razib | January 24, 2007Thinking about it today, I realized there is a "Basic Concept" that I think I should touch upon, and that is linkage disequilibrium (LD). Notice the wiki link? I do that whenever I mention LD because it is such an essential concept for some of the evolutionary ideas which I am interested in, but often not necessarily a transparent or clear one to the lay person.
Its lack of obviousness isn't due to complexity, LD is pretty simple, rather there are particular background ideas which one needs to firmly have in mind before one can easily grasp it. For this reason I've placed an image of a…
razib | January 23, 2007Many fellow ScienceBloggers are doing a "Basic Concepts" series. Here are some of them:
Mean, Median, and Mode
Normal Distribution
Force
Gene
Central Dogma of Molecular Biology
Evolution
Clade
Instead of thinking up something new I've decided to repost a an older post where I cover the "basic" equations and models which I pretty much assume in many of my posts. The post below....
Begin repost
Occasionally I appeal to formalizations or equations on this weblog to illustrate a general verbal principle. I don't do it to obscure or needlessly technicalize a topic of interest, but rather, it is…
razib | January 22, 2007My post below, Group selection & the naturalistic fallacy, elicited some interesting comments. First, I mentinoed W.D. Hamilton's allusion to a relationship between fascism & group selection. Here is what he said:
'Liberal' thinkers should realize from the outset that fervent 'belief' in evolution at the group level, and especially any idea that group selection obviates supposedly unnecesssary or non-existent harsh aspects of natural selection, actually starts them at once on a course that heads straight towards Fascist ideology....
(page 385, Defenders of the Truth)
I believe I…
razib | January 22, 2007So I near the end of my survey of chapter 5 of Evolutionary Genetics: Concepts & Case Studies.1 Today, we address environmental variation, but I think sometimes the end is the beginning, so I quote:
Random environment models have many technical aspects...that make them difficult to analyze. As a result, they have ben largely ignored in population genetics. This is unfortunate as it is clear that environments do change and that adaptive evolution is driven by these changes.
The last sentence made me think, "No shit sherlock." This is a pretty deep indictment of population genetics,…
razib | January 21, 2007Over at Bora's place he talks about a paper on group selection. In regards to the scientific idea and its broad relevance to evolutionary biology, I am mildly skeptical. That being said, this comment drew my attention:
While endorsing DS Wilson's Unto Others, Richard Lewontin mentioned an unsavory aspect of group selection (NYROB, 10/22/98): namely, war is a mechanism of the differential survival and reproduction of whole groups. Out-group aggression goes hand in hand with in-group cooperation. It is very advisable to be mindful of the Naturalistic Fallacy when considering group selection.…
razib | January 20, 2007A reader just informed me that Bob Trivers just won the Crafoord Prize in bioscience! For those who would like to become more familiar with Trivers' work, I highly recommend Natural Selection and Social Theory. Genes in Conflict is also a good read if you want some molecular level evolutionary exposition. Finally, Trivers looms large in both Mother Nature and Defenders of the Truth. If you don't know anyting about Trivers, I suggest this Edge Special Event.
Robert Trivers introduced concepts such as reciprocal altruism in the 1970s which revolutionized social theory, and serve as the atomic…
razib | January 18, 2007There is now a sign up page for A Week of Science. Basically I'll take the feeds and load them up on Justscience.net with Feedpress the day before the 5th. You can see the current list here. You can insert the sign up page with this code into you're own site (remove the styling if you wish of course):
<form action="http://www.justscience.net/signup.php" method="GET">
<style>
#justScienceInputs { border:#CCCCCC thin groove; width: 250px; padding:5px;
background-color:#FFFFCC;
font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:12px;}
input {width:150px;}
</style>
<div…
razib | January 18, 2007PZ and John have commented on a Steve Weinberg review of The God Delusion. This prompts me to offer up a cheap reflection which I've been meaning to air since watching Beyond Belief 2006, Steve Weinberg was, to my eye, the most ignorant and complacent of all the speakers and panelists, while at the same time being likely the most incandescently brilliant of them all. Weinberg is a great physicist, but having him review The God Delusion is like giving Leon Kass The Party of Death. On a related note, over at The Secular Outpost, Taner Edis wonders if Sam Harris shouldn't know something…
razib | January 17, 2007RPM and Chris have hit most of the points in regards to the Just Science project. To be short, what it's not about is anti-science. Just one week, that's all. It certainly isn't about traffic or comment response. It isn't about ease of posting, expressing a clever opinion, but rather a tight exposition of a difficult concept. And it isn't about any one blogger, and it isn't about you, it's about science. Myself, I don't have the marginal time to spend writing one deep scientific post a day, so I'm putting things in the queue right now. I'm going to set up Just Science as an aggregator…
razib | January 17, 2007Both Jason Rosenhouse and Rand Simberg have offered in the past few days that they have never exhibited an inclination to accept theism. Jason wonders:
I have very clear memories of attending Sunday school as a kid, and spending most of that time thinking my teachers were putting me on. Do I lack something that other people have? Are there genes that predispose people to belief or non-belief?
There certainly are such genes involved in predisposition to religiousness. There is non-trivial heritability toward religious zeal. By heritability I mean the proportion of popuation level variation…
razib | January 16, 2007There is news about a skull which is about 40,500 years old found in Europe that exhibits a hybrid Neandertal-Modern morphology:
However, there were some important differences: apparently independent features that are, at best, unusual for a modern human. These included frontal flattening and exceptionally large upper molars with unusual size progression which are found principally among the Neanderthals.
...
Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, London, commented on the PNAS paper's suggestion of interbreeding: "How often it happened and its importance to the bigger picture of…
razib | January 15, 2007p-ter has an interesting post where he explores some current findings about human population substructure. He begins:
First, an important preliminary-- there are millions of places in the human genome where any two given people could possible differ, either by a single base change, the addition of an entire chunk of DNA, the inversion of a chunk of DNA, or whatever. Keep that in mind: millions and millions of places (for a database of many of the single base changes, see the HapMap). Now, the intuitive argument: after humans arose in Africa, they dispered themselves throughout the world. By…
razib | January 13, 2007Sergey Gavrilets and William R. Rice have a new population genetic model for homosexuality out. You can read the full paper over at Gavrilets' website, while Ars Technica and Matt both have some nice commentary. I don't have much to add, and generally share Matt's skepticism of the utility of a one locus model, but at least it is somewhere to start. I will reiterate that the "problem" is obligate homosexuality. I don't find facultative homosexuality as surprising or evolutionarily mysterious. Also, I am intrigued by the the older brother effect because of its implications of genomic…