razib | April 19, 2006I've been a bit anal about genetic drift over the past few days. The reason is simple, replace "random genetic drift" with "sampling error", and note how ridiculous some of the things scientists will say to journalists when they come a callin' sound all of a sudden. "Hm...no, I haven't done research in this area, but it seems like sampling error could generate that sort of pattern." "Well, it could be sampling error, they can't prove it isn't." I'm not saying that random genetic drift isn't a good null hypothesis, I'm just saying that it is a deux ex machina that sounds good when you can't…
razib | April 18, 2006PZ's readers are in a tizzy over this somewhat counterintuitive map:
Notice something weird? If the "Bible Belt" is measured by "religious adherents," then it is slapped vertically across the middle of the country, not in the south. Something is wrong here.
Religion means many things to many people. There are people who have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and who try to convert people to this state who don't go to a specific church on Sunday but meet with a roving "fellowship," reject "religion" and sometimes even the term "Christian." There are Unitarian Universalists I know who…
razib | April 18, 2006The spawn of TomKat lives! Abiola Lapite speculated that Cruise had holoprosencephaly, which would result in miscarriages in his partners. I emailed Lapite and his response was "And how exactly do you know it's his?" Good point. The Superficial has more of course.
razib | April 18, 2006I just found out that a 19th century geologist, John Phillips, was so struck by discontinuities in the stratigraphy of fossil depositions that he believed there had been multiple Creations. What Phillips was seeing were the mass extinctions, like the Permian event, which resulted in an elimination of most genera and a subsequent radiation of new forms. I wonder how Gottfried Leibniz would reconcile this evidence of god's caprice with his assertion that we lived in the best of all worlds. In reference to a previous post where I made a distinction between what people say they believe vs.…
razib | April 17, 2006Beliefnet has a story about Opus Dei disavowing the publication of a cartoon by a local group which put Muhammad in Hell taking after Dante. The officials make it clear that the decision was in part driven by pragmatic concerns of violence after the Danish cartoon controversy, but I found this conclusion amusing:
"The cartoon's publication is further framed by the current debate in many countries regarding the false and unjust depiction of the Christian faith in The Da Vinci Code," he said. "The issue at stake here is how to make compatible freedom of expression, a free market and respect…
razib | April 17, 2006Interesting profile of Roman Catholic evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala. As an aside they note:
In conducting the studies he had suggested, Ayala also made the unexpected discovery that the parasite P. falciparum can reproduce not just sexually, but clonally as well: it can fuse male and female gametes - sexual reproduction - or transmit all of its genes as a single unit, the cloning that was an unexpected phenomenon.
Ayala's discovery has helped reveal that malaria, which now kills up to 2.7 million people per year - mostly African children - became common only within the last 5,000…
razib | April 17, 2006Just a quick review about some issues that I assumed implicitly in my post where I took issue with genetic drift as a force for population variation. It isn't like genetic drift can't result in variation...but the researcher seemed to be pointing to founder effect which would homogenize alternative populations and "fix" them into alternative states. For founder effect to really work you need to reduce the effective population size and squeeze genetic polymorphism out of the gene pool. Consider the equation for decline in heterozygosity1:
Ht = (1 - 1/(2N))tH0
Where H0 is the intial…
razib | April 17, 2006Below the fold is an image of a fine specimen of fitness being signalled by aesthetic characters....
Update: Behold, the oogly-cat:
razib | April 17, 2006Via grrlscientist I found the Personal DNA test. I was attracted to the title before I realized it was a personality test, but it seems a rather good one. I am a:
More details here.
Seems about right, though personality tests tend to skew toward positive labels to make you accept their evaluations. So I'll point to two generally negative things about me which this test seemed to gauge accurately (though via transparent questions), I lack empathy and style. Anyway, like IQ tests, US News & World Report college rankings or "DNA ancestry tests," this test told me what I generally…
razib | April 17, 2006I read the paper that Afarensis pointed me to, Cranial morphology of early Americans from Lagoa Santa, Brazil: Implications for the settlement of the New World. I found it somewhat persuasive. The authors basically posit two primary waves of humans that settled the New World, a "generalized" form that entered before 10,000 years BP, and a specialized "Mongoloid" form that we know as Native Americans who arrived around 10,000 years ago. As John Hawks notes, this model has been proposed for other regions of the world. In regards to "specialized" human populations, The Real Eve Stephen…
razib | April 16, 2006Rob Knop, physicist and Christian, offers us his ruminations on religion. But Rob is not an "orthodox" Christian from what I can tell, he says in a follow up post:
...do I really believe that Jesus was really bodily resurrected, in contrast to everything we have observed, and everything we know and understand about human physiology and the decay that happens even shortly after death?
Let me give you a wholly unsatisfactory answer: probably not.
There you have it, he believes that the balance of the evidence leans against the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That being said, I'm a big…
razib | April 16, 2006I just read Ed Brayton's commentary about an attack on a pro-life display on the campus of the University of Northern Kentucky. The professor who seems to have encouraged this is quoted as saying:
"Any violence perpetrated against that silly display was minor compared to how I felt when I saw it. Some of my students felt the same way, just outraged," Jacobsen said.
First, great job on on refuting the stereotype that women think with their hearts rather than their head Herr Professor! "Outrage" or "repugnance," Left or Right, it doesn't matter. Affairs of the heart have a role to play in…
razib | April 16, 2006Afarensis has a long post worth reading about new discoveries relating to the peopling of the Americans. This is a controversial topic, Moira Breen has been covering this issue for several years now in relation to the famous Kennewick Man. But, this caught my eye:
Still, not all scientists are convinced that the variations found in the skulls are proof of multiple migrations to the Americas.
"There is a huge amount of variation among the first Americans, more than you see among any other population outside of the Pacific," said Joseph Powell, an anthropologist at the University of New…
razib | April 16, 2006What people believe, what they say they believe and what they do may be wholly unrelated, but are never perfectly correlated. The only reason I note this is that I meet so many intelligent people who seem to assume a deep correlation between these distinct vectors.
razib | April 16, 2006Below I mentioned the doyen of living population geneticists, James Crow, yeah, Jim Crow. Collaborater with Motoo Kimura of Neutral Theory fame, Crow is still an active member of the biological community. Recently he reviewed Genes in Conflict : The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements by Bob Trivers & Austin Burt in Nature. He begins:
In the early 1970s, Robert Trivers published six articles on the evolution of social behaviour. They were ignored by most social scientists, who were reluctant to consider natural selection as a cause of human behavioural traits, and they were bitterly…
razib | April 14, 2006As a follow up to my post below, here is a comment over at Uncertain Principles:
Being a lowly biologist myself, I will just note that there is a long tradition of physicists making important contributions in biology (Schroedinger, Pauling), but I can't think of any reverse cases -- that is, biologists who made important discoveries in physics. (That doesn't, of course, mean that there aren't any, and I'd love to hear about some.)
As a point of fact, Linus Pauling was originally a physical chemist. If physical chemists are classed with the physicists I think many biochemistry majors will…
razib | April 13, 2006Alex and PZ point me to this quote from one John Barrow:
When Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins challenged physicist John Barrow on his formulation of the constants of nature at last summer's Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship lectures, Barrow laughed and said, "You have a problem with these ideas, Richard, because you're not really a scientist. You're a biologist."
Ouch!!! Many physical scientists look down on life scientists. I had a friend, who shall remain nameless (who knows his own name) who was habitually contemptuous of the likes of life scientists. I was only a righteous…
razib | April 13, 2006By now most of you have read Online Journalism Review, which deigns to character moi as:
...And there are several blogs, such as Afarensis and Gene Expression, that tend to stay away from cultural and political commentary altogether.
Well, Mr. Science and Politics might have something to say about that! To be fair, this is an issue of sampling bias...I haven't posted too much on politics here on this weblog, so if you sampled on any given day one might surmise that this wasn't a particularly political blog. And I agree it isn't, at least explicitly, though we all have political opinions…
razib | April 12, 2006According to The New York Times Seeking Ancestry in DNA Ties Uncovered by Tests is the most emailed article today. As I've stated before, I believe this area of science & technology is driven by psychology. The same drive which has led men and women to enter into the time consuming hobby of genealogy for hundreds of years. Below, NuSapiens offers the opinion that the new technology will undermine the current orthodoxies and mentalities in regards to race. Unfortunately, I don't believe that anymore...I just think people are too driven by their intuitive pattern matching &…
razib | April 11, 2006There's a terrifying article in The New York Times titled Seeking Ancestry in DNA Ties Uncovered by Tests. Here is a sample:
Alan Moldawer's adopted twins, Matt and Andrew, had always thought of themselves as white. But when it came time for them to apply to college last year, Mr. Moldawer thought it might be worth investigating the origins of their slightly tan-tinted skin, with a new DNA kit that he had heard could determine an individual's genetic ancestry.
The results, designating the boys 9 percent Native American and 11 percent northern African, arrived too late for the admissions…