Month: August 2009

Aquatic Apes

by Chris Bodenner

I Heart Chaos highlights a video of TED's Elaine Morgan discussing the aquatic ape hypothesis of human evolution. Here's the gist:

As compared to the great apes, their nearest living relatives, humans exhibit many significant differences in anatomy and physiology, including bipedalism,[1] almost hairless skin like some marine mammals,[2] hair growth patterns following water flow-lines,[3] increased subcutaneous fat for insulation,[4][5] descended larynx,[3][6] vestigial webbing between the fingers,[7] vernix caseosa,[3] a hooded nose, muscular nostril aperture control and the philtrum preventing water from entering the nostrils,[3] voluntary breath control like marine mammals and birds,[3] and greasy skin with an abundance of sebaceous glands, which can be interpreted as a waterproofing device.[8]

IHC adds:

The problem is that beaches are the worst possible places for fossils to form, so no matter how much it makes sense, all we have to go on is phenotypal evidence, so it's one of those things that will probably always remain theoretical until we invent time travel.

Here's Elaine:

The View From Your Sickbed

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

When my son was learning to talk, he had a speech impediment severe enough that no one except my husband and I could regularly understand him. He was being bullied by other kids, and our doc worried that he would be unable to do well in school because of his difficulty. Our primary care doc referred him to speech therapy, and we called our insurer, United Healthcare, ahead of time to get pre-approval and jump through all the necessary hoops. It was approved, and he started weekly speech therapy. After six months of covered therapy, United Healthcare decided to start denying claims, but waited three months to inform us of this fact, letting us rack up an additional $3000 in speech therapy bills that they now refuse to cover. The only explanation I've gotten from UHC is that "this diagnosis is not covered under your policy," but his diagnosis has never changed, and they did pre-approve the therapy and pay for his first six months of treatment.

 I have never been given an explanation of what changed to cause the later claims to be denied.  I've been fighting the decision, but of course the speech therapy provider will not see my son while we've got an insurance dispute pending, so he's been kicked out of therapy. My son is starting kindergarten this week, and although his speech is fortunately much improved, he still has problems to work on, and will not be eligible to start school-provided speech therapy until next year, when he starts the first grade. Meanwhile, we're still fighting the insurance company, and calling or writing the speech therapist every week, asking that they not report us to a collection agency while we get this worked out.

I know many people have far more difficult situations than we do, but I just wanted to share one story of how an insurer can determine when and whether you get care, even when you supposedly have "good" private insurance.

Five Key Reasons Why Newspapers Are Failing

by Patrick Appel

Felix Salmon sums up Bill Wyman’s two–part article on the death of small newspapers:

The first part, on how consumers have never paid for news, is the clearest exegesis I’ve yet seen of the truism that newspapers don’t sell news, they sell readers. The second part delivers some much-needed home truths about how most newspapers really aren’t that great to begin with. And the third part explains why the Gawker version of a Washington Post story is nearly always going to be much more fun to read than the original newspaper article.

Why Men Find It So Hard To Stay Faithful

by Patrick Appel

Christopher Ryan looks for an evolutionary basis for an all too common occurrence:

When researchers decided to look at this issue to develop a Sexual Boredom Scale, they found that for men, sexual boredom was correlated with variety in partners (or lack thereof), while for women, it was more related to variety in activity. In other words, women were more likely to be satisfied by changes in the sexual what, while men (gay or straight) were more likely to respond to a changes in the sexual whom. It's a simple, unavoidable truth almost everyone knows to be true, but few dare to discuss: variety and change are the necessary spice of the sex life of the male of our species.

Narrowing The Mind

by Patrick Appel

Atheist Norm Geras puts Richard Dawkins claim that "imposing parental beliefs on children is a form of child abuse" in context:

[E]ducating children involves, willy-nilly, the imparting of moral beliefs. This cannot be done without the presentation of some things as good and others as less good or downright bad. Even done in a non-doctrinaire way, it must involve a degree of active direction. It's misleading, therefore, to pretend that only dogmatists and fanatics narrow the minds of their children to the available sum of human beliefs. Everybody does it to some extent. Socialization of any kind would be impossible without it. It begins with the teaching of language.

Surrounded By Strangers

by Patrick Appel

Drake Bennett ponders studies showing that individuals know far less about their friends and spouses than they think:

[It] may be that our selective blindness about our friends provides a clue to what is so nourishing about friendships in the first place. While researchers are in agreement that friendships are good for us, they’re still not sure exactly why. There’s evidence that gender affects what someone wants in a friend – men seek out “side-by-side” friendships that center on sharing activities and interests, women look more for “face-to-face” relationships that provide emotional support and a chance to comfortably unburden themselves. Both require some measure of mutual knowledge to work, but they depend even more on a sort of nonjudgmental steadiness and presence. As much as anything else, what friends do is simply keep us company.