Hurricane "Drought" Sets New Record -- Scientific American -- July 2, 2016

Must be all that global warming. By the way, this was "predicted" by the tea leaves that John Kemp has been posting for the past year. This really is quite amazing. It's not just there have been no major hurricanes in the Gulf this year, but there have been NO hurricanes at all in the Gulf in the past three years. Makes one wonder, doesn't it.

That is the longest streak in the past 130 years, since formal record-keeping began in 1886.

Despite the fact that this is the longest streak in 130 years -- since formal record-keeping began in 1866, the folks who constantly warn us about global warning -- say that "this is not unusual."
The article did not mention "global warming."

Guaranteed: we get one severe hurricane this year, and journalists will "blame" manmade global warming.

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General Mills Flour Recall 

About three weeks, I forget the exact day, I picked up a 5-lb bag of Gold Medal all-purpose flour. When I brought it up to the counter, it would not "ring up." The cashier did not understand why; a quick conversation with Albertson's manager solved the problem: all Gold Medal flour had been recalled.

It happened so quickly, they didn't even have time to put up a sign on the shelves. It was electronically "managed" until store employees could get around to posting notices of the recall.

I didn't give it any thought until I saw this AP article over at Yahoo!Finance. What amazes me is how epidemiologists can identify the cause.

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Mutation: Deus Ex Machina

I am quite happy to have read John Hands' CosmoSapiens. I'm not quite sure what drove him to write such a book, and I'm not sure if he can be "pigeon-holed." But I'm pretty sure he and Richard Dawkins are not drinking buddies.

For guys like Richard Dawkins, it's all about the gene (The Selfish Gene, e.g.).

Not only is John Hands not so sure, he lays out a pretty case that the "jury is still out." Up until a few years I was solidly in Richard Dawkins' camp -- although I detest his methods.

But now, after reading John Hands, I see things quite a bit differently. Some argue that mutations are fairly rare in somatic cells, and even rarer in germ cells.

I was reminded of that when reading the very short -- two pages -- review of a short book, Why Only US: Language and Evolution, by Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky.

When Chomsky entered the field of linguistics it was widely assumed that the human mind began life as a blank slate, upon which later experience was written. Accordingly, language was seen as a learned behavior, imposed from the outside upon the infants who acquire it. This was certainly the view of the renowned behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, and the young Chomsky gained instant notoriety by definitively trashing Skinner’s 1957 book Verbal Behavior in a review published in the journal Language in 1959. In place of Skinner’s behaviorist ideas, Chomsky substituted a core set of beliefs about language that he had already begun to articulate in his own 1957 book, Syntactic Structures.

In stark contrast to the behaviorist view, Chomsky saw human language as entirely unique, rather than as an extension of other forms of animal communication. And for all that humans were notoriously linguistically diverse, he also insisted that all languages were variants on one single basic theme. What is more, because all developmentally normal children rapidly and spontaneously acquire their first language without being specifically taught to do so (indeed, often despite parental inattention), he saw the ability to acquire language as innate, part of the specifically human biological heritage.
Delving deeper, he also viewed most basic aspects of syntax as innate, leaving only the peripheral details that vary among different languages to be learned by each developing infant.

And then the mutation, a deus ex machina:

Berwick and Chomsky go on to suggest that the biology underwriting the Merge operation emerged as the result of a “minor mutation” in a member of an early modern human population. As judged from the archaeological record, this event occurred in East Africa some 80,000 years ago, and it produced a neural novelty that could yield “structured expressions” from “computational atoms” to provide a “rich language of thought.”

Only at a later stage was “the internal language of thought…connected to the sensorimotor system” that makes speech possible. In human evolution, then, the existence of language for thought preceded that of spoken language: a currently controversial idea, albeit with a respectable pedigree that traces back to the writings of John Locke in the eighteenth century.

Of course, there is no proof of that "minor mutation" and one can safely say there never will be. 

Suggesting that the development of language was "the result of a minor mutation in a member of an early modern human population" would certainly catch John Hands' attention. 

"A minor mutation" explains everything. Sort of like Rudyard Kipling's Just So stories.