razib
Posts by this author
February 12, 2008
Last week I reviewed some seminal early papers of the evolutionary biologist William D. Hamilton. Hamilton was arguably the most accomplished theoretical biologist of the second half of the 20th century; Richard Dawkins referred to him as the most "...distinguished Darwinian since Darwin." My…
February 11, 2008
Dienekes points me to a provisional open access paper, Analysis of genetic variation in Ashkenazi Jews by high density SNP genotyping. Here's the conclusion:
There were small but significant differences in measures of genetic diversity between
AJ [Ashkenazi Jewish] and CEU [Utah whites from the…
February 11, 2008
Chapters read:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
And now there have been 5. Through 5 chapters of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Stupidly I only realized that Stephen Jay Gould wrote two books which he had insisted be bound together. The table of contents which I was familiar with turned out to…
February 11, 2008
Got an email from Sheril today:
Well it's finally happened! It's official. Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, and Barack Obama have been invited to ScienceDebate2008.
The location? Philadelphia's Franklin Institute, named after one of our nation's greatest scientists (and greatest…
February 10, 2008
I've finished the 5th chapter of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, but I don't have time to put up a review right now. But I do want to comment on a funny passage:
I ran into Ernst Mayr as I was completing this chapter and asked if he had ever met de Vries. "No," he said, "botanists and…
February 10, 2008
An Association Between the Kinship and Fertility of Human Couples:
Previous studies have reported that related human couples tend to produce more children than unrelated couples but have been unable to determine whether this difference is biological or stems from socioeconomic variables. Our…
February 8, 2008
Thanks to everyone who participated in Just Science 2008! And thanks to everyone who subscribed to the feed! Speaking of which, if you are reading this you should unsubscribe now since I'm pulling the plug on all the feeds for this year.
February 7, 2008
Innate social aptitudes of man is a controversial paper. As noted in the biographical introduction to it William D. Hamilton states that his friend Robert Trivers referred to it as the "fascist paper" (see Natural Selection and Social Theory for Trivers' perspective on his relationship with…
February 6, 2008
Extraordinary Sex Ratios is the paper that William D. Hamilton seems most proud of if the effusive self-praise in the biographical preface can be trusted. In it Hamilton claims his theoretical insight peaked, and it was within this paper that his ideas exhibited the most pluralism of purpose as he…
February 5, 2008
The moulding of senescence by natural selection is not one of William D. Hamilton's favorite papers. In the biographical introduction he notes that both Peter Medawar & George C. Williams covered the same ground in the 1950s; a fact that he was not aware of by the time he had already invested a…
February 5, 2008
I hope you have yesterday's post "out of your system." I will admit here that I don't know if I was particularly intelligible, but the prose and formalism of Hamilton's paper isn't exactly the picture of transparency. I find his later works much more intelligible; I suspect part of it has to do…
February 4, 2008
Inclusive fitness is something you've heard of before no doubt. J. B. S. Haldane, one of the greatest evolutionary geneticists of the 20th century, once quipped that he would "...lay down [his] life for two brothers or eight cousins," a succinct expression of the subset of this framework which is…
February 2, 2008
I stated earlier this week that I would post on papers from William D. Hamilton's Narrow Roads of Gene Land. I've narrowed down which ones I'll blog:
Day 1: The genetical evolution of social behaviour. I
Day 2: The genetical evolution of social behaviour. II
Day 3: The moulding of senescence by…
February 2, 2008
John has a post where he offers:
This reminds me of one of the paradoxes about Gould. Among historians (and the public) he was believed to represent mainstream science, a belief not shared by many scientists. Among scientists (and the public) he was believed to represent mainstream history of…
February 1, 2008
Chapters read:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
And so it goes on as I march through chapter 4 of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, more of the same. Chapter 3 was a history of 19th century evolutionary thought viewed through the lens of the concept of hierarchies of selection. Though Stephen Jay…
February 1, 2008
The story about HERC2 & OCA2 is getting a lot of press; that is, the genetics behind how people have blue eyes. But see this in ScienceNow:
There are still large questions, though. Why did blue eyes persist? Scientists say it is difficult to see how eye color would have an environmental…
February 1, 2008
My friend Reihan Salam, the svengali behind The American Scene, is on blogginghead.tv talking about the primary races. Reihan often has a high signal to noise ratio in large part because of his low analysis to data ratio.1 He's chatting with Chris Hayes, who wrote up a really interesting piece on…
January 31, 2008
Sound familiar? Well, good things come in pairs. A few days ago I posted on a paper which used a linkage analysis to come to the conclusion that an SNP on HERC2 was responsible for the variation in eye color in Europeans. Some background, a gene, OCA2, was implicated in the variation in eye…
January 30, 2008
If science is a culture it needs a way to punish free-riders & cheaters. Otherwise the whole system will collapse. So check out Tetrapod Zoology; Darren has some details on shady goings-on.
January 30, 2008
Chapters read:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
17% of the way through The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, can I get a w00t, w00t!?!?! Chapter 3 was a change. I am wondering if the verbal excesses on garish display in the first two chapters was just an extended fart that Stephen Jay Gould had to get…
January 30, 2008
ScienceDaily has a most-retarded title up for a report on some new research, Blue-eyed Humans Have A Single, Common Ancestor. I already blogged the paper at my other blog. The paper roughly confirms the previous finding that I blogged that an SNP on the gene HERC2 might regulate expression of…
January 30, 2008
Over at Laelaps. Too busy wrestling the 5-pound monster as I tread water attempting to process the copious verbal excreta, so I appreciate the effort!
January 30, 2008
Give the lady her due, Olivia Judson can lay down some serious exposition when she's on:
There are a couple of interesting things about this discovery. The first is that the molecular basis of the change from pelvis to no pelvis does not involve a mutation to the protein-coding region of the Pitx1…
January 30, 2008
Since Just Science starts next week I'm going to have to take a break from Stephen Jay Gould blogging due to the constraints that I'm going to have to adhere to when it comes to posts (i.e., it has to be science). Expect blogging to focus on chapters from W. D. Hamilton Narrow Roads of Gene Land,…