razib
Posts by this author
June 25, 2007
On occasion I've decided I'll quickly review some population genetic concepts. These are really "background assumptions," but sometimes comments make it clear that they're not in the "common" background. So to the left you see two normal distributions, assume these are quantitative traits. The x-…
June 24, 2007
Agnostic translates an Italian interview with mathematical biologist Martin Nowak. Here are my posts read relating to Nowak's work. His book Evolutionary Dynamics is one of the best coffee table books for nerds out there (nice sturdy hard cover and glossy pages with helpful charts to navigate…
June 24, 2007
Strange. Rise of man theory 'out by 400,000 years'. I'm skeptical, not that I know anything in detail about palaeanthropology aside from books and a few advanced courses. In any case:
Our earliest ancestors gave up hunter-gathering and took to a settled life up to 400,000 years earlier than…
June 24, 2007
By now you've probably heard/read about the relationship of HIV resistance and hominoid evolutionary genetics. The original paper in Science that started it off is titled Restriction of an Extinct Retrovirus by the Human TRIM5α Antiviral Protein; quite a mouthful. Lucky for us Carl Zimmer has an…
June 24, 2007
I've always been ill at ease with the term "Judeo-Christian." As someone from a Muslim cultural background I was minimally familiar with the tenets and principles of the Islamic religion. As someone who was socialized with both Jews and Christians I was reasonably familiar with the outlines of…
June 23, 2007
Agnostic says that Lonelygirl15 reincarnated as AngryLittleGirl. I haven't watched any of the other clips, but I found this shit hilarious:
She's like a somewhat less ugly version of real-life Jacqueline Passey. Interestingly, the actress playing AngryLittleGirl is convincing due to her higher…
June 23, 2007
The New York Times has an article up about the trend of young Muslim women donning the niqab in the United Kingdom, the practice of wearing a veil and covering the body with a shapeless shift. The simple narrative is this: Muslim women are reasserting a particular part of their religious tradition…
June 22, 2007
Only on YouTube could a Dramatic Chipmunk eventually lead me to the vlog of two teen atheist girls engaging in a promotion of scientism.
June 21, 2007
U.S. troops form uneasy alliances in Iraq:
Instead, Al Qaeda quickly regained a sanctuary in the province and imposed its extremist interpretation of Islam. U.S. and Iraqi security forces scarcely venture into west Baqubah, where smoking is prohibited, as is the sale of women's clothing by men.…
June 21, 2007
Greg Graffin & Will Provine report on the results of the Cornell Evolution Project in The American Scientist. Emerging out ot Graffin's Ph.D. work it is a survey of prominent evolutionary biologists (see the full list) in regards to their views about religion and science. Their conclusion is…
June 19, 2007
In response to the Etruscan story comments like this keep popping up:
The articles in the press keep mentioning the Etruscans coming from Lydia. Lydian was an indo-european language. So, although there may be a linguistic link to Lemnos and a genetic link to Western Asia, there is no obvious link…
June 19, 2007
Go read RPM's post On the Causes of Variation in the Rate of Molecular Evolution.
June 18, 2007
The post on circumcision certainly got a lot of attention! Google news has been sending me a lot of traffic, so I checked the query out and found this article which ended thus:
Ruth Katz, 38, of San Francisco had both her sons circumcised at brises. She and her husband, Michael Rapaport, were…
June 18, 2007
Update: John Hawks has more.
Male twins reduce fitness of female co-twins in humans:
Here we investigate the effects of being gestated with a male co-twin for daughter lifetime reproductive success, and the fitness consequences for mothers of producing mixed-sex twins in preindustrial (1734-1888)…
June 18, 2007
Nature Reviews Genetics has a short article titled Sociogenetics: Cheating gets you nowhere (free registration). I was intrigued by the title, "Sociogenetics." The Chomskysists always talk about how infinitely flexible language is, and in science the proliferation of fields like "biophysical…
June 17, 2007
Update: On my other blog I have a post up addressing skeptics in the archaeological community.
A few months ago I posted several times about the Etruscans, the ancient non-Indo-European people of north-central Italy whose provenance has always been a matter of debate. To make it short, genetic data…
June 17, 2007
Matt at the Behavorial Ecology Blog is asking for the most perverted queries. His is: "cats as sexual partners." Here are some which have raised my eyebrows:
kindred porno
14-17 age porn
hermaphrodite porn trailers
free animal porn bg
kids.porn
monkey and human porn
free young transexuel porn…
June 16, 2007
Evolutionary geneticist Alan Templeton has an article in Evolution, GENETICS AND RECENT HUMAN EVOLUTION:
Starting with "mitochondrial Eve" in 1987, genetics has played an increasingly important role in studies of the last two million years of human evolution. It initially appeared that genetic data…
June 16, 2007
A few days ago Ross Douthat started a blog-conversation about the rise of secularists as a conscious cultural movement or tribe, and of course there's been plenty of talk about the new atheism. So I thought it was interesting that fundamentalist Christian pollster George Barna has a new survey out…
June 16, 2007
The debate below about circumcision has gotten fast and furious. I stand in the untenable position of neither believing that circumcision should be promoted by the authorities as a "health" precaution in the modern world, but also not considering it an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. That…
June 15, 2007
So like many people I am nearly fed up with Firefox. I really don't have that many plugins, but the freezes and crashes are just too frequent. For the next week I'll be trying out Safari. Anyone have experiences to relate? (on Windows)
June 15, 2007
As you might guess, my site is one of the sources of content. If you're reading this post at New York Articles rather than at my actual site, you are partaking of a suboptimal experience.
I'm not going to give you the URL for the lesser, because there is no value-added to speak of, unless you count…
June 15, 2007
James Hrynyshyn has a post up about circumcision and its relevance to cutting the risk of HIV infection & loss of pleasure. There are a priori reasons to believe that circumcision could reduce the risk of catching diseases through intercourse & that pleasure might be curtailed, ceteris…
June 15, 2007
Gritty real-life kat scene investigation fotoz, below the fold.
June 15, 2007
Tyler Cowen has a nice review in Slate (actually, a slice & summation) of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's most recent book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Taleb's discursive and meandering narrative delves mostly into the domains of economics, statistics and psychology, so Cowen…
June 14, 2007
Ruchira Paul sent me an email asking me to clarify this exposition of how gene selectionism can explain 50:50 sex ratios. First, I would like to second the author of the original post's injunction to read Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, it is a masterpiece of scientific exposition. For many…
June 13, 2007
Waitress is a sleepy little comedy which serves as an enjoyable way to pass an afternoon. The film stars the ethereal Keri Russell as the centerpiece of a drama set in a sleepy little town left unspecified, though the mention of Biloxi suggests the Deep South. With that in mind Andy Griffith's…
June 13, 2007
Dan Everett, linguist who was the subject of a profile in The New Yorker a month ago, gave a talk to Edge, and the transcript is online (the video is still in progress from what I can see). There is a lot of detail there, and most of it is pretty unbelievable to me. I've commented in the past on…