razib | October 31, 2006Apropos of Alex's post, from The Barna Group, A New Generation of Adults Bends Moral and Sexual Rules to Their Liking:
To what extent does faith make a difference among Busters? The research shows that born again Busters - a group defined not based upon self-identification with the "born again" label but based upon their beliefs about Jesus Christ and regarding life after death - were different from non-born again young adults on some issues. Born again Busters were somewhat less likely to illegally download music, to smoke, to view pornography, to purchase a lottery ticket, or to use…
razib | October 31, 2006Vote early and vote often for Shelley Batts. Shelley makes her pitch here. Shelley is a hard working graduate student with moral fiber.
Q: Is it permissable for believers to aid a kuffar in amassing riches?
A: It is permissable if the kuffar adds to the body of knowledge so that the believers may benefit. The prophet Muhammad, P.B.U.H., said, "Seek knowledge even unto Michigan."
razib | October 31, 2006I was going to continue with my review of chapter 5 of Evolutionary Genetics: Concepts & Case Studies today, but time does not permit. This section was to focus on the orgination of advantageous mutations from the stochastic cauldron of generation 1 (which, as we've seen exhibits a 1/3 probability of immediate extinction in th subsequent generation assuming Poisson distribution of reproductive variance and fixed population size), so I will point to my older posts on introgression (of advantageous alleles):
The baby model
My fixations
Archaic-modern hybridization
Intogression-1…
razib | October 30, 2006O believers!
If kuffar flesh is beauteous it is permissable for the faithful to partake of it without nikah....
Q: Is a beauteous kuffar female permissable or unclean?
A: Lo! A beauteous kuffar female is both permissable and unclean! If the kuffar women entreat the believers, let it be known that that the faithful are commanded to hit them hard and hit them often so long as the believers are sufficiently freaky! As the kuffar woman is unclean let it be stated that it is enjoined upon the believers that they wash themselves thoroughly and redouble their salat.
-Ibn Hanbal
razib | October 30, 2006My friend John Derbyshire chronicles his spiritual devolution over the past few years....
razib | October 30, 2006Heterogeneous Genomic Molecular Clocks in Primates:
The rate at which mutations accumulate in a genome, referred as a "molecular clock," is an instrumental tool in molecular evolution and phylogenetics. Different types of mutations occur via distinctive molecular pathways. In particular, while most mutations occur from errors in DNA replication, spontaneous deamination of methylated CpG dinucleotides is another important source of mutation in mammalian genomes. Molecular clock studies typically combined all types of mutations together. In this paper, the authors analyze molecular clocks of…
razib | October 28, 2006Assume that you have a new mutation, totally novel. What's its probability of going extinct in one generation? That is, it doesn't get passed on....
Consider, you have a population of N individuals. Fix the population size across nonoverlapping generations. So, in generation t you have N individuals and in t + 1 you have N individuals. In the first generation of the mutation the proportion in the population is 1/N, that is, there is one mutant amongst N individuals (ergo, N - 1 other copies). The probability that the mutant is never "drawn" (copied) to the next generation in this fixed…
razib | October 28, 2006The Washington Post has a fun profile of Sam Harris. This part cracked me up:
"If the Koran were exactly the same," he said, toward the end of the night, "and there were just one line added to it, and the line said, 'If you see a red-haired woman on your lawn at sunset, kill her,' I can tell you what kind of world we'd live in. We'd live in a world where red-haired women would be killed often. We'd live in a world where people like yourself" -- and here Harris gestures to his opponent, Oliver McTernan -- "would say, 'That's not the true Islam.' Twenty women in Baghdad would have their heads…
razib | October 27, 2006This week's Ask a ScienceBlogger:
What's the most underfunded scientific field that shouldn't be underfunded?...
I'll say old fashioned biological anthropology. There's a reason that a pall was cast over thsi field after World War II, but we need to start pushing an analysis of man the animal on all levels again, as the post-genomic era is starting with an explosion centered on the most important animal of all, and the moment is ripe for the re-emergence of complementary fields.
razib | October 27, 2006There is a working paper out which reports on the nature of the religiousness of the professoriate. Some data of interest....
* Proportion of professors with "No religion" - 31% (vs. ~10% for the general public)
"I don't believe in God" - 10% (vs. 2.8% for the general public)
"I don't know whether there is a God, and I don't believe there is a way to find out" - 13.4% (vs. 4.1% for the general public)
"I don't believe in a personal God, but I do believe in a Higher Power of some kind" - 19.6%
"I find myself believing in God some of the time, but not at others" - 4.4%
"While I have my doubts…
razib | October 27, 2006I noticed today that I was receiving a lot of search engine queries for black and white twins. Well, I have posted on it several times, but I thought it was a bit much, so I checked the news, and lo & behold, another case just popped up. Like the Australian twins the mother here was biracial (Nigerian and English) while the father was white (in contrast to the earlier British case where the parents were both biracial). I'm sure you're getting tired of this, but I have to comment when I see headlines this: Mum defies million-to-one odds to give birth to black and white boys. I've…
razib | October 26, 2006A reader emailed me asking about the genetics of hair color. Since I've discussed the topic before I simply pointed them to the query of the topic on my other blog. But, I thought it might be good to directly answer two specific questions:
Why do many people have much lighter hair during childhood?
The same reason that European babies are often with blue eyes or dark skinned babies are born with light skin, we get darker as we age (with the partial exception of females during puberty). The darkening of hair is simply a symptom of a general trend toward increased melanin as we age (or as…
razib | October 25, 2006John Wilkins has a good post on religion, I tend to agree with its general thrust though I might quibble with details. Not being gifted with much marginal time right now, a few quick thoughts:
1) I believe that institutional organized religion, e.g., Christianity, Islam, etc., can increase the magnitude of a social vector, but has little influence on its direction. For example in relation to slavery religion was a force for inflaming both abolitionist enthusiasm and justifying the holding of other humans in bondage. Religion doesn't do good or evil, humans do, religion is simply a 'virus of…
razib | October 25, 2006One of the things I regret during my tenure blogging is that I started doing "10 questions" too late to get in touch with John Maynard Smith. If you haven't, I highly recommend this interview by Robert Wright from a few years ago. Also, Smith wrote one of the more readable introductory texts on Evolutionary Genetics, as well as pioneering the use of game theory in evolutionary biology, introducing the concept of the ESS.
razib | October 24, 2006Four Stone Hearth, the Anthropology Carnival, starts at Anthropology.net today.
razib | October 24, 2006 US author offers 'Vedic alternative' to evolution theory:
Offering a "Vedic alternative" to Darwin's Theory of Evolution, an American author has claimed that human beings devolved from the "realm of pure consciousness", as testified by archaeological evidence discovered over the past 150 years.
"We did not evolve up from matter. Instead, we devolved, or came down, from the realm of pure consciousness, spirit," author Michael A Cremo, said, citing many archaeological, psychological and genetic examples.
I have stated before that Creationism might be most prominent in American fundamentalist…
razib | October 24, 2006
Note: Download file here (it has more precise percentages on blue eyes in Norway, someone could try their hand at some game theoretic modeling if they were inclined, I lack the time right now).
Ruchira Paul brought this article to my attention:
Before you request a paternity test, spend a few minutes looking at your child's eye color. It may just give you the answer you're looking for...Their studies...show that blue-eyed men find blue-eyed women more attractive than brown-eyed women. According to the researchers, it is because there could be an unconscious male adaptation for the…
razib | October 23, 2006One of the many hypotheses in palaeoanthropology is homonids shifted to meat eating because it was metabolically rich and allowed the increase in our brain sizes. Well, there might now be some support from primate analogs finally, Study suggests evolutionary link between diet, brain size in orangutans:
In a study of orangutans living on the Indonesian islands of Borneo and Sumatra, scientists from Duke University and the University of Zurich have found what they say is the first demonstration in primates of an evolutionary connection between available food supplies and brain size.
Based on…