razib
Posts by this author
June 16, 2009
Alcohol's Good for You? Some Scientists Doubt It:
For some scientists, the question will not go away. No study, these critics say, has ever proved a causal relationship between moderate drinking and lower risk of death -- only that the two often go together. It may be that moderate drinking is just…
June 15, 2009
With the Iranian election and the protests there are occasional references to ethnic groups in Iran. For example, Mousavi did not do as well in Azerbaijan as one would expect knowing that he is an ethnic Azeri Turk. The father of the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamneini is also an Azeri Turk. So despite…
June 12, 2009
FWIW, I've taken to using Bing for image and video searches. A lot of the time "Web 2.0" dynamism and interactivity are irritating to me, but I think M$ added some value compared to Google's relatively vanilla interfaces. Intuitive too. Thoughts? This other blogger agrees.
June 12, 2009
Joshua Trevino points out that Khomeini's original conception of how the Iranian state was governed was to be governed was derived from Plato's Republic. This is not that surprising, the Shia clerical elite of Iran has been engaged in various innovations from the 18th century on.
June 11, 2009
Dr. Daniel MacArthur has the must read post on the $48,000 whole-genome sequence. Dr. MacArthur notes that the price point isn't quite within reach for most of the population. Nevertheless, I do find it interesting that I asked Armand Leroi 4 years ago if he would forgo 1 month salary for a whole-…
June 11, 2009
Seems appropriate to point to the "Iran So Far" SNL digital short from fall 2007 which features Mahmoud Ahmadinejad again. Hopefully it will be irrelevant after today, but who knows?
June 11, 2009
There is currently a presidential election going on in Iran. The buffoon Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is running against a "reformist," Mir-Hossein Mousavi. There is some controversy because Mousavi's wife, Zahra Rahnavard, has been active in the campaign, and held hands with him in public! (and I thought…
June 11, 2009
FuturePundit points to a New Scientist piece on a new study profiling older virgins. Who is the 40-Year-Old Virgin and Where Did He/She Come From? Data from the National Survey of Family Growth:
A total of 122 (13.9%) men aged 25-45 reported never having had sex, representing approximately 1.1…
June 10, 2009
Seed interviews Richard Wrangham about his new book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
June 10, 2009
The locus MAOA pops up every year or so in a study which attempts to correlate variation in these region with behavior. In particular, anti-social or pathological behavior. So another one is out, Monoamine oxidase A genotype is associated with gang membership and weapon use:
The low MAOA activity…
June 10, 2009
In Defense of Inaccuracy
Chaos
Daydreaming and Booze
Why the double standard on genomic data release policies?
Galileo, the Leaning Tower, and Bull@%#$!
June 9, 2009
Recently I've been seeing a lot of Chris Patil's posts over at Ouroboros on Twitter. Worth checking out. He's hosting on the Hourglass on the biology of aging right now, though readers of this weblog might find Did aging evolve to prevent epidemics? of more interest.
June 9, 2009
Domestication has a long history. It predates the invention of writing by thousands of years. In the history of biology the study of domestication is closely connected to the emergence of experimental and theoretical biology out of the shadow of natural history. Chapter I of The Origin of Species…
June 8, 2009
Back before the Iraq War invasion there was some talk about the human and cultural capital of the nation. That it was the Germany of the Middle East. That it was in a good position to benefit from liberation. There was some theorizing that Iraq could be a linchpin of a new geopolitical axis which…
June 8, 2009
It looks like the PirateParty will gain 1 seat in the EU parliament. This means Christian Engström will have a job and income. He's been spending the last 3 years as an activist living off his savings.
June 7, 2009
What Darwin said - and was he right?:
In this Darwin year many popular accounts of 'Darwinism' have appeared, but these seldom make a clear distinction among the different components of Darwin's theory of evolution. Many popularisations are simplified to the point of caricature, and presented in an…
June 6, 2009
There are particular correlations about attitudes toward abortion rights within nations. For example, in the United States thereis no sex difference but more educated people tend to be pro-choice. But what are the international trends? In this post I look at attitudes toward abortion by Catholics…
June 5, 2009
In Natural selection of a human gene: FUT2 I referred to a paper, Signals of recent positive selection in a worldwide sample of human populations (see my earlier review). Now the same group has a follow up paper which takes a slightly different tack, The Role of Geography in Human Adaptation:…
June 4, 2009
Classic case of "no free lunch," a new paper in Science, Did Warfare Among Ancestral Hunter-Gatherers Affect the Evolution of Human Social Behaviors?, gives rise to popular press pieces with titles such as Blood and treasure and Altruism's Bloody Roots. If for most of human existence our species…
June 4, 2009
In the 19th & 20th centuries with the emergence of nationalism and its various scholarly subsidiaries in archaeology, philology and ethnography quite a few pan-ethnic movements rooted in language were born. Pan-Slavism, the Greater German idea (Grossdeutsch) and Pan-Arabism come to mind. As…
June 3, 2009
Dan MacArthur of Genetics Future is at the center of a minor controversy because of his blogging The Biology of Genomes conference. Realistically it seems updating pre-internet protocols is just a band-aid solution. And the issues aren't particular to blogging conferences, they're general to the…
June 3, 2009
It's My Ritz in a Box
Comps readings: virtual communities
Articles I want to read: May Geology edition
Confabulatory hypermnesia, or severe false memory syndrome
Evolving an Altruistic Robot
June 3, 2009
A few months ago I reviewed a paper which examined the various complexities of interpreting signals of natural selection from recently developed genomic tests in response to the avalanche of human sequence data. In the paper, Signals of recent positive selection in a worldwide sample of human…
June 2, 2009
I've been meaning to recommend Epiphenom for a while. As its subheading, "at the intersection of science, atheism and humanism" indicates, it has a perspective. But the analysis of new papers suggests a rather light touch. Remember, this isn't a blog which just opines about religion; rather, he…
June 2, 2009
On a recent diavlog between Dayo Olopade and Reihan Salam the role of minorities as integrators and catalysts for cultural ferment & change was brought up. Minorities being minorities naturally by definition would, one assumes, be the ones assimilating and integrating into the majority matrix.…
June 2, 2009
Two interesting papers, one which relates KITLG and cancer, and another which connects ABCC11 and cancer. These are familiar genes. KITLG has been implicated in depigmentation, both of skin and hair. ABCC11 in earwax form and body odor. If you knock around a gene there is a high probability that…
June 2, 2009
Nominees are now up for 3 Quarks Daily Science Prize. I have four posts up:
Genetic variation in space & time - Iceland
How Ashkenazi Jewish are you?
Inbreeding & the downfall of the Spanish Hapsburgs
The ancient origins of African pygmies
There are many great posts on the list…