Perhaps because we only remember the good stuff? Or only the good suff & famous authors get reprinted. I'm prompted to offer this hypothesis in response to Chad Orzel's commentary that there was a lot of bad space opera even during the "Golden Age" of science fiction. I recall that Zadie Smith once noted that 99.99% (or something to that effect) of Victorian fiction is forgotten and out of print. All that remains read are the "classics," so contemporary audiences have a biased perspective as to the median quality of Victorian-era writers. Of course the insight can be generalized to the arts overall; only the good gets reproduced or remembered.
To be fair, some science fiction authors, such as George R. R Martin (who also writes other genres obviously), have claimed that the turn away from "hard" sf rooted in physics and engineering is reflective of a cultural shift. In the 1950s the "atomic age" was viewed positively, and the possibilities seemed unbounded. Today a lot of the fiction deeply influenced by science in constructing a story may take a more ambivalent, or even pessimistic, view of how science effects human happiness (e.g., dystopian futures where nanotech gets out of control).
Although copy number variation (CNV) has recently received much attention as a form of structure variation within the human genome, knowledge is still inadequate on fundamental CNV characteristics such as occurrence rate, genomic distribution and ethnic differentiation. In the present study, we used the Affymetrix GeneChip® Mapping 500K Array to discover and characterize CNVs in the human genome and to study ethnic differences of CNVs between Caucasians and Asians. Three thousand and nineteen CNVs, including 2381 CNVs in autosomes and 638 CNVs in X chromosome, from 985 Caucasian and 692 Asian individuals were identified, with a mean length of 296 kb. Among these CNVs, 190 had frequencies greater than 1% in at least one ethnic group, and 109 showed significant ethnic differences in frequencies (p<0.01). After merging overlapping CNVs, 1135 copy number variation regions (CNVRs), covering approximately 439 Mb (14.3%) of the human genome, were obtained. Our findings of ethnic differentiation of CNVs, along with the newly constructed CNV genomic map, extend our knowledge on the structural variation in the human genome and may furnish a basis for understanding the genomic differentiation of complex traits across ethnic groups.
Here's a figure which shows the distributions, CHI = Chinese and CAU = Caucasion.*
The big picture issue is CNVs may be important in gene expression, the paper cites a number that ~18% of the variance in this may be due to CNVs. An interesting recent case was CNV differences in regards to the gene which codes for amylase, with some researchers suggesting this is due to selection for the ability to digest starches for agriculturalists. In relation to the title, there might not be anything there:
A third example of ethnic variation is that the genomic coverage of CNVs in Asians is 1.6-fold higher than that in seen in Caucasians, indicating that genome variants were more common in Asians than in Caucasians. Further sensitivity analysis resulted in an only 1.2-fold elevated genomic coverage of Chinese CNVs compared to Caucasian CNVs. Considering different DNA extraction methods for Chinese and Caucasian samples, the ethnic differences seen in genomic coverage may be partially due to different binding affinities of diverse DNA extracts to the SNP chip array.
Citation: Li J, Yang T, Wang L, Yan H, Zhang Y, et al. 2009, Whole Genome Distribution and Ethnic Differentiation of Copy Number Variation in Caucasian and Asian Populations. PLoS ONE 4(11): e7958. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007958
* If they use "Caucasian" for European origin people, why not "Mongoloid" for Chinese?
Although the North American megafaunal extinctions and the formation of novel plant communities are well-known features of the last deglaciation, the causal relationships between these phenomena are unclear. Using the dung fungus Sporormiella and other paleoecological proxies from Appleman Lake, Indiana, and several New York sites, we established that the megafaunal decline closely preceded enhanced fire regimes and the development of plant communities that have no modern analogs. The loss of keystone megaherbivores may thus have altered ecosystem structure and function by the release of palatable hardwoods from herbivory pressure and by fuel accumulation. Megafaunal populations collapsed from 14,800 to 13,700 years ago, well before the final extinctions and during the Bølling-Allerød warm period. Human impacts remain plausible, but the decline predates Younger Dryas cooling and the extraterrestrial impact event proposed to have occurred 12,900 years ago.
What about humans, those pesky slayers of animals? Some scientists believed that North America's Clovis people specialised in hunting big mammals, causing a "blitzkrieg" of spear-throwing that drove many species to extinction. But these hunters only arrive in North America between 13,300 and 12,900 years ago, around a thousand years after the population crashes had begun.
If people were responsible, they must have been pre-Clovis settlers. There's growing evidence that such humans were around, but they weren't common or specialised. They may have contributed to the beasts' downfall, while Clovis hunting technology delivered a coup de grace to already faltering populati0ons.
By analysing the sediment at Appleman lake - spores, pollen, charcoal and all - Gill has replayed the history of the site, spanning the last 17,000 years. Her data rule out a few theories, but as she says, they "[do] not conclusively resolve the debate" about climate causes versus human ones. It's possible that similar studies at different sites and other continents will help to provide more clues.
A complex story like this is perhaps more common than an event such as the extinction of the passenger pigeons. Populations of organisms often go through cycles in census size, whether due to environmental variation or coevolutionary dynamics with parasites. Consider the example of the Tasmania devil, the disease which it is susceptible to is not the doing of humans, but the introduction of dingos (probably by humans) mean that the species is restricted to Tasmania. Additionally, humans have laid claim to much of the habitat of the devil (or what was the habitat of the devil). When a virulent disease hits, the devil has a much smaller margin of error than it had before. It could be that recent megafaunal extinctions are ultimately due to humans, even if they are not always proximately due to humans.
During the first few years of ScienceBlogs there was a lot of talk about religion. Yes, there's talk about religion now, but it's toned down in the wake of the ebbing of the publicity around The God Delusion. Naturally in the wake of the New Atheism a raft of conventional apologetics have been published, The Dawkins' Delusion being a typical example. More recently more nuanced books which wend the middle ground between militant atheism and conventional apologetics have taken center strage. Karen Armstrong's The Case for God approaches this from a philo-theistic angle, while Robert Wright's The Evolution of God is predicated on materialist presuppositions.
...We synthesize mitochondrial phylogenetic information from 263 subfossil moa specimens from across NZ with morphological, ecological, and new geological data to create the first comprehensive phylogeny, taxonomy, and evolutionary timeframe for all of the species of an extinct order. We also present an important new geological/paleogeographical model of late Cenozoic NZ, which suggests that terrestrial biota on the North and South Island landmasses were isolated for most of the past 20-30 Ma. The data reveal that the patterns of genetic diversity within and between different moa clades reflect a complex history following a major marine transgression in the Oligocene, affected by marine barriers, tectonic activity, and glacial cycles. Surprisingly, the remarkable morphological radiation of moa appears to have occurred much more recently than previous early Miocene (ca. 15 Ma) estimates, and was coincident with the accelerated uplift of the Southern Alps just ca. 5-8.5 Ma. Together with recent fossil evidence, these data suggest that the recent evolutionary history of nearly all of the iconic NZ terrestrial biota occurred principally on just the South Island.
"Subfossil" means that it hasn't totally fossilized and one can extract organic material from the remains.
It's hard to say exactly how much support the theory of evolution enjoys in the world's Muslim countries, but it's definitely not very much. In one 2006 study by American political scientists, people in 34 industrial nations were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the idea that human beings evolved from earlier life forms. Turkey, the only Muslim country in the survey, showed the lowest levels of support - barely a quarter of Turks said they agreed. By comparison, at least 80 percent of those surveyed in Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and France agreed. (The United States ranked second lowest, after Turkey, at 40 percent.) Turkey is widely seen as the most culturally liberal Muslim nation, and on attitudes about evolution, other polling has borne this out: A recent study of religious attitudes found that only 16 percent of Indonesians, 14 percent of Pakistanis, and 8 percent of Egyptians believed in evolution.
I asked the reporter for a citation, and I received one, On being religious : patterns of religious commitment in muslim societies. You can download the PDF at that link (bottom of the page). It has a nice breakdown of religious beliefs, including attitudes toward evolution. But the sample is non-representative:
As you can see the sample is strongly skewed toward the more educated segments of society. On the other hand, they did try and include religious professionals as well, though I'm unclear as to the proportion within the samples. The N's are large, so probably only a few percent. But keep in mind the biases in the sample above when looking at the data below.
There was recently a conference on evolution in Egypt. Some interesting numbers:
Dr Guessoum, who is a Sunni Muslim, said that in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and Malaysia, only 15 per cent of those surveyed believed Darwin's theory to be "true" or "probably true". This stand was equally prevalent among students and teachers, from high school to university. Most alarmingly, he claimed, science teachers were misrepresenting the facts and theories of evolution by mixing it with religious ideologies.
A survey of 100 academics and 100 students that he conducted at his own university showed that 62 per cent of Muslim professors and students believed evolution to be an "unproven theory", compared with 10 per cent of non-Muslim professors. "The rate of acceptance of evolution and of the idea of teaching evolution was extremely low," he said. "I wondered, who are all these educated people rejecting evolution? They are even rejecting the fact that it should be taught as scientific knowledge."
I put more stock in the second paragraph since he did that survey himself, though I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers for the first checked out. I did find this Boston Globe article with more concrete numbers:
The relationship between language families and historical population genetics has a long history. In the 19th and early 20th centuries anthropologists were wont to substitute and synthesize the connections discerned in linguistic relationships with those of presumed biological affinities. This resulted in great hilarity. Older works sometimes labeled the Finns a "Mongoloid" people because of their Uralic language. But once the physical substrate of genetic inheritance (DNA) was ascertained some correspondences did emerge.
The figure to the left is from an L. L. Cavalli-Sforza paper, Genes, peoples, and languages. The correspondence between gene families and language families is clear. From the paper:
Most patterns found in the analysis of human living populations are likely to be consequences of demographic expansions, determined by technological developments affecting food availability, transportation, or military power. During such expansions, both genes and languages are spread to potentially vast areas. In principle, this tends to create a correlation between the respective evolutionary trees. The correlation is usually positive and often remarkably high. It can be decreased or hidden by phenomena of language replacement and also of gene replacement, usually partial, due to gene flow.
Genetic variation and languages are both characteristics of individuals & populations. One might imagine that gene flow between groups might be modulated by linguistic affinity between groups, or, linguistic affinity between groups might be modulated by gene flow between the groups. Cavalli-Sforza's colleague Marcus Feldman has asserted that the correlation does indeed emerge out of biases in mating patterns more explicitly of late.
Language and genes are passed from parents to offspring. But, there are clearly differences in terms of the specific constraints on inheritance. When it comes to genes we have both the Mendelian abstraction as well as DNA as a concrete substrate. Parent-offspring transmission is symmetrical (from both parents), subject to mutation, segregation, recombination, etc. Though there are attempts to model language, to my knowledge there is not such robust theoretical understanding of the inheritance of language from parents to offspring, in particular the biological substrate which acquires language (I do not class the arguments about deep structure in linguistics in the same class as Mendelian and DNA models of genetics).
Of course there is the reality of great differences in transmission of language and genes. In the domain of language horizontal transmission is critical to understanding its distribution & evolution (I am aware that horizontal gene transfer is important in biological evolution, but not so much in the scope and species we're talking about). One's parents may speak a different language because language acquisition and fluency is also dependent on peers in a way that genetic variation is not. Additionally, language transmission from parents need not be symmetrical, one may acquire the language of one parent but not the other. One may speak the same language as one's parents, but with a different accent (that one of one's peer group). Interestingly, the exception to this rule of accents are individuals with some socialization dysfunction, such as autism.
There are also similarities between languages and genes. The molecular clock has its analogy in the lexical clock. There is also lexical admixture between languages, for example the heavy load of French-derived terms in modern English, the influence of Slavic upon the Baltic languages. A new paper in PLoS Biology leans on these last similarities to utilize the Structure framework to flesh out the relationships of the language of New Guinea & Australia, what was once "Sahul" during the last Ice Age. The author's summary from Explaining the Linguistic Diversity of Sahul Using Population Models:
Changes in the world of personal genomics. Dan MacArthur has the details on 23andMe changing up its offerings, perhaps signalling that the money gush is long over. And deCode is finally dead. Of course, just because the .com bubble burst doesn't mean that the internet is no longer a part of our lives. New players will likely emerge in the wake of this creative destruction, and old players will adapt to survive.
This discussion between Michael Specter & Chris Mooney pointed me to an interesting new book, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives. Instead of Global Warming or Creationism, Specter addresses less pervasively disputatious issues such as genetically modified food, the anti-vaccination movement and the politics of the FDA approval process (at least judging from the discussion). Mooney & Specter also point to the reality that denialism exists in Blue America (though anyone who has followed the dabbling of the Huffington Post in this area would be aware of that stream of thought). When I was in college a friend of mine who active in Leftish causes expressed her disgust with the idea of fish genetic material spliced into tomatoes.* This is a cliche and widely quoted example, so she wasn't being original, but it was clear that she thought that the argument was powerful on prima facie grounds. That is, fish genes shouldn't be in plants. Why? Because they just shouldn't. This genre of argument from intuition and plausibility derived from an emotional response is of the same family as Sarah Palin's Creationism.
It is rare for a movie not based on a pre-existing brand, franchise or hit novel to deliver such robust results. Sony said "2012," with a budget of $200 million, had the highest worldwide opening ever for an original movie.
And with its never-ending parade of glorious, ludicrous, and utterly improbable catastrophes, it more or less succeeds. 2012 is the sort of movie so aggressively hyperbolic and devoutly over-the-top that it makes traditional descriptive labels obsolete and thus requires the invention of whole new words. My suggestions? How about catastrophaganza--the subgenre to which 2012 (and most of Emmerich's oeuvre) belongs--and retardiculous--a combo word to describe its barfy blend of low-quality yucks; treacly, social-welfare obsessed melodrama; buzz-word-laden psuedo-scientific babble; and gleefully apocalyptic pyrotechnic spectacle.
John Emerson points me to some interesting data crunching over at Open Left. The diarist, "dreaminonempty," is analyzing the past few years' election results against demographic variables. What's there not to like? Though I do think the perspective is a bit too The Emerging Democratic Majority. Yes, it does look like the Republicans, as a white Christian party, are in a world of demographic hurt. But, be cautious about projecting current trends too far. By that, I mean that the trends working against the Republicans are clear, but we aren't quite where the Republicans were during the 1970s-1990s where the opposition party had to play on their terms (e.g., the two Democratic Presidents were Southerners who engaged in triangulation). Realignments take time, and by the time all the dynamics play out some of the background assumptions may have changed.
More substantively, below is a comparison of the proportion of votes that the Republican John C Fremont received in 1856, and the proportion of whites who voted for Barack Hussein Obama in 2008 (the % county-by-county here is an estimate since Exit Polls are only statewide).
