razib
Posts by this author
November 24, 2006
Does Islam Forbid Befriending Non-Muslims?.
It is obvious that Jews patronize the Jews and Christians patronize the Christians, so why not Muslims patronize Muslims and support their own people. This verse is not telling us to be against Jews or Christians, but it is telling us that we should take…
November 24, 2006
Via Kambiz I found this post which argues that the high-protein diet of the Mongols was important in allowing them to defeat their enemies, who were relatively nutritionally deficient. Perhaps. But history isn't that simple, after all, if "more meat = more ass-kicking," you wouldn't have…
November 23, 2006
Shelley Batts has a post, Whites-Only Scholarship as "Reverse Affirmative Action". Shelley sayeth:
...In order to ensure that universities, and students, benefit from a diverse education, often pro-active techniques are utilized to recruit minorities.
When the race war comes all of us colored folk…
November 23, 2006
A new paper in Nature, Global variation in copy number in the human genome, suggests that it isn't just SNPs that matter in regards to human variation. Those of you who are "in the know" aren't surprised, so this press release is a bit much. Along with a focus on gene regulation, this is a…
November 23, 2006
The Messiah will be on In Our Time to discuss the evolutionary origins of altruism. They are pretty good about getting the archive up in a day or so. Interesting that they illustrate the idea with Mr. a priori Kant, or am I being pretentious and misunderstanding Kant? I simply suspect that…
November 23, 2006
Gene-culture coevolution is a topic of interest for me. Consider adult milk digestion. It's weird, and seems like a new adaptation. The lactase gene has been under such strong selection that it is often used (or the region around it) as a control to test whether new methods for detecting…
November 22, 2006
Nick Anthis, he of the fake British accent, has a follow up post on "ethical stem cells."
November 22, 2006
David points out that they are talking about Mormons in The Corner today relating to Mitt Romney.
Jonah thinks that the Mormon thing might help
An evangelical who is married to a Mormon thinks that it isn't a big issue
Anti-Mormon readers weigh in
A Mormon comments on the anti-Mormons
Mormonism is…
November 22, 2006
A friend pointed to this massive collation of statistics on atheism across the world. I myself keep track of this literature and most of the values are pretty plausible, or I've seen them before (you can find The World Values Survey publications in any college library). This section caught my…
November 21, 2006
Chris of Mixing Memory is now a Christian. Just so you know. It was reading Kierkegaard that pushed him over the edge. He just told me via IM. You think Chris is an idiot now, right J-Dog?
November 21, 2006
Discover is doing a "25 Greatest Science Books of All-Time" list. The great thing about stuff like this is it gets you thinking, talking, and exposes what your priorities are. There isn't a canonical list with a clear rank order. I mean, yeah, Principia is the bomb, but people can make a case for…
November 20, 2006
This NPR story about the anti-immigrant backlash in Denmark is pretty interesting. How you feel about it, well, that would depend on your perspective. I see no alternative to Danish "tough love" myself. A brown-skinned immigrant I am you say? Well yes, true that. But, aside from the non-trivial…
November 20, 2006
When I was a kid, back in the day, I read up to book 6 of The Wheel of Time. It seemed that after book 3 the series went into an exponential decay of quality...and I couldn't handle the flat female characters and I ditched in book 6. Well, turns out that he's churned out 11 books total. A friend…
November 20, 2006
Muhammad Yunus, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, will be on Talk of the Nation today (Nov. 21st).
November 20, 2006
Wow, wow. Lots of chatter around the ScienceBlogs about religion and evolution, etc. etc. Ed Brayton starts it off, drawing a line in the sand against those with an "anti-theist agenda." John Lynch tends to side with Ed. Our resident Ozzie, John Wilkins has been getting into it with Jason…
November 20, 2006
I don't have time to comment in detail, but I thought I'd give readers a heads up, there is a preprint in The American Journal of Human Genetics which confirms that a few SNPs on one locus is responsible for 3/4 of the variation between blue and brown eyes in white populations. This locus, OCA2,…
November 19, 2006
Newsweek has a summation of the recent Neandertal papers. Nothing special, but a good reading of the public Zeitgeist.
November 19, 2006
A new paper, A Maternal-Offspring Coadaptation Theory for the Evolution of Genomic Imprinting (open access), presents a theory of genomic imprinting which purports to explain some facets of the phenomenon via maternal-child interaction:
Imprinted genes are expressed either from the maternally or…
November 19, 2006
Both Jason (TFK) and John (SF) also give E.O. Wilson as the response to Ask a ScienceBlogger. This is kind of disheartening. Can anyone think of another scientist who is plausible and alive? (obviously Carl Sagan would have been a good candidate) I mean, James Watson is an acerbic kook part of…
November 18, 2006
I was surprised to see Matt Yglesis on Bloggingheads.tv today, arguing with Ross Douthat...he seems shockingly elfin in his countenance compared to his normal appearance. And interestingly, his voice is far more masculine! I wonder if this is some form of correlated response on the scale of…
November 17, 2006
Why is it permissible for Muslims to propagate the One True Faith amongst the kuffar, while the kuffar are not allowed to preach their shirk amongst the believers? Watch the video below, and you'll see that it's as simple as 2 + 2 = 4! Bow down to Allah, the one most high!
November 17, 2006
This week's Ask a ScienceBlogger:
Who would you nominate for Scientist Laureate, if such a position existed?...
E.O. Wilson. Wilson combines the skills of a serious researcher with literary grace and social/political prominence. With the passing from the scene of Carl Sagan I can't think of any…
November 17, 2006
You want more links to Neandertal related stuff? OK...Afarensis hits the morphology, while Kambiz hits the genetics. On Science Friday they interviewed one of the authors of one of the archeo-genomics papers (Rubin) as well as paleoanthropologist Richard Klein.
November 16, 2006
Finally Nick Wade is wading in on the Neandertal genomics story. Wade is a top level reporter, so when he covers a story I am pretty sure he is getting "inside" information that allows him to frame his piece appropriately. So when he says, "Researchers also hope to resolve such questions as whether…
November 16, 2006
A post on my other blog from p-ter on the second Neandertal genomics paper. Here is the important conclusion:
...expect some big papers on "sexy" genes like ASPM, microcephalin, and FOXP2 in the coming years.
Remember "Netscape time." Feels like genetics is approaching that in the Post-genomic…
November 16, 2006
"Ali Eteraz" has started a new site, States of Islam. My friend Aziz Poonawalla has a post up offering his thoughts on the Israel-Palestine conflict. I am aware of two of the headline contributors, Haroon Moghul and Thabet. Though I disagree with them, they're both smart, so I indulge them in…