razib
Posts by this author
December 7, 2006
Another update on the "Tripoli 6," this time on the science. Spread the meme! Nature has a paper out which vindicates the claims of innocence of the scientists.
December 6, 2006
Thanks to Chet for filling in, but now I'm back! Your long Snicker nightmare is over! I kid, but seriously, I appreciate Chet's contribution, and he'll be guest blogging in the future. I'll be helping Chet set up a weblog where he can focus on his two passions: Austrian economics & radical…
December 6, 2006
A few years ago the developmental geneticist Armand Leroi burst on to the scene with the engaging book, Mutants, and a controversial op-ed where he attempted to rehabilitate the concept of race. Leroi's op-ed spawned a rebuttal website which brought together a variety of scholars from disparate…
December 5, 2006
Nick Wade just wrote up an article on the relationship between Neandertals and divison of labor. John Hawks hurls a cannon of a post at this hypothesis.
December 5, 2006
Your Political Profile:
Overall: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal
Social Issues: 25% Conservative, 75% Liberal
Personal Responsibility: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal
Fiscal Issues: 75% Conservative, 25% Liberal
Ethics: 25% Conservative, 75% Liberal
Defense and Crime: 75%…
December 5, 2006
Over at agnostic's blog p-eter points out that lactose tolerance can be considered "dominant." Most of you know I have issues with terms like dominant or recessive because I think the simple heuristic is infectious and tends to persist and spread throughout the discourse to the point where it…
December 4, 2006
A reader asks:
I often hear the Sunni/Shia conflict analogized to the Catholic/Protestant conflict, esp as manifested in Northern Ireland. Would you say this is valid or not? Why? I honestly don't understand these intramural conflicts very well, so this is a genuine request for clarification.
This…
December 4, 2006
RPM discusses hybrid speciation while agnostic waxes skeptical about the relevance of more symmetry among multiracial humans. The comments on agnostic's posts are interesting as well.
December 4, 2006
A few weeks ago I presented a tentative model for how lactose tolerance (the ability of adults to digest milk easily and efficiently) spread throughout the world. Here is what I offered:
1) A haplotype block, A, associated with the LCT gene, and a particular SNP on that block, -13910*T, is…
December 3, 2006
Chris has a post up where he asserts that it looks like Louisiana is trying to flip off the Caribbean. I hold that Florida and the Tarim Basin both look pretty phallic.
December 3, 2006
The Associated Press has an article on the genetics of taste and its relevance in everyday life. I've posted on the genetics of taste in the past, it's an interesting topic. Basically, you have three phenotypes:
Super-taster
Taster
Non-taster
Until recently the "super-taster" category was…
December 2, 2006
RPM and Kambiz comment on a paper which argues for the utility of mtDNA in phylogeography.
Remember,
there is lots of mtDNA that is easy to extract because there are so many mitochondria within eukaryotic cells
it mutates fast, building up a lot of genetic variation, in a neutral matter (i.e.,…
December 2, 2006
Update: Ed Brayton has now acknowledged the non-triviality of his original error. Bravo! A gentleman he is.
End Update:
Today, Ed Brayton has post where he comments on an article about Saudi ties to Sunnis in Iraq, etc. The article itself isn't interesting to me really, but what Ed did say about…
December 1, 2006
In the post below there is a lot of talk about genius that might rival Newton. I didn't throw down a list of criteria for why I esteem Newton, a lot of this is gestalt intuition anyway, and I'm probably not reflectively totally aware of why I feel the way I do. That being said, someone threw down…
November 30, 2006
Over at The Edge Scott Atran and Sam Harris continue to spar over the question of religion. This is a continuation of the discussions that occurred at Beyond Belief 2006. The Q & A's at the end of the presentations were actually far more interesting to me than the talks themselves. Having so…
November 30, 2006
In his presentation for Beyond Belief 2006 Neil deGrasse Tyson offered Isaac Newton as his candidate for the most brilliant intellectual ever. Because he is trained as a physicist Tyson can be accused of some bias, but the impact on him personally was pretty obvious, he was emotionally moved just…
November 29, 2006
Foreign Policy has a interesting selection of charts. They show that "radicals" and "moderates" in the Muslim world are not that different. Below the fold is a chart which offers two facts
1) Radical Muslims are, on average, more educated than non-radical Muslims
2) Radical Muslims are, on average…
November 29, 2006
Over at Michael Brendan Dougherty's place a debate broke out over the relative importance of language vs. religion in the Irish identity. This could perhaps be abstracted and extrapolated to many peoples and nations. In the comments Daniel Larison offered:
But then I also think that Catholicism in…
November 28, 2006
I grew up in the Northeast (almost New England) and the Pacific Northwest. Here is a map of American English dialects.
Via Shaitan. You can take the quiz here.
November 28, 2006
Science Daily summarizes findings that Neandertal teeth grew at the same rate as modern humans. John Hawks applies the skeptical eye of a scientist. N matters....
November 27, 2006
Orac has a rather thorough post on eugenics, and what Richard Dawkins has recently had to say on it. Here is the dictionary.com definition of eugenics:
...the study of or belief in the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population, esp. by such means as…
November 26, 2006
Update: Chris has a follow up post.
Chris leaves nothing unsaid. A sample:
In that talk Dawkins sounds, at times, like a 5-year old with the vocabulary and factual knowledge of a world-renowned scientist....
I find it hypocritcal and, as an atheist, more than a little embarrassing that these…
November 26, 2006
Interesting article which surveys the confusion in Europe right now as countries whose electoral systems are based on proportional representation are seeing a tendency by the populace to vote for parties of the far Right and far Left. This has resulted in unwieldly and unstable coalitions drawn…
November 25, 2006
Below I made a reference to the heritability of religiosity. In a chat with Christer Chris that the heritability for religiosity was 0.5, and he was surprised at the result. I decided to double-check, and here is the latest paper:
Estimates of the degree of genetic and environmental influences on…
November 24, 2006
Samuel 17:36 - Thy servant slew both the lion and the bear: and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be as one of them, seeing he hath defied the armies of the living God.
November 24, 2006
How has your post-T-day been if you are a citizen of the Greatest Nation in the World?TM Wow, I woke up this morning to a flare up in the Ed vs. PZ battle here on SB and elsewhere. Bora has the most most thorough round up of links, which can be reduced to theistic-evolutionists-are-sell-outs vs.…