razib

Apropos of Alex's post, from The Barna Group, A New Generation of Adults Bends Moral and Sexual Rules to Their Liking: To what extent does faith make a difference among Busters? The research shows that born again Busters - a group defined not based upon self-identification with the "born again"…

Vote early and vote often for Shelley Batts. Shelley makes her pitch here. Shelley is a hard working graduate student with moral fiber. Q: Is it permissable for believers to aid a kuffar in amassing riches? A: It is permissable if the kuffar adds to the body of knowledge so that the believers…

I was going to continue with my review of chapter 5 of Evolutionary Genetics: Concepts & Case Studies today, but time does not permit. This section was to focus on the orgination of advantageous mutations from the stochastic cauldron of generation 1 (which, as we've seen exhibits a 1/3…

O believers! If kuffar flesh is beauteous it is permissable for the faithful to partake of it without nikah.... Q: Is a beauteous kuffar female permissable or unclean? A: Lo! A beauteous kuffar female is both permissable and unclean! If the kuffar women entreat the believers, let it be known…

My friend John Derbyshire chronicles his spiritual devolution over the past few years....

Heterogeneous Genomic Molecular Clocks in Primates: The rate at which mutations accumulate in a genome, referred as a "molecular clock," is an instrumental tool in molecular evolution and phylogenetics. Different types of mutations occur via distinctive molecular pathways. In particular, while most…

Assume that you have a new mutation, totally novel. What's its probability of going extinct in one generation? That is, it doesn't get passed on.... Consider, you have a population of N individuals. Fix the population size across nonoverlapping generations. So, in generation t you have N…

The Washington Post has a fun profile of Sam Harris. This part cracked me up: "If the Koran were exactly the same," he said, toward the end of the night, "and there were just one line added to it, and the line said, 'If you see a red-haired woman on your lawn at sunset, kill her,' I can tell you…

This week's Ask a ScienceBlogger: What's the most underfunded scientific field that shouldn't be underfunded?... I'll say old fashioned biological anthropology. There's a reason that a pall was cast over thsi field after World War II, but we need to start pushing an analysis of man the animal on…

There is a working paper out which reports on the nature of the religiousness of the professoriate. Some data of interest.... * Proportion of professors with "No religion" - 31% (vs. ~10% for the general public) "I don't believe in God" - 10% (vs. 2.8% for the general public) "I don't know whether…

I noticed today that I was receiving a lot of search engine queries for black and white twins. Well, I have posted on it several times, but I thought it was a bit much, so I checked the news, and lo & behold, another case just popped up. Like the Australian twins the mother here was biracial…

Check the comments interspersed....

A reader emailed me asking about the genetics of hair color. Since I've discussed the topic before I simply pointed them to the query of the topic on my other blog. But, I thought it might be good to directly answer two specific questions: Why do many people have much lighter hair during childhood…

John Wilkins has a good post on religion, I tend to agree with its general thrust though I might quibble with details. Not being gifted with much marginal time right now, a few quick thoughts: 1) I believe that institutional organized religion, e.g., Christianity, Islam, etc., can increase the…

One of the things I regret during my tenure blogging is that I started doing "10 questions" too late to get in touch with John Maynard Smith. If you haven't, I highly recommend this interview by Robert Wright from a few years ago. Also, Smith wrote one of the more readable introductory texts on…

Four Stone Hearth, the Anthropology Carnival, starts at Anthropology.net today.

US author offers 'Vedic alternative' to evolution theory: Offering a "Vedic alternative" to Darwin's Theory of Evolution, an American author has claimed that human beings devolved from the "realm of pure consciousness", as testified by archaeological evidence discovered over the past 150 years. "…

Note: Download file here (it has more precise percentages on blue eyes in Norway, someone could try their hand at some game theoretic modeling if they were inclined, I lack the time right now). Ruchira Paul brought this article to my attention: Before you request a paternity test, spend a few…

One of the many hypotheses in palaeoanthropology is homonids shifted to meat eating because it was metabolically rich and allowed the increase in our brain sizes. Well, there might now be some support from primate analogs finally, Study suggests evolutionary link between diet, brain size in…

Hsien-Hsien Lei points me to another story about black and white twins. First, the "black" twin is clearly mixed race, her skin color is between the modal complexion of Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans on the von Luschan scale. The "white" twin on the other hand does seem to exhibit the color…

Just for the record, that's a pajama, not a dress. I don't appreciate people I know making fun of me (you know who you are). If you are curious about the fact that I am beardless and singing, well, that was before I became a good Muslim.

The comments below about Muslims in Europe have continued to come in, so I figured I would put a new post up and allow further comments here on the front page. On my other blog I have another post on the veil. Two points: 1) It seems like "New Labor" has decided to drop the PC-veil, so to speak,…

Ask a Science Blogger: What's the best science TV show of all time?... No contest, NOVA.

Via The American Scene, Skin Color and Wages Among New Immigrants (Update: Steve Sailer an interesting critique of this study). The basic finding is that controlling for all variables that they could nail down darker skinned immigrants tend to make less bank. As someone of luscious brownitude (see…

David B continues his series on R.A. Fisher's opinions regarding population size and evolutionary genetics (part I). Update: Links fixed. Thanks John.

Steven Pinker has responded to Lakoff's reply in TNR.

In the comments Fly states: Within the next two decades it will become easy to modify skin color and hair characteristics. A person's skin color may be a fashion statement much as a woman's hair color is today. Rather than most people being brown, I expect some will opt for attention garnering…

I really enjoyed The Long Summer by Brian Fagan. It's a pretty interesting and multi-dimensional story, hitting all the evolutionary, archeological and climatological angles that you'd expect. Fagan's central hypothesis is that our species has been responding to local climatic shocks with short-…