razib
Posts by this author
October 6, 2006
The Evil One recently talked to Paul Bloom, one of my favorite cognitive psychologists. Here is something I found of interest:
...and I brought up the issue that many researchers -- David Sloan Wilson being one that springs to mind -- have argued that religion is evolutionary but that it is also…
October 6, 2006
Richard Dawkins is going to be on Science Friday. It should be easy to find a live internet feed if you are on the web at work. It's for the second hour (i.e., 12-1 PM for me here on the West coast).
Update: An MP3 file of the interview.
October 6, 2006
Aside from the fact that they remind those of us who were exposed to Japanese movies of ninjas, why are veiled women so disconcerting? I bring this up because Jack Straw over in England is causing a controversy by talking about the fact that when he meets female constituents who are veiled he asks…
October 5, 2006
JP offers us some links about brain development & genetics. He also reports on a preprint which implies selection for musculature in Africans. Finally, David discusses R.A. Fisher addressing the contentious issue of race.
October 5, 2006
Radio Open Source had a show about Islam & The Netherlands. They mention one of my comments in the last 5 minutes (the download should be up tomorrow). I have cut & pasted my first comment below.
And what better place for this flourishing multicultural paradise than the tolerant…
October 5, 2006
Radio Open Source had a show on about "free will" with a foody focus inspired by Clay Shirky's Edge response, "Free will is going away. Time to redesign society to take that into account." Megan McAardle offers a good skeptical and rational rebuttal to the emotive talking points spouted by some of…
October 4, 2006
Bora is having some non-trivial financial deficits right now, if you read his content & enjoy his blog and have a local surplus, considering redistributing it via PAYPAL (click the icon on the clock blog) or via AMAZON.
October 4, 2006
So I read The God Delusion. I wasn't going to. The reason is this: I didn't want to read an atheist manifesto. I'm an atheist, no need to strengthen my unfaith. I have read books on atheism before, so I have that under my belt. Now, I am interested in religion as a natural phenomenon, but that…
October 3, 2006
Two Catholic pubications touch upon evolution, first, Commonweal reviews kenotic theology, which seems to be entail (or at least align with) the necessity of evolution. I'm skeptical obviously, not being a believer, but it is an interesting idea and perhaps it will be attractive to some…
October 2, 2006
JP at my other blog has two posts on molecular evolution worth checking out (the second post was inspired by a comment from RPM).
October 2, 2006
Steven Pinker has a piece where he slams George Lakoff in The New Republic. Unfortunately like much of the best stuff in TNR this is behind a pay wall, though The American Scene has posted a snip. Chris has a lot of Lakoff criticism over at his old blog, and as a political liberal himself I hope…
October 2, 2006
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has a press release out about a new paper, Transforming the architecture of compound eyes, in Nature. The last sentence of the abstract states:
Our results provide a molecular atlas for the construction of microvillar assemblies and illustrate the critical…
October 1, 2006
I received this comment and thought I might tap into the community here:
Ok I'm really sorry but this has nothing to do with the above post. I'm truly desperate to get my hands on a good pro-evolution film or something that explains clearly what its all about. All I seem to get locally is a bunch…
October 1, 2006
This is a shout out to the biologists out there: do you think the concept of dominance and recessive is worthwhile? In other words, does it help in conceptualization more than it hurts? Clearly the idea of recessiveness of deleterious traits helps in comprehending why such alleles exist in the…
October 1, 2006
Since Noah Millman posts so infrequently he should really install an RSS feed! In any case, Noah lays out a pragmatic case for why we shouldn't invade Iran, which prompted a response with this denouement:
We lack only the will, not the power, to destroy the threat that Iran presents -- and we lack…
October 1, 2006
Time has a long piece about the sequencing and comparative genetics between humans and the great apes. There is also some material thrown in about Neandertals.
September 30, 2006
Check out the data posted by rikhurzen from the GSS.
September 30, 2006
RPM has a post up about Y and mtDNA lineages, and what they can (or can't) tell us about demographic history. I'm pretty skeptical myself about the broad and detailed deep time inferences some make with these markers (see The Real Eve for an extreme case), but Dienekes points me to a situation…
September 30, 2006
Back in August AlphaPsy had series of posts on 'naturalism' in the context of culture. Check them out! (links below) I strongly believe it is important to discuss human affairs with a multi-disciplinary lens, too often the public discourse is presupposed on naive psychology, while elite models…
September 30, 2006
One of the major dialogues in evolutionary genetics in the 20th century was that between R.A. Fisher and Sewall Wright. It is so seminal that the term Fisher-Wright controversy is often used. One of the major points of disagreemant between Fisher and Wright was the role of population…
September 29, 2006
Dienekes reports on a paper which chronicles the change height of "Europeans" over the last 20,000 years ago. Anthropologist Henry Harpending once told me that when the first modern humans arrived in European 40-30 thousand years ago they were as slim and towering as modern Nilotic peoples, in…
September 29, 2006
In the post below on skin color within a multiracial family I made the point that genetics is inherited in a discrete fashion. In the post-genomic era, or even the post-DNA era, this seems intuitively clear. Our genetic sequence, our genome, is a string of precisely four base pairs, A, G, T and C…
September 28, 2006
Check out this Mendelian Genetics reference site, which has an enormous catalogue of links. It doesn't just talk about Punnett Squares, there's also a link to a simple introduction to the chi square test.
September 27, 2006
Our old friend Brown Gaucho is hosting Tangled Bank #63. I enjoyed his post, The importance of evolution in medicine. BG is a primatologist-turned-med student, so he knows of what he speaks. But, I do have to take some issue with this contention:
Anatomically and genetically, humans haven't…
September 27, 2006
Last winter a story surfaced about "black" and "white" twins. As you can see by the picture the main difference is in skin color, though genetically full sisters (fraternal twins), one twin has the complexion typical of a northern European, while the other is darker skinned. Contrary to the news…
September 26, 2006
Update: Make sure to read the comments, some of them are worthy of posts.
John Wilkins has a long response to my post Cultural Cladistics. Now, John knows several orders of magnitude more about systematics than I do...so he emphasized the cladistics aspect and traced out the misimpressions,…
September 26, 2006
Along with Dave I would like to bring to your attention AlphaPsy, a blog devoted to the naturalistical paradigm in cultural anthropology, drawing deeply from the well of cognitive science. Posts like this, exploring the cognitive grounding of our understanding of biology, are typical. Also, I…