razib
Posts by this author
February 10, 2007
I hope you've been checking out the Just Science site this week. If you haven't, I recommend the RSS feed, http://www.justscience.net/?feed=rss2 for ease of browsing. In any case, I just want to announce that I'm shutting down the feeds Sunday night at 9 PM PDT. The site will then be frozen in…
February 9, 2007
The "domestic" cat, Felis silvestris catus, has been with us for nearly 10,000 years. Recently, a 9,500 year old burial of a human and their companion cat was discovered on Cyprus. Cats are not indigenous to the island, so it seems that the presence of this cat must be owed to human intervention…
February 8, 2007
I've always had an interest in human origins, and have been an avid consumer of books and papers relating to the emergence of our own species through an evolutionary lens. Though I am interested in paleontology, my own bias has been to look toward the genetic evidence because it is more accessible…
February 7, 2007
Why do humans cooperate? Why do we behave "altruistically"? These are the sort of "big" questions which the human sciences explore. From the vantage point of evolutionary biology there has been a long history of exploring, and attempting to explain, altruistic behavior. And yet such questions…
February 6, 2007
The idea of stochastic training wheels sounds a bit scary, but I am alluding to the series of posts on stochastic dynamics adapted from chapter 5 of Evolutionary Genetics: Concepts & Case Studies by John Gillespie. Using Gillespie's terminology the posts were:
Boundary Process
Origination…
February 5, 2007
The conventional Mendelian
model for diploid organisms assumes that the expression of an autosomal
allele within an individual should be invariant of its sex of origin,
that is, whether it is inherited from the father or the mother.
This model is incorrect for a subset of alleles across many taxa…
February 4, 2007
A Week of Science starts tomorrow. I've loaded up an aggregator blog at http://www.justscience.net, but the best place to follow things will be via RSS, http://www.justscience.net/?feed=rss2.
February 1, 2007
I've been sick. Flu. That's why I haven't been posting. I will be posting again soon. But I am taking time out to post something right now, because having a blog means having a place to vent.
1) 2.5 weeks ago I ordered a piece of hardware from amazon
2) The hardware did not work
3) I called amazon…
January 27, 2007
Pretty cool. Via Afarensis.
I am:
Arthur C. Clarke
Well known for nonfiction science writing and for early promotion of the effort toward space travel, his fiction was often grand and visionary.
Which science fiction writer are you?
January 24, 2007
Thinking about it today, I realized there is a "Basic Concept" that I think I should touch upon, and that is linkage disequilibrium (LD). Notice the wiki link? I do that whenever I mention LD because it is such an essential concept for some of the evolutionary ideas which I am interested in, but…
January 23, 2007
Many fellow ScienceBloggers are doing a "Basic Concepts" series. Here are some of them:
Mean, Median, and Mode
Normal Distribution
Force
Gene
Central Dogma of Molecular Biology
Evolution
Clade
Instead of thinking up something new I've decided to repost a an older post where I cover the "basic"…
January 22, 2007
My post below, Group selection & the naturalistic fallacy, elicited some interesting comments. First, I mentinoed W.D. Hamilton's allusion to a relationship between fascism & group selection. Here is what he said:
'Liberal' thinkers should realize from the outset that fervent 'belief' in…
January 22, 2007
So I near the end of my survey of chapter 5 of Evolutionary Genetics: Concepts & Case Studies.1 Today, we address environmental variation, but I think sometimes the end is the beginning, so I quote:
Random environment models have many technical aspects...that make them difficult to analyze.…
January 21, 2007
Over at Bora's place he talks about a paper on group selection. In regards to the scientific idea and its broad relevance to evolutionary biology, I am mildly skeptical. That being said, this comment drew my attention:
While endorsing DS Wilson's Unto Others, Richard Lewontin mentioned an unsavory…
January 20, 2007
A reader just informed me that Bob Trivers just won the Crafoord Prize in bioscience! For those who would like to become more familiar with Trivers' work, I highly recommend Natural Selection and Social Theory. Genes in Conflict is also a good read if you want some molecular level evolutionary…
January 18, 2007
There is now a sign up page for A Week of Science. Basically I'll take the feeds and load them up on Justscience.net with Feedpress the day before the 5th. You can see the current list here. You can insert the sign up page with this code into you're own site (remove the styling if you wish of…
January 18, 2007
PZ and John have commented on a Steve Weinberg review of The God Delusion. This prompts me to offer up a cheap reflection which I've been meaning to air since watching Beyond Belief 2006, Steve Weinberg was, to my eye, the most ignorant and complacent of all the speakers and panelists, while at…
January 17, 2007
RPM and Chris have hit most of the points in regards to the Just Science project. To be short, what it's not about is anti-science. Just one week, that's all. It certainly isn't about traffic or comment response. It isn't about ease of posting, expressing a clever opinion, but rather a tight…
January 17, 2007
A Week of Science. More later (I'm on board obviously)....
January 17, 2007
Both Jason Rosenhouse and Rand Simberg have offered in the past few days that they have never exhibited an inclination to accept theism. Jason wonders:
I have very clear memories of attending Sunday school as a kid, and spending most of that time thinking my teachers were putting me on. Do I lack…
January 16, 2007
There is news about a skull which is about 40,500 years old found in Europe that exhibits a hybrid Neandertal-Modern morphology:
However, there were some important differences: apparently independent features that are, at best, unusual for a modern human. These included frontal flattening and…
January 15, 2007
p-ter has an interesting post where he explores some current findings about human population substructure. He begins:
First, an important preliminary-- there are millions of places in the human genome where any two given people could possible differ, either by a single base change, the addition of…
January 13, 2007
Sergey Gavrilets and William R. Rice have a new population genetic model for homosexuality out. You can read the full paper over at Gavrilets' website, while Ars Technica and Matt both have some nice commentary. I don't have much to add, and generally share Matt's skepticism of the utility of a…