razib
Posts by this author
October 27, 2009
I show that Protestants like Israel; Midwesterners not so much, at Secular Right. Also, many nations are getting more religious, but young people are still less religious, at Gene Expression Classic.
October 27, 2009
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
October 26, 2009
The US State Department has released International Religious Freedom Report 2009. Here the list of countries where "violations of religious freedom have been noteworthy."
Afghanistan
Azerbaijan
Brunei
Burma
China
Cuba
Egypt
Eritrea
Fiji
India
Indonesia
Iran
Iraq
Israel
Laos
Malaysia
Nigeria
North…
October 26, 2009
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 to compare it with the…
October 25, 2009
Lawyer: Death complicates Madoff investment case:
The death of Jeffry Picower, accused of profiting more than $7 billion from the investment schemes of his longtime friend Bernard Madoff, will make it more difficult for suing investors to recoup their money, attorneys said.
...
But the trustee's…
October 25, 2009
When Mendelism reemerged in the early 20th century to become what we term genetics no doubt the early practitioners of the nascent field would have been surprised to see where it went. The centrality of of DNA as the substrate which encodes genetic information in the 1950s opened up molecular…
October 23, 2009
If you haven't been following the goings-on via Twitter, Luke Jostins has been posting some tidbits on his blog, Genetic Inference. If you get interested in something, remember you can search abstracts.
October 22, 2009
I've pointed out before that the most (reputedly) secular Muslim majority country, Turkey, is more friendly to Creationism and more religious than the United States. This is why I get really agitated by those who argue that Turkey should join the European Union, it isn't culturally appropriate.…
October 22, 2009
The past few months Technorati really stopped working for me. Hardly any new links back in, at least that they detected. They unveiled a new site recently, you can read about it at TechCrunch. I really hate it, though to be honest I'd stopped using Technorati for a while. It looks like they pruned…
October 22, 2009
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 both the theoretical framework and applied implications of the…
October 21, 2009
I'm not a close follower of the news, but the past week I've checked The New York Times for David Rohde's chronicle of his period of captivity and escape from the Taliban. All five articles are up now (and an epilogue).
October 21, 2009
I stumbled onto a fascinating working paper today (via the sagacious Andrew Gelman), All Together Now: Putting Congress, State Legislatures, and Individuals in a Common Ideological Space. It uses the NPAT survey of political opinions to construct an ideological scale (as opposed to self-reports).…
October 21, 2009
Pamela Ronald of Tommorow's Table, author of Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food. Additionally, David Sloan Wilson, has moved his blog to ScienceBlogs. It's called Evolution for Everyone, after the book of the same name. You can read my review of his book here.
October 21, 2009
Dr. Daniel MacArthur and Luke Jostins. Also see the #asgh2009 hash-tag.
October 21, 2009
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 consider this after reading Joe Thornton's magisterial response to Michael Behe's giddy excitement over his…
October 20, 2009
Eric Michael Johnson is doing some serious science blogging. Worth checking out.
October 20, 2009
I've gotten a few emails about this new article, The White City, illustrated by this chart:
This isn't news. It's only of interest because people like hoisting others up by their petards. When I lived in Portland I ran into several people who would complain about the city's lack of diversity, but…
October 20, 2009
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 model before the rise of modern…
October 19, 2009
Relative to atheists, and conventional religious people (though conventional religious people are more delusional than atheists). Tom Rees has more:
Overall, the New Agers were more delusional than the Religious. That was particularly true for belief in witchcraft and telepathy (not shown in the…
October 19, 2009
If you're at ASHG, a session you might want to attend, Scale Effects and Recent Brain Evolution: Theory and Preliminary Evidence. Here's the abstract:
What forces have driven human evolution since the grand human diaspora? In this paper, I argue that the scale effects so central to endogenous…
October 18, 2009
Fascinating interview with Richard Heene's former assistant:
But he was motivated by theories I thought were far-fetched. Like Reptilians -- the idea there are alien beings that walk among us and are shape shifters, able to resemble human beings and running the upper echelon of our government.…
October 17, 2009
In the comments of this post I mildly disagreed with Eric Michael Johnson that humans are "polygynous" and the relevance of the fact that "estimates range between 5-10% that all children have been sired by men other than a woman's partner."
The human monogamy vs. polygamy argument is long-standing…
October 17, 2009
From the comments:
Jizya is only a financial tribute / aid to the Muslim State which is in-charge of safeguarding the security of the state and non-muslim's lives and properties on their behalf.
Non-muslims pay Jizya BUT they are EXEMPTED from any other taxes which muslims pay in a Muslim State i.e…
October 17, 2009
Another episode with me interviewing John Hawks on Bloggingheads.tv. Mostly we're talking about about Ardipithecus. The last 1/3 is about Indian genetics. We recorded on Thursday, but since then I've changed my mind on some issues and now disagree with some of what I said. I will likely post on my…
October 15, 2009
What's different about Kiva:
Contrast Kiva with, for example, UNICEF. Kiva makes it possible to trace the path of your donation, to the extent that such tracing is realistic (and it largely turns out to be more along the lines of "you funded a certain MFI" rather than "you funded a certain person…
October 15, 2009
Owen Lovejoy has some theories which he is using to process the data from the spate of Ardipithecus ramidus papers. When it comes to the argument about social structure based on the anatomy of the extant remains I'm skeptical. I just recorded a diavlog with John Hawks which is 2/3 devoted to Ardi-…
October 15, 2009
In the interminable debate on Wall Street compensation Ryan Avent makes an important point:
Officials in Washington scrutinising the pay packages of TARP recipients are primarily focused on the incentive effects of those pay structures--whether financial pay packages are inducing financial…
October 15, 2009
In the OkCupid post on response rates and race & sex there are two charts which show how males and females respond to inquiries of the opposite sex by race. So, you can see that black women on OkCupid respond positively to men in general, while women respond positively in particular to white…