razib | April 30, 2006Here is a long article titled Catholicism and Evolution which covers a lot of ground and seems pretty accurate. The interesting thing though is that this is published at Islam Online. Weird huh?
razib | April 28, 2006There's a hilarious, and often thoughtful, comment thread over at The American Scene. Ross Douthat is a Roman Catholic, and many of his readers are serious intellectual Christians. So, I am always interested when they object to the bizarre and obviously anthropogenic hocus-pocus of Mormonism. Some snips of interest:
dude, mormans are weird. let's just face it. the whole thing makes me giggle when I talk about it. golden tablets . . . the whole thing is goofy-times.
[later]
Because the theology is "weird," and the history is even weirder. Captain Moroni? Golden tablets? Steve Young gets his…
razib | April 28, 2006The lion roars...by the way, in case anyone cared, my evil black cat is only up to three birds this spring. I think the worst is over.
Update: More cat below the fold.
razib | April 27, 2006Over at John Hawks, Has the dam broken on mtDNA selection?. I don't know if this matters that much scientifically since non-human phylogeography tends to be more cautious than the field of historical human population genetics, but it matters a lot for the public which has been habituated to a steady stream of mitochondrial data being interpreted by popularizers and the press since African Eve.
razib | April 26, 2006There is a preprint in the website of The American Journal of Human Genetics titled "Genetic variation in the CCL18 - CCL3 - CCL4 chemokine gene cluster influences HIV-1 transmission and AIDS disease progression." The title is a mouthful, but the short of it is what we've known for a long time, that human genetic variatian responds differently to HIV infection (or the risk of infection). This is surely going to be important, not because the science is a priori killer, but because AIDS is a big public policy issue. Back in the 1990s some people were talking about HIV resulting in the…
razib | April 26, 2006Greg Cochran's comment below is worth turning into a post:
There's more to it than that. Tribes often have extremely limited HLA variation, contain only a small subset of the variation that you see in a wider set of Amerindians. Whereas in the old world, even little tiny groups with very low gene flow have lots of different HLA alleles. [Cavalli-Sforza 1994] You'd think that they'd lose those rare alleles by drift, but they don't - has to be frequency-dependent selection, the same force that has kept alleles around for tens of millions of years. But in the Americas, it appears that those…
razib | April 25, 2006Evolgen says:
Let's focus on two things: the hypothetical deductive method and essential information that you must know to be able to read the science section of a newspaper.
Hm. Amen. Sort of. Scientists in many fields needed to be straight-jacketed into the "hypothetico-deductive" model for a reason. I remember a phylogeneticist telling a group of us why the hypothetico-deductive method was crucial in his own work, before his time taxonomists would get into arguments where they would justify their opinion about systematic relationships with an operational "Cuz I said so!" Testing…
razib | April 25, 2006The San Jose Mercury News has a review up of Ann Gibbons' The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors. It concludes:
But too many pieces are still missing from the puzzle -- including fossils of the ancestors of our closest relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas -- to allow for a clear picture of the evolutionary lineage.
So in the end, ``The First Human'' is a bit like a detective story without a conclusion, or like a detective story that puts Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Sam Spade, V.I. Warshawski, Easy Rawlins and Gil Grissom all in the same room, gives them a handful…
razib | April 24, 2006Earlier this week I hinted that I had a priori genetic reasons for being skeptical of a "two wave" theory for the peopling of the New World. Well, I was going to do some literature searches and slap something together that was meaty, but I don't have time, so I'll just offer up an attenuated but sufficient outline of what my issue is.
First, look at this map and note the "Amerindians" and other populations. Now, look at this table and note the level of heterozygosity of Amerindians vs. other populations. In short, Amerindians are notoriously genetically homogenous on the MHC loci compared…
razib | April 24, 2006John put up his last thoughts on race, and Evolgen chimed in with his ruminations.
First, nice exchange. Quick points....
1) I'm not hung up on a word. If you want to agree on another word that captures what I'm trying to say, I'm willing to go along with it.
2) One key point I want to make is that we should be cautious about relying on Lewontin's 85% intragroup vs. 15% intergroup data. Evolution and genetics are sciences of some subtly, and one can not draw a straight line between statistical data and pithy verbal conclusions. Context and framing matters a lot. What exactly does "…
razib | April 24, 2006Check out John Hawks' commentary on this story about chimpanzees attacking a taxi and killing the driver. Never forget that we are a relatively gracile species.
razib | April 23, 2006John responds to the "race" response from Matt & I. I'm not interested in making a point-by-point response to the response because I don't think the "objective" difference in opinion is that great, rather, it seems to be that we are clashing in the turbulent waters of nominalism.
First, I will respond to what I believe is the perception by John that I am conceiving of race as an essential and fundamental taxonomical unit. I don't hold to that. I've rejected the Platonic conception of race before. The problem that "race based public policy" often has is that the legal system is…
razib | April 22, 2006John Wilkins has a post on race where he expresses skepticism about its biological reality. He comment was in response to a post on my other blog (by another individual), but I'll stand by it.
I've talked abut race in the past, and I'm not into the topic at this point since it is going over old ground, but a few quick responses....
Re: Lewontin's point about 85% within group vs. 15% between group variance, that is true, at one locus, but it ignores the correlation structure across loci. This is elucidated by mathematical geneticist Anthony Edwards in his paper from a few years back (PDF…
razib | April 21, 2006Just a note for those of you who don't read my other weblog, Greg Cochran has two new ideas that we're trying to guess at. First, he's got a new theory about the origin/evolution about the Hobbits of Flores. Second, he thinks it might be a possibility that there are living Neandertals. Anyway, I'm throwing this out there because I won't be too surprised if Greg can convince Nick Wade to write a story in the Grey Lady about this stuff at some point in the near future....
razib | April 21, 2006How deep do the seams of tolerance run in this country? Sometimes you wonder...ultimately, I'm pessimistic about the human love of liberty. I tend to agree with Matt McIntosh that to some extent American defense of individual freedoms is based on custom & tradition rather than reasoned acceptance of core principles. In any case I had a book on my shelf which I just had some spare time to open today, America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity, and I saw this table:
Spiritual Shoppers (%)
Christian Inclusivists(%)
Christian Exclusivists(%)
All Respondents (%)
Percentage who said…
razib | April 20, 2006Check out this cool paper in PLOS Genetics:
In this first application of the approximate Bayesian computation approach using the serial coalescent, we demonstrated the estimation of historical demographic parameters from ancient DNA. We estimated the timing and severity of a population bottleneck in an endemic subterranean rodent, Ctenomys sociabilis, over the last 10,000 y from two cave sites in northern Patagonia, Argentina....We found a decrease from a female effective population size of 95,231 to less than 300 females at 2,890 y before present: a 99.7% decline. Our study demonstrates the…
razib | April 20, 2006Since I will use vulgar language, this post will be mostly below the fold.
This commenter asked me to justify a claim, to which I responded by calling him an asshole. The reason is simple, the question is a simple factual query which could have been answered by checking the source I cited. The reality is that adding links to my posts take time, but I do so on the theory that readers will take some time out of their day and follow the links to make sure they fulfill their obligation toward due diligence. Sure, I could have simply responded "check the link," but I didn't like the tone of the…
razib | April 19, 2006The late 4th century witnessed the death of the pagan world and the rise of the early medieval era. Today, our culture focuses on the here & now and we neglect the past. But the past is important because we can learn from the rivers explored by our ancestors. In our modern age of religious pluralism, poised between the past and the future, I am often struck by how apropos the dispute between the pagan Prefect of Rome, Symmachus, and the great Christian cleric Ambrose, seems.
Here is Symmachus:
The divine Mind has distributed different guardians and different cults to different cities…
razib | April 19, 2006Richard Dawkins pioneered the popularization of the "selfish gene" concept in the book of the same name in the 1970s, and yet it is clear that most people haven't really internalized this idea. Otherwise, how to explain the success of books like The Journey of Man and The Seven Daughters of Eve which explicitly conflate population history and gene history to the point where one would assume a 1:1 covariance.
In the post below I pointed to a paper, Local extinction and recolonization, species effective population size, and modern human origins, which shows how more non-trivially simple models…