razib | May 25, 2006I don't know what to think about this year's idol winner, but hey, perhaps he won't be a closeted gay man always in image control mode because of his "secret" (not that there's anything wrong with that!). As for the runner up, best of luck to her, I know how it feels....
razib | May 25, 2006My friend Manish Vij just started a new brown themed weblog, aptly titled UltraBrown. Anyway, this entry is hilarious. Talk about seeing the world only through your own lens! When I was in San Francisco once someone came up to me in a shop at Ghirardelli Square and asked "where I was from." You see, I had bleached my hair blonde at that point, so she was wondering where the land of brown-skined blondes was! (there are dark-skinned blondes among the Aboriginals of Australia)
razib | May 25, 2006This week's "Ask a Science Blogger" is:
Since they're funded by taxpayer dollars (through the NIH, NSF, and so on), should scientists have to justify their research agendas to the public, rather than just grant-making bodies?
This question is loaded because how you interpret it really colors how you respond. I would say, no, the public doesn't really understand any specific science, just as physicists and biologists (or biochemists and population geneticists) don't really understand the particulars of other fields. Unfortunately, science is the domain of specialists, even across and within…
razib | May 25, 2006I had a strange experience the other day. I was walking down a hallway, and all of a sudden the name of a local software company came to mind. I didn't understand why I was thinking about this, and I was mulling over this strange issue when 20 seconds after I'd started thinking about the company in question, a woman to my right nodded in my direction (she was a few people over). And bingo, all of a sudden I realized why I'd been thinking about that company, the woman was the roommate of another individual who I knew worked at that company. The peculiar thing is that it is clear that one…
razib | May 23, 2006PLOS has a new paper out which fleshes out how SRY might play a critical role in sex determination in mammals. Here is the press release. Below the fold I've taken figure 7 from their paper and cropped and reedited it a bit for ease of viewing, as well as adding minor parenthetical remarks (e.g., I assume most readers know the common symbol for repression in molecular genetic models, but some might not). Molecular genetics really isn't my thing, but it is good to know if we are interested in the phenotypic impact of a particular locus (e.g., SRY) the particular genotypic dynamics that…
razib | May 23, 2006I'm an atheist. Just like some people who are Christians but weren't always tell me that they "always believed in Christ," myself, I've never believed in God. Before the age of 7 I did avow a belief in God, but in hindsight I see only the most minimal of deisms in my conception of the world aside from the times when I was at the mosque with my family. Religion wasn't talked about in my family much aside from major festivals, and it wasn't something I ever really thought about. When I was 7 I was in the library, reading some books on astronomy, and it struck me that there was no reason for…
razib | May 23, 2006My post yesterday offered up a quick sketch of the phenomenon of genomic imprinting. In short, genomic imprinting is the selective expression of an allele conditional upon whether it is inherited from the father or mother. This selective expression is limited to a small subset of loci, perhaps about 200 in the typical mammal. These expression patterns often relate to conflicts over resources between offspring and mother, and have fitness implications for all individuals in question, mother, father and offspring. All of this is derived from the initial logic that maternal and paternal…
razib | May 22, 2006Since I'm on a Dumb Vinci Code kick today, check out this amusing article about the genetics of Jesus! Check it:
In humans, females package some of their DNA in two matched X chromosomes, males in a single X and Y. So if you're a male, there's only one way you could have gotten your Y chromosome, and that's from your biological father.
Where would Jesus have gotten his Y?
Where indeed. Perhaps Jesus Christ was an XX male? In other words, he was a clone of Mary that was miraculously possessed of an SRY.
razib | May 22, 2006Below GrrlScientist asks why The Da Vinci Code is "bad history." I believe it is bad history because someone whose work I respect and have enjoyed has pointed out manifold errors, incluing in a book which covered this ground. His name is Bart Ehrman, and he is the head of Relgious Studies at UNC. I've read two of his books, Lost Christianities and Misquoting Jesus. Erhman went through a phase of fudamentalist Christianity, but his need to know the New Testament in the original led him to learning Latin and Greek, and a Ph.D. In the process, he became an agnostic.
Here are some errors…
razib | May 22, 2006Some of the most fascinating theoretical evolutionary biology that I've run into emerges out of David's Haig's work on genetic conflict. You've probably stumbled into it somewhere, whether via popularizers like Matt Ridley, or other researchers like Robert Trivers and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. Haig is a biologist who extrapolates from the familiar axioms of evolutionary genetics and hacks his way through the jungle of derivations and wanders into a world turned upside down. Though his work in the area of mother-offspring genetic conflict in utero is probably what is in widest circulation in the…
razib | May 22, 2006Conservative Christian Pollster George Barna has an interesting report out on those who have read the book, The Da Vinci Code. Some results:
* Catholics more likely to have read it than Protestants
* "Upscale" individuals are four times as likely to have read it than "downscale" ones (household income greater than $60 K & college degree vs. vs. less than $30 K & no college degree)
* The novel shifted the religious thinking of Hispanics, liberals, women (vs. men) and the upscale to a greater extent than other groups
I haven't read the book and to a great extent have checked out of "…
razib | May 21, 2006Interesting article in The Boston Globe which profiles researchers who suggest that variation in gut flora (the mix of bacteria) might be the cause of differences in body weight. Interesting fact: there are an order of magnitude more bacteria in your gut than cells in your body. Also, to my knowledge (hearing this from a microbiologist last year) this gut ecosystem hasn't really been replicated in the lab, so that kind sucks for a scientific understanding beyond description.
Update: An expert comments.
razib | May 21, 2006I talk about religion a lot on this weblog....but to some extent, I think I talk past many of the readers here. Many of my ideas over the past few years in regards to religion have been shaped by the naturalistic program in evolutionary cultural anthropology. The key workers in this area are Dan Sperber, Scott Atran, Pascal Boyer and Lawrence Hirschfeld. In any case, I know I sound gibberishy sometimes. When I first read Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust, I laughed it was so incomprehensible. Nevertheless, after a period of reflection I realized that common sense introspection on questions…
razib | May 21, 2006Reader Mengu Gulmen emailed me about our exchange in regards to how we view the development of the mind:
Mengu: Every decision we make, everything we do and say, is based on the
previous experiences we've had [all we did, all we have learned from
our schools and our families and friends and internet and ....
Myself: This sounds close to tabula rasa. See the cognitive revolution for why
I disagree.
Mengu then sent me this link, and stated:
Our neurodevelopment is closely related with our experiences (what our 'sensors' provide us) throughout our lives. So our thoughts are shaped according…
razib | May 21, 20063 years ago I invited David B to post on Gene Expression (classic), and over the years he's produced some meaty entries which deal with important scientific and cultural issues. Below are 10 posts which I'd like to introduce to Science Blogs readers....
Biological versus cultural evolution
Is culture useful?
Celts and Anglo-Saxons
Once more into the breach
The World Riddle
Defining Group Selection: Price's Equation
Regression to the mean and Galton's Fallacy (not!)
A load of Rawls
Ethnic Genetic Interests: Part 1
Measuring Genetic Diversity
Update: Links fixed.
razib | May 20, 2006There are reports coming out that Angelina Jolie is going into labor. This is improtant, because last year Armand Leroi spoke about the possible relationship between beauty and low mutational load.
Leroi has posited that one way to decrease the effect of load is hybridization. The logic is simple: assume that each human carries multitudinous deleterious alleles, that is, nasty grams on particular genetic loci. If one assumes that these are predominantly recessive so that their negative implications really manifest themselves disproportionately when they are found in two copies, then…
razib | May 20, 2006A new paper in The American Naturalist should interest some in these parts, Placental Invasiveness Mediates the Evolution of Hybrid Inviability in Mammals:
...Here, we show that the maximum genetic distance at which interspecific mammalian pregnancies yield viable neonates is significantly greater in clades with invasive (hemochorial) placentation than in clades with noninvasive (epitheliochorial or endotheliochorial) placentation. Moreover, sister species with invasive placentation exhibit higher allopatry in their geographic ranges, suggesting that formerly separated populations in mammals…
razib | May 20, 2006Rik asks:
Off topic... what's the best argument you've read, contra Dawkins and Dennett, that Christianity is compatible with the scientific worldview?
I had to mull this over because I didn't have a "pat" response. The short of it is that I like have my cake and eat it when it comes to science vs. religion, I think that both the confrontationists (Dawkins et. al.) and reconciliationists (Gould et. al.) go too far. Mostly, this is because I think that "religion" and to a lesser extent "science" can mean different things, and a subset of the pairwise associations will naturally contradict…
razib | May 19, 2006In the comments below Jason Malloy took issue with John Hawks' contention that Creationists "will now cite Eric Lander in support of the idea that hominid fossils are not transitional between apes and humans, but instead are hybrids of apes and humans."
I don't know. Here is a short passage from Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust:
...after reading a bogus article on a new finding from the Dead Sea Scrolls that seemed to contradict Christian doctrine, religious respondents who also believed the story reported their religious beliefs reinforced (Batson 1975)....
My first reaction, from the gut…