Quotes from Christine Kenneally

One of the most important implications of own-race bias is that in eyewitness situations the testimony of a witness may be considered less reliable if the accused is of a different race. Most

The same linguistic structures that allow us to soar through time and space and model entire universes in our heads also enable us to foresee our own mortality. Language also permits us to imagine a self that isn't earthbound and a world beyond death. So far it hasn't offered a way to avoid it.

There is evidence from ancient DNA that lighter skin, hair, and eye pigmentation was strongly selected for in Europe in just the last five thousand years.

Better: DNA, History, and Health The

Jackendoff and Lerdahl point out that large structures in music can be like dramatic arcs in narratives. The slow buildup of tension, a climax, and then denouement can be found in both musical pieces and stories. It may be that both music and language exploit a human predisposition to understand events in terms of tension and resolution.

Jackendoff and Lerdahl also suggest that the way people convert music into gesture, whether by dance or in conducting an orchestra, is instinctive and special to music alone.

Indeed, the ancestral proof that Nazis began to require of German citizens would not have been possible without the formalization of genealogy that began in imperial Germany and continued through the Weimar era. Even

Once you have that feeling of that great mystery, any piece of information feels like a treasure trove. Whether it's a name or a place where somebody once was, it's a form of a connection that you thought you were never going to have.

In just the last few years we have learned that 85 percent of all people carry DNA from Neanderthals, an entirely different species that lived until 27,000 years ago. If the research on the human genome hasn't completely destroyed the idea of genetic purity, our newly discovered Neanderthal ancestors show how truly absurd the notion is.

Future historians could retrieve the mountain's records and re-create many hundreds of years of demographic history. Would they also discover that most humans from all of history were, in fact, Mormons?

I once read that the flow of genes through time is like a great river, and individual lives are just eddies in the stream. When an eddy forms, the current is paused for a microsecond, and there we are–an assemblage of many different bits from many different sources–and then the stream pours on, and all those bits go forward in time, except that we no longer travel with them.

It's small wonder that humans dream in myth and in art about other worlds, because we all have the experience of inhabiting one world and, as we are taught language, of walking through a door into another. Even physicists are obsessed with the idea of a multiverse. But we already live in one.

Or, as Razib Khan, a geneticist and science blogger, put it, culture is chunky, whereas genes are creamy.

All the industry that the Mormons have devoted to assembling genealogical records is not just for church members. "We provide our records for everybody," Verkler explained. "We think that it's doing good for the world.

At the time that the sagas were written, however, names were not passed down in families, and recall that English surnames only came into being seven hundred years ago.

Today the Church has 220 data-gathering teams in forty-five countries that are making digital copies of new records. They are also converting 2.4 million microfilm records into a digital format.

According to Fred Dick, a senior lecturer in psychology at Birkbeck, University of London, all the laboratories that have tried to find a language area have been successful in that they have indeed found dozens, even hundreds, of them.

History," wrote the researchers, "is always ending today.

While few researchers would claim that language and genes are not related, there has been little evidence that language is genetically encoded.

Today, the questions that remain most controversial in language evolution are the following: Was there one crucial gateway to language through which only humans have passed? Is there anything in the way language is processed by the brain that is unique to language, rather than a more general form of cognition? At what points in the trajectory of language evolution has natural selection come into play? Can any elements of the language suite be clearly identified as spandrels?

It takes at least ten years for a child to learn to coordinate lips, tongue, mouth, and breath with the exacting fine motor control that adults use when they talk.

What's amazing about speech is that when you're on the receiving end, listening to the noise that comes out of people's mouths, you instantaneously hear meaningful language. Yet speech is just sound, a semicontinuous buzz that fluctuates rapidly and regularly. Frequencies rise and fall, harmonics within the frequencies change their relationships to one another, air turbulence increases and dies away. It gets loud, and then it gets quiet.

He concluded that language, specifically the act of naming something with a word, helps categorize.

As language is learned, it alters how we process information. Just as when we learn to identify a face with a name, it alters how we treat a face-it's not just a face, it's my friend Mike-so learning language results in our automatic labeling of objects, actions, sounds, and even more abstract categories like emotions. This labeling categorizes the item and links it to other instances of the category.