Evolution:
The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved & Why It Endures permlink
Category: Evolution
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...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 5:03 AM • 23 Comments •
Ancient DNA & the moa permlink
Category: Evolution
The evolutionary history of the extinct ratite moa and New Zealand Neogene paleogeography: ...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,...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 10:54 PM • 1 Comments •
What if fitness & migration were random? permlink
Category: Genetics
There are many ways one can model population genetic dynamics. A simple avenue is to imagine a deme, a group of breeding individuals, subject to a few major parameters which are modulating genetic variation. Mutation, migration, random drift and selection....
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Posted by Razib Khan at 5:50 AM • 2 Comments •
Levels of selection & the full Price Equation permlink
Category: Evolution
In the post below on the Price Equation I stayed true to George Price's original notation in his 1970 paper where he introduced his formalism. But here is a more conventional form, the "Full Price Equation," which introduces a second...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 4:34 PM • 2 Comments •
The Price Equation permlink
Category: Evolution
In the comments below I referred to the "Price Equation." Here is what William D. Hamilton had to say about George Price's formalism in Narrow Roads of Gene Land: A manuscript did eventually come from him but what I found...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 9:18 AM • 1 Comments •
Unitary mindfulness in collective action permlink
Category: Genetics
In reviewing a paper which sketches out the boundary conditions under which group-level natural selection would result in the emergence of altruism as a genetically encoded trait, I stated: ... I would look to cultural group selection, because there are...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 8:39 AM • 6 Comments •
What does not kill the group, makes it stronger! permlink
Category: Genetics
I recently finished reading The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, a new book by Nicholas Wade, a science writer for The New York Times. Before giving it the "full treatment" I thought it behooved me to...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 8:34 AM • 10 Comments •
Materialism leads to inequality permlink
Category: Evolution
Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and the Dynamics of Inequality in Small-Scale Societies: Small-scale human societies range from foraging bands with a strong egalitarian ethos to more economically stratified agrarian and pastoral societies. We explain this variation in inequality using a dynamic...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 3:13 PM • 1 Comments •
Remember the lizard men permlink
Category: Evolution
Carl Zimmer points me an article about a former anthropologist who has some weird ideas about the origin of man: Since his resignation from the university in 1990, however, Horn has changed his tune. Once a staunch Darwinist and tenured...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 5:22 PM • 20 Comments •
Alberta has no rats! permlink
Category: Evolution
There's something cool about Canada, I just found out that Alberta is the only large region of permanently inhabited human territory which lacks brown rats. One thing you have to remember is that the brown rat only began spreading within...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 2:11 AM • 2 Comments •