razib
Posts by this author
April 18, 2007
A few days ago I posted about how overdominance, the fitness advantage of a heterozygote (an Aa genotype instead of an AA or aa genotype), can maintain polymorphism (genetic variation) within a population at a locus. Roughly, the equilibrium ratio between the two alleles is determined by their…
April 18, 2007
I have a review up over at my other weblog of the book The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization.
April 17, 2007
The Scientist has some good quotes in a article on the chimp positive selection story from yesterday:
The screen failed to find evidence for positive selection of two genes involved in brain development and cognition - ASPMM and Foxp2 - that studies have previously identified as positively selected…
April 16, 2007
One of the classic ways to maintain genetic variation with a population is "overdominance," in short, a state where heterozygotes exhibit greater fitness than the homozygote genotypes. Imagine for example a locus, A, with two alleles, A1 & A2. Now, assume the fitness is distributed like so…
April 16, 2007
The times has a mildly stupid article up, Chimps are ahead of humans in the great evolutionary race, which just goes to show that the people writing the headlines often have no comprehension skills, or just don't bother reading more than the first paragraph of a story. As confused as the article…
April 16, 2007
You know a scientist has made it to the "big time" when they are given the opportunity to write to a general audience. Some thinkers, such as Richard Dawkins, have made their name via popularization. Others, such as E.O. Wilson, only became notable figures outside of academia after having…
April 15, 2007
...sorry about the delay this week. Been busy, will post a few more before next Friday.
April 13, 2007
I promised I'd go over the recent PNAS paper, Group selection and kin selection: Two concepts but one process. This is one of those articles where most of the heavy lifting is in the technical appendix. I've decided that it isn't worth the effort to restate this verbally in detail, I looked over…
April 11, 2007
I read Evolution for Everyone, and I was struck by how much David S. Wilson discussed religion. First, he seems to praise The Templeton Foundation quite a bit, in part because of their generous funding of his research. This isn't to say that he has any illusions about the nature of their interests…
April 11, 2007
I don't normally blog about stuff like this, but I've decided to link to this story about an assault on a Sikh American veteran by a police officer. Here's the original story posted by the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund. If this sort of stuff concerns you I encourage you to link…
April 10, 2007
A few months ago I was posting on R.A. Fisher's Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. I stopped because I was a bit confused as to what to do about the chapter on dominance, which was basically an exposition on a theory which has been falsified by the preponderance of data. In sum, R.A. Fisher…
April 9, 2007
I'm not going to post about fr*ming (don't want this to get caught by the "Buzz" algorithm), just so you know. Yann pointed me to this paper, Group selection and kin selection: Two concepts but one process, and I'm going over the details (this is one where most of the math has been pushed to the…
April 8, 2007
Some people have joked that journalists have a tendency to always present "alternative viewpoints" even when the sides are not symmetrical in their cogency or credibility, e.g., "Earth is a sphere, views differ." That being said, this article about the controversy over blogging etiquette, and…
April 7, 2007
I went to a Thai restaurant I frequent regularly today. The wait & kitchen staff know me, I called ahead to make sure they prepped "the usual," a medium rare steak served with onion, tomatoes and spicy lime sauce. In my case I like the lime sauce "4-stars spicy," that is, mixed together with…
April 7, 2007
A few days ago I introduced how higher levels of selection could occur via a "toy" example. Obviously it wasn't realistic, and as RPM pointed out a real population is not open ended in its growth potential. I simply wanted to allude to the seeds of how Simpson's Paradox might occur, where…
April 7, 2007
David Sloan Wilson, the doyen of Multilevel Selection theorists, has a new book out, Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives. It seems pretty clear to me that Wilson is trying to "do a Dennett" here. But unlike Dennett, who was not a scientist…
April 5, 2007
You know you've hit the big time when you are on CNN. Kind of like Anna Nicole.
April 5, 2007
I'm rereading Unto Others, David Wilson and Elliott Sober's argument for Multilevel Selection. One of the core planks in the book is that supra-individual levels of selection are necessary for the evolution of altruism, and much of the book details what Wilson & Sober perceive are the…
April 4, 2007
Nick Wade has a long write up about the recent work on Etruscan phylogenetics.
"The overwhelming proportion of archaeologists would regard the evidence for eastern origins of the Etruscans as negligible," said Anthony Tuck, an archaeologist at the University of Massachusetts Center for Etruscan…
April 3, 2007
I'd assumed that Mad Dog's Revenge Habanero & Chile Extract would be the spiciest "sauce" of the bunch. I put sauce in quotations because it isn't a hot sauce, it's a food additive. The label warns not to use this as a hot sauce because it is way too spicy. How spicy? The label says, "1,000,…
April 2, 2007
I enjoyed the recent Blogging Heads dialogue between John Horgan and George Johnson, in part because I could follow the whole thing without falling asleep. But the comments about string theory were really over the top and kind of disturbing. I enjoyed Lee Smolin's jeremiad against string theory,…
March 31, 2007
For Mad Dog Liquid Fire the same critique that I applied to Ass in Space applies. The only difference is that there was a nice tangy smoked flavor to it, so I will actually give it a 4 out of 10 (I was too disgusted with Ass in Space's lack of spice to rate it).
March 30, 2007
You Can't Handle This Hot Sauce is subject to the same critique as Dave's Insanity. Only not as spicy (though close). 6.5 out of 10. I ate it with rice + Yumm! Sauce + avocado + black beans & onions + cilantro & tomatoes.
March 29, 2007
Steve Gimbel has a post up where he expresses skepticism of the utility of lab sections. Janet, Chad & Chad and RPM all offered responses. All that needs to be said from the various angles that I would have touched upon has been said, so I won't add much more, except to recall my discussion…
March 29, 2007
As some of you might have noticed, I was not impressed with Hot Sauce #2. For day 3, I had pepper-crusted beef, bacon, and arugula sandwiches and spicy mustard with the Hottest Fuckin' Sauce. As you can tell by the picture to the left where I'm pouring, yes, pouring, the sauce over my sandwich,…