razib | July 7, 2007A few days ago I went to watch Transformers with my younger brother. A young man in his mid-teens he, doesn't remember the Clinton years with any great clarity, let alone the Reagan era in which the original cartoon series and toy line emerged as cultural forces. Let's cut to the chase. The special effects are amazing and awe inspiring. The characterization and plot are pedestrian. And of course the script isn't a work of poetry. Nevertheless, the article in Wired which makes much of Optimus Prime's Christ-like valence for a large group of young males who grew up with the original…
razib | July 6, 2007Recently a few blogs I follow have been having a back and forth "debate" which seem to recapitulate in the most general sense the "selectionist vs. neutralist" debates of the 1970s.
Three posts from p-ter:
Do phenotypes evolve neutrally?
More on adaptation
Final Thoughts on adaptation
From Larry:
Visible Mutations and Evolution by Natural Selection
Richard Dawkins on Visible Change and Adaptationism
While RPM offers Whither Adaptation?
There are two general responses I have to these sorts of debates. First, their relevance to the "post-genomic era" is something I would question. The…
razib | July 5, 2007Many of you have heard of the Ultimatum Game:
The ultimatum game is an experimental economics game in which two parties interact anonymously and only once, so reciprocation is not an issue. The first player proposes how to divide a sum of money with the second party. If the second player rejects this division, neither gets anything. If the second accepts, the first gets his demand and the second gets the rest.
In theory a "rational" player should accept whatever is offered when there isn't a repeated iteration. Reality is different. From The Economist:
...Those results recorded, Dr Burnham…
razib | July 5, 2007Hope all my fellow Americans out there had a good Independence Day. I was away on a trip, and I thought I'd share a few photos.
razib | July 2, 2007Chad has a post up discussing the crappiness of physics in science fiction. Rob has more. This was all prompted by a post titled R-E-S-P-E-C-T; which makes the case that biology gets no respect in science fiction (e.g., notice the abundance of dangerous and large predators stalking deserts with no sign of plant life or herbivores). Chad & Rob focused on science fiction films as opposed to print. I'm not a big fan of science fiction films or television in general, but, back in the day I was a voracious consumer of novels and short stories within the genre.
First, I have to say that in…
razib | July 2, 2007Eye on DNA has an interview with a "genetic genealogist." He's a little more enthusiastic about the informative value of these tests than I am, but the interview itself is pretty informative.
razib | July 2, 2007If you're a regular reader of ScienceBlogsTM I hope you'll take this survey. The theory is that the results of the reader survey will help us improve your experience as an end user.
razib | July 1, 2007I was chatting with my much younger brother recently and he mentioned an interest in philosophy. I asked if he'd read Plato, and he returned my query with a question: "Is Plato worth reading?" My own answer: I don't think Plato is really worth reading, but, many thinkers have disagreed and Plato is a place to start when attempting to comprehend the arc of human history. In other words, though I myself am no Platonist I think that to understand what it means to not be a Platonist, as well as grapple with a world influenced by Platonic ideals, one must know something about Plato. This…
razib | July 1, 2007Spencer Wells, author of The Journey of Man, has a write up of The Genographic Project and "Out of Africa" in Vanity Fair. Nothing new or groundbreaking, but you know historical population genetics has come a long way if it's in Vanity Fair. On a related note The Genographic Project has finally yielded a major paper in PLOS Genetics. More method than meat though.
Via Eye on DNA.
razib | June 30, 2007Saw Ratatouille today. Never once checked the time. Very good film. So far Yahoo Movie critics & users give it an A-, and it seems like it'll win the box office. Much recommended (Pixar animation is the bomb obviously, but the story is really good and could only be told in a non-live action context for obvious reasons). This is a movie whose target audience are children and foodies, so definitely a strange and surprising beast. A flavor you won't forget.
razib | June 29, 2007Chris of Mixing Memory has a must read post up about the normal distribution. The man did the tedious work of encoding mathematical notation and symbolism into HTML, so he should take a bow.
razib | June 29, 2007Update: iPhone, iPhone, iPhone? Jobs is God? iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone!!! iPhone. iPhone. iPhone? iPhone-iPhone. iPhone iPhone. Apple Store, wet my pants. iPhone iPhone iPhone. iPhone!!!! iPhone iPhone. iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone. Jobs does not exist! iPhone? Jobs is oppressive!!! iPhone. Ah...land line.
razib | June 28, 2007There's a paper to be published on domestic cat phylogenetics in Science tomorrow. National Geographic has a summary, but Forbes has a more thorough treatment. The short of it is that the maternal lineages (mtDNA) of domestic cats seem derived from the Near Eastern varieties . The acculturation of humanity toward domestic cats seems to have taken place gradually between 12,000 and 3,600 years ago, the presence of five distinct maternal lineages suggests that it wasn't one event, but several simultaneous parallel ones. Sedentary populations rooted around agriculture were the likely…
razib | June 27, 2007John Hawks has the details on a new paper (DOI might not work yet) coming out in PNAS. The researchers trying to reconstruct the Neandertal genome are reporting biases in degradation which is aiding their task. Scientific American has a summary.
razib | June 27, 2007Someone named Schvach Yid left an irritated comment in response to my post about the term Judeo-Christian. He also sent me a short email clearing up the fact that Judaism is more than legalism, and that it is steep to consider Jews non-Western. I think addressing these questions is worthwhile insofar as others might wonder what business a blog whose central theme focuses on evolutionary genetics has with venturing into topics such as the discussion of the history of Judaism and Christianity.
First, the blog is an expression of my interests. My interests are rather broad. Though I tend to…
razib | June 27, 2007John Hawks has an excellent decomposition of the story yesterday in The New York Times about paleoanthropology and biology.
razib | June 26, 2007John Noble Wilford in The New York Times has a piece titled The Human Family Tree Has Become a Bush With Many Branches, which reflects the current consensus thinking that the hominid lineage was until recently relatively diversified, with a host of species extant contemporaneously (the other view is that many of the "species" we conjecture are just the extant morphological variation of one species across varied local ecological conditions). To be honest the piece seemed to just be throwing a lot of genus and species names at you all the while stirring up the tempest in the tea pot between…
razib | June 25, 2007Humans Have Spread Globally, and Evolved Locally (The New York Times):
No one yet knows to what extent natural selection for local conditions may have forced the populations on each continent down different evolutionary tracks. But those tracks could turn out to be somewhat parallel. At least some of the evolutionary changes now emerging have clearly been convergent, meaning that natural selection has made use of the different mutations available in each population to accomplish the same adaptation.
This is the case with lactose tolerance in European and African peoples and with pale skin in…