A Companion to the History of the Book published

See below

OUDSHOORN

The Relationship between Roman and Local Law in the Babatha and Salome Komaise Archives
General Analysis and Three Case Studies on Law of Succession, Guardianship and Marriage
Jacobine G. Oudshoorn
See below:

N.A. SALEM, Graeco-Roman and Byzantine Documents: Ten Unpublished Papyri From The Egyptian Museum

Noha A. Sâlem, Graeco-Roman and Byzantine Documents: Ten Unpublished Papyri From The Egyptian Museum.
Edited, English translation and Commentary by ----, Cairo 2006. 107 pp. (10 plates). Price not stated.

Misr al-Arabia,
19 Islam Str.,
Hammamat al-Koubba, Cairo,
POB 5740 Heliopolis Gharb,

ISBN 9775471486
ISBN 13: 9789775471482


1: Part of a Private Letter, P.Cair.Cat. inv. 10709 (Prov. ?, Ist cent.)
2: Fragment of Deposit Repayment, P.Cair.Cat. inv. 10499 (Arsinoite, IInd cent.)
3. Official Document, P.Cair.Cat. inv. 10705 (Prov. ?, IIIrd cent.)
4. Fragment of a Receipt, P.Cair.Cat. inv. 1064<3> (Hermop., IVth cent.)
5. Petition to an Exactor, P.Cair.Cat. inv. 10513 (Hermop., IVth cent.)
6. Fragment of a Petition P.Cair.Cat. inv. 10490 (Hermop., IVth cent.)
7. Part of an Agreement of Sale, P.Cair.Cat. inv. 10514 (Hermop., IVth cent. [307, 318, 319, 320, 321, 326, 352 or 356?])
8. Part of a Private Letter, P.Cair.Cat. inv. 10614 (Hermop., IVth cent.)
9. Fragment of a Private Letter, P.Cair.Cat. inv. 10454 (Hermop., IVth cent.)
10. Receipt, P.Cair.Cat. inv. 10746 (Hermop., VIIth cent.)

This volume appears to republish (or reprint?) the edition in BACPS 21 (2004) 9-109. The same inv. nos. are listed in P.Cair. Cat.

Source: K.A. Worp on Papy-L; I have checked the ISBN's given above on WorldCat and OLIS . The ref. to the earler publication in the Bulletin of the Center of Papyrological Studies (BACPS) I owe to K.A. Worp and D. Hagedorn.

Modern women are excellent gatherers

 
Here's an article form this week's New Scientist [Modern women are excellent gatherers]. I'd be curious to know what our adaptationist friends think about it. Is this a good example of how to do research?

Men hunted, women gathered. That is how the division of labour between the sexes is supposed to have been in the distant past. According to a new study, an echo of these abilities can still be found today.

Max Krasnow and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have discovered that modern women are better than men at remembering the location of food such as fruit and veg in a market.

The researchers led 86 adults to certain stalls in Santa Barbara's large Saturday farmer's market, then back to a location in the centre of the market from where the stalls could not be seen. They were then asked to point to each stall's location. This requires dead reckoning - a skill that men may once have used to return from hunting, and one that men today still usually perform better than women in experiments. Despite this, the ...

The news report refers to a paper that will soon be published in Proc. Roy. Soc. B [New et al. 2007]. Here's the abstract.

We present evidence for an evolved sexually dimorphic adaptation that activates spatial memory and navigation skills in response to fruits, vegetables and other traditionally gatherable sessile food resources. In spite of extensive evidence for a male advantage on a wide variety of navigational tasks, we demonstrate that a simple but ecologically important shift in content can reverse this sex difference. This effect is predicted by and consistent with the theory that a sexual division in ancestral foraging labour selected for gathering-specific spatial mechanisms, some of which are sexually differentiated. The hypothesis that gathering-specific spatial adaptations exist in the human mind is further supported by our finding that spatial memory is preferentially engaged for resources with higher nutritional quality (e.g. caloric density). This result strongly suggests that the underlying mechanisms evolved in part as adaptations for efficient foraging. Together, these results demonstrate that human spatial cognition is content sensitive, domain specific and designed by natural selection to mesh with important regularities of the ancestral world.

As indicated in the news report, 86 adults (41 women and 45 men) were tested for their ability to remember the location of food stalls in a farmers market. The women were 9% better at this than the men.

The result confirms the authors' hypothesis that women are genetically superior at this task because of adaptation during our hunter-gatherer past.

Silverman & Eals (1992) argue that the female advantage on pencil-and-paper and desktop measures of object location memory reflects a selective pressure on ancestral women for plant-foraging efficiency. But their measures did not involve foods, tested spatial memory on a very small scale, and included no measure of vectoring; as a result, a female advantage on their measures is open to many alternative interpretations. For this reason, we deemed it important to examine whether a female advantage could be demonstrated on a task that closely resembles foraging for plant foods. From this theory, we predicted that women should remember the locations where they have previously encountered immobile resources (e.g. plants, honey) more accurately than do men.

The authors don't explain exactly how this adaptation might have happened. Presumably it went something like this ...

At some time in the ancient past all humans had a single allele for the (unknown) gathering gene. A mutation in this gene arose producing an allele where the ability to gather food was improved. Since women were the principle food gatherers, this mutant allele conferred a selective advantage on women who carried it: presumably because they didn't share their food with their friends who carried the old allele. Over time, the new allele became fixed (or very frequent) in women but men did not benefit.

The first three authors are in Departments of Psychology and the senior author is in a Department of Anthropology.

---

New, J., Krasnow, M.M, Truxaw, D. and Gaulin, S.J.C. (2007) Spatial adaptations for plant foraging: women excel and calories count. Proc. Roy. Soc. B. DOI 10.1098/rspb.2007.0826.

[Photo Credit: The drawing is "An artist’s impression of early Hunter-Gatherers" from Manx National Heritage]

Adaptationomics

 
Jonathan A. Eisen is an evolutionary biologist with a blog called The Tree of Life. He's also one of the authors of a new textbook on evolution published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories [A New Textbook on Evolution]. I'm about to order a copy.

I mention this because Eisen is a pluralist. He's as annoyed by adaptationist just-so so stories as I am. Over on the Dennett on Adaptationism thread I'm encountering commenters who question whether there really are modern scientists who believe in the adaptationist program. I can assure you there are. Eisen has discovered some of them in the field of genomics—he didn't have to look very hard—and he decided to label their approach adaptationomics [Adaptationomics Award #1 - Wolbachia DNA sneaking into host genomes]. This is tongue-in-cheek so don't all you adaptationists get your knickers in a knot.

Here's how Jonathan sets up the issue.

For years I have been fighting against the tide on the tendency for people doing genomics work to resort to silly adaptationist arguments for observations. The argument goes something like this. We sequenced a genome (or did some type of genomics). We made an observation of something weird being present (take your pick - it could be a gene order or a gene expression pattern or whatever). We conclude that this observation MUST have an adaptive explanation. We have come up one such adaptive explanation. Therefore this explanation must be correct.

Gould and Lewontin railed against this type of thing many years ago and others have since. Just because something is there does not mean it is adaptive (e.g., it could be neutral or detrimental). And even if something is adaptive, just because you can think of an adaptive explanation does not mean your explanation is correct.

And this is so common in genomics I have decided to invent a new word - Adaptationomics. And I am giving out my first award in this to Jack Warren and colleagues for their recent press release on their new study of lateral transfer in Wolbachia (plus it lets me plug their new study which is pretty ^$%# cool).

Does this sound familiar?

What did the authors say that makes them adaptationists? In order to understand their statement you have to be familiar with their findings. They discovered that the genome of a parasite (Wolbachia) has been integrated into the geonome of their insect host. There are several reasons why this might have happened. It could just be an accident, since these kind of recombinant events occur frequently and most insects don't carry a full complement of their parasite's genome. In other words, it could be junk.

On the other hand, the parasite genome could possibly confer some (unknown) selective advantage on the host. But here's the rub. When the author of the article, Julie Dunning Hotopp, was interviewed for the the Nature News article here's what she said.

You're talking about a significant portion of its DNA that is now from Wolbachia," says Julie Dunning Hotopp, a geneticist at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, who led the study. "There has to be some sort of selection to carry around that much extra DNA."

That's a classic adaptationist statement. The result "must be" explained by natural selection. There are no other options. I agree with Jonathan Eisen, this is a fitting recipient of his new Adaptationomics Award.

Congratulations to Julie Dunning Hotopp.

Theories of Speciation

 
In order to understand real evolution you have to understand speciation. This fact usually comes as a great surprise to adaptationists who tend not to think of such things. (Or, if they do, they adopt a grossly simplified version of speciation based on adaptation.)

John Wilkins tries to explain theories of speciation in his latest posting on Evolving Thoughts [Theories of Speciation]. John is a philosopher but don't let that fool you. He's an expert of speciation. The problem is, he explains it like a philosopher. :-)

Here's a nifty chart that I stole from John's article (he published it in his latest paper). If, after looking at the chart, it all becomes crystal clear to you then you have my sympathy. This is a very difficult problem but it can't be swept under the rug if you want to debate hierarchical theory and punctuated equilibria.

A genetic trigger for the Cambrian explosion unraveled?

 
Here's an interesting press release [A genetic trigger for the Cambrian explosion unraveled?]. This is the abstract, there's much more but I can't make sense of any of it.

A team of scientists led by young Croatian evolutionary geneticist Tomislav Domazet-Lošo from Ruder Boškovic Institute (RBI) in Zagreb, Croatia, developed a novel methodological approach in evolutionary studies. Using the method they named 'genomic phylostratigraphy', its authors shed new and unexpected light on some of the long standing macroevolutionary issues, which have been puzzling evolutionary biologists since Darwin.

We won't be able to discuss this "revolutionary" paper because it won't be published until November. The journal is Trends in Genetics, which is billed as "the most established monthly journal in Genetics."

RPM at Evolgen didn't seem to be too impressed either [Genomic Phylostratigraphy]. Go there if you want to see a list of the really best journals in genetics.

I wish there were some way of enforcing standards on places that issue scientific press releases. This one from the Ruder Boškovic Institute (RBI) is worse than useless.