razib
Posts by this author
January 7, 2009
Over at Gene Expression Classic there has been discussion of a new paper elucidating exactly how blind cavefish become depigmented. Please read the comments, as there's a lot of good discussion on evolutionary genetic parameters....
January 5, 2009
Madoff Investor Awaits 'Imbecile' or 'Dupe' Verdict:
Patrick Littaye, co-founder of Access International Advisors, lost his savings after investing with Bernard Madoff, expects to lose his house in his hometown of Saint-Malo, France, and says he'll canvass investors over the next few weeks to see…
January 4, 2009
A commenter below sayeth:
I remember reading somewhere that a child can't be darker than the darker of his two parents and that in such instances the biological father is not the putative father. I have no idea if that's true or not.
This seems like a common sense assertion, but as I noted this is…
January 2, 2009
Nanodiamonds in the Younger Dryas Boundary Sediment Layer:
We report abundant nanodiamonds in sediments dating to 12.9 ± 0.1 thousand calendar years before the present at multiple locations across North America. Selected area electron diffraction patterns reveal two diamond allotropes in this…
January 1, 2009
Every now and then British newspapers publish the story of twins born to an interracial couple who seem to resemble only one of the races of their parents. The irony being that siblings may appear to be of different populations. I've commented on several of these stories before. Now we have…
December 31, 2008
So implies The Audacious Epigone:
Mormons are the least likely of the 19 denominations to live alone, but I suspect among the married, they are among the most likely to have a single breadwinner household.
Atheists and agnostics, by contrast, come in at the bottom. The low rates of multiple person…
December 31, 2008
ScienceBlogs has a new contributor, Rebecca Skloot of Culture Dish. The title is in part a reference to her new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Looks interesting. If Henrietta Lacks doesn't ring a bell, look her up, it's rather freaky....
December 31, 2008
Most Americans are not aware that the debtor status of our nation is not particularly novel; we have been a debtor nation for most of our history. This fact serves as one of the major linchipins in Eric Rauchway's Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America, a economic historical look at how…
December 29, 2008
I'm old enough to have very faint memories of the very first shuttle missions, though I do not recall the last moon landings. I recently heard a science fiction writer observe that when he was a child the idea of a moon landing was so futuristic. Then it happened...and we stopped going. It's…
December 29, 2008
Patient's DNA May Be Signal to Tailor Drugs:
The colon cancer drugs Erbitux and Vectibix, for instance, do not work for the 40 percent of patients whose tumors have a particular genetic mutation. The Food and Drug Administration held a meeting this month to discuss whether patients should be tested…
December 29, 2008
Neanderthal Extinction by Competitive Exclusion:
Despite a long history of investigation, considerable debate revolves around whether Neanderthals became extinct because of climate change or competition with anatomically modern humans (AMH).
...
We apply a new methodology integrating archaeological…
December 28, 2008
A few days ago the Audacious Epigone pointed out that Episcopalians are in the same neighborhood as Jews in the United States on intelligence tests; i.e., on the order of a bit more than 2/3 of a standard deviation above the norm. The recent paper on religion & IQ confirmed these findings.…
December 28, 2008
Dienekes points me to a new paper, Searching for the origin of Gagauzes: Inferences from Y-chromosome analysis:
The Gagauzes are a small Turkish-speaking ethnic group living mostly in southern Moldova and northeastern Bulgaria. The origin of the Gagauzes is obscure. They may be descendants of the…
December 24, 2008
PLOS has a think piece up, "It's Ok, We're Not Cousins by Blood": The Cousin Marriage Controversy in Historical Perspective, which comes out against the laws in the United States which ban the marriage of cousins:
It is obviously illogical to condemn eugenics and at the same time favor laws that…
December 22, 2008
Say you have a abstruse paper such as, Accelerated genetic drift on chromosome X during the human dispersal out of Africa:
Comparisons of chromosome X and the autosomes can illuminate differences in the histories of males and females as well as shed light on the forces of natural selection. We…
December 22, 2008
Evolutionary curveball for curvy?:
While women with curvy figures might enjoy more attention from men in Western culture, and find it easier to become pregnant, new research suggests they may also face some evolutionary disadvantages compared to women with thicker waists.
That's because the same…
December 21, 2008
Even Bernard Madoff Doesn't Deserve This:
Remember Jeffrey Skilling? Losses to Enron shareholders of more than $1 billion largely determined his 24-year-plus sentence. Or consider WorldCom's former chief, Bernard J. Ebbers. He got 25 years based principally on the $2.2 billion loss suffered by his…
December 21, 2008
Check this out, Matt Yglesias was dissing on an obscure D.C. outfit, Third Way, a few days ago. Today, the CEO of The Center For American Progress put up a Very Special Post on his weblog clarifying that CAP thinks much of Third Way. Creepy. I guess we always knew there was a puppet master back…
December 20, 2008
In the social circles I move in there is a lot of concern with overpopulation. Now, it is somewhat ironic to me that those who are concerned do not tend to breed so as to be virtuous...while others who are not so concerned, such as Sarah Palin (and also these ladies and gentlemen) make up for the…
December 20, 2008
I remember that back in mid-2007 I was mooting the possibility of a recession. Part of the reason was that I'd been looking at the statistical trendlines in real estate MLS data at the time for a software project, and I'd been getting a bad feeling from the summer of 2006 on (the flip rates in many…
December 20, 2008
The paperback edition of "Dow, 30,000 by 2008" Why It's Different This Time came out on the 1st of this month on Amazon. I guess publishing schedules are fixed so that at a date is a date? Here's the most amusing of the "reviews" on Amazon (4 out of 4 stars by the way):
A Prescient Mind - Spot On…
December 20, 2008
Mark Chu-Carroll has a "must read" post, Fitness Landscapes, Evolution, and Smuggling Information:
If you look at the evolutionary process, it's most like the iterative search process described towards the beginning of this post. The "search function" isn't really static over time; it's constantly…
December 19, 2008
The New York Times just published the definitive Bernie Madoff piece so far, Madoff Scheme Kept Rippling Outward, Across Borders. Reading about Madoff, I can't help but think about this conversation attributed to J. P. Morgan:
Untermyer: "Is not commercial credit based primarily upon money or…
December 19, 2008
This is really weird, New World Post-pandemic Reforestation Helped Start Little Ice Age, Say Scientists:
Stanford University researchers have conducted a comprehensive analysis of data detailing the amount of charcoal contained in soils and lake sediments at the sites of both pre-Columbian…
December 19, 2008
Science and God: An automatic opposition between ultimate explanations:
Science and religion have come into conflict repeatedly throughout history, and one simple reason for this is the two offer competing explanations for many of the same phenomena. We present evidence that the conflict between…
December 18, 2008
I don't know much about this topic, but I thought this paper was cool, Avian Paternal Care Had Dinosaur Origin:
The repeated discovery of adult dinosaurs in close association with egg clutches leads to speculation over the type and extent of care exhibited by these extinct animals for their eggs…
December 18, 2008
On today's Talk of the Nation there was a show with the title, Obama And The Politics Of Being Biracial. Here's the intro:
President-elect Barack Obama defines himself as African-American. His mother is a white American, and his father is a black African. This hits a nerve with some people, who…
December 18, 2008
Jake Young has a skeptical take on the contention that science can save the economy. He ends:
In short, I think the suggestion, while well-meaning, is misguided. If all that would happen in this project was that more brains would be applied to the problem, I would support it. It would probably be…
December 18, 2008
Is online. Also note the collected papers of R. A. Fisher.