razib
Posts by this author
July 10, 2007
A commenter below observed that both the Sami and the Finns are cases where females tend to have darker eyes than males. He chalked this up to sexual selection. I was skeptical a priori because 3/4 of the time the variation between blue and brown eyes within the population can be explained by…
July 10, 2007
Chad's response to Dave Ng's meme attempt asking people about their own field and relationship to other fields included this:
I'm particularly not envious of biology, in which every result seems to be messy and contingent. Everything has a hundred confounding factors, and all the results seem to be…
July 10, 2007
Someone asked below if the Sami are actually darker than the Finns. Since I've been making this assumption in previous posts I thought I'd check this out. I found this source for the Finnish Sami where they cite a 1936 paper written in German. I've translated the relevant table (hair and skin…
July 9, 2007
Over the past two days I've posted about the problems with Vitamin D deficiency that can crop up at high latitudes because of low UV levels. In Civilization Felix Fernandez-Armesto quotes a source stating about the Sami of Finland:
...They are blow-legged from rickets....
The argument I made…
July 9, 2007
Apropos of the recent drift vs. selection debates in regards to the driving forces of evolution, I thought I'd pass on this press release about the pervasiveness of neutral genetic elements. You can read the full provisional paper in PLOS Genetics:
Using sequence analysis and fossil dating, we…
July 9, 2007
In my previous post I highlighted the possibility that extremely light skin might have evolved in Europeans relatively recently due to selection for Vitamin D production in the context of a nutritional deficiency prompted by the shift from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to an agricultural one. I want…
July 8, 2007
Recently I had some blood work done for a routine check up and it turned out that I had vitamin D deficiency. The doctor explained to me that this is common amongst darker skinned people who live at high latitudes, especially in areas where cloudiness is the norm. That would fit the bill for my…
July 7, 2007
A few days ago I went to watch Transformers with my younger brother. A young man in his mid-teens he, doesn't remember the Clinton years with any great clarity, let alone the Reagan era in which the original cartoon series and toy line emerged as cultural forces. Let's cut to the chase. The…
July 6, 2007
Recently a few blogs I follow have been having a back and forth "debate" which seem to recapitulate in the most general sense the "selectionist vs. neutralist" debates of the 1970s.
Three posts from p-ter:
Do phenotypes evolve neutrally?
More on adaptation
Final Thoughts on adaptation
From Larry:…
July 5, 2007
Many of you have heard of the Ultimatum Game:
The ultimatum game is an experimental economics game in which two parties interact anonymously and only once, so reciprocation is not an issue. The first player proposes how to divide a sum of money with the second party. If the second player rejects…
July 5, 2007
Hope all my fellow Americans out there had a good Independence Day. I was away on a trip, and I thought I'd share a few photos.
July 2, 2007
Chad has a post up discussing the crappiness of physics in science fiction. Rob has more. This was all prompted by a post titled R-E-S-P-E-C-T; which makes the case that biology gets no respect in science fiction (e.g., notice the abundance of dangerous and large predators stalking deserts with…
July 2, 2007
Eye on DNA has an interview with a "genetic genealogist." He's a little more enthusiastic about the informative value of these tests than I am, but the interview itself is pretty informative.
July 2, 2007
If you're a regular reader of ScienceBlogsTM I hope you'll take this survey. The theory is that the results of the reader survey will help us improve your experience as an end user.
July 1, 2007
I was chatting with my much younger brother recently and he mentioned an interest in philosophy. I asked if he'd read Plato, and he returned my query with a question: "Is Plato worth reading?" My own answer: I don't think Plato is really worth reading, but, many thinkers have disagreed and Plato…
July 1, 2007
Spencer Wells, author of The Journey of Man, has a write up of The Genographic Project and "Out of Africa" in Vanity Fair. Nothing new or groundbreaking, but you know historical population genetics has come a long way if it's in Vanity Fair. On a related note The Genographic Project has finally…
June 30, 2007
Saw Ratatouille today. Never once checked the time. Very good film. So far Yahoo Movie critics & users give it an A-, and it seems like it'll win the box office. Much recommended (Pixar animation is the bomb obviously, but the story is really good and could only be told in a non-live action…
June 29, 2007
Chris of Mixing Memory has a must read post up about the normal distribution. The man did the tedious work of encoding mathematical notation and symbolism into HTML, so he should take a bow.
June 29, 2007
Update: iPhone, iPhone, iPhone? Jobs is God? iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone!!! iPhone. iPhone. iPhone? iPhone-iPhone. iPhone iPhone. Apple Store, wet my pants. iPhone iPhone iPhone. iPhone!!!! iPhone iPhone. iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone. Jobs does not exist! iPhone? Jobs…
June 28, 2007
There's a paper to be published on domestic cat phylogenetics in Science tomorrow. National Geographic has a summary, but Forbes has a more thorough treatment. The short of it is that the maternal lineages (mtDNA) of domestic cats seem derived from the Near Eastern varieties . The acculturation…
June 27, 2007
John Hawks has the details on a new paper (DOI might not work yet) coming out in PNAS. The researchers trying to reconstruct the Neandertal genome are reporting biases in degradation which is aiding their task. Scientific American has a summary.
June 27, 2007
Someone named Schvach Yid left an irritated comment in response to my post about the term Judeo-Christian. He also sent me a short email clearing up the fact that Judaism is more than legalism, and that it is steep to consider Jews non-Western. I think addressing these questions is worthwhile…
June 27, 2007
John Hawks has an excellent decomposition of the story yesterday in The New York Times about paleoanthropology and biology.
June 26, 2007
John Noble Wilford in The New York Times has a piece titled The Human Family Tree Has Become a Bush With Many Branches, which reflects the current consensus thinking that the hominid lineage was until recently relatively diversified, with a host of species extant contemporaneously (the other view…
June 25, 2007
Humans Have Spread Globally, and Evolved Locally (The New York Times):
No one yet knows to what extent natural selection for local conditions may have forced the populations on each continent down different evolutionary tracks. But those tracks could turn out to be somewhat parallel. At least some…