razib | July 7, 2006Check out Darwin Catholic, a traditionalist Roman Catholic who comments on the intersection between his faith and evolutionary biology (and other things).
razib | July 6, 2006I am a registered Republican. There, I said it. I'm not a particularly ardent one, but I am not ashamed of being a Republican. I have no idea if there are any other Republican bloggers here at Science Blogs, even nominal ones like myself. Additionally, my impression is that aside from David Ng everyone here at Science Blogs is pretty pale faced. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but someone should chi square this and see if they scry prima facie grounds for discrimination. I kid of course.
In any case, Bora has a long post about liberalism and the academy. He talks about a long…
razib | July 6, 2006This entry is somewhat unconvential, but I will place in the "brain & behavior" category because I want comments on my own feelings & attitudes from those who know some psychology. I am an individual with opinions about the world. I suppose you could say that I'm your typical individual with a scientific & operationally materialistic worldview. I'm also mildly right-of-center, and tend to have as many issues with Post Modern "progressives" thought as I do with Religious Right reactionaries. Like the Religious Right I do believe there are truths in this world which are sacred…
razib | July 5, 2006A worthy (so I believe) repost from my other blog....
[begin repost]
Several years back David wrote about Sewall Wright's Shifting Balance Theory. If you know much about the history of mathematical genetics you know that R.A. Fisher and Wright's disputes over the importance of population substructure, genetic drift and the adaptive landscape was a simmering pot looming in the background of the emergence of the Modern Synthesis. One of the points that Fisher and Wright clashed over was the relative evolutionary importance of epistasis. I want to emphasize the evolutionary importance, because…
razib | July 5, 2006Jake at Pure Pedantry has been on a blog tear posting some seriously funny shit. But this post on Linsday Hohan makes me wonder what the real identity of the guy who blogs at The Superficial is.
A real smokin' readhead below the fold....
razib | July 5, 2006If you are reading this at paternityzone.com, you should know
1) This content was generated here, under the aegis of Science Blogs.
2) I am not a "contributor" to paternityzone.com.
3) Taking an RSS feed and making it look like regular content without attribution isn't cool.
4) You should ask before you take.
5) We don't need to talk about this if appropriate measures are taken, you know what I mean?
razib | July 4, 2006Is it just me, or is Miss Albania trying to do an Angelina Jolie? Picture below the fold....
razib | July 4, 2006On another weblog I got involved in a rather long-winded thread on colonialism in British India. Someone made an assertion about Islam and its relatively non-effect on the subcontinent. This seemed strange. My own family is brown and Muslim, but one can't generalize from one's own experience, no?
So I was bored, the combined population of India-Bangladesh-Pakistan ("British India") is 30.5% Muslim. Assuming 1% defection rates from a pure Hindu state toward a Muslim state per generation, how many generations would it take to reach 30.5%? Well, turns out it would take 37 generations, and…
razib | July 4, 2006The LA Times commissioned a poll and found that:
54% of Americans would not vote for a Muslim
37% of Americans would not vote for a Mormon
21% of Americans would not vote for an evangelical Christian
15% of Americans would not vote for a Jew
10% of Americans would not vote for a Roman Catholic
This is relevant because Mitt Romney, a Mormon, is running for president (all but officially). The fact that is that even if 37% is a high water mark of rejection (I suspect it is, and that some voters would warm to Romney as they got to know the person as opposed to the perception of his religion),…
razib | July 3, 2006The Guardian has a long piece up by a Muslim who has wrestled with the issue of reconciling his faith with evolutionary theory. The author is a secretary for The Muslim Council of Britain, an organization criticized for its illiberal tendencies (e.g., rejection of the participation of homosexual Muslim groups under their umbrella group). The interesting point, for me, is that the author alludes to the evolution of Muslims themselves, as they encounter evolutionary biology with their own pre-scientific models of the universe. The reaction of denial and incredulity seems akin to how some…
razib | July 3, 2006Evolgen has a nice little post up on the problems with mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in regards to using it to infer demographic history. This form of genomic information is useful in that it is relatively copious, being present in the hundreds of mitochondrion to be found within every cell. This is one reason that the early work on molecular clocks in the context of paleoanthropology used mtDNA, you needed a lot of raw material in the pre-PCR era. Remember mitochondrial Eve?
Now that neat story is fallling apart as the reality that mtDNA is subject to a great deal of selection seems to be…
razib | July 2, 2006Over at my other weblog "Darth Quixote" interviews cognitive science superstar Steven Pinker.
While I've got your attention, here are some other 10 questions....
John Derbyshire, conservative writer.
Armand Leroi, evolutionary & developmental biologist.
Warren Treadgold, Byzantine historian.
Dan Sperber, cognitive anthropologist.
Ken Miller, cell biologist.
Judith Rich Harris, social & developmental psychologist.
Justin L. Barrett, cognitive psychologist.
David Haig
Adam K. Webb., political scientist.
James F. Crow, population geneticist.
razib | July 2, 2006A population bottleneck has a tendency of reducing the long term effective population size (harmonic mean) a great deal. I'm sure all of you knew that, and I'm sure you know that it also has a tendency of reducing variation. This is because low effective population sizes increase the power of genetic drift, which tends to expunge variation from a population.1
Great. The only thing though is that sometimes bottlenecks can "release" variation and make it available for selection. Additive genetic variance (heritability) increases as the genetic background is fixed on many loci, but not all,…
razib | July 1, 2006My focus on this weblog will tend to be a bit more theoretical and abstract when it comes to genetics. Specifically, as I've made clear before, I'm interested in how theoretical population genetics as conceived of during the Fisher-Wright-Haldane era can be applied and made relevant in the postgenomic epoch. That being said, obviously genetics/genomics plays an important role in the health & well being of individuals in the context of medicine and life choices, so I'll point you to DNA Direct Talk (via Genetics & Health, which also hits some of the same topics, though with a more…
razib | July 1, 2006Paul comments on blogging, politics and science in response to my interview at Genetics & Health. Some of what Paul says mirrors Chris of Mixing Memory's sentiments in relation to reaching out and engaging in dialogue with those who differ from you.
There is a big topic, and I'm not going to weigh in deeply at this point, but, I will say that there is a balance between accepting differences and dismissing the absurd. Where people draw the line differs. Myself, Creationism is absurd. So is someone who questions the selectionist narrative of adult lactase persistence. There are…
razib | July 1, 2006A few years ago there were reports of a new great ape in the Congo, perhaps a chimp-gorilla hybrid. As the story unfolded it seemed more and more plausible that this was a local morph of the common chimpanzee, and genetic tests have confirmed that hunch. It is a subspecies of common chimpanzee, though with unusual morphological features. The latter is important, we see a wide range of phenotypes among humans across small distances, so it should not surprise if chimpanzees also exhibit variation.