they're not as interesting predators.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Challenges of decreasing ability to tune out irrelevant information leading to memory loss?
Global7 the new Millennial Renaissance Vision for the Globe
Distractions 'hit old-age memory'
Mental slowing down in old age can be blamed partly on being more easily distracted, research suggests.
The Canadian team asked young and old people to attempt a memory test while in a scanner showing which bits of their brain were working.
The older subjects did worse at the tests, and their brains responded more to the background buzzing and banging from the scanner itself.
The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Other researchers have suggested that mental decline may be due to a decreasing ability to "tune out" irrelevant information from their senses.
This has been shown for both sound and vision, where older subjects were more likely to focus on the landscape in a picture rather than the figure within it.
The University of Toronto study used a standard face recognition test, placing 12 old and 12 young volunteers within a "functional MRI" scanner, which allows scientists to see which parts of the brains are activated during a particular activity.
Of prime interest was activity in the hippocampus, and area of the brain known to be involved with the laying down of memories.
When both the old and young volunteers failed to remember a face, there was less activity in the hippocampus, as might be expected.
However, when the older subjects failed, there was also increased activity in two other parts of the brain, the auditory cortex and the pre-frontal cortex, which are responsible for processing signals from the external environment.
Unnecessary information
Dale Stevens, who led the study, said that that brains of the older people were processing too much unnecessary information - in this case the normal knocking and rattling sounds that an MRI machine produces.
"The old brains showed increased activation in certain regions that should normally be quieter or turned down."
He said that the poorer performance overall of the older people might be due to an inability to "tune out" this noise while their brains were trying to form new memories of the faces.
Dr Jan de Fockert, a psychologist from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, said that there were a number of competing theories as to why "selective attention" - the ability to focus on something in spite of distraction - might decline with age.
One suggestion, he said, is that the brain loses the ability to inhibit the processing of distracting signals.
Another suggests that an age-related decline in "working memory" - the information storage needed for the completion of everyday tasks, rather than longer-term storage - made it harder for individuals to pay close attention to one thing.
He said: "This seems like a very interesting paper, although it does not prove that the problems with selective attention are contributing to poor performance in the memory tasks."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/7749690.stm
Published: 2008/11/26 11:19:15 GMT
© BBC MMVIII
Distractions 'hit old-age memory'
Mental slowing down in old age can be blamed partly on being more easily distracted, research suggests.
The Canadian team asked young and old people to attempt a memory test while in a scanner showing which bits of their brain were working.
The older subjects did worse at the tests, and their brains responded more to the background buzzing and banging from the scanner itself.
The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Other researchers have suggested that mental decline may be due to a decreasing ability to "tune out" irrelevant information from their senses.
This has been shown for both sound and vision, where older subjects were more likely to focus on the landscape in a picture rather than the figure within it.
The University of Toronto study used a standard face recognition test, placing 12 old and 12 young volunteers within a "functional MRI" scanner, which allows scientists to see which parts of the brains are activated during a particular activity.
Of prime interest was activity in the hippocampus, and area of the brain known to be involved with the laying down of memories.
When both the old and young volunteers failed to remember a face, there was less activity in the hippocampus, as might be expected.
However, when the older subjects failed, there was also increased activity in two other parts of the brain, the auditory cortex and the pre-frontal cortex, which are responsible for processing signals from the external environment.
Unnecessary information
Dale Stevens, who led the study, said that that brains of the older people were processing too much unnecessary information - in this case the normal knocking and rattling sounds that an MRI machine produces.
"The old brains showed increased activation in certain regions that should normally be quieter or turned down."
He said that the poorer performance overall of the older people might be due to an inability to "tune out" this noise while their brains were trying to form new memories of the faces.
Dr Jan de Fockert, a psychologist from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, said that there were a number of competing theories as to why "selective attention" - the ability to focus on something in spite of distraction - might decline with age.
One suggestion, he said, is that the brain loses the ability to inhibit the processing of distracting signals.
Another suggests that an age-related decline in "working memory" - the information storage needed for the completion of everyday tasks, rather than longer-term storage - made it harder for individuals to pay close attention to one thing.
He said: "This seems like a very interesting paper, although it does not prove that the problems with selective attention are contributing to poor performance in the memory tasks."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/7749690.stm
Published: 2008/11/26 11:19:15 GMT
© BBC MMVIII
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Global7 the new Millennial Renaissance Vision for the Globe
Our passion is to reach our individual and collective potential via science, creativity and interactive engagement of all 6.6 Billion People
The oldest and most efficient female humanoid pelvis discovered in Ethiopia
Should we reduce the global population or increase the creative potential of every new born that comes to bless the world?
News
Pelvis Dated To 1.2 Million Years Ago Shows Ancestors May Have Been Born With Big Heads
Science Daily (based on a report provided by Indiana University) | November 15, 2008
A reconstruction of the 1.2 million-year-old pelvis discovered in 2001 in the Gona Study Area at Afar, Ethiopia, that has led researchers to speculate early man was better equipped than first thought to produce larger-brained babies. The actual fossils remain in Ethiopia. (Credit: Scott W. Simpson, Case Western Reserve University)
Sileshi Semaw
Discovery of the most intact female pelvis of Homo erectus may cause scientists to reevaluate how early humans evolved to successfully birth larger-brained babies.
"This is the most complete female Homo erectus pelvis ever found from this time period," said Indiana University Bloomington paleoanthropologist Sileshi Semaw. "This discovery gives us more accurate information about the Homo erectus female pelvic inlet and therefore the size of their newborns."
A reconstruction of the 1.2 million-year-old pelvis discovered in 2001 in the Gona Study Area at Afar, Ethiopia, that has led researchers to speculate early man was better equipped than first thought to produce larger-brained babies. The actual fossils remain in Ethiopia.
The discovery will be published in Science this week (Nov. 14) by Semaw, leader of the Gona Project in Ethiopia, where the fossil pelvis was discovered with a group of six other scientists that includes IU Department of Geosciences graduate student Melanie Everett.
Reconstructing pelvis bone fragments from the 1.2 million-year-old adult female, Semaw and his co-workers determined the early ancestor's birth canal was more than 30 percent larger than earlier estimates based on a 1.5-million-year-old juvenile male pelvis found in Kenya. The new female fragments were discovered in the Gona Study Area in Afar, Ethiopia, in 2001 and excavation was completed in 2003.
Scientists also were intrigued by other unique attributes of the specimen, such as its shorter stature and broader body shape more likely seen in hominids adapted to temperate climates, rather than the tall and narrow body believed to have been efficient for endurance running.
Early humans became taller and narrower over time, scientists believe, partly due to long distance running and to help them maintain a constant body temperature. One consequence, however, is that a narrower pelvis would have been less accommodating to producing larger-brained offspring.
But rather than a tall, narrow hominid with the expected slight pelvic region, Semaw and the Gona researchers found evidence of a hominid ready to produce offspring with a much larger brain size.
"The female Homo erectus pelvic anatomy is basically unknown," Semaw said. "And as far as the fossil pelvis of ancestral hominids goes, all we've had is Lucy (dated at 3.2 million years and also found in Ethiopia), and she is very much farther back in time from modern humans."
Scientists studying early man predominantly find fragments of craniums and dental remains, while fossil bones from the neck down are rarely discovered. Even more difficult to verify are Homo erectus fossil bones that can be identified as those belonging to a female.
Scientists had thought early adult Homo erectus females, because of the assumed small birth canal, would produce offspring with only a limited neonatal brain size. These young would have then experienced rapid brain growth while still developmentally immature, leading researchers to envision a scenario of maternal involvement and child-rearing on par with that of modern humans. But those theories had been based upon extrapolations from the existing male skeleton from Kenya.
"This find will give us far more accurate information," Semaw said. Semaw is also a research scientist at the Stone Age Institute, a research center near Bloomington dedicated to the study of early human evolution and culture. It is affiliated with Indiana University's CRAFT, the Center for Research into the Anthropological Foundations of Technology.
Gona has turned out to be a productive dig site for Semaw. In 1997 Semaw and colleagues reported the oldest known stone tools used by ancestral humans. Then in 2004 he coauthored a paper summarizing Gona's geological properties and the site's cornucopia of hominid fossils spanning several million years. At the time, Science gave the article an "Editor's Choice" recognition. In 2005 he and colleagues published an article in Nature announcing the discovery of Ardipithecus ramidus, one of the earliest ancestral hominids, dating between 4.3 and 4.5 million years ago.
Scott Simpson (Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History), Jay Quade (University of Arizona), Naomi Levin (University of Utah), Robert Butler (University of Portland) and Guillaume Dupont-Nivet (Utrecht University, Netherlands) also contributed to the report. Support for the research was provided by the Leakey Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
The authors thank Ethiopia's Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage and the National Museum of Ethiopia for research permits and support.
Adapted from materials provided by Indiana University.
Wide-hipped homo changes picture of Homo erectus
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The fossil of a wide-hipped Homo erectus found in Ethiopia suggests females of the pre-human species swayed their hips as they walked and gave birth to relatively developed babies with big heads, researchers said on Thursday.
The finding transforms thinking about some early human ancestors and evolution and suggests that helpless babies came along relatively late in the human lineage.
"We could look at this pelvis and then, using a series of measurements, we can calculate ... how big the baby's head could be at birth," said Scott Simpson, a paleontologist at Case Western Reserve University who worked on the study.
Writing in the journal Science, Simpson and colleagues said the size and shape of the 1.2 million-year-old pelvis indicates that H. erectus females had hips wider than those of modern human females and their infants were born with heads about 30 percent larger than previously calculated.
"What this means is the offspring were not as helpless as a modern human," he said in a telephone interview.
"It is not coming out walking and talking. But it was probably capable of more advanced behavior at a younger age like grasping, like sitting up ... than we would see in a modern human."
An extended childhood is a particularly human characteristic. Helpless babies require intensive care, not only from the mothers but from an extended group, which may have spurred the development of human society and culture.
Homo erectus, Latin for "upright man," arose in Africa 1.8 to 2 million years ago, migrating to Asia and Europe before becoming extinct about half a million years ago. Experts agree it was likely a direct ancestor of modern humans.
Scientists did not know much about what its body would have looked like until the discovery of "Turkana Boy," an adolescent H. erectus whose bones were discovered in 1984.
His slim-hipped build led researchers to believe that H. erectus gave birth to small-headed babies that would have required a great deal of care in early life, much like modern human infants.
But Simpson said Turkana boy's pelvis was damaged and the restoration of a near-complete female pelvis from Gona, Ethiopia, changes this picture.
"This H. erectus would have even wider hips (than modern women)," Simpson said.
One main difference between human males and females is hip width, which makes women sway as they walk and which allows men to run and walk more efficiently.
"The reason women do have that sway is their hips are a little further apart," Simpson said. "She would have had a good one."
(Editing by Alan Elsner)
Our passion is to reach our individual and collective potential via science, creativity and interactive engagement of all 6.6 Billion People
The oldest and most efficient female humanoid pelvis discovered in Ethiopia
Should we reduce the global population or increase the creative potential of every new born that comes to bless the world?
News
Pelvis Dated To 1.2 Million Years Ago Shows Ancestors May Have Been Born With Big Heads
Science Daily (based on a report provided by Indiana University) | November 15, 2008
A reconstruction of the 1.2 million-year-old pelvis discovered in 2001 in the Gona Study Area at Afar, Ethiopia, that has led researchers to speculate early man was better equipped than first thought to produce larger-brained babies. The actual fossils remain in Ethiopia. (Credit: Scott W. Simpson, Case Western Reserve University)
Sileshi Semaw
Discovery of the most intact female pelvis of Homo erectus may cause scientists to reevaluate how early humans evolved to successfully birth larger-brained babies.
"This is the most complete female Homo erectus pelvis ever found from this time period," said Indiana University Bloomington paleoanthropologist Sileshi Semaw. "This discovery gives us more accurate information about the Homo erectus female pelvic inlet and therefore the size of their newborns."
A reconstruction of the 1.2 million-year-old pelvis discovered in 2001 in the Gona Study Area at Afar, Ethiopia, that has led researchers to speculate early man was better equipped than first thought to produce larger-brained babies. The actual fossils remain in Ethiopia.
The discovery will be published in Science this week (Nov. 14) by Semaw, leader of the Gona Project in Ethiopia, where the fossil pelvis was discovered with a group of six other scientists that includes IU Department of Geosciences graduate student Melanie Everett.
Reconstructing pelvis bone fragments from the 1.2 million-year-old adult female, Semaw and his co-workers determined the early ancestor's birth canal was more than 30 percent larger than earlier estimates based on a 1.5-million-year-old juvenile male pelvis found in Kenya. The new female fragments were discovered in the Gona Study Area in Afar, Ethiopia, in 2001 and excavation was completed in 2003.
Scientists also were intrigued by other unique attributes of the specimen, such as its shorter stature and broader body shape more likely seen in hominids adapted to temperate climates, rather than the tall and narrow body believed to have been efficient for endurance running.
Early humans became taller and narrower over time, scientists believe, partly due to long distance running and to help them maintain a constant body temperature. One consequence, however, is that a narrower pelvis would have been less accommodating to producing larger-brained offspring.
But rather than a tall, narrow hominid with the expected slight pelvic region, Semaw and the Gona researchers found evidence of a hominid ready to produce offspring with a much larger brain size.
"The female Homo erectus pelvic anatomy is basically unknown," Semaw said. "And as far as the fossil pelvis of ancestral hominids goes, all we've had is Lucy (dated at 3.2 million years and also found in Ethiopia), and she is very much farther back in time from modern humans."
Scientists studying early man predominantly find fragments of craniums and dental remains, while fossil bones from the neck down are rarely discovered. Even more difficult to verify are Homo erectus fossil bones that can be identified as those belonging to a female.
Scientists had thought early adult Homo erectus females, because of the assumed small birth canal, would produce offspring with only a limited neonatal brain size. These young would have then experienced rapid brain growth while still developmentally immature, leading researchers to envision a scenario of maternal involvement and child-rearing on par with that of modern humans. But those theories had been based upon extrapolations from the existing male skeleton from Kenya.
"This find will give us far more accurate information," Semaw said. Semaw is also a research scientist at the Stone Age Institute, a research center near Bloomington dedicated to the study of early human evolution and culture. It is affiliated with Indiana University's CRAFT, the Center for Research into the Anthropological Foundations of Technology.
Gona has turned out to be a productive dig site for Semaw. In 1997 Semaw and colleagues reported the oldest known stone tools used by ancestral humans. Then in 2004 he coauthored a paper summarizing Gona's geological properties and the site's cornucopia of hominid fossils spanning several million years. At the time, Science gave the article an "Editor's Choice" recognition. In 2005 he and colleagues published an article in Nature announcing the discovery of Ardipithecus ramidus, one of the earliest ancestral hominids, dating between 4.3 and 4.5 million years ago.
Scott Simpson (Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History), Jay Quade (University of Arizona), Naomi Levin (University of Utah), Robert Butler (University of Portland) and Guillaume Dupont-Nivet (Utrecht University, Netherlands) also contributed to the report. Support for the research was provided by the Leakey Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
The authors thank Ethiopia's Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage and the National Museum of Ethiopia for research permits and support.
Adapted from materials provided by Indiana University.
Wide-hipped homo changes picture of Homo erectus
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The fossil of a wide-hipped Homo erectus found in Ethiopia suggests females of the pre-human species swayed their hips as they walked and gave birth to relatively developed babies with big heads, researchers said on Thursday.
The finding transforms thinking about some early human ancestors and evolution and suggests that helpless babies came along relatively late in the human lineage.
"We could look at this pelvis and then, using a series of measurements, we can calculate ... how big the baby's head could be at birth," said Scott Simpson, a paleontologist at Case Western Reserve University who worked on the study.
Writing in the journal Science, Simpson and colleagues said the size and shape of the 1.2 million-year-old pelvis indicates that H. erectus females had hips wider than those of modern human females and their infants were born with heads about 30 percent larger than previously calculated.
"What this means is the offspring were not as helpless as a modern human," he said in a telephone interview.
"It is not coming out walking and talking. But it was probably capable of more advanced behavior at a younger age like grasping, like sitting up ... than we would see in a modern human."
An extended childhood is a particularly human characteristic. Helpless babies require intensive care, not only from the mothers but from an extended group, which may have spurred the development of human society and culture.
Homo erectus, Latin for "upright man," arose in Africa 1.8 to 2 million years ago, migrating to Asia and Europe before becoming extinct about half a million years ago. Experts agree it was likely a direct ancestor of modern humans.
Scientists did not know much about what its body would have looked like until the discovery of "Turkana Boy," an adolescent H. erectus whose bones were discovered in 1984.
His slim-hipped build led researchers to believe that H. erectus gave birth to small-headed babies that would have required a great deal of care in early life, much like modern human infants.
But Simpson said Turkana boy's pelvis was damaged and the restoration of a near-complete female pelvis from Gona, Ethiopia, changes this picture.
"This H. erectus would have even wider hips (than modern women)," Simpson said.
One main difference between human males and females is hip width, which makes women sway as they walk and which allows men to run and walk more efficiently.
"The reason women do have that sway is their hips are a little further apart," Simpson said. "She would have had a good one."
(Editing by Alan Elsner)
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Global7 the new Millennial Renaissance Vision for the Globe
The benefits of flaxseed
The Benefits of Flaxseed
Is flaxseed the new wonder food?
Preliminary studies show that flaxseed may help fight everything from heart disease and diabetes to even breast cancer.
By Carol Sorgen
Reviewed By Michael Smith, MD
on Monday, March 10, 2003
Flaxseed may be on everyone's lips -- and in everyone's cereal -- but this new darling of the plant world has been around for more than 4,000 years, known even in the days of Hippocrates for its healthful benefits.
Flaxseed has been a part of human and animal diets for thousands of years in Asia, Europe, and Africa, and more recently in North America and Australia, says Kaye Effertz, executive director of AmeriFlax, a trade promotion group representing U.S. flaxseed producers. As flax gained popularity for its industrial uses, however, its popularity as a food product waned, but it never lost its nutritional value. "Today flax is experiencing a renaissance among nutritionists, the health conscious public, food processors, and chefs alike," says Effertz.
The reason for the increasing interest in flaxseed is its apparent benefits for a host of medical conditions, says Roberta Lee, MD, medical director of the Center for Health and Healing at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in New York.
Flaxseed is very high in omega-3 essential fatty acids, Lee explains. It's the omega 3s -- "good" fats -- that researchers are looking at in terms of their possible effects on lowering cholesterol, stabilizing blood sugar, lowering the risk of breast, prostate, and colon cancers, and reducing the inflammation of arthritis, as well as the inflammation that accompanies certain illnesses such as Parkinson's disease and asthma.
In addition to the omega-3s, the remaining two components of flaxseed -- lignans and fiber -- are being studied for their health benefits as well, says Diane Morris, PhD, RD, spokesperson for the Flax Council of Canada. Lignans, for example, act as both phytoestrogens and antioxidants, while the fiber contained in the flaxseed is of both the soluble and insoluble type. "Flax is an interesting mixture of nutrients and other components," says Morris.
Though studies conducted to date have been limited in scope and small in nature, their results are promising, says Morris. In a small Canadian study of 39 women, for example, researchers from the University of Toronto found that flaxseed may boost conventional treatment for breast cancer.
In the study, reported in the American Institute for Cancer Research Newsletter in 1998, postmenopausal women with breast cancer ate either a plain muffin or a muffin containing 25 grams of flaxseed oil every day for approximately five-and-a-half weeks. Of the 29 out of the 39 women who ate both muffins, researchers found reductions in the growth of their tumors.
These results were encouraging, says Morris, but she adds, "It's just one study." The favorable results of that study, however, are leading to others. At the John Wayne Cancer Institute in Santa Monica, Calif., for example, investigators are also looking into the effect of essential fatty acids on breast cancer, says Rachel Beller, MS, RD, director of the Brander Nutritional Oncology Counseling and Research Program. But here, too, says Beller, it's too soon to have any conclusive findings.
In addition to research on breast cancer, Morris says, other studies are looking at heart disease, blood pressure, diabetes, menopause, osteoporosis, and inflammatory bowel disease, to name just a few.
Yet another study has found that omega-3 fatty acids, and by extension, flaxseed, can reduce the risk of macular degeneration -- an eye disease that destroys vision by damaging nerve cells in the eye.
The results of a Harvard study, published in August 2001 in the Archives of Ophthalmology, showed that people with a high intake of omega-6 (vegetable oils) were more likely to develop macular degeneration, while those with a combination of lower omega-6 intake and high omega-3 intake were less likely to have the disease.
"Flaxseed is the best source of omega-3 fatty acids," says Lylas G. Mogk, MD, director of the Henry Ford Visual Rehabilitation and Research Center in Detroit, chairman of the Vision Rehabilitation Committee of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, and co-author of Macular Degeneration: The Complete Guide to Saving and Maximizing Your Sight.
Flaxseed is also good for combating dry eyes, a very common problem, says Mogk, probably because of our poor omega-3 intake. "Dry eyes are usually the result of an insufficient outer oil layer in the tear film, so the water in the tears doesn't have anything to keep it from evaporating," she says. Omega-3 fatty acids help the oil glands produce the proper consistency of oil so it will flow from the oil glands and coat the surface of the eye.
Mogk recommends that her patients take a tablespoon a day of flaxseed oil. "I think all adults should do this," she says, "and most certainly those at high risk for macular degeneration (which includes those between the ages of 65 and 74, those who have a family member with the disease, women, and whites).
Flaxseed is available in supermarkets and health food stores and comes in whole seeds, ground seeds, or oil. Most nutrition experts recommend the ground seeds, which have "all the goodies," says Morris -- the fiber, the lignans, and the essential fatty acids. Whole seeds will pass through your system undigested, she says, while the oil lacks the fiber, which, if nothing else, will help alleviate any problems of constipation. (Some patients with diverticulosis, however, find the ground flaxseed too irritating; for those people, says Lee, the flaxseed oil is a better choice.)
Ninety-six percent of the flaxseed grown in the U.S. is grown in North Dakota because of its cooler climate and wide open spaces, says Kaye Effertz; for those same reasons, Canada is also a top grower of flaxseed. Flaxseed comes in two colors -- reddish brown and golden brown. The color makes no difference when it comes to nutritional value.
Rachel Beller recommends buying ground flaxseed in vacuum-packed bags. Most people refrigerate their flaxseed, but Morris says that's not a necessity (even though she does it herself). Whole seeds will last from 10-12 months, she says, while ground flax has a shelf life of about four months, even out of the refrigerator.
The recommended daily amount of flaxseed is approximately 1-2 tablespoons of ground flaxseed, or 1 teaspoon of flax oil (which is best used cold, perhaps mixed in a vinaigrette salad dressing). Morris' favorite way to get her flaxseed is to mix a tablespoon of the ground seeds with 2 tablespoons of honey, and then spread the mixture on toast. "It has a nutty flavor," she says, "and is a great alternative to buttering your toast."
1. Texas nutritionist Natalie Elliott offers these additional suggestions for adding flax to your diet:
Sprinkle ground flax on cereal, yogurt, or salads.
2. Mix flax into meatloaf or meatballs.
3. Add ground flax to pancake, muffin, or cookie batter, or other baked goods such as pie crust.
4. Coat fish or homemade chicken nuggets in ground flaxseed and oven fry.
5. Toss salads with flax oil and vinegar.
6. Or try one of her favorites, "Nat's Flax Snacks":
7. 1 cup Karo corn syrup
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup smooth peanut butter
1 cup ground flax
1 teaspoon vanilla
6 cups of Rice Krispies
Mix together the first five ingredients in a saucepot over low heat until melted and smooth. Add Rice Krispies to the pot and stir. Pour contents into a buttered 9"x13" pan. Press down to flatten. Stir, cool, and cut into 8 bars.
Published March 10, 2003.
1. SOURCES: Kaye Effertz, executive director, AmeriFlax, Mandan, N.D. Roberta Lee, MD, medical director, Center for Health and Healing, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, New York.
2. Diane Morris, PhD, RD, spokesperson for Flax Council of Canada, Toronto. Rachel Beller, MS, RD, director, Brander Nutritional Oncology Counseling and Research Program,
3. John Wayne Cancer Institute, Santa Monica, Calif. Archives of Ophthalmology, August 2001. "Research Update: Flaxseed Shows Promise Against Breast Cancer," American Institute for Cancer Research Newsletter 59, Winter 1998.
4. Natalie Elliott, co-owner, Brain Waves Music and Wellness Center, Austin, Texas.
© 2003 WebMD Inc. All rights reserved.
The benefits of flaxseed
The Benefits of Flaxseed
Is flaxseed the new wonder food?
Preliminary studies show that flaxseed may help fight everything from heart disease and diabetes to even breast cancer.
By Carol Sorgen
Reviewed By Michael Smith, MD
on Monday, March 10, 2003
Flaxseed may be on everyone's lips -- and in everyone's cereal -- but this new darling of the plant world has been around for more than 4,000 years, known even in the days of Hippocrates for its healthful benefits.
Flaxseed has been a part of human and animal diets for thousands of years in Asia, Europe, and Africa, and more recently in North America and Australia, says Kaye Effertz, executive director of AmeriFlax, a trade promotion group representing U.S. flaxseed producers. As flax gained popularity for its industrial uses, however, its popularity as a food product waned, but it never lost its nutritional value. "Today flax is experiencing a renaissance among nutritionists, the health conscious public, food processors, and chefs alike," says Effertz.
The reason for the increasing interest in flaxseed is its apparent benefits for a host of medical conditions, says Roberta Lee, MD, medical director of the Center for Health and Healing at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in New York.
Flaxseed is very high in omega-3 essential fatty acids, Lee explains. It's the omega 3s -- "good" fats -- that researchers are looking at in terms of their possible effects on lowering cholesterol, stabilizing blood sugar, lowering the risk of breast, prostate, and colon cancers, and reducing the inflammation of arthritis, as well as the inflammation that accompanies certain illnesses such as Parkinson's disease and asthma.
In addition to the omega-3s, the remaining two components of flaxseed -- lignans and fiber -- are being studied for their health benefits as well, says Diane Morris, PhD, RD, spokesperson for the Flax Council of Canada. Lignans, for example, act as both phytoestrogens and antioxidants, while the fiber contained in the flaxseed is of both the soluble and insoluble type. "Flax is an interesting mixture of nutrients and other components," says Morris.
Though studies conducted to date have been limited in scope and small in nature, their results are promising, says Morris. In a small Canadian study of 39 women, for example, researchers from the University of Toronto found that flaxseed may boost conventional treatment for breast cancer.
In the study, reported in the American Institute for Cancer Research Newsletter in 1998, postmenopausal women with breast cancer ate either a plain muffin or a muffin containing 25 grams of flaxseed oil every day for approximately five-and-a-half weeks. Of the 29 out of the 39 women who ate both muffins, researchers found reductions in the growth of their tumors.
These results were encouraging, says Morris, but she adds, "It's just one study." The favorable results of that study, however, are leading to others. At the John Wayne Cancer Institute in Santa Monica, Calif., for example, investigators are also looking into the effect of essential fatty acids on breast cancer, says Rachel Beller, MS, RD, director of the Brander Nutritional Oncology Counseling and Research Program. But here, too, says Beller, it's too soon to have any conclusive findings.
In addition to research on breast cancer, Morris says, other studies are looking at heart disease, blood pressure, diabetes, menopause, osteoporosis, and inflammatory bowel disease, to name just a few.
Yet another study has found that omega-3 fatty acids, and by extension, flaxseed, can reduce the risk of macular degeneration -- an eye disease that destroys vision by damaging nerve cells in the eye.
The results of a Harvard study, published in August 2001 in the Archives of Ophthalmology, showed that people with a high intake of omega-6 (vegetable oils) were more likely to develop macular degeneration, while those with a combination of lower omega-6 intake and high omega-3 intake were less likely to have the disease.
"Flaxseed is the best source of omega-3 fatty acids," says Lylas G. Mogk, MD, director of the Henry Ford Visual Rehabilitation and Research Center in Detroit, chairman of the Vision Rehabilitation Committee of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, and co-author of Macular Degeneration: The Complete Guide to Saving and Maximizing Your Sight.
Flaxseed is also good for combating dry eyes, a very common problem, says Mogk, probably because of our poor omega-3 intake. "Dry eyes are usually the result of an insufficient outer oil layer in the tear film, so the water in the tears doesn't have anything to keep it from evaporating," she says. Omega-3 fatty acids help the oil glands produce the proper consistency of oil so it will flow from the oil glands and coat the surface of the eye.
Mogk recommends that her patients take a tablespoon a day of flaxseed oil. "I think all adults should do this," she says, "and most certainly those at high risk for macular degeneration (which includes those between the ages of 65 and 74, those who have a family member with the disease, women, and whites).
Flaxseed is available in supermarkets and health food stores and comes in whole seeds, ground seeds, or oil. Most nutrition experts recommend the ground seeds, which have "all the goodies," says Morris -- the fiber, the lignans, and the essential fatty acids. Whole seeds will pass through your system undigested, she says, while the oil lacks the fiber, which, if nothing else, will help alleviate any problems of constipation. (Some patients with diverticulosis, however, find the ground flaxseed too irritating; for those people, says Lee, the flaxseed oil is a better choice.)
Ninety-six percent of the flaxseed grown in the U.S. is grown in North Dakota because of its cooler climate and wide open spaces, says Kaye Effertz; for those same reasons, Canada is also a top grower of flaxseed. Flaxseed comes in two colors -- reddish brown and golden brown. The color makes no difference when it comes to nutritional value.
Rachel Beller recommends buying ground flaxseed in vacuum-packed bags. Most people refrigerate their flaxseed, but Morris says that's not a necessity (even though she does it herself). Whole seeds will last from 10-12 months, she says, while ground flax has a shelf life of about four months, even out of the refrigerator.
The recommended daily amount of flaxseed is approximately 1-2 tablespoons of ground flaxseed, or 1 teaspoon of flax oil (which is best used cold, perhaps mixed in a vinaigrette salad dressing). Morris' favorite way to get her flaxseed is to mix a tablespoon of the ground seeds with 2 tablespoons of honey, and then spread the mixture on toast. "It has a nutty flavor," she says, "and is a great alternative to buttering your toast."
1. Texas nutritionist Natalie Elliott offers these additional suggestions for adding flax to your diet:
Sprinkle ground flax on cereal, yogurt, or salads.
2. Mix flax into meatloaf or meatballs.
3. Add ground flax to pancake, muffin, or cookie batter, or other baked goods such as pie crust.
4. Coat fish or homemade chicken nuggets in ground flaxseed and oven fry.
5. Toss salads with flax oil and vinegar.
6. Or try one of her favorites, "Nat's Flax Snacks":
7. 1 cup Karo corn syrup
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup smooth peanut butter
1 cup ground flax
1 teaspoon vanilla
6 cups of Rice Krispies
Mix together the first five ingredients in a saucepot over low heat until melted and smooth. Add Rice Krispies to the pot and stir. Pour contents into a buttered 9"x13" pan. Press down to flatten. Stir, cool, and cut into 8 bars.
Published March 10, 2003.
1. SOURCES: Kaye Effertz, executive director, AmeriFlax, Mandan, N.D. Roberta Lee, MD, medical director, Center for Health and Healing, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, New York.
2. Diane Morris, PhD, RD, spokesperson for Flax Council of Canada, Toronto. Rachel Beller, MS, RD, director, Brander Nutritional Oncology Counseling and Research Program,
3. John Wayne Cancer Institute, Santa Monica, Calif. Archives of Ophthalmology, August 2001. "Research Update: Flaxseed Shows Promise Against Breast Cancer," American Institute for Cancer Research Newsletter 59, Winter 1998.
4. Natalie Elliott, co-owner, Brain Waves Music and Wellness Center, Austin, Texas.
© 2003 WebMD Inc. All rights reserved.
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