razib | December 14, 2009
Cool new report in Current Biology, Defensive tool use in a coconut-carrying octopus:
The use of tools has become a benchmark for cognitive sophistication. Originally regarded as a defining feature of our species, tool-use behaviours have subsequently been revealed in other primates and a growing spectrum of mammals and birds...Among invertebrates, however, the acquisition of items that are deployed later has not previously been reported. We repeatedly observed soft-sediment dwelling octopuses carrying around coconut shell halves, assembling them as a shelter only when needed. Whilst being…
razib | December 13, 2009I was looking for the term "Depression," in the economic sense. But look at the clear seasonal trend in search for the term:
razib | December 10, 2009A friend pointed me to a new Pew survey, Many Americans Not Dogmatic About Religion. It shows the general finding that though Americans are a religious people, they're moderately ecumenical in their practices and beliefs. I was concerned in particular though with the resurgence of supernatural beliefs with the decline of institutional religious orthodoxy.
The back story to this is that many psychologists posit that humans have an innate predisposition toward supernatural beliefs because of the cognitive biases we're hardwired with. For example, it isn't a coincidence that almost all human…
razib | December 9, 2009According to search engine traffic one of the most popular posts on this weblog has to do with the genetic background of Ashkenazi Jews. That is, those Jews whose ancestors derive from Central & Eastern Europe, and the overwhelming number of Jews in the United States. The genetic origins of this group are fraught with politics naturally. With the rise of biological science the characteristics of Jews were used as a way to differentiate them as a nation apart in more than a cultural and religious sense. After World War II other researchers attempted to show that Jews were not genetically…
razib | December 9, 2009At Reuters Felix Salmon has been making the case that a home should not be thought of as an investment. Here's the the Google Trends for "investment property":
I think the biggest argument that one should be careful about viewing a home purchase as an investment is that many people will now roll their eyes at you when you moot the idea. In other words, a substantial proportion of young adults are going to view the idea of getting locked down into a mortgage with a great deal more skepticism than they would have a few years ago. The cultural shock of the late real estate correction is going…
razib | December 8, 2009I post some data analysis over at my other weblog. For example, today I looked at the relationship between food stamp usage and unemployment. The Census makes a lot of county-level data available, though it's often slapdash and disorganized. But using R I've constructed many data sets including most American counties. I don't post here much because I concentrate more on science in this space, and the 500 pixel width means that integrating scatter plots into a post seamlessly is pretty much impossible.
But since readers of this weblog are much more liberal than over at GNXP Classic, I thought…
razib | December 7, 2009
Well, I don't quite know about that, but that's the sort of take-away from a new paper in PLoS Biology which looks at the downsides of female attractiveness. A Cost of Sexual Attractiveness to High-Fitness Females:
Adaptive mate choice by females is an important component of sexual selection in many species. The evolutionary consequences of male mate preferences, however, have received relatively little study, especially in the context of sexual conflict, where males often harm their mates. Here, we describe a new and counterintuitive cost of sexual selection in species with both male mate…
razib | December 7, 2009Researcher Can't Find Men Who Have Not Seen Porn:
A new study on the effects of pornography has just started, but there is already one revealing find: the researcher could not find any men who have not viewed pornography. The study will proceed without a control group consisting of men who have not viewed pornography.
razib | December 6, 2009Two loci control tuberculin skin test reactivity in an area hyperendemic for tuberculosis:
Approximately 20% of persons living in areas hyperendemic for tuberculosis (TB) display persistent lack of tuberculin skin test (TST) reactivity and appear to be naturally resistant to infection by Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Among those with a positive response, the intensity of TST reactivity varies greatly. The genetic basis of TST reactivity is not known. We report on a genome-wide linkage search for loci that have an impact on TST reactivity, which is defined either as zero versus nonzero (TST-BINa…
razib | December 6, 2009Cardiovascular fitness is associated with cognition in young adulthood:
During early adulthood, a phase in which the central nervous system displays considerable plasticity and in which important cognitive traits are shaped, the effects of exercise on cognition remain poorly understood. We performed a cohort study of all Swedish men born in 1950 through 1976 who were enlisted for military service at age 18 (N = 1,221,727). Of these, 268,496 were full-sibling pairs, 3,147 twin pairs, and 1,432 monozygotic twin pairs. Physical fitness and intelligence performance data were collected during…
razib | December 6, 2009At my other weblog I looked at some of the data on the international data on religion. There are two positions in regards to religious trends which always crop up.
* That in the medium-to-long term religion, in particular supernatural religion, will disappear.
* That in the short-to-medium term we are in the midst of a "religious revival."
The first position has been held more or less by some intellectuals since the Enlightenment. The second position is something that I'm familiar with contemporaneously. The reality is that the world is not going through a revival in religiosity if by…
razib | December 6, 2009Apple's Game Changer, Downloading Now:
The way the industry once operated, "Each handset company would come up with its latest iterations and maybe have the hottest device of the season or not," says Ms. Huberty, the Morgan Stanley analyst. "Enter apps into the equation, and that changes. It goes from being a product cycle game to a platform game."
"People will look back on the iPhone as a turning point in the industry," says Craig Moffett, a telecom analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein. "The iPhone will be remembered as the first true handheld computer.
razib | December 5, 2009About six months ago I had a post up on the Cape Coloureds of South Africa. As a reminder, the Cape Coloureds are a mixed-race population who are the plural majority in the southwestern Cape region of South Africa. Like the white Boers they are a mostly Afrikaans speaking population who are adherents of Reformed Christianity. After the collapse of white racial supremacy many white Afrikaners have argued that it is natural and logical to form a cultural alliance with the Cape Coloureds because of the affinity of language and faith (Afrikaans speaking Coloureds outnumber Afrikaans speaking…
razib | December 5, 2009Darwin's idea has cost lives:
Truths that America's founding fathers had held to be self-evident - that all men were created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights - were now scorned as gross sentimentalities that had been overtaken by Darwinian science. Within a decade the self-styled "scientific racialists" had begun to classify other groups as genetically inferior. Immigrants from Spain and Italy were held to be a threat to the quality of the American gene pool and spurious scientific evidence was adduced to "prove" that Jewish immigrants were near-imbeciles whose admission in…
razib | December 4, 2009One thesis in regards to the vitality of religions is that state sponsorship tends to result in disaffection because public monopolies offer sub-standard product. In contrast, separation between the public sector and religion results in a free market of ideas which promotes vigorous diversity and competition which satisfies the tastes of all (or nearly all).
Below is a map from Wikipedia which shows "state religions" by geography. I don't think I accept the predictive power of the thesis above....
How you define "state religion" can be a little sketchy, but usually it has to be privileges…
razib | December 4, 2009Press release on the partnership with ScienceBlogsTM. Nothing should change around these parts, though I might avail myself of the image library instead of going to Wikipedia all the time. When I was a kid I will admit though that reading issues of National Geographic from 1910 or 1920 was one of my more bizarre pleasures; it was a bit of an anthropological exercise, with the irony being the target was itself anthropology.