Evolution:
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 • 9 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 •
Svante Paabo didn't say what I suggested he said. Perhaps permlink
Category: Evolution
Dr. Thomas Mailund has posted a YouTube interview of Svante Paabo. Looks like the previous post was off-base, though I'm not really totally sure....
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Posted by Razib Khan at 4:31 AM • 1 Comments •
"What Darwin Said" permlink
Category: Evolution
My co-blogger at Gene Expression Classic, David, has completed a very interesting series today. 1: The Pattern of Evolution 2: Mechanisms of Evolution 3: Heredity 4: Speciation 5: Gradualism (A) 6: Gradualism (B) 7: Levels of Selection...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 5:58 PM • 1 Comments •
Svante Paabo believes modern humans & Neandertals interbred permlink
Category: Genetics
Neanderthals 'had sex' with modern man: Professor Svante Paabo, director of genetics at the renowned Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, will shortly publish his analysis of the entire Neanderthal genome, using DNA retrieved from fossils. He aims...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 5:25 PM • 11 Comments •
The arcs of evolutionary genetics always cross back permlink
Category: Evolution
If you have more than a marginal interest in evolutionary biology you will no doubt have stumbled upon the conundrum of sex & sexes. Matt Ridley's most prominent work, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, covered...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 7:13 AM • 7 Comments •
The arc of evolutionary genetics may be irreversible permlink
Category: Evolution
One of the banes of modern life is the stack of papers in one's "to-read" list. I guess that goes to show how cushy modern life is, as what sort of complaint is that? In any case, I began to...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 9:33 AM • 4 Comments •
The arc of evolutionary genetics is long permlink
Category: Genetics
Evolutionary ideas have been around a long time, at least since the Greeks, and likely longer. I accept the arguments of researchers who suggest that humans are predisposed to Creationist thinking; after all, cross-cultural data shows the dominance of this...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 10:09 AM • 14 Comments •