razib | June 25, 2007On occasion I've decided I'll quickly review some population genetic concepts. These are really "background assumptions," but sometimes comments make it clear that they're not in the "common" background. So to the left you see two normal distributions, assume these are quantitative traits. The x-axis is the trait value, while the y-axis is the frequency of that value within a population. As you might note I've labeled the two populations "generation 1" (g1) and "generation 100" (g100). The implication is that the two distributions represent the "same" population shifted in time.…
razib | June 24, 2007Agnostic translates an Italian interview with mathematical biologist Martin Nowak. Here are my posts read relating to Nowak's work. His book Evolutionary Dynamics is one of the best coffee table books for nerds out there (nice sturdy hard cover and glossy pages with helpful charts to navigate the formalism).
razib | June 24, 2007Strange. Rise of man theory 'out by 400,000 years'. I'm skeptical, not that I know anything in detail about palaeanthropology aside from books and a few advanced courses. In any case:
Our earliest ancestors gave up hunter-gathering and took to a settled life up to 400,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to controversial research.
...
Professor Ziegert claims that the thousands of blades, scrapers, hand axes and other tools found at sites such as Budrinna, on the shore of the extinct Lake Fezzan in southwest Libya, and at Melka Konture, along the River Awash in Ethiopia,…
razib | June 24, 2007By now you've probably heard/read about the relationship of HIV resistance and hominoid evolutionary genetics. The original paper in Science that started it off is titled Restriction of an Extinct Retrovirus by the Human TRIM5α Antiviral Protein; quite a mouthful. Lucky for us Carl Zimmer has an excellent exposition as well as a background primer, while John Hawks offers further thoughts looking at the various hypotheses through the lens of someone with a deep grasp of paleoanthropology.
razib | June 24, 2007I've always been ill at ease with the term "Judeo-Christian." As someone from a Muslim cultural background I was minimally familiar with the tenets and principles of the Islamic religion. As someone who was socialized with both Jews and Christians I was reasonably familiar with the outlines of both faiths. When my teachers wouldrefer to the "Judeo-Christian" tradition I simply felt that something was off. Talking to Jews about their religion it seemed, to me, to resemble Islam more than what the Christian children described. Additionally, on occasion my family would purchase kosher food…
razib | June 23, 2007Agnostic says that Lonelygirl15 reincarnated as AngryLittleGirl. I haven't watched any of the other clips, but I found this shit hilarious:
She's like a somewhat less ugly version of real-life Jacqueline Passey. Interestingly, the actress playing AngryLittleGirl is convincing due to her higher level of biological masculinity. She has a fairly masculine jaw-line for an 18 y.o. girl, and just watch An American Girl, where she makes her hands visible throughout. If you pause this clip at 4:27, you can see that on her right hand her ring finger is noticeably longer than her index finger. This…
razib | June 23, 2007The New York Times has an article up about the trend of young Muslim women donning the niqab in the United Kingdom, the practice of wearing a veil and covering the body with a shapeless shift. The simple narrative is this: Muslim women are reasserting a particular part of their religious tradition which Westerners feel is illiberal and medieval. Normally I get tired of the anecdotal modus operandi which dominates newspaper reports, though I do understand that it makes for engaging prose. Nevertheless, in the articles about extreme veiling the assertions by Western born women who choose to…
razib | June 22, 2007Only on YouTube could a Dramatic Chipmunk eventually lead me to the vlog of two teen atheist girls engaging in a promotion of scientism.
razib | June 21, 2007U.S. troops form uneasy alliances in Iraq:
Instead, Al Qaeda quickly regained a sanctuary in the province and imposed its extremist interpretation of Islam. U.S. and Iraqi security forces scarcely venture into west Baqubah, where smoking is prohibited, as is the sale of women's clothing by men. Even placing a cucumber next to a tomato in the markets is forbidden because they have been gendered male and female.
Many people think they can introspect their way toward understanding how other human beings model the world around them. That's a human bias, we have an innate psychology and in many…
razib | June 21, 2007Greg Graffin & Will Provine report on the results of the Cornell Evolution Project in The American Scientist. Emerging out ot Graffin's Ph.D. work it is a survey of prominent evolutionary biologists (see the full list) in regards to their views about religion and science. Their conclusion is:
Only 10 percent of the eminent evolutionary scientists who answered the poll saw an inevitable conflict between religion and evolution. The great majority see no conflict between religion and evolution, not because they occupy different, noncompeting magisteria, but because they see religion as a…
razib | June 19, 2007In response to the Etruscan story comments like this keep popping up:
The articles in the press keep mentioning the Etruscans coming from Lydia. Lydian was an indo-european language. So, although there may be a linguistic link to Lemnos and a genetic link to Western Asia, there is no obvious link to Lydia and the classical accounts of the origins of the Etruscans.
On my other blog I placed "Lydia" in quotation marks because saying that the Etruscans were Lydian is about as accurate as saying that the Wyandot (Huron) tribes who resided north of lake Superior in 1500 were "Canadian." To the…
razib | June 19, 2007Go read RPM's post On the Causes of Variation in the Rate of Molecular Evolution.
razib | June 18, 2007The post on circumcision certainly got a lot of attention! Google news has been sending me a lot of traffic, so I checked the query out and found this article which ended thus:
Ruth Katz, 38, of San Francisco had both her sons circumcised at brises. She and her husband, Michael Rapaport, were astonished when the teacher in their birthing class described circumcision as "immoral" and "not consensual."
"The edict to have your son circumcised was the first covenant with God -- the first challenge to being Jewish," said Katz, pursuing a master's degree in business administration. "I am a…
razib | June 18, 2007Update: John Hawks has more.
Male twins reduce fitness of female co-twins in humans:
Here we investigate the effects of being gestated with a male co-twin for daughter lifetime reproductive success, and the fitness consequences for mothers of producing mixed-sex twins in preindustrial (1734-1888) Finns. We show that daughters born with a male co-twin have reduced lifetime reproductive success compared to those born with a female co-twin. This reduction arises because such daughters have decreased probabilities of marrying as well as reduced fecundity. Mothers who produce opposite-sex twins…
razib | June 18, 2007Nature Reviews Genetics has a short article titled Sociogenetics: Cheating gets you nowhere (free registration). I was intrigued by the title, "Sociogenetics." The Chomskysists always talk about how infinitely flexible language is, and in science the proliferation of fields like "biophysical chemistry" are examples of that range. But a close reading this article shows that "sociogenetics" is just a new sticker on an old field within genetics & evolution:
When food is scarce, solitary D. discoideum cells aggregate into a fruiting body that distributes spores. However, only 75% of the…
razib | June 17, 2007Update: On my other blog I have a post up addressing skeptics in the archaeological community.
A few months ago I posted several times about the Etruscans, the ancient non-Indo-European people of north-central Italy whose provenance has always been a matter of debate. To make it short, genetic data suggests that the ancient Etruscans and some inhabitants of modern Tuscany share a relatively close ancestry with the peoples of the near east, in particular, Turkey. Additionally, an independent line of data from cattle suggests a congruent phylogenetic relationship between the herds of Tuscany…
razib | June 17, 2007Matt at the Behavorial Ecology Blog is asking for the most perverted queries. His is: "cats as sexual partners." Here are some which have raised my eyebrows:
kindred porno
14-17 age porn
hermaphrodite porn trailers
free animal porn bg
kids.porn
monkey and human porn
free young transexuel porn
feces+porn
-gay+felching+free+porn+pics (I don't know what "felching" is, but I assume it is disgusting?)
byzantine+porno (this is just weird)
buck tooth porn
mongolian rape sequence+genghis khan+porn
pygmy porn women
camel porno
darwin's porno
Just a sample.
(just use th keyword filter in google…
razib | June 16, 2007Evolutionary geneticist Alan Templeton has an article in Evolution, GENETICS AND RECENT HUMAN EVOLUTION:
Starting with "mitochondrial Eve" in 1987, genetics has played an increasingly important role in studies of the last two million years of human evolution. It initially appeared that genetic data resolved the basic models of recent human evolution in favor of the "out-of-Africa replacement" hypothesis in which anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa about 150,000 years ago, started to spread throughout the world about 100,000 years ago, and subsequently drove to complete genetic…
razib | June 16, 2007A few days ago Ross Douthat started a blog-conversation about the rise of secularists as a conscious cultural movement or tribe, and of course there's been plenty of talk about the new atheism. So I thought it was interesting that fundamentalist Christian pollster George Barna has a new survey out titled Atheists and Agnostics Take Aim at Christians. Barna finds that:
20 million Americans are of "no faith," that is, they are atheists, agnostics or avow their nonaffiliation with a religion
Of those 20 million 5 million accept the label "atheist."
Those with no faith tend to be youger, more…