razib | October 6, 2006The Evil One recently talked to Paul Bloom, one of my favorite cognitive psychologists. Here is something I found of interest:
...and I brought up the issue that many researchers -- David Sloan Wilson being one that springs to mind -- have argued that religion is evolutionary but that it is also evolutionarily beneficial. David Sloan Wilson has proposed the idea that religion arose from group selection because religion promotes in-group cohesiveness. This would differ from Dr. Bloom's ideas because Bloom is essentially arguing that religion is neutral to selection and secondary to larger…
razib | October 6, 2006Richard Dawkins is going to be on Science Friday. It should be easy to find a live internet feed if you are on the web at work. It's for the second hour (i.e., 12-1 PM for me here on the West coast).
Update: An MP3 file of the interview.
razib | October 6, 2006Aside from the fact that they remind those of us who were exposed to Japanese movies of ninjas, why are veiled women so disconcerting? I bring this up because Jack Straw over in England is causing a controversy by talking about the fact that when he meets female constituents who are veiled he asks them to remove it. Of course some Muslims are saying that their religion demands a veil, which is utter bullshit, their interpretation of their religion demands it. I know from personal experience that even many Muslims find the veil disturbing and are uncomfortable with it. Occasionally people…
razib | October 5, 2006JP offers us some links about brain development & genetics. He also reports on a preprint which implies selection for musculature in Africans. Finally, David discusses R.A. Fisher addressing the contentious issue of race.
razib | October 5, 2006Radio Open Source had a show about Islam & The Netherlands. They mention one of my comments in the last 5 minutes (the download should be up tomorrow). I have cut & pasted my first comment below.
And what better place for this flourishing multicultural paradise than the tolerant Netherlands of the Church-baiting Erasmus and the Portuguese-Jewish rationalist Spinoza?
Let me be frank, this makes great rhetoric, but the reality was far less peachy. The Calvinist confession dominated Dutch society and tolerated a level of dissent, it did not accept or celebrate it. Baruch Spinoza was…
razib | October 5, 2006Radio Open Source had a show on about "free will" with a foody focus inspired by Clay Shirky's Edge response, "Free will is going away. Time to redesign society to take that into account." Megan McAardle offers a good skeptical and rational rebuttal to the emotive talking points spouted by some of the guests, nevertheless, I do think that libertarians (and I still consider myself one) must face up to the reality that advances in the science of the mind inevitably lead to "applications" which manipulate our mental architecture with greater precision and prediction than anything imagined by…
razib | October 4, 2006Bora is having some non-trivial financial deficits right now, if you read his content & enjoy his blog and have a local surplus, considering redistributing it via PAYPAL (click the icon on the clock blog) or via AMAZON.
razib | October 4, 2006So I read The God Delusion. I wasn't going to. The reason is this: I didn't want to read an atheist manifesto. I'm an atheist, no need to strengthen my unfaith. I have read books on atheism before, so I have that under my belt. Now, I am interested in religion as a natural phenomenon, but that's a different issue. With all that said, I caved to the cultural phenomenon that is The God Delusion and read it. And I'm glad for it, was a fun book on the whole, something I hadn't expected. Dawkins preaches an entertaining sermon.
The book is divided into two rough halves, the first is a…
razib | October 3, 2006Two Catholic pubications touch upon evolution, first, Commonweal reviews kenotic theology, which seems to be entail (or at least align with) the necessity of evolution. I'm skeptical obviously, not being a believer, but it is an interesting idea and perhaps it will be attractive to some philosophically sophisticated believers (like panentheism). Second, The National Catholic Reporter reviews The Language of God by Francis Collins. This caught my attention:
As an alternative to creationism and intelligent design, Dr. Collins endorses the theory of theistic evolution, which accepts Darwin's…
razib | October 2, 2006JP at my other blog has two posts on molecular evolution worth checking out (the second post was inspired by a comment from RPM).
razib | October 2, 2006Steven Pinker has a piece where he slams George Lakoff in The New Republic. Unfortunately like much of the best stuff in TNR this is behind a pay wall, though The American Scene has posted a snip. Chris has a lot of Lakoff criticism over at his old blog, and as a political liberal himself I hope that insulates him from the charge that he is biased in some way. I actually read Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think back in the late 1990s, and remember thinking a lot "where does this dude get off telling me what I think!" I was a more strident libertarian back then and I wasn…
razib | October 2, 2006The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has a press release out about a new paper, Transforming the architecture of compound eyes, in Nature. The last sentence of the abstract states:
Our results provide a molecular atlas for the construction of microvillar assemblies and illustrate the critical effect of differences in a single structural protein in morphogenesis.
The press release isn't as pithy:
Zuker said the findings offer an important lesson about the beauty of evolution. "It's not unusual to see alterations in regulatory proteins with a profound effect on form and function," he said. "…
razib | October 1, 2006I received this comment and thought I might tap into the community here:
Ok I'm really sorry but this has nothing to do with the above post. I'm truly desperate to get my hands on a good pro-evolution film or something that explains clearly what its all about. All I seem to get locally is a bunch of bullshit about evolution vs. creationism. I've gotten a few good books mainly Dawkins, Steve Gould and Steve Jones but I'd love to see a good evolution film for once any reccomendations?
The only things I can think of are the PBS series Evolution and God, Darwin and Dinosaurs.
razib | October 1, 2006This is a shout out to the biologists out there: do you think the concept of dominance and recessive is worthwhile? In other words, does it help in conceptualization more than it hurts? Clearly the idea of recessiveness of deleterious traits helps in comprehending why such alleles exist in the ambient genetic background of a population and can reemerge via inbreeding.1 On the other hand, my own experience is that if you try to move the conversation to additive polygenic traits, which I think are interesting and need to be understood to really "get" population genetics you have to keep…
razib | October 1, 2006Since Noah Millman posts so infrequently he should really install an RSS feed! In any case, Noah lays out a pragmatic case for why we shouldn't invade Iran, which prompted a response with this denouement:
We lack only the will, not the power, to destroy the threat that Iran presents -- and we lack that will partly because people like you delude yourself and others into believing we can't defeat these savages militarily. How sad to see the greatest nation on earth brought to its knees by its own people. How sad to see these dark-ages barbarians, who are bent on the elimination of all freedom…
razib | October 1, 2006Time has a long piece about the sequencing and comparative genetics between humans and the great apes. There is also some material thrown in about Neandertals.
razib | September 30, 2006RPM has a post up about Y and mtDNA lineages, and what they can (or can't) tell us about demographic history. I'm pretty skeptical myself about the broad and detailed deep time inferences some make with these markers (see The Real Eve for an extreme case), but Dienekes points me to a situation where there is some utility to this methodology:
The differential relative contribution of males and females from Africa and Europe to individual African American genomes is relevant to mapping genes utilizing admixture analysis...The European genetic contributions were highest (and African lowest)…