razib | September 30, 2006Back in August AlphaPsy had series of posts on 'naturalism' in the context of culture. Check them out! (links below) I strongly believe it is important to discuss human affairs with a multi-disciplinary lens, too often the public discourse is presupposed on naive psychology, while elite models tend to fixate on one dimension (e.g., the 'rational actor,' a pet historical paradigm, etc.).
A Primer on Evolution
A Primer on Cognition
A Primer on Culture
A Primer on Darwinian Psychiatry
A Primer on Religion
A Primer on Coevolutions and Domestications
A Primer on Technology
A Primer on Meta-…
razib | September 30, 2006One of the major dialogues in evolutionary genetics in the 20th century was that between R.A. Fisher and Sewall Wright. It is so seminal that the term Fisher-Wright controversy is often used. One of the major points of disagreemant between Fisher and Wright was the role of population substructure and the relevance of long term effective population size in shaping the trajectory of allele frequencies over time. At my other blog David B is starting a series which addresses this issue. The initial post deals with the period before the publication of The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection.
razib | September 29, 2006Dienekes reports on a paper which chronicles the change height of "Europeans" over the last 20,000 years ago. Anthropologist Henry Harpending once told me that when the first modern humans arrived in European 40-30 thousand years ago they were as slim and towering as modern Nilotic peoples, in other words, they were evolutionary reflections of the African environment. But soon enough the nouveau Europeans shape shifted and developed a more robust physiognomy, with a reduction in median height. As you can see from the graph which I generated the Neolithic Revolution and the introduction of…
razib | September 29, 2006In the post below on skin color within a multiracial family I made the point that genetics is inherited in a discrete fashion. In the post-genomic era, or even the post-DNA era, this seems intuitively clear. Our genetic sequence, our genome, is a string of precisely four base pairs, A, G, T and C. The genome is digital, not analog. Case closed, right?
Not really. One of the main reasons I wrote the post below is the consistent misconception that genetics is blending, that children are a mix of the essences of their parents. This captures the expectation, but the variance. A natural…
razib | September 28, 2006Check out this Mendelian Genetics reference site, which has an enormous catalogue of links. It doesn't just talk about Punnett Squares, there's also a link to a simple introduction to the chi square test.
razib | September 27, 2006Our old friend Brown Gaucho is hosting Tangled Bank #63. I enjoyed his post, The importance of evolution in medicine. BG is a primatologist-turned-med student, so he knows of what he speaks. But, I do have to take some issue with this contention:
Anatomically and genetically, humans haven't changed all that much in the past 100,000 years.
Yes, anatomically modern humans emerged over 100,000 years ago, but, that does not suffice to allow us to assume that genetically humans haven't changed "all that much." Of course, that depends on how you define "all that much," but a supercharged…
razib | September 27, 2006Last winter a story surfaced about "black" and "white" twins. As you can see by the picture the main difference is in skin color, though genetically full sisters (fraternal twins), one twin has the complexion typical of a northern European, while the other is darker skinned. Contrary to the news reports the darker skinned twin does not seem to exhibit the modal complexion of sub-Saharan Africans, rather, she is several shades lighter. In fact, the photo suggests that she is about the same color as her parents, who are both genetically 1/2 European and 1/2 black.* Seeing as how adults are…
razib | September 26, 2006Update: Make sure to read the comments, some of them are worthy of posts.
John Wilkins has a long response to my post Cultural Cladistics. Now, John knows several orders of magnitude more about systematics than I do...so he emphasized the cladistics aspect and traced out the misimpressions, fallacies and problems. He begins:
He repeats the usual [redacted] canard that culture isn't like biology in terms of its evolution. I think it is exactly like it, and that the "analogy" between cultural traditions and species is quite exact. All that differs is the frequency of the various kinds of…
razib | September 26, 2006Along with Dave I would like to bring to your attention AlphaPsy, a blog devoted to the naturalistical paradigm in cultural anthropology, drawing deeply from the well of cognitive science. Posts like this, exploring the cognitive grounding of our understanding of biology, are typical. Also, I want to point to you this post over at alt.muslim titled The Evolution of Monotheism. I am generally skeptical of the existence of a "religious Left" in Islam, but only because I believe they are thin on the ground, not because they are non-existent. This post is witness to the existence of such a…
razib | September 26, 2006Sandy at Discovering Biology in a Digital World responded to my post about skin color with White People are Mutants. This is an interesting juxtposition with a observation that some might claim that this implies that one is saying white people are more evolved. But it's more complex than that, as I point out, it seems that before our species evolved dark skin, we were white skinned, underneath our fur, so white people are "back to the future." Does that mean they are primitive? Or evolved back to primitivity? Obviously not, these sort of categories, "more evolved," or "advanced," are really…
razib | September 25, 2006A year ago, Armand Leroi, the author of Mutants, wrote:
...We don't know what the differences are between white skin and black skin, European skin versus African skin. What I mean is we don't know what the genetic basis of that is. This is actually amazing. I mean, here's a trait, trivial as it may be, about which wars have been fought, which is one of the great fault lines in society, around which people construct their identities as nothing else. And yet we haven't the foggiest idea what the genetic basis of this is. It's amazing.
Wonder no more Armand! Some have said we are in the…
razib | September 22, 2006Two articles are out, one by Stephen Oppenheimer, author of The Real Eve, and another profiling some of Bryan Sykes'1 new research. The headlines are eye-catching, "We're nearly all Celts under the skin!" The fine print:
Even in England, about 64 per cent of people are descended from these Celts, outnumbering the descendants of Anglo- Saxons by about three to one.
The proportion of Celts is only slightly higher in Scotland, at 73 per cent. Wales is the most Celtic part of mainland Britain, with 83 per cent.
Sykes and Oppenheimer tell the tale of the resettlement of northern Europe, and…
razib | September 21, 2006Which is the correct tree?*
One could argue that this is fallacious insofar as Judaism is the "ancestor" of both Islam and Christianity, but my own opinion is that the Jewish traditions of this day and age (including "Orthodox" Judaism) are very different from ancient Judaism (the transition from ancient to modern Judaism might be analogized to anagenesis, while the relationship between Christianity and ancient Judaism is more like cladogenesis). In the United States the term "Judeo-Christian" became popular after World War II as the "Protestant-Catholics-Jew" alignment was used to…
razib | September 21, 2006
Pure Nerd
82 % Nerd, 17% Geek, 30% Dork
For The Record:
A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.
You scored better than half in Nerd, earning you the title of: Pure Nerd.
The times, they are a-changing. It used to be that being exceptionally smart led to being unpopular, which would ultimately lead to picking up all of the traits and…
razib | September 21, 2006Mike Dunford has the low down on how to help by doing something. If you have a blog, consider linking and bringing attention to this matter. Mass action is crucial!
razib | September 21, 2006The first chapter of Evolutionary Genetics: Concepts & Case Studies gives a quick sketch of the arc of the field that the book covers via exposition of topical and current issues. Michael R. Dietrich focuses on the series of controversies which serve as "hinges of history." I have addressed the controversy between the biometricians & Mendelians before, below are the "highlights" over a longer period based on the outline constructed by Dietrich in his chapter, From Mendel to molecules: A brief history of evolutionary genetics.
1860s
Genesis
Charles Darwin brings forth an evolutionary…
razib | September 20, 2006A report in The University of Chicago Magazine details the problems that interracial children have in relation to monoracial children, specifically, violence, drug abuse and disciplinary problems. Ah, but note this:
Choi has yet to decipher all the factors that exacerbate multiracial youths' "bad outcomes," but racial discrimination is part of the equation. Kids act out in response to ridicule or ostracism. In junior high and high school, "some [racial] groups are very exclusive. Other children will push you out if you're a racial combination." In similar surveys in Hawaii, she notes,…
razib | September 20, 2006Declan Butler is urging everyone to get the word out about the Bulgarian and Palestinian medics falsely accused of infecting children with AIDS. I've known about this story for a while, and like a lot of tragedies it has bubbled in the background. The reality is that even doing good in a nation like Libya can get you trapped in the capricious net of dictactorial fiat, and how they maybe be facing execution. Get the word out! Not only are six innocent lives hanging in the balance, but what sort of chilling message will this send to professionals out to do some good in the world where they…