razib
Posts by this author
June 10, 2008
I was poking around Fund Race 2008 and was curious how different scientist professions were giving in regards to political parties in the USA. Below is what I found....
profession
Repub #
Dem #
Repub $
Dem $
Ratio #
Dem $
mathematician
18
98
13740
72837
5.44
5.3
physicist
86
532
65722…
June 10, 2008
This is cool, Intraspecific phylogenetic analysis of Siberian woolly mammoths using complete mitochondrial genomes:
We report five new complete mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genomes of Siberian woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), sequenced with up to 73-fold coverage from DNA extracted from hair…
June 9, 2008
Carl has an excellent post up, Engineering Life: The Dog that Didn't Bark in the Night:
...Erwin Chargaff, an eminent Columbia University biologist, called genetic engineering "an irreversible attack on the biosphere."
"The world is given to us on loan," he warned. "We come and we go; and after a…
June 8, 2008
Will Wilkinson and Jon Haidt just did a bloggingheads.tv. I've blogged Haidt's ideas before (Chris is skeptical). During this bloggingheads.tv interview Haidt lays out the difference between college age liberals and other societies with a scenario where a beloved dog dies and the family decides…
June 8, 2008
A long response by me at my other weblog to Alan Jacob's piece, Too Much Faith in Faith. A sample:
As they say, read the whole thing. Alan, as a Christian, place particular focus on the New Atheists who wish to leave at religion's feet all evil done it in its name but explain away as incidental…
June 7, 2008
Twilight for the Forest People:
If they are removed and survive the exposure to diseases they have never encountered, it is likely that the unique knowledge and beliefs that define them, the spirit of their life, will probably slip away.
I am to understand that governments like Brazil are better…
June 6, 2008
Notes on Sewall Wright: Population Size:
Continuing my series of notes on the work of Sewall Wright, I come to the question of population size. This is important in Wright's formulation of population genetics and his evolutionary theory generally. One of the major differences between Wright and R.…
June 5, 2008
Inductivist looked into the General Social Survey and found that the mean IQs of white college graduates has been dropping:
1960s 113.72
1970s 110.59
1980s 108.04
1990s 104.42
2000s 105.12
Remember that the popualtion mean is around 100, with a standard deviation of 15. That means that since the…
June 4, 2008
You've probably read Carl and Ed's posts, but the paper is finally out, Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli:
The role of historical contingency in evolution has been much debated, but rarely tested. Twelve initially…
June 3, 2008
John Hawks has a post up, Handling exponential growth in demographic models. You might like to read it in concert with p-ter's post Modeling human demographic history. One question I have in regards to human evolutionary genetic history is this: how typical are our population dynamics up to this…
June 3, 2008
When I was a kid I was what you might call a "climate nerd." I would be at a party my parents took me to and pour over atlases and maps, as well as descriptive books on climatology, just to pass the time. Though it was just a phase I have kept a lot of that knowledge with me, and I've found it…
June 2, 2008
A week ago I posted on the gender gap in politics; today Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science critiques a similar argument:
Via Craig Newmark, I saw a column by John Lott summarizing his 1999 paper with Lawrence Kenny, "Did women's suffrage change the size and scope of…
June 1, 2008
I realized today that my post about doing quantitative genetic back-of-the-envelopes was rather wordy. And, I have a hunch that those who "got it" already have an intuitive feel for what I'm talking about, so I thought perhaps the easiest way to get people to develop a better feel was to roll up…
June 1, 2008
Shrimp is my favorite food; I really like shrimp. When I was an undergrad I used to stuff myself during "shrimp night" at the cafeteria. Basically I would show up at 4:30 and hang out eating until 7:00, then I would recline for an hour because moving was going to be really, really, painfull.…
June 1, 2008
I was chatting with a friend about a few quantitative genetic "back-of-the-envelopes." Specifically, about the expectation of the heights of the offspring of any given couple in the United States. I say the United States because it is a nation where most people get enough to eat; that means that…
May 31, 2008
Haven't had a time to check this paper out, but looks real interesting, Assessing the Evolutionary Impact of Amino Acid Mutations in the Human Genome:
Although mutations are known to cause varying degrees of harmful effects, it is difficult to quantify the distribution that best describes the…
May 29, 2008
Here's another example of how genetic methods can shed light on archaeological questions, Paleo-Eskimo mtDNA Genome Reveals Matrilineal Discontinuity in Greenland:
The Paleo-Eskimo Saqqaq and Independence I cultures, documented from archaeological remains in Northern Canada and Greenland, represent…
May 29, 2008
I'm getting into an exchange with Luis below about the rise of European domination. Unfortunately with historical questions I can't "prove" my case as in mathematics, nor can I cite an empirical result that is extremely generalizable as in much of the natural sciences. I'm trying to describe a…
May 29, 2008
Just got a copy of Short Guide to the Human Genome, put out by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. It's a fun little review; appropriate for browsing during your "in-between" time. As the title emphasizes this guide is characterized by extreme brevity, under 200 pages. Nevertheless it attempts a…
May 28, 2008
A good critique of my posts which explored the correlates of Biblical literacy. It isn't surprising that some transformations make the relationship clearer....
May 28, 2008
Five years ago Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek's International Edition editor, splashed onto the public intellectual scene with The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. It's somewhat heterodox, at least for the mainstream, observation that liberal democracy is more than simple…
May 27, 2008
My two posts on religion & IQ/education are getting a lot of attention. I didn't spend more than 30 minutes on both entries combined, so the attention to unit time invested ratio is rather out of wack. Doing some digging it's funny how interested people are in this topic, while at the same…
May 27, 2008
Current Vitamin D Recommendations Fraction Of Safe, Perhaps Essential Levels For Children:
The current recommended daily allowance (RDA) of vitamin D for children is 200 International Units (IUs), but new research reveals that children may need and can safely take ten-times that amount. According…
May 26, 2008
A few weeks ago I mentioned that there is some debate as to the taxonomy of the Polar Bear; specifically, as to whether it was simply a clade of the Brown Bear species. Interesting, I note that today a Polar Bear-Grizzly hybrid was shot in Canada:
There have long been stories of oddly coloured…
May 26, 2008
The post below where I show that belief in the literal truth of the Biblical tends to correlate well with IQ scores from the General Social Survey on a denominational scale is getting a lot of response; enough of it is of low quality that I'll close the comment thread soon enough. As I observed the…
May 25, 2008
Update II: Many links into this entry are labeling this a "study." It wasn't a study, I literally took 10 minutes before I went to sleep to collect the data and produce the chart. The data on literal interpretation of the Bible is from a book which you can read via Google. The IQ scores are…