A simpler family tree?

From today's New York Times:

Skull 5; a rendering of the original owner

After eight years spent studying a 1.8-million-year-old skull uncovered in the republic of Georgia, scientists have made a discovery that may rewrite the evolutionary history of our human genus Homo.

It would be a simpler story with fewer ancestral species. Early, diverse fossils — those currently recognized as coming from distinct species like Homo habilis, Homo erectus and others — may actually represent variation among members of a single, evolving lineage.

This was the conclusion reached by an international team of scientists led by David Lordkipanidze, a paleoanthropologist at the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi, as reported Thursday in the journal Science.

The key to this revelation was a cranium excavated in 2005 and known simply as Skull 5, which scientists described as “the world’s first completely preserved adult hominid skull” of such antiquity. Unlike other Homo fossils, it had a number of primitive features: a long, apelike face, large teeth and a tiny braincase, about one-third the size of that of a modern human being. This confirmed that, contrary to some conjecture, early hominids did not need big brains to make their way out of Africa.  ...

“Had the braincase and the face of Skull 5 been found as separate fossils at different sites in Africa, they might have been attributed to different species,” a co-author of the journal report, Christoph Zollikofer of the University of Zurich, said in a statement. Such was often the practice of researchers, using variations in traits to define new species.

Although the Dmanisi finds look quite different from one another, Dr. Zollikofer said, the hominids who left them were living at the same time and place, and “so could, in principle, represent a single population of a single species.” He and his Zurich colleague, Marcia Ponce de León, conducted the comparative analysis of the Dmanisi specimens.

“Since we see a similar pattern and range of variation in the African fossil record,” Dr. Zollikofer continued, “it is sensible to assume that there was a single Homo species at that time in Africa.” Moreover, he added, “since the Dmanisi hominids are so similar to the African ones, we further assume that they both represent the same species.”

Four facts about the national debt many people don't know

From the Los Angeles Times's David Lauter:

Nothing new

1. The U.S. debt burden is starting to decline. That’s right – it’s going down, not up. ... Economists measure the debt relative to the total size of the gross domestic product. By that measure, the debt grew rapidly during most of President George W. Bush’s tenure and President Obama’s first term as the government borrowed money to fight two wars and the deepest recession in more than half a century. But the rapid growth ended more than a year ago.

2. China holds only a relatively small fraction of U.S. debt. ... Just about one-third of the debt is owned by people and institutions  in other countries, of which the largest single holder is China, which has, at last count, about $1.3 trillion in U.S. treasury securities, or about 7.8% of the U.S. outstanding debt.

3. The U.S. has had a national debt for almost its entire history. ... The federal government has been without a debt for only one year in U.S. history, during parts of 1835 and 1836. As a percentage of the GDP, the debt peaked at the end of World War II. Notably, the dollar value of the debt increased through the 1950s and 1960s, but because of rapid economic growth, the debt fell dramatically relative to the size of the economy.

4. Debt crises have marked American politics from the beginning. ... One of the biggest political fights of the George Washington administration involved the national debt. Alexander Hamilton successfully pushed a plan under which the new federal government would assume the debts that the states had incurred during the Revolution. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison fought the idea. In the end, the two sides reached a compromise under which Congress approved the debt plan and Hamilton backed the idea of placing the new nation’s capital on the banks of the Potomac River, rather than in Philadelphia.

Where are you on the political spectrum?

Here is First Read's breakdown of the eight categories from an Esquire/NBC poll of the American electorate.  Which group best describes you?  Take the quiz and find out.

Lisa

The Bleeding Hearts (the left – representing about 10% of the survey): These folks are mostly white, highly educated, and very liberal. They believe in a strong government and are supportive of gay marriage and abortion rights. Think of Lisa Simpson from “The Simpsons.” They voted for Obama, 96%-1% in 2012.

The Gospel Left (the left – 11%): These people tend to be African Americans, females, and older. Like the Bleeding Hearts, they support government, but are more conservative on social issues like gay marriage and abortion. Think of Tyler Perry’s Madea. They voted for Obama, 99%-1%. 

Minivan Moderates (the center – 14%): Two-thirds of these people are women and white, and they tend to live in the suburbs in the South and Midwest. They support abortion rights, gay marriage, and gun control, but they have concerns about government regulation. Think of Claire Dunphy from “Modern Family.” They voted for Obama, 66%-33%, and the reason he blew the doors off of this group was due to his campaign’s messaging on abortion and contraception.

Michael

The MBA Middle (the center – 13%): Mostly white and highly educated, these folks are more liberal on social issues, more conservative on economic ones -- but they do support some government regulation. Think of Don Draper from “Mad Men” or Michael Scott from “The Office.” They split evenly between Obama and Romney in 2012.

The Pickup Populists (the center – 12%): These people tend to be white, lower income, and living in the South, Midwest, or rural areas. They strongly support the government doing more and taxing millionaires, but they also support gun rights and a constitutional amendment to balance the budget. Think of Phil from “Duck Dynasty.” Obama got 56% of the vote from this group.

The #Whateverman (the center – 13%): These are the least politically engaged in the survey. They’re also the youngest of the eight groups. They back abortion rights and gay marriage, and they’re divided on government involvement. Think Turtle from “Entourage.” Obama got 53% from this group, but another 11% didn’t vote.

Ned

The Righteous Right (the right – 14%): These folks are socially conservative and extremely devout. They oppose abortion and gay marriage, but are more supportive of some government regulation. Think Ned Flanders from “The Simpsons.” They broke for Romney in 2012, 87%-11%.

The Talk Radio Heads (the right – 14%): These people – mostly men – are your red-meat conservatives. They strongly oppose government regulation and spending; they are against abortion and gay marriage; and they want to end affirmative action. Think Jack Donaghy from “30 Rock.” They went for Romney, 94%-3%.

Conflicted football fans

The Daily Dish has a round-up of reactions to Frontline's new documentary, League of Denial: The NFL's Concussion Crisis:

Eric Levenson:

After watching, it’s hard not to feel conflicted about the sport, particularly after hearing about Pittsburgh Steelers lineman “Iron Mike” Webster, whose football-caused head injuries led to an early death. The documentary showed parts of his autopsy and it wasn’t pretty for fans to see: cracked feet, disfigured legs, and a brain filled with tangled tau protein, the tell-tale signs of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, the degenerative condition most associated with damaged football players. And as a fan, it’s hard not to feel a little responsible for that.

Dan Amira:

Like many football fans, I've always cringed a little during those big, loud helmet-to-helmet hits, the ones you can almost feel in your own neck as you watch them. But now, even during the mundane plays, I couldn't shake the thought that men were mortgaging their futures away, and perhaps shortening their lives significantly, for my entertainment.

Evin Demirel:

[A]fter you’re through with the film, you can’t help but feel that the league’s days of dominance are numbered, even if League isn’t what ultimately destroys it. It’s not that football is too violent; it’s that we now know too much about that violence’s effects. A tipping point of mothers who find the sport dangerous will inevitably be reached, and football will become yet another relic of America’s past, one of those things it’s embarrassing we used to love.

 

The business community vs. the tea party

Business has lost influence over the GOP, which is one of Ezra Klein's "13 reasons why Washington is failing":

Business leaders aren't amused

Here's an amazing fact: The Chamber of Commerce, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting the Republican Party in the last two elections, completely supports the Democratic Party's position right now. They're for a "clean CR" to reopen the government. They want the debt limit raised. They're even considering spending money to protect business-friendly Republicans from tea party challengers.

But they're not being listened to. Nor is the Business Roundtable. "There is an element of the more independent, tea party coalition Republicans that, frankly, don't listen to very many people," John Engler, president of the Business Roundtable, told Talking Points Memo. "They are on a mission, often defined on the basis of their view of the world, and they aren't paying very much attention to what this means beyond maybe their own districts.

There are plenty of times when the business community's agenda diverges from the public interest. But the business community needs a functioning government and a growing economy just as much as everyone else does. The problem is they helped elect a group of Republicans that isn't particularly interested in such mundane matters of effective governance.

"The Tea Party comes in and it isn't a case of being responsible," says Greater Washington Board of Trade Director Jim Dinegar. "They don't want to spend a dime, they want to reduce, reduce, reduce. It's a very effective and destructive third party that doesn't play well with others."

Why the Swiss are so healthy and happy

Not surprisingly, Switzerland occupies the top spot of the WEF's Human Capital Report. Carolyn Gregoire writes for HuffPo:

Switzerland is home to one of the world's most thriving economies and also one of the happiest populations on the globe. So what's the Swiss secret sauce? The tiny, landlocked central European country is known for investing in its people. In fact, according to the World Economic Forum's 2013 Human Capital Report, Switzerland invests more in the health, education and talent of its people than any other country in the world. ...

Human capital is a function of four pillars: health and wellness, education, work and employment, and what WEF calls an "enabling environment," which includes factors like legal framework and infrastructure that allow for returns on human capital. Switzerland topped the index by generating high scores across the four pillars, coming in first in the health and wellness and workforce and employment categories, second for enabling environment and fourth in education -- which goes a long way in explaining the success of the Swiss economy. 

 Just one example - excellent health care:

When it comes to health and wellness -- taking into account longevity, infant mortality, the general state of physical and mental health of the population, and quality of healthcare -- the Index places the Swiss in the number-one spot. Thanks to the Santésuisse system, the Swiss have the lowest government spending on health care in the developed world -- and some of the healthiest citizens.

"The Swiss have universal coverage, the healthiest population in the Western Hemisphere, and a government that spends a mere 2.7 percent of GDP on health care: about a third of what ours spends," writes Forbes's Avik Roy. "The Swiss system isn’t perfectly transposable onto the United States, but it is vastly superior. And the Swiss do it with a top federal income tax rate of only 11.5 percent, compared to 35 percent in the U.S. of A."

Higgs got his boson...and now his Nobel

From NYT science writer Dennis Overbye's story yesterday:

Two theoretical physicists who suggested that an invisible ocean of energy suffusing space is responsible for the mass and diversity of the particles in the universe won the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday morning. They are Peter W. Higgs, 84, of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and François Englert, 80, of the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.  ...

The Higgs was the last missing ingredient of the Standard Model, a suite of equations that has ruled particle physics for the last half-century, explaining everything from the smell of a rose to the ping when your computer boots up. According to this model, the universe brims with energy that acts like a cosmic molasses, imbuing the particles that move through it with mass, the way a bill moving through Congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming more and more ponderous and controversial. 

Without the Higgs field, many elementary particles, like electrons, would be massless and would zip around at the speed of light. There would be no atoms and no us. 

For scientists, the discovery of the Higgs (as physicists call it) affirmed the view of a cosmos ruled by laws of almost diamond-like elegance and simplicity, but in which everything interesting — like us — is a result of lapses or flaws in that elegance. That is the view that emerged in a period of feverish and tangled progress after World War II, in which the world’s physicists turned their energies from war to looking under the hood of nature, using the tools of quantum field theory.

Seven habits of highly ineffective political parties

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum makes a list:

Frum

Maximalist goals, Apocalyptic visions, Irrational animus, Self-reinforcing media, Politics as war, Despair.

From habit 2, Apocalypstic visions:

Republicans have insisted on maximal goals because they fear they face a truly apocalyptic moment: an irrevocable fork in the road, with one path leading to socialist tyranny, the other to the restoration of the constitutional republic. There sometimes are such moments in history of nations. This is not one. If the United States has remained a constitutional republic despite a government guarantee of health care for people over 65, it will remain a constitutional republic with a government guarantee of health care for people under 65. Obamacare will cost money the country doesn’t have, and that poses a serious fiscal problem. But it’s not as serious a fiscal problem as is posed by the existing programs, Medicare and Medicaid, which cover the people it costs most to cover. It’s not a problem so serious as to justify panic.

Yet panic has gripped the Republican rank-and-file since 2009—and instead of allaying panic, Republican leaders have aggravated and exploited it, to the point where the leaders are compelled to behave in ways they know to be irrational. In his speech to the “Bull Moose” convention of 1912, Teddy Roosevelt declared, “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord!” It’s a great line, but it’s not a mindset that leads to successful legislative outcomes.

(via Political Wire)

Why do we eat popcorn at the movies?

From the latest issue of Smithsonian magazine:

A street vendor in 1912

“[Early] Movie theaters wanted nothing to do with popcorn,” Smith says, “because they were trying to duplicate what was done in real theaters. They had beautiful carpets and rugs and didn’t want popcorn being ground into it.” Movie theaters were trying to appeal to a highbrow clientele, and didn’t want to deal with the distracting trash of concessions–or the distracting noise that snacking during a film would create.

When films added sound in 1927, the movie theater industry opened itself up to a much wider clientele, since literacy was no longer required to attend films (the titles used by early silent films restricted their audience). By 1930, attendance to movie theaters had reached 90 million per week. Such a huge patronage created larger possibilities for profits–especially since the sound pictures now muffled snacks–but movie theater owners were still hesitant to bring snacks inside of their theaters.

The Great Depression presented an excellent opportunity for both movies and popcorn. Looking for a cheap diversion, audiences flocked to the movies. And at 5 to 10 cents a bag, popcorn was a luxury that most people were able to afford. ...

Eventually, movie theater owners realized that if they cut out the middleman [the street vendors], their profits would skyrocket.  For many theaters, the transition to selling snacks helped save them from the crippling Depression. In the mid-1930s, the movie theater business started to go under. “But those that began serving popcorn and other snacks,” Smith explains, “survived.” ... Eventually, movie theater owners came to understand that concessions were their ticket to higher profits, and installed concession stands in their theaters.

World War II further solidified the marriage between popcorn and the movie theaters. Competing snacks like candy and soda suffered from sugar shortages and in turn, rationing, as traditional sugar exporters like the Philippines were cut off from the United States.

By 1945, popcorn and the movies were inextricably bound: over half of the popcorn consumed in America was eaten at the movie theaters. Theaters began pushing advertisements for their concessions harder, debuting commercials that played before (and sometimes in the middle of) movies that enticed audiences to check out the snacks in the lobby.

(h/t Kottke)

Unprecedented polarization

Dan Balz analyzes the trends underlying Washington's current paralysis:

The bonds that once helped produce political consensus have gradually eroded, replaced by competing camps that live in parallel universes, have sharply divergent world views and express more distrust of opponents than they did decades ago. Many activists describe the stakes in apocalyptic terms.  ...

That is why a solution to the shutdown and the debt ceiling does not lead to a resolution of the issues that separate the parties. “I don’t really see a way out of it in the very short term,” said Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University who has written extensively on polarization. “We’re stuck in it. There was a time when it was possible for the parties to work together, because the divide between them was much smaller. Now we’ve gotten to the point where it’s almost impossible.”  ...

For comparison purposes, look at the makeup of the House at the time of the last government shutdown, in late 1995 and early 1996. Then, 79 Republicans came from districts won by Bill Clinton in 1992’s presidential race — a third of the entire GOP conference, according to David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report. Today, just 17 — fewer than 10 percent — are in districts won by Obama last November. (There are only nine Democrats in districts won by Romney.)  ...

Ideological polarization in the House is wider than it has ever been. The last time it approached today’s levels was after the Civil War, in the late 19th century. Nolan McCarty, a political science professor at Princeton University, has helped chart those changes, along with the scholars who first created the index, Keith Poole of the University of Georgia and Howard Rosenthal of New York University.
 
Calling the period during Reconstruction “a highly polarized time,” McCarty said: “Our measures today are far worse than we observed then. We’re almost at the point where we can’t measure further increases.” 

Today, there is almost no overlap between the voting behavior of the most conservative Democrats in the House and the most liberal Republicans. That’s in part because there are few ­moderate-to-conservative Democrats and ­moderate-to-liberal Republicans left in the chamber.