Humans Had Dogs Before They Had Farming

By roughly 14,000 years ago, hunter-gatherer societies across Europe had discovered dogs, scientists reported in two new papers, which were published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The studies provide the first definitive genetic evidence that dogs existed during the Paleolithic period, before humans developed agriculture.

The researchers, who used several approaches to analyze DNA extracted from ancient canine specimens, identified Paleolithic dogs at five different archaeological sites in Europe and Western Asia. The oldest of these dogs lived about 15,800 years ago, pushing back the oldest known genetic evidence of dogs by nearly 5,000 years.

These early dogs came from sites that extend from Britain to Turkey, and were associated with several very different hunter-gatherer populations. But the dogs themselves were closely related. Across the five sites, the dogs were more genetically similar than the humans were, the researchers found.

“The people are so different, but the dogs are very much the same,” said Greger Larson, a paleogeneticist at the University of Oxford and one of the authors on both new studies, which were conducted by large, international scientific teams.

The finding suggests that these early human societies were exchanging dogs or acquiring them from one another.

“It is kind of the equivalent of a new blade or a new point or a new kind of material culture or art form or something, where everybody’s getting really excited about having this fun new thing around.” Dr. Larson said. “And it’s useful and it’s interesting and it’s probably cute.”

The research provides new insight into the early history of dogs, as well as the genetic legacy and the interspecies relationship that extends to today.

“It’s really a major step forward in advancing our knowledge of humans and dogs,” said Elaine Ostrander, a canine genomics expert at the National Human Genome Research Institute who was not involved in the research.

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The finding suggests that these early human societies were exchanging dogs or acquiring them from one another.

“It is kind of the equivalent of a new blade or a new point or a new kind of material culture or art form or something, where everybody’s getting really excited about having this fun new thing around.” Dr. Larson said. “And it’s useful and it’s interesting and it’s probably cute.”

The research provides new insight into the early history of dogs, as well as the genetic legacy and the interspecies relationship that extends to today.

“It’s really a major step forward in advancing our knowledge of humans and dogs,” said Elaine Ostrander, a canine genomics expert at the National Human Genome Research Institute who was not involved in the research.

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Happy Brithday Saroo & Blue!

March 24th 2024; the day Saroo and Blue came to Max's home. This day became their birthday. 

Life hasn't been mundane ever since they came :-) 

Happy 9th birthday my little ones!

What Was The Very First Plant In The World?

The story of plants begins in the water. The earliest plantlike organisms were simple, tiny green life-forms such as algae. You can still see algae today as seaweed along beaches or as green slime on rocks in ponds.

Algae have lived in Earth’s oceans and lakes for over 1 billion years. They can make their own food, using sunlight, water and carbon dioxide to create sugars. This process is called photosynthesis; it releases oxygen – the gas we need to breathe – as a byproduct.

At first, Earth’s atmosphere had very little oxygen. Over millions of years, photosynthesizing organisms like algae and some bacteria slowly released oxygen into the air. This change, sometimes called the Great Oxygenation Event, made it possible for larger and more complex life to evolve. Without oxygen-producing organisms, animals, including humans, could never have existed.

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Moving onto land was not easy. Water plants are supported by water and can absorb nutrients easily, but land plants faced new challenges. How would they avoid drying out? How could they stand upright without floating? How would they get water and nutrients from dry ground?

To survive, early plants evolved important new features. One key adaptation was a waxy coating, called a cuticle, which helped keep water inside the plant. Plants also developed stronger cell walls that allowed them to stand upright against gravity. Simple rootlike structures, called rhizoids, helped anchor plants to the ground and absorb water and minerals from the soil.

The earliest land plants were very small and simple. They looked similar to modern mosses, liverworts and hornworts, which still grow today in damp places like forest floors and stream edges. These plants did not have true roots or stems, and they stayed close to the ground. Fossils of early land plants, such as Cooksonia, date back to about 430 million years ago and show small branching stems only an inch or two tall.

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Happy 20th Birthday Max !

My everything would have been 20 today! 

20 years! 

Two insignificant creatures became one this day to make earth a little better place than the one we inherited. 

Happy Birthday Max! 

You know I talk to you every hour if not every moment of the day - I am in you and you are in me. 

Together we bought beauty, magic, awe, wonder, and peace into our lives and it will persist for eternity my love. 

I love you, I miss you every moment.

                                                                2009, Max's 3rd Birthday!

Underrated Ways To Change The World

Wonderful list here!!

Good Bye Robert Trivers

He was the only person, I wanted to meet but never met (although he lived in NJ).

Humanity hasn't scratched the surface of his work's; thank you for everything sir.

Wisdom Of Taleb

To be a real Human, one needs intelligence, courage, tenacity, curiosity, and a strong sense of justice. 

Remove any one of the five and you end up with the equivalent of a lemon. 

Remove the sense of justice and you end up with a monster.

- Taleb

Animal Suffering...

Animals who are sick, in pain, cold, frustrated, or thirsty respond differently to experimental cancer treatments. Animal stress is not just bad for the animals but it’s also bad for the scientists’ data.

- How Animal Suffering Can Ruin Lab Experiments, Lab animal veterinarian

There Is No Such Thing As Grand Strategy - The Continued Influence Of A Bad Genre

So this all begs the question, if not grand strategy, then what? If we discard the idea that states possess a coherent, elevated ideological and philosophical design integrating all instruments of power across time, what replaces it? I would simply say that doing so would provide a far clearer view of what strategy actually is. If we return to Gaddis’s original definition, “the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities,” strategy appears not as a grand design, but as a continual exercise in discipline, prioritization, and adjustment.

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A more realistic approach, then, is to focus on decision points rather than designs. Instead of asking whether a state has a grand strategy, we should ask how it resolves specific tradeoffs at specific moments. Where does it allocate marginal resources? Which risks does it accept, and which does it avoid? Which commitments does it reinforce, and which does it quietly allow to erode? These choices, taken together, tell us far more about strategy than any post hoc narrative of alignment ever could. This reframing also forces greater intellectual honesty about failure. When strategy is imagined as a grand design, failure is attributed to incompetence or moral weakness. When strategy is understood as constraint management, failure is often tragic but explicable. States misjudge adversaries, overestimate capacities, underestimate costs, and act on incomplete information. These are not deviations from strategy; they are the conditions under which strategy exists.

Finally, abandoning the grand strategy genre clarifies what strategic skill actually looks like. It is not the ability to synthesize everything into a single vision, but the capacity to say no, to sequence objectives, and to recognize when ambition has outrun means. It is judgment exercised under uncertainty, not mastery imposed from above. This kind of strategic thinking is less glamorous and far harder to narrate, which is precisely why it is so often displaced by grander abstractions.

There is no higher plane of statecraft waiting to be discovered beyond politics, budgets, institutions, and tradeoffs. What exists instead is the ordinary, difficult work of governance under constraint—choosing among competing priorities, allocating scarce resources, managing risk, and accepting imperfection. Abandoning the language of grand strategy does not mean abandoning strategic thought. It means stripping away a genre that flatters elites and replacing it with analysis that takes politics seriously. Strategy need not be grand to be real. It needs only to be honest.

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"Surprisingly Popular" Algorithm - Better Wisdom From Crowds

The new method is simple. For a given question, people are asked two things: What they think the right answer is, and what they think popular opinion will be. The variation between the two aggregate responses indicates the correct answer.

“In situations where there is enough information in the crowd to determine the correct answer to a question, that answer will be the one [that] most outperforms expectations,” says paper co-author Drazen Prelec, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management as well as the Department of Economics and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

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Across all these areas, the researchers found that the “surprisingly popular” algorithm reduced errors by 21.3 percent compared to simple majority votes, and by 24.2 percent compared to basic confidence-weighted votes (where people express how confident they are in their answers). And it reduced errors by 22.2 percent compared to another kind of confidence-weighted votes, those taking the answers with the highest average confidence levels.

The paper, “A solution to the single-question crowd wisdom problem,” is being published today in Nature. The authors are Prelec; John McCoy, a doctoral student in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences; and H. Sebastian Seung, a professor of neuroscience and computer science at Princeton University and a former MIT faculty member. Prelec and McCoy are also researchers in the MIT Neuroeconomics Laboratory, where Prelec is the principal investigator.

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In this sense, the “surprisingly popular” principle is not simply derived from the wisdom of crowds. Instead, it uses the knowledge of a well-informed subgroup of people within the larger crowd as a diagnostically powerful tool that points to the right answer.

“A lot of crowd wisdom weights people equally,” McCoy explains. “But some people have more specialized knowledge.” And those people — if they have both correct information and a correct sense of public perception — make a big difference.

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