razib
Posts by this author
August 18, 2006
In response to my post about Heather Mac Donald and her debate with others on the Right about the fundamental role of religion within "the movement" Steve Burton has offered his own thoughts. Roughly, I see Steve's points as being this:
The misery of the historical record does not exhibit man's…
August 18, 2006
Over at my other weblog there is a post titled Reconstructing human origins in the genomic era, a commentary on a review paper in Nature. Here are the two bullet points I want to highlight:
These genome-scale patterns could be best accounted for by models that involve low levels of gene flow…
August 18, 2006
Many people have posted on this, so I'm going to give a quick link round up.
I linked it early, and then Kawfee Mugg posted a follow up on my other weblog. John-too-good-for-10-assertions then offered up his commentary, and then RPM kicked in his 3 cents. He pointed me to Carl Zimmer's smackdown…
August 17, 2006
Update: Heather offers a follow up. Mario Loyola offers an interesting response. Here is what I find worth noting:
One of them expresses a weirdly postmodern view: We cannot know the nature of the Gods, but a good person knows in his gut the difference between right and wrong, and good people…
August 16, 2006
So it seems that many bloggers here are talking about whether Pluto is a planet. Well, all I gotz to say to that is this: whose the stamp collecter now Orzel!?!?.
August 16, 2006
It's been nearly a month since I last posted on The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. I've been holding off because I didn't know how to approach chapter 2, in many ways it is the most important and ambitious chapter (though not technically the most taxing). I think I will likely post twice…
August 15, 2006
I will "house" responses to my 10 assertions about evolution query in this post.
So far, only RPM has taken the bait. He asks some interesting questions in regards to the rather vague scope & nature of this query...but this was purposeful. If you examine RPM's list you see that it is…
August 14, 2006
Seems like I am no longer the undisputed champion of "brownest ass amongst ScienceBlogs," as Scientific Brown has joined the pack. That doesn't mean that my ass isn't still the brownest, just that it isn't a no contest situation when it was just Nick Anthis & Steinn Sigurðsson offering up…
August 14, 2006
My post asking to define evolution in less than 10 words elicited a lot of response (some of it outside the parameters I set in regards to length). So I figured I'd give this sort of thing another shot, again, with parameters which all are welcome to violate, but which I set for myself to prune my…
August 13, 2006
Dienekes points me to a new paper in Science which purports to add an archaeological layer of data to the "Out of Africa" paradigm which initially burst onto to the scene in the 1980s due to the molecular clock & mtDNA (though Chris Stringer and others long argued for a form of "Out of Africa"…
August 11, 2006
The headline says, Evolution Less Accepted in U.S. Than Other Western Countries, Study Finds, but here is the money shot: "The only country included in the study where adults were more likely than Americans to reject evolution was Turkey." My liberal friends often make fun of the "inbred"…
August 10, 2006
The American Conservative is having a symposium on the nature of Left & Right, and Heather Mac Donald of the The Manhattan Institute offers up an eyebrow raising piece which is a jeremiad against the perceived necessary connection between conservatism and religiosity. It seems likely that this…
August 10, 2006
Blogger NuSapiens offers an intriguing comment on my post about Neandertal introgression:
It's been shown that some mtDNA lines are associated with metabolic adaptations related to climate. This is a serious violation of the neutrality requirement for tracking things, especially far back in time.…
August 9, 2006
This week:
What movie do you think does something admirable (though not necessarily accurate) regarding science? Bonus points for answering whether the chosen movie is any good generally....
Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis. Cinematically it is an early masterpiece, but, it also features a…
August 8, 2006
Over at Gene Expression Classic MC Kawffee Mugz throws down 10 questions with neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux. I wish I knew more about neuroscience, but I can recommend LeDoux's The Synaptic Self, since I've read it....
August 7, 2006
More political blogging from me over at Neo-neo-centrist weblog Nation Building on political & foreign policy issues. The short form is this: I am fast becoming convinced that many "hawks" are coming to resemble the child who beats up the nearest warm human body after being hurt from falling…
August 7, 2006
Greg Cochran and John Hawks have a hypothesis about the possibility of a population today that are "living Neandertals." I don't know which population it is, but below the fold, I think I've found strong evidence....
The Boston Irish!
August 5, 2006
I've decided to jot down some simple* formalisms which I can refer new readers to on this website. So today....
You know that if you have a novel mutation within a population, its probability of fixation if it is neutral is:
1/(2N), where N = effective population, in a neutral scenario where the…
August 5, 2006
Most of you have likely heard of the paper out in The Proceeding of the Royal Society, Can the common brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, influence human culture?. Here is the relevant section from the abstract:
Toxoplasma gondii, explains a statistically significant portion of the variance in…
August 3, 2006
People often talk about random genetic drift. Like sexual selection it is the deus ex machina of choice when you are shit out of luck in regards to hypotheses. And yet though it looms large in our minds R.A. Fisher dismissed it as an important evolutionary force. Sewall Wright in his Shifting…
August 3, 2006
Over at my other weblog I have a new 10 questions up, this one for Matthew Stewart, author of two popular books on history and philosophy which I have enjoyed, The Truth About Everything and The Courtier and the Heretic. Stewart's responses have been among the most entertaining so far in this…
August 2, 2006
Over at Nation Building I make a plea for methodological rationality. But more importantly, I point to Noah Millman.
August 2, 2006
Since I'm the 6th person to point to this, check out a new Science Blog, Smooth Pebbles. I'm expecting readers to come up with a real cool header....
August 2, 2006
I have talked about the problems that may occur because of long term societal inbreeding in the past. In short, in a society that is predominantly outbred isolated cases of cousin marriage are not particularly deleterious, but in many cultures systemic inbreeding results in tunneling and…
August 1, 2006
There has been talk about rock star scientists and what not on Science Blogs. Rock stars? Isn't that so baby boomer? So let me rephrase it: who is the thug geneticist? I'll nominate Bruce Lahn, an evolutionary genomicist at the University of Chicago. According to Chicago Lahn is down with "…
August 1, 2006
RPM points me to a post at Salamander Candy which discusses the usefulness of neutral markers in conservation genetics. Obviously this complements my recent posts about introgression, and in fact, my last entry was a comment on a conservation genetic paper. Here is the important point from…