razib | March 5, 2007I have often said that I tend to see "group selection" as a lesser evolutionary force when set against lower levels of evolutionary processes, e.g., "individual" or "gene" level selection. By group selection I do not mean pro-social tendencies, or the success of individuals who band together as a group, but rather evolutionary processes which can not be reduced down to a lower level of selection. In other words, evolution is acting directly upon the group as an emergent property of a collection of individuals. My skepticism toward groups selection is conventional and orthodox: evolutionary…
razib | March 4, 2007Over at my other blog I have a long post where I comment on the recent piece in The New York Times which highlights the debate around the evolutionary origins of religion.
razib | March 1, 2007Thought I'd post this link to a conference on the biology and genetics of music. As someone who is tone deaf I'm interested in the topic, though obviously as an outsider.
razib | February 28, 2007I was chatting with another Neville, and I repeated something which I have observed: Many atheists are as able to be rational about an analysis of religion as many opponents of the "War on Terror" are about a deeper understanding of Islam, Islamism and terrorism. Now, the interesting point is that viscerally, emotionally, I am neither a fan of religion or Islam. But, when speaking of these topics I believe it is important to put feelings aside, as much as humanly possible, and analyze with a cold eye. Allow the data to speak. Unfortunately, I've encountered situations where any discussion…
razib | February 28, 2007A story just came out today about drinking high fat vs. low fat milk, and the positive effect on fertility that the former can have. Remember the report that drinking milk increases twinning? Issues like this should be kept in mind when considering the spread of lactose tolerance, anything that increases fitness should spread. Why didn't it? Well, it seems likely that cattle can't be raised everywhere, so you have a situation where the selective benefit is geographically constrained. Also, modern lifestyles are characterized by no scarcity of calories so comparing this to pre-modern…
razib | February 27, 2007Early man 'couldn't stomach milk'
Working with scientists from Mainz University in Germany, the UCL team looked for the gene that produces the lactase enzyme in Neolithic skeletons dating between 5480BC and 5000BC.
These are believed to be from some of the earliest farming communities in Europe.
The lactase gene was absent from the DNA extracted from these skeletons, suggesting that these early Europeans would not be tolerant to milk.
The paper will be Absence of the Lactase-Persistence associated allele in early Neolithic Europeans in PNAS. First LCT, then OCA2, and god knows what else?…
razib | February 26, 2007The comments for the post where I imply that Sam Harris is a religiously inclined individual addressed the topic of whether Buddhism is a religion or not. This is a common issue, and I tend to cause some irritation whenever I declare that Buddhism is a theistic religion, because that's not what you would read in books (or, Wikipedia). I'm generally a big fan of what books have to say, and defer to scholars in areas that I'm not familiar with, but, I've really come to the point where I simply don't think that Religious Studies really adds enough intellectual value for me. Christians believe…
razib | February 25, 2007John Emerson has a long post about the relationship between irrationality and the emergence of new cultural forms. Worth reading. The other day I had a thought: many cultural traits are basically hitch-hiking along. Consider circumcision and the ban against pork consumption for Muslims, in places like Indonesia when tribes convert to Islam they abandon their pigs and circumcision becomes the norm. Why? People have been inventing strange functional rationales for these customs for decades. It seems likely that these practices have a role as ingroup vs. outgroup markers, that is, they're…
razib | February 21, 2007Most of you know I'm not very into politics...but I do have two political weblogs in my RSS which pound it hard, Matt Yglesias on the "Left" and Daniel Larison on the "Right."1 I humbly request that Robert Wright have these two face off on Blogging Heads, just to see if English will allow them to communicate in any intelligible manner (please note, Ross Douthat over at The American Scene reads and is read by both, so there is only one degree of separation).
1 - Quotations are for two reasons...Matt Yglesias has sometimes stated that he wishes he lived in Europe...so he could be a European…
razib | February 21, 2007Sam Harris says:
I do not deny that there is something at the core of the religious experience that is worth understanding. I do not even deny that there is something there worthy of our devotion. But devotion to it does not entail false claims to knowledge, nor does it require that we indulge our cultural/familial/emotional biases in an unscientific way. The glass can get very clean-not sterile perhaps, not entirely without structure, not contingency-free, but cleaner than many people are ready to allow. One need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to experience the "ecstasies of…
razib | February 20, 2007Bora sayeth:
Are you sure? How can a hierarchical, Chain-of-Being, authoritarian, sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, religious ideology be 'normal' when it does not understand the world correctly? Isn't it maladaptive to hold erroneous views of nature (and human nature) and try to organize societies to fit that view instead of trying to organize societies in synch with our best understanding of the way the world really works?
(mild typos fixed)
There's so much I could say, and yet I will leave it without a word....
razib | February 19, 2007For those of you who don't know, check out Allabout-SP.net/, which has an archive of all the South Park episodes. I don't own a TV mostly because most of the stuff is crap but still compulsively addictive...but the great thing about South Park is that I enjoy 80-90% of the episodes, so there is a good chance that I won't waste my time.
razib | February 17, 2007Success begets succes, Dienekes was looking closely at genetic data due to the publication two papers which suggest an Anatolian origin for Etruscans (there has been previous mtDNA going back at least 5 years as well). He finds that central Italy exhibits a relatively high frequency of a variant of Haplogroup J, famously connected to the spread of farmers from Anatolia into Europe during the Neolithic revolution. Not that we're on the trail of the definitive answer I suspect that things will "fit into place" far more easily. Scholarship is informed by scholarship, knowing that the Etruscans…
razib | February 17, 2007Do you remember the age before polling in politics? I don't. Today we bemoan the emphasis on polls and idealize the past, before candidates knew in scientific and statistically significant detail the temperature of the democratic water. But no one is going to ban polls in the near future, for every person who complains about survey data there are hundreds who are clicking refresh over & over to find the most recent tracking results on their website of choice.
I think something similar is necessary for the sciences (or scholarship in general). Is George Lakoff a laughing stock (as Chris…
razib | February 16, 2007The always fascinating Ron Gunhame parses the GSS and religion & intelligence data. He finds:
Mean vocabulary score - Whites
6.52 Doesn't believe
7.24 No way to find out
6.96 Some higher power
6.02 Believes sometimes
6.42 Believes but doubts
6.05 Knows God exists
Ron concludes that atheists are less intelligent than agnostics from this, but Jason Malloy in the comments has several follow ups which clear up the issue a bit and suggest that Ron spoke too soon.