razib | June 5, 2006Nick Wade reviews and summarizes the new festschrift to Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins : How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think. Here is the list of contributors (from Edge):
Dr Robert Aunger, Senior Lecturer, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
David P.Barash, Professor of Psychology, University of Washington
Sir Patrick Bateson, Professor of Ethology, University of Cambridge
Dr Seth Bullock, University of Leeds
Helena Cronin, Co-Director, Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, LSE
Martin Daly, Department of Psychology, McMaster University
Marian Stamp Dawkins,…
razib | June 5, 2006Is it me, or did Janet explode by the old 300 world barrier? :) In any case, she brings up some good issues in her expansive post, and there is one thing I want to follow up in regards to the "brain drain." Who is it good for? Who is being drained?
This is a definitely "US centric" question. As an American, and a mildly patriotic one (or, more properly, US-egoistic one) I do look at this question through the "but is it good for America?" lens. Some people might ask, "but is it good for the world?" (that is, brain drain to the United States). That depends, but in general, I think yes…
razib | June 5, 2006Brown gaucho has set up a website, Conservatives Against Intelligent Design. He elaborates on a few points in one of his introductory posts. So far nearly 200 people have signed the mission statement, with some known figures such as John Derbyshire, Derek Lowe and Pejman Yousefzadeh. It would be nice to have others who have spoken against Intelligent Design on the Right on board. I'm thinking of people like Stephen Bainbridge, if anyone knows him, send him an email!
razib | June 5, 2006Here is a press release of a paper which reviews Neandertal mtDNA diversity. Here is the first paragraph:
The cohabitation of Neandertals and modern humans in Europe about 35,000 years ago has stimulated considerable debate regarding hypothetical admixture. Recently, sequences of the hypervariable region-1 (HVR-1) of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from 9 Neandertal specimens dated between 29,000 and 42,000 years ago from dispersed locations have revealed the genetic diversity of Neandertals around the time of the cohabitation 1, 2, 3 and 4. The genetic signatures before and after contact with…
razib | June 3, 2006There has been a long standing debate in evolution of the possibility of sympatric speciation, that is, speciation between two coterminous populations. Well, here is evidence from some fish of it happening, at least in the first stages, so that genetic differentiation is minimal to non-existent. I don't know how common sympatry is, but I've been to other talks pointing to similar phenomena in other taxa, so I think there has been a detection bias toward allopatry.
But anyway, species concepts are a bugger. The main point is that population differentiation need not always be…
razib | June 3, 2006I received an interesting email from the lead researcher on the work reported in the earlier post on prosopagnosia:
Dear Razib, I appreciate your comments (and scepticsm) about our reported work and the thoughts about continuums (aspergers/autism). One possibly clarifying point -- Face recognition is just one aspect of face specific processing. Humans are are also adept at judging emotion, mood, intention, age, attractiveness in faces. Its our experience that the majority of prosopagnosic individuals (with some notable exceptions) are pretty much normal in performing these arguably…
razib | June 2, 2006Possible ancestral structure in human populations:
Using sequence data from the Environmental Genome Project, we find strong evidence for ancient admixture in both a European and a West African population (p ~ 10^{-7}), with contributions to the modern gene pool of at least 5%. While Neanderthals form an obvious archaic source population candidate in Europe, there is not yet a clear source population candidate in West Africa.
5% isn't jack, but, that's enough to introduce lots of novel alleles which might reshape the larger population into which admixture results in introgression. Remember…
razib | June 2, 2006This weeks "Ask a Science Blogger" is:
"Do you think there is a brain drain going on (i.e. foreign scientists not coming to work and study in the U.S. like they used to, because of new immigration rules and the general unpopularity of the U.S.) If so, what are its implications? Is there anything we can do about it?"
A "drain" seems to imply a net outflow, and that doesn't seem to be happening. But, as the paranthetical makes clear what meant is the reduction of the extent of the inflow. And yes, from all I can gather this is an issue in regards to student visas. My father had to pick…
razib | June 2, 2006It is no secret that John Derbyshire is a friend of mine. I am sure most SB readers would find such a connection abhorrent, nevertheless, any man who picks up Mark Ridley's Evolution at my recommendation is a friend :) The goddess of evolution should not just be admired and given due respect, one should strive to understand her. In any case, it is easy to stand by Darwin's legacy amongst fellow travellers, but over the past year Derb has been defending the scientific consensus over at NRO in the face of a wall of reader hostility and relative neutrality from his colleagues.
With this, I…
razib | June 2, 2006Some people have wondered if there is any point in signing petitions. Well, sometimes it is important to declare you exist, to stand and be counted. With all due respect to Ed, evolution's connection with "Culture Wars" is not a good thing, and, more importantly (to me) it saps genuine discourse on this topic that engages the science instead of focusing on meta-politics which will never go anywhere. There are many things in the world to be "against," and I would not say that Intelligent Design/Creationism is the most important, but, comments like this are fucking scary. On this blog I get…
razib | June 1, 2006Dave Munger reports that "face blindness," prosopagnosia, might be found in ~2% of the population. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, so I'm not convinced, but, if it does pan out this seems to have two primary implications off the top of my head
1) It is a signal for mutational load, and the genetic pathways that lead to face blindeness are sensitive to developmental stress (due to bad environment or genes) or the loci that control them are subject to abnormally high mutational rates
2) There is something else going on and face blindness is a pleiotropic side effect
In…
razib | May 31, 2006Brown Gaucho seems to have set up a petition under the heading "Conservatives against Intelligent Design." I am the first signer. Come now John, why not make it official?
Update: John not only signed, but he linked from The Corner.
There have been some questions regarding whether I am a "conservative." I don't know, I am actually at this point a very milquetoast libertarian. But, I am not big on labels and I will accept what people term me, and many say I am right-wing or conservative. As a "person of color" my attitudes toward racial and cultural issues (against affirmative action,…
razib | May 31, 2006Percentage of Students Earning Degrees in Science and Math Has Fallen, GAO Tells Lawmakers ($$$), but this is all you need to know:
The GAO reported that 27 percent of students obtained degrees in those fields, which are known as the STEM disciplines, in the 2003-4 academic year, compared with 32 percent in 1994-95. It also noted that the number of degrees obtained in engineering, the biological sciences, and certain technical fields declined in the past decade. The number of graduate degrees awarded in the STEM fields also declined, it said.
Percentage is crucial. More & more people go…
razib | May 31, 2006Apropos of this week's Ask a Science Blogger, AMERICANS SUPPORT FREE ACCESS TO RESEARCH. Not that their opinion matters!
razib | May 31, 2006The title is tongue in cheek, some researchers now are suggesting that speciation may be proportional to a particular energetic value. R.A. Fisher wanted an "ideal gas law" for evolutionary genetics, but this is ridiculous! In any case, one issue that many of us who are interested in paleoanthropology will have noted is that Africa seems to have been the repeated mother of hominid species. That is, "erectus" left around 2 million years ago, only to be swept aside by moderns around 50,000 years ago. Why Africa twice? This might be part of the answer, and is a flip to WIlliam H. Calvin's…
razib | May 31, 2006This lion research is just cool. Hey, I'm human, I'm a sucker for cats, and the bigger the better:
Understanding the phylogeographic processes affecting endangered species is crucial both to interpreting their evolutionary history and to the establishment of conservation strategies. Lions provide a key opportunity to explore such processes; however, a lack of genetic diversity and shortage of suitable samples has until now hindered such investigation. We used mitochondrial control region DNA (mtDNA) sequences to investigate the phylogeographic history of modern lions, using samples from…
razib | May 31, 2006The American Journal of Human Genetics has a paper in its pre-print section titled "A geographically explicit genetic model of worldwide human settlement history." I quickly skimmed it (and uploaded it into the GNXP forum). I have serious issues some of the inferences made in regards to the "obvious" fit of such coalescence data with a particular demographic history. I am convinced that meta-population dynamics tend to be ignored (in part because they are just another complication) even though they can also explain the data. Nevertheless, this jumped out at me:
We further neglected key…
razib | May 30, 2006PLOS Genetics has a nice review titled The Jewels of Our Genome: The Search for the Genomic Changes Underlying the Evolutionarily Unique Capacities of the Human Brain. It is short and pithy and hits the major points (e.g., SNPs vs. duplications vs. gene expression), so I see no reason to offer any commentary or review of an an already satisfactory commentary and review. If you want original research articles in this area, go here. Some of the material is even open access now.
Update: John Hawks has more.
razib | May 29, 2006I was pointed to this research (via David) that is just out about the correlation between variation on DRD4 and "sexual arousal." From the press release:
Interestingly, some forms of variants in this gene were shown to have a depressing effect on sexual desire, arousal and function, while other common variant had the opposite effect - an increase in the sexual desire score. The latter is believed to be a relatively new mutation, and it is estimated that it appears in Homo sapiens "only" 50,000 years ago at the time of humankind's great exodus from Africa. Approximately 30% of many…