razib | December 7, 2006Another update on the "Tripoli 6," this time on the science. Spread the meme! Nature has a paper out which vindicates the claims of innocence of the scientists.
razib | December 6, 2006Thanks to Chet for filling in, but now I'm back! Your long Snicker nightmare is over! I kid, but seriously, I appreciate Chet's contribution, and he'll be guest blogging in the future. I'll be helping Chet set up a weblog where he can focus on his two passions: Austrian economics & radical feminism, and how the former can be used in the service of the latter. Stay tuned!
razib | December 6, 2006A few years ago the developmental geneticist Armand Leroi burst on to the scene with the engaging book, Mutants, and a controversial op-ed where he attempted to rehabilitate the concept of race. Leroi's op-ed spawned a rebuttal website which brought together a variety of scholars from disparate disciplines to refute his arguments.
Never one to shy away from controversy Armand has published a new essay, The future of neo-eugenics, where he lays out what is happening, and will possibly happen, from the perspective of an evolutionary biologist. The great thing about Armand's work is that he…
razib | December 5, 2006Nick Wade just wrote up an article on the relationship between Neandertals and divison of labor. John Hawks hurls a cannon of a post at this hypothesis.
razib | December 5, 2006
Your Political Profile:
Overall: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal
Social Issues: 25% Conservative, 75% Liberal
Personal Responsibility: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal
Fiscal Issues: 75% Conservative, 25% Liberal
Ethics: 25% Conservative, 75% Liberal
Defense and Crime: 75% Conservative, 25% Liberal
How Liberal Or Conservative Are You?
Via Shellee.
razib | December 5, 2006Over at agnostic's blog p-eter points out that lactose tolerance can be considered "dominant." Most of you know I have issues with terms like dominant or recessive because I think the simple heuristic is infectious and tends to persist and spread throughout the discourse to the point where it obstructs rather than illuminates. That being said, I can see where he's coming from. We know a bit about the primary European mutation which confers the ability to digest milk as an adult. It's a cis-acting element which works to maintain transcription from the LCT gene, and so results in a level of…
razib | December 4, 2006A reader asks:
I often hear the Sunni/Shia conflict analogized to the Catholic/Protestant conflict, esp as manifested in Northern Ireland. Would you say this is valid or not? Why? I honestly don't understand these intramural conflicts very well, so this is a genuine request for clarification.
This is a common issue that crops up. First, I would suggest that all reading Chris' post on analogical reasoning. The main issue I have with the analogy is that it gives you information about the situation which you already have unless you're ignorant in the first place. That is, there is a sectarian…
razib | December 4, 2006RPM discusses hybrid speciation while agnostic waxes skeptical about the relevance of more symmetry among multiracial humans. The comments on agnostic's posts are interesting as well.
razib | December 4, 2006A few weeks ago I presented a tentative model for how lactose tolerance (the ability of adults to digest milk easily and efficiently) spread throughout the world. Here is what I offered:
1) A haplotype block, A, associated with the LCT gene, and a particular SNP on that block, -13910*T, is responsible for Eurasian lactose tolerance (here are some numbers across populations)
2) In African populations which are lactose tolerant this haplotype, A, and the SNP, -13910*T, are not always found.
3) This implies that separate mutational events resulted in alternative genetic strategies which…
razib | December 3, 2006Chris has a post up where he asserts that it looks like Louisiana is trying to flip off the Caribbean. I hold that Florida and the Tarim Basin both look pretty phallic.
razib | December 3, 2006The Associated Press has an article on the genetics of taste and its relevance in everyday life. I've posted on the genetics of taste in the past, it's an interesting topic. Basically, you have three phenotypes:
Super-taster
Taster
Non-taster
Until recently the "super-taster" category was unknown, the crude assays (e.g., tasting PTC doped paper) only distinguished between tasters and non-tasters. The inheritance pattern would have suggested a recessive pattern for the non-tasters, but the super-taster category suggests that we are simply seeing a more additive process where two "on"…
razib | December 2, 2006RPM and Kambiz comment on a paper which argues for the utility of mtDNA in phylogeography.
Remember,
there is lots of mtDNA that is easy to extract because there are so many mitochondria within eukaryotic cells
it mutates fast, building up a lot of genetic variation, in a neutral matter (i.e., perfect "clock")
it is uniparental, passed from mother to daughter, making the coalescent model congenially tractable
razib | December 2, 2006Update: Ed Brayton has now acknowledged the non-triviality of his original error. Bravo! A gentleman he is.
End Update:
Today, Ed Brayton has post where he comments on an article about Saudi ties to Sunnis in Iraq, etc. The article itself isn't interesting to me really, but what Ed did say about it caught my attention:
That could spark a regional war with the two largest and most powerful Arab nations [Saudi Arabia and Iran], not to mention the world's top 2 oil producers, on opposite sides.
There are some factual issues here. 95% of Iranians are not Arabs. The largest number are Persian…
razib | December 1, 2006In the post below there is a lot of talk about genius that might rival Newton. I didn't throw down a list of criteria for why I esteem Newton, a lot of this is gestalt intuition anyway, and I'm probably not reflectively totally aware of why I feel the way I do. That being said, someone threw down Aristotle. Instead of Aristotle, or Plato, or any of the other numerous ancients I mentioned Archimedes. Why? Aristotle certainly had, and has, more influence than Archimedes.
The reason is simple: Aristotle had superhuman intellect, but Archimedes had inhuman intellect. Aristotle had beefed up…
razib | November 30, 2006Over at The Edge Scott Atran and Sam Harris continue to spar over the question of religion. This is a continuation of the discussions that occurred at Beyond Belief 2006. The Q & A's at the end of the presentations were actually far more interesting to me than the talks themselves. Having so many super-intelligent people in the room was incredible. In regards to Atran and Harris, those of you who have read my opinions about religion know that I lean strongly toward Atran in regards to the science of religion as a natural phenomenon. On the other hand, I think Sam Harris plays an…
razib | November 30, 2006In his presentation for Beyond Belief 2006 Neil deGrasse Tyson offered Isaac Newton as his candidate for the most brilliant intellectual ever. Because he is trained as a physicist Tyson can be accused of some bias, but the impact on him personally was pretty obvious, he was emotionally moved just comprehending Newton's genius. Myself, I would tend to agree with Tyson though these things are always subject to the various weights on your parameters. Who would you offer up? Of the ancients I believe that Archimedes is likely to have been a magician in the mold of Newton. Here is what the…