razib
Posts by this author
October 12, 2008
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A clarification (always needed!) of some issues in regards to Sewall Wright's conception of an adaptive landscape....
October 11, 2008
John Hawks succinctly responds to Steve Jones' argument that evolution is ending. Nothing surprising, but a very tight and accessible exposition.
Related: Evolution, why it still happens (in pictures) and No Virginia, evolution isn't ending.
October 11, 2008
Follow up to The executive class supports John McCain, see What your work is and how you vote:
Professionals (doctors, lawyers, and so forth) and routine white collar workers (clerks, etc.) used to support the Republicans more than the national average, but over the past half-century they have…
October 11, 2008
A survey of 751 CEOs shows that 80% support John McCain while 20% support Barack Obama. Remember, wealthier white people still tilt Republican. That being said, I think there is something to the dichotomy between professional class vs. business class. The former are affluent and educated, but may…
October 10, 2008
Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
I rarely post anything on space because I really don't know much more than the average reader of this weblog; no value-add from me. But yesterday I ran across an article which reported the financial overruns in the Mars Science Laboratory project. Today NASA said…
October 9, 2008
How Fatty Foods Curb Hunger:
Fatty foods may not be the healthiest diet choice, but those rich in unsaturated fats - such as avocados, nuts and olive oil - have been found to play a pivotal role in sending this important message to your brain: stop eating, you're full.
The broad point is probably…
October 9, 2008
There's a new paper out which models human behavioral ecology, Dynamics of Alliance Formation and the Egalitarian Revolution. Anthropology.net has a good review, so I'll just point you there. I was going to read this paper, and a few others on models of human group dynamics...but lately, I've…
October 8, 2008
The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality:
We examine empirical evidence for religious prosociality, the hypothesis that religions facilitate costly behaviors that benefit other people. Although sociological surveys reveal an association between self-reports of religiosity and prosociality…
October 7, 2008
Yesterday I attempted to rebut Steve Jones' ridiculous contention that evolution is going to stop in the modern West. Sometimes it is difficult to really know when to start, especially when your interlocutor seems to be in "incoherent spray arguments mode." Some of the commenters also noticed the…
October 6, 2008
Updated: Follow up post End Update
I've already the covered Steven-Jones-evolution-is-ending story at my other weblog. I notice that John Wilkins has also objected to Jones' exaggerations. When I initially read the quotes from Jones in The Times I was alarmed, but wondered if his position was…
October 6, 2008
Dawn of Low-Price Mapping Could Broaden DNA Uses in The New York Times. So of course I checked in on Genetic Future:
There's an important message here between the lines: as technology drives the price of sequencing down, massive competition between platforms and service providers will almost…
October 6, 2008
Yann commented on a new paper, Association of the SLC45A2 gene with physiological human hair colour variation:
Pigmentation is a complex physical trait with multiple genes involved. Several genes have already been associated with natural differences in human pigmentation. The SLC45A2 gene encoding…
October 6, 2008
In response to my post below, Are the elites more polarized? Yes!, a comment:
The high "moderation" of low-income voters tends to make me think that what's measured is low-information voters instead, people don't take an active interest and who answer in harmless generalities. And maybe people who…
October 5, 2008
Since I flog the book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do incessantly, I thought I should point to the companion weblog. Why do I bring this book up so much? Well, I think the posts will tell you why. For example, look at this map which shows where…
October 5, 2008
I was checking out videos on NBC's Saturday Night Live website, and I got this error:
Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Zend_Db_Adapter_Exception' with message 'SQLSTATE[08004] [1040] Too many connections' in /var/www/common/classes/Zend/Db/Adapter/Pdo/Abstract.php:131 Stack trace: #0 /var/www/…
October 5, 2008
Think Gene has a new digg-like site up, news.thinkgene.com. Worth checking out.
October 4, 2008
Read all about it, When Open Access Fails. Reminds me of what happened to Hotmail.
October 4, 2008
One of the argument from Andrew Gelman's Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State which has percolated into the punditocracy is that the Culture Wars are to a large extent a feature of the upper socioeconomic brackets. Gelman presents data which strongly contradicts Thomas Frank's argument…
October 3, 2008
Photo credit: AP
I listened to the VP debate on the radio last night. Then afterwards I saw my RSS getting saturated with assessments. The Corner reverberated with agreement that Sarah Palin wiped the floor with Joe Biden. Over at Daily Kos the assessment was curiously inverted. No surprise.…
October 3, 2008
Photo credit: Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY
It is the norm today to discuss race as a social construct. Less fashionable is it to explore race as a biological concept. When there's no up or downside and the discussion is abstract I think most people can get away with benign neglect in regards to…
October 2, 2008
Rise of colonial African cities kick-started AIDS pandemic: scientists:
"As there must have been many opportunities for such transmission over past millennia, why did the AIDS pandemic not occur until the 20th century?
"The answer may be that, for an AIDS epidemic to get kick-started, HIV-1 needs…
October 2, 2008
Again, Bayblab looks into it. I've checked it out myself for obvious reasons and found similar stuff. You have to look at the net effects of something.
October 1, 2008
Ta-Nehisi Coates asks:
...I don't want to scapegoat my brown bothers--my sense is that ethnicity is a really bad filter here--for blacks, whites and Latinos. For instance, is homophobia tied to wealth? Is it tied to education? Is it tied to region? What is the best predictor of homophobia? Is it…
October 1, 2008
PLoS One has an interesting new paper on the intersection of archeology, history and genetics, Mitochondrial DNA Evidence for a Diversified Origin of Workers Building Mausoleum for First Emperor of China:
In conclusion, we showed that MBWs was an admixture and bore genetic continuity with…
October 1, 2008
Hey, check this out:
We've rented out the top floor of the place for the event and will be providing food and a bar tab up to about $600. The Delancey will be suspending their usual cover charge. In attendance will be GrrlScientist, PhysioProf, Jake Young, Ginny Hughes, Erin Johnson, and Logan…
October 1, 2008
During a conversation with Nick Matzke he asserted that Creationists weren't less intelligent necessarily. I contended that they were less intelligent. I based on this on snooping through the GSS when I was posting about the association between lower educational attainment and intelligence and…
September 30, 2008
It's fall 2008, and I'm starting the 3rd DonorsChoose drive in this weblog's history. In 2006 $1,941.06 was given through this weblog's challenges. In 2007 $4,354.19. First, thank you to everyone who donated! Second, the priority is obviously to give money where needed, but, it would be nice to…
September 29, 2008
The New York Times has an article up about how French Muslim girls are enrolling in Catholics schools, in part because of the relatives freedoms these religious schools offer in terms of their dress vis-a-vis the normal public schools. I found this portion interesting:
The biology teacher at St.…
September 29, 2008
Bayblab has a post up, Which organisms can feel pain?, on capsaicin. The post also points to an article about a man dying after eating habanero chili paste (though the article makes me suspect it was some allergy).
Related: 7 days of hot sauce.
September 29, 2008
Agnostic has three posts of interest over the past week: Graphs on the death of Marxism, postmodernism, and other stupid academic fads, Response to criticism on the death of academic -isms and Graphs on the rise of scientific approaches to humanity.