Thursday, September 29 11:35 am
SciCafe brings together scientists and curious minds for a night of cocktails and conversation. © AMNH/R. Mickens. Click to enlarge.
On the first Wednesday of every month, the Museum hosts inquisitive minds for cocktails and conversation about the latest science topics at SciCafe. The popular after-hours series returns on October 5 with an evening devoted to scientific evidence about the nature of race and “racial” differences led by Museum Curators Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle, who recently co-authored a book on the subject.
Dr. DeSalle, an evolutionary geneticist, and Dr. Tattersall, a physical anthropologist, will discuss the lack of biological evidence for racial boundaries among human populations, the evolutionary processes that account for distinctions among Homo sapiens, and more. They recently answered a few questions on the topic.
Why is race a scientific myth? What has science or culture done to perpetuate it?
Tattersall: “Race” is a within-species phenomenon. And within a species there are two possible processes, the effects of which are diametrically opposed: diversification and re-integration. The human diversity we see today, and its distribution, is a product of both, producing a messy picture that is not helpfully clarified by trying to recognize discrete “races.”
DeSalle: Why race as a biological concept keeps raising its ugly head is a question that is addressed by biologists, sociologists, and historians all the time. Almost all racialist scientific approaches have been detrimental to our understanding of human cultural variation and have led in some instances to the worst atrocities committed in the name of science. Social Darwinism, Eugenics, Nazism, and the IQ Debate all stemmed from scientific racialism. Read more »
Friday, September 03 8:57 am
Spider Silk. Credit: AMNH\R. Mickens
Time is running out to view what took four years, some 80 people, and over one million golden orb spiders from Madagascar to create: an 11-by-4 foot, naturally golden-hued textile on display in the Museum through October 3.
For more than 100 years, people have tried to extract silk from spiders, but the spectacular, rare fabric showcased in the Museum Grand Gallery is the only surviving textile made out of the silk of these hairy, eight-legged creatures.
“I was blown away by its wonderful, lustrous, golden color,” says Museum Curator Ian Tattersall. “Only one other spider silk textile was ever exhibited, in Paris around 1900, and that has subsequently been lost, so this is unique in the world” (To hear more from Dr. Tattersall on the spider silk exhibit, go here).
Golden orb spiders—the largest of which can grow to the size of a human hand—produce golden-hued silk that is stronger than steel but is conveniently elastic and lightweight. Because of these rare properties, people have envisioned potential applications for spider silk in battle, surgery, and space exploration, among other fields. But unlike silkworms, which can be easily farmed to produce mass quantities of silk, golden orb spiders are cannibalistic in nature, making them difficult to hold in close quarters and to extract silk filament in big quantities.
Despite the obstacles, American fashion designer Nicholas Godley teamed up with art historian and textile expert Simon Peers to build a complex spider silk harvesting operation in Madagascar. The pair hired locals, who collected over 3,000 spiders per day by using long bamboo sticks to tear down the spiders’ golden-colored webs, which can span the length of a one-lane road. Read more »
Tuesday, February 16 3:13 pm
Museum Curator Ian Tattersall, of the Division of Anthropology, will lead an AMNH Expedition to Spain from June 2 through June 13. Below, he explains the unique itinerary.
Almost everyone has heard about the Ice Age cave art of southern and southwestern France that provides the spectacular evidence for early human creativity. Fewer people know that the artistic tradition of ancient European hunters also flourished in northern Spain.
Altamira is the best known of the decorated Spanish Stone Age sites. © Mattias Kabel
The extraordinary cave of Altamira, which introduced Ice Age art to the world in 1879, is the best known of the decorated Spanish Stone Age sites. But my personal favorite is Covalanas, a small cave in the Cantabria region that is perched high on the side of a deep valley in the foothills of the picture-perfect Picos d’Europa mountains. Twenty thousand years ago, as the last Ice Age neared its coldest point, the valley it overlooks enjoyed an ideal microclimate for Paleolithic hunters. The ancient people who decorated Covalanas could watch from their living quarters in the entrance of the large cave of El Miron to spot reindeer in the valley. And they made animal images in red ochre on the walls of Covalanas that are among the most graceful made not only in the Ice Age, but ever.
I’ve worked together with AMNH Expeditions to design a unique itinerary to visit this “other Spain,” focused around Covalanas and other decorated Stone Age sites. We will travel from the far west of Asturias to the Basque country, admiring the landscapes and sampling superb local foods, as well as visiting Ice age sites that rank high among the world’s most wonderful hidden treasures. We will also see the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the new Altamira Museum with its re-creation of the legendary Ice Age Cave. We will finish with a guided visit to the incredible sites of the Atapuerca Hills, which have yielded the earliest fossil evidence of human relatives on the European peninsula. Join us!
Visit amnhexpeditions.org or call 800-462-8687 for more details.
Thursday, February 04 5:26 pm
Curator Ian Tattersall on Darwin’s Thoughts About the Fossil Evidence for Human Evolution
Scientists at the American Museum of Natural History continue to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species with a collection of vignettes describing expeditions and ideas with links to Darwin’s seminal work.
Below is an excerpt of a longer piece that Ian Tattersall wrote for Evolution: Education and Outreach in 2009.
Charles Darwin was curiously unforthcoming on the subject of human evolution as viewed through the fossil record, to the point of being virtually silent. He was, of course, most famously reticent on the matter in On the Origin of Species, … [and] this is true even of his 1871 book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex in which Darwin finally forced himself to confront the implications of his theory for the origin of humankind [but in which he barely managed even a passing reference to the Neanderthal fossil that by then was the subject of extensive scientific speculation.]
There were…many reasons why Darwin should have been disposed in The Descent of Man to shrink from any substantive discussion of whether extinct human relatives might actually be represented in fossil form. The fossil and antiquarian records were awash with fakes; any discussion of human ancestry was rife with social and political pitfalls; and anyway, by his own close colleague’s testimony, the record contained nothing that could have any relevance to ancient and now-extinct human precursors. Add to that Darwin’s innate suspicion of the distorting effects of incompleteness in the fossil record, and he may have felt that a large degree of discretion on the matter was mandatory.
The Feldhofer skullcap--the Neanderthal type specimen-- was discovered in a limestone cave in 1857 and is one of a handful of fossils that Darwin could have been aware of while writing The Origin of Species. The image includes an associated zygomaticomaxillary fragment that was discovered in the miners’ dump almost a century and a half later, in 1997. Credit: AMNH
None of this means, of course, that The Descent of Man has not exerted an immense influence on the sciences of human origins over the last century and a half. Just as it is easy for English speakers to forget how much they owe to William Shakespeare for the language they use daily, we tend to lose sight of the fact that much received wisdom in paleoanthropology has come down to us direct from Darwin. Darwin it was who proposed a mechanism for the structural continuity of human beings with the rest of the living world and who gave a detailed argument for human descent from an “ape-like progenitor.” It was Darwin who documented beyond doubt, in The Descent of Man, that all living humans belong to a unitary species with a single origin—which we now know, on the basis of evidence of which Darwin could never have dreamed, to have been around 200,000 years ago. He also had the inspired hunch that our species originated in the continent of Africa—and again, this guess has been amply substantiated by later science. Darwin’s perceptions on the behaviors of other primates and how they relate to the way humans behave were remarkably astute, particularly given the highly anecdotal nature of what was then known. Read more »
Monday, December 14 10:19 am
Curator Rob DeSalle Explains the Limitations of Genetic Ancestry Tests
This year, scientists at the American Museum of Natural History are celebrating the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species with a collection of vignettes describing expeditions and ideas with links to Darwin’s seminal work.
An annotated academic poster from a conference held at AMNH in 1932 shows the inheritance of two genetic sequences commonly used in ancestry testing. On top of Charles Darwin’s pedigree, DeSalle plotted mitochondrial DNA in red and Y-chromosome in blue. Darwin is outlined by a blue square. - AMNH
When Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University professor and host of the PBS series African American Lives, learned that his Y-chromosome—a gene popularly used to trace male ancestry—“goes back to Europe,” he joked that he was having an identity crisis. And in his best-selling book The Seven Daughters of Eve geneticist Brian Sykes suggests that 95% of all Europeans are descended from just seven Stone Age women. He used mitochondrial DNA, inherited directly from mothers and employed by companies for ancestry testing of the maternal ancestry, for this work.
These are dramatic moments, but they are based in part on misleading assumptions, according to geneticists like Rob DeSalle, Curator in the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the Museum. “Ancestry testing is pushed as simple and straight-forward,” he says. “But it is not. Often the verbal history passed down in families is more accurate than ancestry DNA testing done now.”
DeSalle, along with Museum colleague Ian Tattersall, turned to the family history of the most famous of evolutionary thinkers to illustrate their point. By simply mapping basic inheritance onto Charles Darwin’s pedigree, it is easy to see how quickly a specific Y-chromosome or sequence of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) can be lost in a lineage. Darwin’s Y-chromosome, for example, is probably found in only two of his living descendents. Only three of his four sons reproduced and one of these sons only had daughters. Ultimately, the number of male descendents of Darwin’s two sons who had male offspring dwindled to a very small number. There are many direct male descendents of Charles Darwin living today, but most of them do not have his Y chromosome. Read more »
