razib | May 1, 2007There's a local "wrap" bistro
where I often get my lunch, and they offer a wide selection of hot sauces for condiments. I always pick out Frank's RedHot Original because it's the hottest of the bunch. By "hot" I'm talking on a relative scale, it's a typical cayenne sauce, powerful enough to terrify civilians, but nothing intimidating for true soldiers. Nevertheless, I really enjoy its tangy flavor, it adds some extra dimensions of taste that nicely complement the heat (and compensate for its middle-row "spice" rating). It some ways it reminds me of the Trappey's Red Devil cayenne sauce,…
razib | May 1, 2007The post yesterday where I reflect David Dobb's departure from ScienceBlogs made me reconsider why I blog. There are many sorts of blogs out there. Some, like The Daily Kos, are involved in affecting social and political change. Others are basically notepads for personal hobbies. Many blogs are run by writers who have a "beat" and try out ideas and supplement their print content on the web. And so on. So why do I blog? To learn. I've made this pretty implicitly clear before, but I thought I would make it totally clear. This doesn't mean that other people can't learn from me, but,…
razib | April 30, 2007Below is why I haven't been blogging much....
~70 degrees fahrenheit, light breeze, no humidity....
razib | April 30, 2007Today we debuted the Denialism Blog, while David Dobbs of Smooth Pebbles bids farewell to ScienceBlogs. David offers cogent rationales for why he decided to leave ScienceBlogs (the proximate reason is that he just isn't posting much as far as bloggers go). One thing to note that is I don't think a blog is really worthwhile for most people without an intelligent commentariat. I've learned a lot from critiques, suggestions and recommendations from comments on my blogs over the past 5 years. Of course, the key is intelligent. Most humans aren't very smart, so they're basically just expending…
razib | April 26, 2007Via Dienekes, a new possible historical genetic story on the horizon: the extent of "European"-origin settlers in pre-modern China. The biography of the individual sequenced:
Yu Hong (d. 592 [C.E.]) was a high-ranking member of a community of Sogdians who had settled on the northern border of China at the beginning of the fourth century. While barely in his teens, Yu Hong began his career in the service of the most powerful nomadic tribe at the time, known as the Ruru, and was posted as an emissary to several countries, including Iran.
Now, the genetics:
...we discuss our analysis of the…
razib | April 25, 2007Final Update: Victory Day! In response to Shelley's request I've removed the text of the original email.
Update III: Shelly has another post on what she wants out of this:
Some have called for the boycott of all Wiley journals. While I appreciate the sentiment (more than any of you can know), I'm not sure that that is the best idea for science. I'd like to think that we bloggers can deal with these types of things with some grace, roll with the punches, get up, and keep on going. Wiley didn't exercise the best judgment in choosing to prod me into submission, but I don't think we have to…
razib | April 24, 2007Erick Trinkaus has a new article in PNAS, European early modern humans and the fate of the Neandertals:
A consideration of the morphological aspects of the earliest modern humans in Europe (more than ~33,000 B.P.) and the subsequent Gravettian human remains indicates that they possess an anatomical pattern congruent with the autapomorphic (derived) morphology of the earliest (Middle Paleolithic) African modern humans. However, they exhibit a variable suite of features that are either distinctive Neandertal traits and/or plesiomorphic (ancestral) aspects that had been lost among the African…
razib | April 23, 2007The April 16th issue of The New Yorker had an article by John Colapinto, The puzzling language of an Amazon tribe. It's in print, so I can't post it, but the short of it is that the tribe might lack recursion, a hammer blow to Chomskyan universal grammar. Overall the tribe seems to have a rather attenuated tendency toward engaging in abstract thought, and has been incredibly immune to any attempts by Christian missionaries to convert them. At some point in the piece the author notes that occasionally someone will ask a Christian if they've ever met this Jesus Christ that they keep talking…
razib | April 23, 2007A few weeks ago, Andrew Brown (author of The Darwin Wars) stated:
I'm not sure that Boyer, Atran and Wilson regard their explanations as complementary. I have talked to all three of them about it. My feeling is that while all three of them understand that the explanations might be complementary, they prefer to believe that all the work is done by their preferred model. It's not clear to me how one could decide this point in principle.
He refers to Scott Atran (In Gods We Trust), Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained) and David S. Wilson (Darwin's Cathedral). Atran & Boyer are of very similar…
razib | April 22, 2007Chris of Mixing Memory rips into the usual suspects for analogizing atheist activism with the women's suffrage movement. I have basically taken a sabbatical from these SB intramural debates about religion, Creationism, etc. So I'll let you comment over there. But, I will offer that I've never been jumped for being an atheist, but I have for being a "sand nigger." So I hope people will maintain some perspective....
Update: Also @ Mike's & Josh's.
razib | April 20, 2007Obviously a sex-linked trait. All males seem to exhibit the trait but none of the females. It can't just be the lack of something on the X, otherwise some of the females would have exhibited this trait as well. No, perhaps a mutant on the Y which acts in a trans & "dominant" acting manner to repress or abolish something on other chromosomes?
Note: All the males exhibit the phenotype, but none of the females do. If you accept it is a sex-linked trait which manifests because the males don't have a compensatory copy of the allele inherited from the mother, then all their mothers had to…
razib | April 20, 2007I was at the local food co-op when I saw Brother Bru Bru's African Hot Sauce. It said it was "very hot!" on the label, and since some of you had recommended African hot sauces to me earlier I decided to check it out. The label suggests that there were assorted peppers mixed into this concoction. Frankly, for me it was a bit on the mild side. Also, the background sweetness and pungency overwhelmed the heat. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the flavor, even if I was disappointed by tepid spice level. I'm giving it a 4 out of 10, mostly because this was way too mild for a "very hot!" sauce. I mean…
razib | April 20, 2007Here is a report on some developments on the hypothesis that humans are very well evolved to run in the heat. A physical anthropologist told me that while cold adapted peoples can acclimate to tropical conditions, heat adapted peoples are not as good at the reverse. That suggested to me that as a tropical species we have deep and extremely powerful adaptations which allow us to tolerate heat, and these adaptations might have other uses that remained advantageous once we moved north into Eurasia.
razib | April 18, 2007It's been a cold & rainy April. This morning I got up and walked down the block to take an unobstructed photo of the mountains which loom over my apartment. When I visit the Midwest I am always struck by the 2-dimensional topography....
Update: Later in the day....