Social Sciences
razib | December 3, 2008Though Barbara Oakley's Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend is ostensibly about Machiavellian behavior, it is also a testament to her intellectual ambition. The subheading is a clear pointer to this. Oakley attempts to synthesize a wide range of fields, behavior genetics, cognitive neuroscience, clinical psychology, diplomatic history, evolutionary psychology, economic history, along with heavy dollops of political and personal biography, to produce a portrait of how Machiavellian intelligence emerges from its biological substrate…
drorzel | December 2, 2008
A Blog Around The Clock : The Open Laboratory 2008 - all the submissions fit to print
Some light reading to fill your infinite free time.
(tags: science blogs writing)
Pay Bankers Much Less - Finance Blog - Felix Salmon - Market Movers - Portfolio.com
"I've now reached the point at which I simply don't believe people when they say that lower pay for bankers will result in worse performance -- especially since it looks very much as though it was higher pay for bankers which was at least partly responsible for much of the present crisis. Let's bring down pay, a lot, and see whether…
grrlscientist | December 1, 2008tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
Whimbrel, Numenius phaeopus at Bolivar Flats, Texas.
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 2 July 2008 [larger view].
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/2000s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400.
Christmas Bird Count News
The Annual Christmas Bird Counts are rapidly approaching, so I am publishing links to all of the counts here; who to contact, and where and when they are being held, so if you have a link to a Christmas Bird Count for your state, please let me know so I can include it in the list:
Alabama (Thanks…
grrlscientist | December 1, 2008
I receive a fair number of books to review each week, so I thought I should do what several magazines and other publications do; list those books that have arrived in my mailbox so you know that this is the pool of books from which I will be reading and reviewing on my blog.
Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do by Andrew Gelman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton; 2008) Brief Comment: Gelman and a group of fellow political scientists crunch numbers and draw graphs, arriving at a picture that refutes the influential one drawn by Thomas Frank, in What's…
The Scientific, Political, Social, and Pedagogical Context for the claim that "Race does not exist."
gregladen | November 29, 2008These days, many people say that race is largely a social construct; while it may have a place in describing the population genetics of some species, is not particularly applicable to humans. I'm one of those people. The race concept is generally inapplicable or at best misleading when used as it often is with our species. This is why race should be abandoned in favor of other ways of describing human variation.
At the same time, there are political, social, and pedagogical reasons to put aside the race concept. Race is not that useful of a concept to begin with, and beyond that it has…
gregladen | November 28, 2008A new study published by Chiao et al. in the journal PLoS ONE explores the gendered nature of American voting behavior. Subjects were asked to rank politicians -- based only on photographs of each politician's face -- along different quality scales, and also to choose among these photographs who should be President. The study concludes that male and female candidates are evaluated on distinctly different terms, and that male and female voters do this evaluation in somewhat (but not dramatically) different ways. The authors conclude that "...contrary to popular notions, people are not…
evolvingthoughts | November 27, 2008
The Greens (who I am considering joining, despite their unreasonable opposition to nuclear power) have said they will oppose the "clean feed" proposal in the Senate, so unless the Coalition decides it is a good idea after all, or put it to a conscience vote (because let's face it, a number of conservatives think censorship is a legitimate form of governance), it's dead. This is a Very Good Thing.
But it raises some more general issues: why is Australia so damned intent upon censoring anything? Why do we have among the most draconian censorship laws in the democratic world? Isn't it about…
revere | November 24, 2008The science of climate change is difficult and everyone agrees there are uncertainties and a contested point or two. But some points are asserted over and over again and aren't really contested. They are just plain false. Yet no matter how often they are refuted they rise again from the dead, true zombie lies. One of the great things about writing on the internet is the ability to link to really excellent pieces and Darksyde over at DailyKos has just such a piece you owe it to yourself to read. It's not short but not excessively long, either. Just long enough to get the job done. And the job…
clock | November 24, 2008Plants Grow Bigger And More Vigorously Through Changes In Their Internal Clocks:
Hybrid plants, like corn, grow bigger and better than their parents because many of their genes for photosynthesis and starch metabolism are more active during the day, report researchers from The University of Texas at Austin in a new study published in the journal Nature.
How Red Wine Compounds Fight Alzheimer's Disease:
Scientists call it the "French paradox" -- a society that, despite consuming food high in cholesterol and saturated fats, has long had low death rates from heart disease. Research has suggested…
gregladen | November 19, 2008Post Election 2008, Liberals have the blues. Two kinds of blues.
First, we have BLUE STATES!!! Lots of them! Unsurprisingly, many of the submissions for this edition of the carnival are about the election. Second, we have the blues over Proposition Eight, which we Hate. Many of this edition's submissions are about this topic. In both areas, we find the usual insight and thoughtful writing.
We also have a third category this time around, called Honorable Mention. The COL is a selective carnival: Only a small number of posts get in each time compared to the avalanche of entries we…
jstemwedel | November 18, 2008So, at the end of the PSA I was so sick that I took to my overpriced hotel bed, forgoing interesting papers and the prospect of catching up with geographically dispersed friends in my field who I can only count on seeing every two years at the PSA. I managed to get myself back home and then needed another eight days to return to a "functional" baseline.
Checking in with the internets again, I feel like maybe I was in a coma for six months.
In particular, I was totally sidelined when Isis the Scientist issued her manifesto and when Zuska weighed in on the various reactions to Isis and her…
dgmacarthur | November 18, 2008A Nature News article discusses the ongoing 1000 Genomes Project, an international effort planning to sequence 1,200-1,500 human genomes. The discussion springs from project co-chair David Altshuler's update at last week's American Society of Human Genetics meeting on the progress of the project (in brief: 3.8 terabases down, 996.2 terabases to go).
The article provides a generally positive overview of the project's historical context, goals and progress. The one contrary note comes from Duke University's David Goldstein, who has previously publicly expressed skepticism regarding the value of…
razib | November 17, 2008A few days ago I suggested that it is folly to expect Europeans would elect a person of color to their highest office when so few Europeans are persons of color. Today in Slate a piece basically suggests that Americans should not be so full of themselves, Only in America? The wrongheaded American belief that Barack Obama could only happen here:
People are still amazed he won. In a country where more than a few white folks would still say outright that one of "them'' shouldn't be in charge, here was a politician who didn't downplay his ethnicity, his foreign-sounding name, or his father who…
revere | November 16, 2008The latest hilarious dust-up over religion has to do with an ad on DC buses scheduled for the holidays by the American Humanist Association (AHA):
Ads proclaiming, "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake," will appear on the outside and inside of DC Metro buses starting next Tuesday and will run throughout December. Newspaper versions of the ads ran in The New York Times and The Washington Post this week.
The advertising campaign is part of an effort by the American Humanist Association to reach out to like-minded individuals around the nation's capitol and elsewhere who might…
dgmacarthur | November 15, 2008Blaine Bettinger at the Genetic Genealogist has an extensive and thoughtful critique of the American Society of Human Genetics' recently released statement on genetic ancestry testing (pdf). (You can read about the Society's statement at GenomeWeb News and Science Now; 23andMe also comments from the point of view of a company engaged in ancestry testing.)
If you have comments on the issues surrounding genetic ancestry testing I'd encourage you to add them to Blaine's post.
revere | November 15, 2008One of the good things about the pandemic flu threat (if you'll let me put it that way) is the stimulus it has provided for vaccine technology. While current flu vaccines are still mired in horse and buggy technology of egg-based production, all sorts of alternative ways of making antigen or stimulating an immune response are being worked on. Most of them involve the major antigens of the flu virus, hemagglutinin (the H part of subtype designation) and neuriminidase (the N part). They are on the viral surface and easily "seen" by the immune system. There is also a little bit of another…
dgmacarthur | November 14, 2008Last week I posted on the publication of three papers in Nature describing whole-genome sequencing using next-generation technology: one African genome, one Asian genome, and two genomes from a female cancer patient (one from her cancer cells and one from healthy skin tissue). At the end of that post I noted that the era of the single-genome publication is drawing to a close as the age of population genomics commences.
Today GenomeWeb News reports from the American Society of Human Genetics meeting on the biggest current foray into the field of population genomics: the 1000 Genomes Project.…
bcohen | November 14, 2008Pt. I | Pt. 2
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Part 2 with Keith Warner, discussing his book Agroecology in Action, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: How did science and social power intersect in your study?
KW: A particularly salient feature of my field work was the divergent assumptions held by actors about the evaluation of novel practices in farming. Many advocates of alternative agriculture argue for a systems-based approach to selecting and managing technology in farming systems, and critique dominant forms of agriculture as reductionistic (or simply narrow minded…
oracknows | November 13, 2008
The things I do for my readers.
I'm referring to a movie entitled The Beautiful Truth, links to whose website and trailers several of you have e-mailed to me over the last couple of weeks. Maybe it's because the movie is only showing in New York and Los Angeles and hasn't made it out of the media enclaves of those cities out to the rest of us in flyover country, or maybe its release is so limited that I just hadn't heard of it. Certainly that appears to be the case, as the schedule shown at the website lists it as beginning an engagement in New York tomorrow and running through November 20…
mikethemadbiologist | November 12, 2008Admittedly, this isn't anything regular ScienceBlogs readers haven't seen before, but it's nice to see it enter the mainstream media (albeit eight years too late). Sharon Begley:
The truly poisonous legacy of the past eight years is one that spread to much of society and will therefore be much harder to undo: the utter contempt with which those in power viewed inconvenient facts, empiricism and science in general.
Look at how Bush justified inaction on greenhouse gases. Not by arguing that cuts would have cost too much, a stance that would at least have been intellectually honest, albeit…