razib
Posts by this author
March 14, 2008
Our old friend Noah Feldman has a new article in The New York Times Magazine exploring the subtly of shariah law. I know that Feldman is exceedingly bright, and as someone raised as an Orthodox Jew and a law professor, he is very well placed to explore this topic and translate to a Western…
March 14, 2008
I generally skim only a few political/public policy weblogs via my RSS to get a sense of the Zeitgeist. M. McArdle and M. Yglesias are two of the blogs I sample. Anyway, if you read their blogs, check out the latest installment of The Table, the intro is really hilarious. Most-def trying to do…
March 14, 2008
A few days ago I mooted the possibility that balancing selection may be more common than we had assumed, and that much of the recent evolutionary action in our species' history might be characterized by non-fixed allele frequencies which exhibit the signatures of positive selection because of their…
March 13, 2008
Steve Waldman has been blogging some of the major arguments from his new book, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America. He says:
As for their religious beliefs, someone in the comment thread said I was being incoherent or contradictory by saying the Big…
March 12, 2008
A new story highlighting the waxing of Creationism within modern Turkey. A depressing tidbit:
Education Minister Huseyin Celik, an AKP member, said he has an open mind over the debate about evolution, but in 2005, the Ministry reportedly suspended five teachers for advocating evolution too…
March 12, 2008
Scientist calculates an equation for the common cold: "Ten percent of your life is spent fighting colds." Wow. That makes sense though. I've read that common cold viruses need at least the population density of agricultural societies to persist endemically. No wonder the recent work on natural…
March 12, 2008
Just noticed that Carlos Bustamante's chapter from Statistical Methods in Molecular Evolution, Population Genetics of Molecular Evolution, is online (PDF). Enjoy.
March 11, 2008
Chris at Mixing Memory has a post up, Respecting the Religious (or the A-Religious), pointing to a Simon Blackburn working paper, Respect and Religion. I enjoyed Blackburn's Think, but the chapter on God left me a bit cold. Blackburn is a philosopher, and his thoughts reflect that training. If I…
March 11, 2008
You've probably heard about this story. Check out Afarensis and Anthropology.net for a summary of the science. But Kambiz also has some juicy gossip about the back-story here....
March 10, 2008
A few of you have noticed that I'm a little darker skinned than I was previously (see photo to left). Well, the explanation is simple, it's a recent photo and I was at the beach getting my ultra-tan on. I happened to be at the BIL Conference, and was in Monterey where the beaches are. BIL was…
March 10, 2008
Dan MacArthur has a post up, Climate genes: positive or balancing selection?, where he questions the interpretation of data from a recent paper, Adaptations to Climate in Candidate Genes for Common Metabolic Disorders:
The critical point I want to make is that while positive selection will usually…
March 7, 2008
Dave Munger has a post up about discernment when it comes to wine. The Munger sayeth:
Researchers have known for some time that not everyone has the same ability to detect tastes. Some people -- "super-tasters" -- are especially sensitive to a wide range of tastes. As it turns out, whether or not…
March 7, 2008
As I have noted before one of the consequences of genomic analysis techniques becoming relatively cheap and accessible is that they are now viable tools toward exploring a host of fundamentally non-genetic questions. That is, instead of exploring the dynamics of evolutionary biology, they can be…
March 6, 2008
John Hawks has everything you need to know. Question: how did this get by peer review?
March 6, 2008
Genetic evidence and the modern human origins debate:
A continued debate in anthropology concerns the evolutionary origin of 'anatomically modern humans' (Homo sapiens sapiens). Different models have been proposed to examine the related questions of (1) where and when anatomically modern humans…
March 6, 2008
Small kerfuffle about the fact that ScienceBlogsTM is so white. Some amusement that I am one of the white science bloggers. In any case, this comment caught my attention:
Second, it is no secret that minorities of most stripes are seriously underrepresented in science. Bloggers are even more…
March 5, 2008
Yann points me to a new paper, Complex signatures of selection for the melanogenic loci TYR, TYRP1 and DCT in humans:
Diversity patterns clearly evidence adaptive selection in pigmentation genes in Africans and Asians. In Europeans, the evidence is more complex, and both directional and balancing…
March 4, 2008
David B gives an excellent overview of some of the issues with Stephen Oppenheimer's The Origins of the British.
March 3, 2008
Josh Donlan has joined Shifting Baselines. If you don't know who Donlan is, read Re-wilding North America. A few months ago I suggested that biologists who argue against mass extinction on basically aesthetic or normative grounds need to remember that these are distinct from consequentialist…
March 3, 2008
There's a new paper which is getting some press buzz; here's a typical headline, Immune system differences found. That's as banal as can be: of course immune systems differ, there's a reason that MHC loci are very polymorphic. Our own immune diversity is the only way we can equalize the unfair "…
March 2, 2008
Evolgen points me to a new blog, Computational Biology and Evolution. Only quibble, http://bioinf.cs.auckland.ac.nz/ isn't a memorable domain....
February 29, 2008
Got these pix via a forward. Thought it might be a nice change of pace....
February 28, 2008
Lots of articles on the radical reinterpretation of the Hadith in Turkey. The Hadith serve as the basis for Islamic law, and orthopraxy more generally. I am on the record as saying that texts don't in the end determine anything, so obviously I'm skeptical. But, I will simply point to a…
February 28, 2008
In my post below about a possible locus to look at to explain the normal variation in hair form we see around us a reader asked:
I was once suckered into giving a course on animal ecophysiology (I was told it was basic ecology until after it was too late to back out) which was a traumatic…
February 28, 2008
If you haven't, check out Slate's delegate calculator. It looks hard for HRC....