razib | July 15, 2006Strong words from a "progressive" site:
Because it further negates their discrimination-based "biblical worldview," the science of human genetics - which has again suggested homosexuality is genetic (determined before birth) and not simply "a lifestyle choice" - is the Christian Right's special target. Genetic mutations and evolution are not theories. They're facts the validity of which cannot be disputed scientifically. (Ask any bacterium or virus, or read the medical literature on pathogens evolving to become resistant to traditional drugs used against them.)
The more people…
razib | July 15, 2006In my post below on the phenotypic difference in sensitivity to PTC (and ergo, bitterness), I allude to the fact that until recently the inheritance mode of this simple mongenic Mendelian trait (that is, controlled from one locus in the genome) was assumed to express via a dominance-recessive relationship on the phenotypic level. In other words, if you were heterozygous, you were a taster, and only homozygous individuals for non-taster alleles (two copies with lack of function) would express the "recessive" phenotype. Well guess what? Turns out that there are three phenotypes, and they seem…
razib | July 14, 2006Wikipedia is really funny, I mean, what you stumble upon...Nikah Ijtimah "is a form of polyandry that existed in the Pre-Islamic period in the Arabian peninsula." I knew of the purported existence of polyandry in pre-Islamic Arabia (see No God but God), but this, I did not know of:
...there were four types of marriage during the Pre-Islamic period of ignorance. One ... type of marriage was that a group of less than ten men would assemble and enter upon a women, and all of them would have sexual relations with her. If she became pregnant and delivered a child and some days had passed after…
razib | July 13, 2006In modern philosophy of the mind an unresolved issue is the question of qualia [update: I might be wrong about this actually]. What is 'whiteness' or 'sweetness,' as such? Well, I'm not a philosopher, but one thing that has interested me over the past few years has been the genetics of taste. Not surprisingly there seems to be a strong genetic and biological component in regards to perception and preferences. For example, it has long been known that there is variation in the extent of sensitivity to "bitter," assayed via the famous PTC test. Of late it has been shown that not only are…
razib | July 12, 2006A few months ago I posted on a conundrum that faces liberal moderns when it comes to engaging "traditional" peoples. The short of it is that the typical Eurasian pathogen load is deadly over the life history of individuals from many smaller isolated populations. I posted after reading Land of the Naked People, an attempt by an Indian science journalist to assay the situation on the ground in the Andaman Inslands. Now, John Hawks points to an article in Science which moots many of the issues I brought up.
Fundamentally a liberal order assumes equality before the law, but, as realists who…
razib | July 12, 2006Ask a Science Blogger ?:
On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first successfully cloned mammal. Ten years on, has cloning developed the way you expected it to?...
Well, I waited this week to see if someone would say what I would say to save me the trouble of responding. Dynamic of the Cats hit it about right.
Also, the talk about stem cells in some of the comments is really pointing to where the action is going to be. Myself, I am very pro-stem cell (hell, aren't we all? Either adult or fetal?), and for a particular reason that is very anti-clonal. Today, mixed-race individuals…
razib | July 11, 2006I don't speak that much about the Evolution-Creation debate in comparison to other Science Bloggers. Fundamentally, it is because I find the elucidation of the fact of evolution far more fascinating at this point in my life than an analysis of the meta-scientific and cultural issues revolving around the Creationist response to evolutionary science. But today I checked the genetics & evolution query on google news as is my habit, and I stumbled upon this blog entry, Mathematicians and Evolution by Casey Luskin. Most of you probably know him, and I'll leave it to others to appraise this…
razib | July 11, 2006Gmail's "chat" app is now integrated via AJAX with the email application. In other words, if you've sent someone an email from gmail to gmail you will show up in their user list for chat automatically. I was explaining this to a coworker and I proceeded to demonstrate it. One woman that I always saw as "green" (online) on my chat list had emailed me only once, she had thanked me for some help in data collection that went into a presentation she was giving for the lab. I didn't know her well, though she sure was a talker. In any case, I was like, "Check it, people never notice when you chat…
razib | July 11, 2006One of the things that frustrates me about the modern Left is that many secularists tend to pull their punches when it comes to non-white or non-Christian groups. While white Protestant charismatics are sneered at as "holy rollers," black Protestant charismatics are "inspirational" and "spiritual." While white Protestant men oppress their wives, Muslim men are oppressed.
This is not to say that there are no issues in regards to racism and prejucide when it comes to the groups I highlight above. But, at the end of the day superstition is superstition, no? And shouldn't we expect the best of…
razib | July 10, 2006 Helen of Troy by Bettany Hughes offers a panaromic romp across the the Eastern Mediterranean between the end of the Bronze Age and the cusp of the Age of Iron. Hughes, a historian by training, inserts her own insights as to what it must have been to be a woman of the Achaeans within the framework of archaeological consensus. I say archaeological rather than historical because Hughes' canvas offers few written clues as to its mental and emotional texture, the Bronze Age Greeks used literacy only as a tool of accounting, not of storytelling. This is the greatest weakness, and strength, of…
razib | July 10, 2006This is a shout out to regular readers, I'm asking a survey in this entry to get a general feel for who is reading this weblog since I'm 6 monthis into this, so please click below the fold if you are interested in fessing up
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razib | July 10, 2006This is somewhat Onion worthy, but it happens to be true: identical twins now run Poland. Specifically, both the legislative (Prime Minister) and executive branches (President) are under the control of a of monozygotic twin (via ParaPundit).
razib | July 10, 2006Just a reiteration on prosopagnosia. Let's assume that the findings as to the extent of face blindness pan out (I am willing to grant they found something seeing as there was an autosomal dominant pattern of inheritance in the pedigree).
1) I am skeptical that the 2% frequency in the population is due to reduced selection pressure in some populations. This behooves us to believe that we are just "catching" the German population on its way toward fixation. Additionally, this is a dominanttrait, so it seems less likely to be a loss-of-function which emerges because of relaxed selection (loss-of…
razib | July 9, 2006Update: Hawks responds.
John Hawks has not commented on this feature in Wired titled Code of the Caveman. But I'm sure he will, and when he does, I will point you to it because what he says on this topic is worth listening to. But, until then, here are a few points.
1) This extraction of ancient autosomal DNA, not just the copious mtDNA, from Neandertals by the Paabo group and its associates has been talked about for a year or so now. So within the scientific community this isn't a big surprise.
2) The new bioinformatically flavored techniques offer up the possibility to "learn more about…
razib | July 8, 2006Charles Lumsden's Of Biocultural Mathematics and Mind is too long for me to summarize in my half roused state. Nevertheless, I suspect some of you will find it of interest....
razib | July 7, 2006Prosopagnosia is "An inability or difficulty in recognizing familiar faces; it may be congenital or result from injury or disease of the brain." I've talked about this before. Well, Jake "The Superficial" Young now has a follow up post on the paper which elicited my initial skepticism. Since you can read the abstract, here is the conclusion:
Congenital PA is the only known monogenic dysfunction of a higher cognitive visual skill. Among more than 90 different cognitive functions (e.g., musical mind, absolute pitch) and dysfunctions (e.g., agraphia, dyscalculia, dyslexia) related to…