razib | May 11, 2006OK, some fluff...it seems that the Greek Neo-Pagans have received permission to worship in pagan temples. That might sound obvious, but most pagan temples in Greece are historic treasures, and so the purview of the government. The Greek Orthodox Church is not happy:
But Greece's powerful Orthodox Church takes a less charitable view, accusing the worshippers of idolatry and "poisonous New Age practices".
Father Eustathios Kollas, who presides over the community of Greek priests, said: "They are a handful of miserable resuscitators of a degenerate dead religion who wish to return to the…
razib | May 11, 2006...because they die!!!!. I got to thinking about this when I saw this article titled Leaving the Wild, and Rather Liking the Change, about the emergence of an isolated tribal population into the Columbian mainstream. This caught my eye:
Though it is unclear how big the Nukak population once was, anthropologists believe that what little contact the Nukak have had with outsiders has most likely left them reduced by Western diseases, including influenza and the common cold, to which they have no natural defenses.
Read 1491 by Charles C. Mann, and you'll see that unfortunately the decimation…
razib | May 10, 2006Evolgen points me to another paper about positive selection for an allele which doesn't always help us out. Intelligent Designer my ass, Mr. Omnipofuck-up needs to go back to bioengineering school!
razib | May 9, 2006A friend of mine, a biology graduate student, emailed me the following:
i did recently get in an argument with a fellow student (and friend) because he said he thought he was verging on being a militant agnostic eugenicist, but i said being a militant agnostic was idiotic because agnostics are just pussies. That got a big response from a few people around me.
I laughed for a while at that. Sometimes I feel decisively ambivalent.
Postscript: Just a note to those who find the use of the term "pussies" offensive and sexist, my correspondent is female. And one bad-ass-bitch at that.
razib | May 9, 2006A new paper by Daniel Kruger posits a general framework for why women tend to live longer than males across cultures when environment is equalized (obviously there are cultures where strong sex bias in quality of life is more important than underlying genotypic variation). The idea is simple, it is a spin off of antagonistic pleiotropy where males tend to engage in risky behavior when young and so increase their mortality in the interests of increasing their potential reproductive value. Additionally, for a host of of genetic and physiological reasons we are also susceptible to many…
razib | May 9, 2006I would like to give a heads up that the last volume of W.D. Hamilton's papers are out, Narrow Roads of Gene Land, The Collected Papers of W. D. Hamilton Volume 3: Last Words. Of course, you should check our volume 1, on social theory, and volume 2, the evolution of sex. If you don't know who Hamilton is, you should. Matt Ridley and Richard Dawkins as we know them are in large part due to Hamilton's body of work, from his gene-centered social models to exploration of the "Red Queen" theory of the origins of sex. Hamilton's hero early in life was the great evolutionary biologist R.A.…
razib | May 8, 2006Weird finding:
A mutation in a gene commonly associated with deafness can play an important part in improving wound healing, a scientist told the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, today (Monday 8 May 2006). Dr. Stella Man, from the Institute of Cell and Molecular Sciences, Queen Mary's University, London, UK, said that the discovery may have implications for the treatment of a wide range of wounds, including post-surgery.
...
Professor Kelsell was the first to describe the link between Cx26 mutations and deafness in 1997. "Since many…
razib | May 6, 2006Over the past few years I have cast a skeptical eye at human phylogeography. Researchers like Spencer Wells have parlayed the study of uniparental lineages into books and television specials. Taking gene trees constructed from the Y chromosome Wells fashions the story of our species, in particular, of men. The problem of course is that Wells is looking at the lineage of the Y chromosome only! Humans are not neat little vacuum packages, nor are populations, rather, we are messy amalgamations of discrete genetic coalitions which are always in flux. Primed by our cultural mythologies and…
razib | May 6, 2006I really don't know what to make of this paper I just stumbled upon, The Structures of Letters and Symbols throughout Human History Are Selected to Match Those Found in Objects in Natural Scenes:
...Our first result is that these three classes of human visual sign possess a similar signature in their configuration distribution, suggesting that there are underlying principles governing the shapes of human visual signs. Second, we provide evidence that the shapes of visual signs are selected to be easily seen at the expense of the motor system. Finally, we provide evidence to support an…
razib | May 5, 2006Seed is asking which invention I'd uninvent. My reflexive response is atomic weapons. I want to emphasize weapons because I think nuclear energy is going to be important, just as James Lovelock does. But if I was God who could change the world by fiat, well, atomic weapons would probably be it. Now, I say this with the convinction that I suspect more lives would be lost between 1945-2000 than in the "atomic age." I think convential wars would be more brutal and more frequent than under the specter of the nuclear apocolypse. But, I suspect in my lifetime some idiotic small banana republic…
razib | May 5, 2006Recently I stumbled on to this long article, titled Race and the Church, which examines racism and racial theory from a Catholic perspective. I don't have time to comment in detail. Obviously there are many issues I would have with the piece, but, I will offer that I tend to be of the opinion that the ideology of European racial supremacy was something special, and that uniqueness was connected to the rise of modern science. Xenophobia and prejudice are a common theme which unites many cultures, but the coupling of European military-political ascendancy in the 19th century with the prestige…
razib | May 4, 2006I see that UC Davis is touting that its ecology & evolutionary biology program was ranked #1 by US News and World Report. Check out the "Best Graduate Schools" online sampler at US News and World Report. I had a friend who narrowly chose Harvard over Davis for evolutionary ecology, so it doesn't surprise me that much. In ecology & evolutionary biology Berkeley & Harvard were #2 & #3 respectively.
Does this mean anything? I don't know, I don't really think so on the most basic of levels: do US News & World Report's graduate school rankings give you information you wouldn…
razib | May 3, 2006Pten Regulates Neuronal Arborization and Social Interaction in Mice:
...PTEN mutations in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have also been reported, although a causal link between PTEN and ASD remains unclear. In the present study, we deleted Pten in limited differentiated neuronal populations in the cerebral cortex and hippocampus of mice. Resulting mutant mice showed abnormal social interaction and exaggerated responses to sensory stimuli...Thus, our data suggest that abnormal activation of the PI3K/AKT pathway in specific neuronal populations can underlie macrocephaly and…
razib | May 3, 2006Some reader emailed me to explain that my secret identity has been blown. Well, you can read about it here. But note that I'm staying positive. Remember, Clay sold more than Reuben. Yes, I love science, but singing is my soul!
razib | May 2, 2006Mike Lynch and Bruce Walsh are working on a "sequel" to Genetics and Analysis of Quantitative Traits. Thanks to the glory of the internet you can read draft chapters of Evolution and Selection of Quantitative Traits in PDF form.
razib | May 2, 2006 Study: Geography Greek to young Americans:
...33 percent could not point out Louisiana on a U.S. map....
...showed that 88 percent of those questioned could not find Afghanistan on a map of Asia....
..."half or fewer of young men and women 18-24 can identify the states of New York or Ohio on a map [50 percent and 43 percent, respectively],"....
But I'm sure many could pinpoint Britney Spears' butt crack.
The reality is that most humans are not interested in "world affairs" (aside from The World Cup). Not only is their interest lacking, they don't possess that much native intelligence. We…
razib | May 1, 2006The New York Times has an article that reviews the problems with peer review. I don't know what to think, as it has something of the "and the other side says" air to it, never really coming to any conclusion. There's a lot of shoddy crap being published in stuff like the Tuvan Journal of Entomology, and always has been, but the big issue is when crap gets into Science and Nature. Ultimately science is a social enterprise based on trust and long term self-correction. There's a lot of noise in the system, but I don't see any other alternative out there.
One issue that I've been wondering…