razib
Posts by this author
January 29, 2008
...Das Kapital! So says Bora:
Forget Dennett's strawmen destruction - read Gould carefully for what GOULD is trying to say. The Big Book is 'Das Kapitaal' of the 21st century biology - someone now needs to write a shorter, simpler Manifesto for the masses to read and understand....and we can go…
January 29, 2008
Chapters read:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
Booyah! Over 10% of the way through The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Unfortunately, I'm still in heavily exegetical territory. Personally I much prefer Richard Elliott Friedman when it comes to textual interpretation of ancient works, but I knew what I…
January 29, 2008
Last year a group out of Australia published a paper which purported to explain eye color variation based upon a polymorphism around the OCA2 locus. The paper was A Three-Single-Nucleotide Polymorphism Haplotype in Intron 1 of OCA2 Explains Most Human Eye-Color Variation, and I blogged it here.…
January 28, 2008
Chapters read:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
So I'm reading Stephen Jay Gould's magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. I figure if I read this I won't have to read anything else by the guy; if he couldn't squeeze it into 1,464 pages, it really wasn't worth mentioning I'm assuming. Here are…
January 28, 2008
Didn't know there was a State of the Union today until I got home and turned on NPR.
January 28, 2008
Over at Greg's place, Brian Switek notes:
Thanks for the link Greg (and thanks for the compliment, Steve). I've generally been unimpressed with Coyne's popular articles, especially given that he seems to go out of his way to attack Gould and evo-devo whenever it seems fit to do so (which is just…
January 27, 2008
In The Hopeless Monster? Not so fast! Bora says:
In a back-and-forth with a commenter, Coyne defends himself that he is talking about the changes in genes, not evolution. This just shows his bias - he truly believes that evolution - all of it - can be explained entirely by genetics, particularly…
January 27, 2008
Long time readers of this weblog will know I have an interest in Vitamin D. It has been hypothesized to be one of the major causal factors in generating human skin color variation, and we know from evolutionary genomics that the genes which underly skin color have been under very recent &…
January 26, 2008
Was checking out the exit poll data. Two things that jumped out at me....
Here are the votes for Obama from non-blacks in the South Carolina primary by age:
18-29 - 52%
30-44 - 25%
45-59 - 23%
60+ - 15%
Here are the votes by income for Edwards:
Under $15,000 - 14%
$15,000-$30,000 - 15%
$30,000-$50…
January 26, 2008
A few weeks ago, I posted some stuff about what genetics an tell us about the Slavic expansion into the lands of Finno-Ugric tribes. Obviously, I don't think this is a line of inquiry is specific to that situation; and used judiciously it can add a lot of value toward answering many questions.…
January 25, 2008
Over at Half Sigma there's some really interesting crunching of the GSS data. Some of it was not surprising to me, you see the same results in national polls on the topic; blacks are more Creationist than whites, who are more Creationist than Asians. Women are more Creationist than men, as are…
January 24, 2008
Wow. Well, Jerry Coyne has never been one for weak words. A few days ago evolutionary biologist & journalist Olivia Judson posted The Monster is Back, and It's Hopeful on her blog The Wild Side. Jerry Coyne, a prominent evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and co-author of the…
January 23, 2008
A few days ago I put up a post, Why red Indians aren't white, where I offered up a rough & ready model for why the indigenous peoples of the New World are relatively swarthy at the same latitudes as Europe compared to Europeans. Regular readers of this weblog know that I have somewhat of an…
January 22, 2008
Austin Bramwell has a very enjoyable review up of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism in the most recent issue of The American Conservative. I don't plan on reading Goldberg's book myself, but Bramwell is an intimidating combination of substance & style, and I'm always interested in what he has…
January 22, 2008
Since I've been flogging Just Science, I should note the launch of Research Blogging. Dave has the details.
January 22, 2008
The always interesting Inductivist has a post up where he cranks through the GSS to figure out how belief that astrology is somewhat or very scientific relates to belief in God. Below the fold I've taken his results and turned it into a chart.
The further you go the right, the more one is…
January 22, 2008
Variation in neural V1aR predicts sexual fidelity and space use among male prairie voles in semi-natural settings:
Although prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster) are socially monogamous, males vary in both sexual and spatial fidelity. Most males form pairbonds, cohabit with one female, and defend…
January 22, 2008
In the Fatosphere, Big Is in, or at Least Accepted:
Blogs written by fat people -- and it's fine to use the word, they say -- have multiplied in recent months, filling a virtual soapbox known as the fatosphere, where bloggers calling for fat acceptance challenge just about everything conventional…
January 21, 2008
Genes, Culture, and Human Evolution: A Synthesis, Linda Stone, Paul F. Lurquin and L. L. Cavalli-Sforza.
January 21, 2008
Why elephants are not so long in the tusk:
The average tusk size of African elephants has halved since the mid-19th century. A similar effect has been spotted in the Asian elephant population in India.
Researchers say it is an example of Darwinism in action, caused by the mass slaughter of dominant…
January 20, 2008
Seriously, what's up with Robert Wright recruiting a terrorist-looking-dude to chat with the Elf? Is there any way this is good for the financial bottom line? Is this the face of D.C. punditry you want to present to a terrified country? Perhaps someone should look into Wright's bank transaction…
January 20, 2008
Look who's perusing the men seeking men adverts on Craigslist. But you're not surprised, are you?
January 20, 2008
I've placed the list of current sign ups for Just Science 2008 below the fold.
Just Science blogs
Anthropology.net
feed
Behavioral Ecology Blog
feed
Bitesize Bio
feed
business|bytes|genes|molecules
feed
Camphor's
feed
Discovering Biology in a Digital World
feed
El Gentraso
feed…
January 20, 2008
Yesterday I pointed out that in the South Carolina Republican primaries this year where Huckabee did well Romney did badly, and vice versa, on a county by county basis. The tendency also seemed in line with the proportion of evangelicals within a county. I did the same analysis with Michigan…
January 19, 2008
Not that interested in politics myself, but I was curious about the South Carolina primary. You can see the exit polls here; seems like Mike Huckabee won evangelicals while McCain won non-conservatives. Nothing too surprising. As someone who has generally been of the opinion that evangelical…
January 17, 2008
I've been blogging a fair bit on the relationship between history & genetics (see here, here and here), both as a parameter in shaping the course of events (e.g., immunological profiles, or through gene-culture coevolution), and as a tool in tracing out phylogenetic relationships between…