razib | March 20, 2006You can watch the whole South Park episode that was never aired on Comedy Central online.
razib | March 20, 2006Just so you know, Brad and Angelina did not get married. What sort of animal signal is this?
razib | March 20, 2006In my post below where I try to synthesize The Superficial and The Causes of Evolution I used the term "fitness." Well...as Matt McIntosh pointed out the term itself is problematic, and so using it as a reference of any sort is really sketchy. Evolgen has slammed the use of "genetic load", and I I think the skepticism is warranted to some extent. The originator of the formula for genetic load, JBS Haldane, famously quipped "fitness is a bugger!" Part of the problem is that the term "fitness" has unique connotations in evolutionary biology. Physical fitness, health and longevity, often…
razib | March 19, 2006Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are classic "beautiful people." By now you know they are going to have a baby. What sort of child will this be? Handbag.com offers you a projection:
Not half bad. Certainly more traditionally beautiful than the Brit Rock look-alike produced by Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck.
Why are Brad Pit and Angelina Jolie so beautiful? Neither of them were raised in dire circumstances, but likely they have a "genetic leg up." In any given population there will be a genetic load, a number of deleterious alleles which decrease average population fitness from the…
razib | March 18, 2006I often read the weblog Sepia Mutiny, and today there was a post about a pair of men flying while brown. They were pulled off the plane and their bags were sent ahead. It was a big foul up. Now, here is the kicker: the men were wearing "traditional" South Asian clothes and skull caps and one of them was reading the Koran. This scared the crap out of a flight attendent. Now, I pointed out that dressing likes this was likely to scare the crap out of people on a plane, so it is a really idiotic modus operandi for a terrorist, so the response was probably irrational. Frankly, the people…
razib | March 18, 2006I was just sent a link to the torrent for last night's showing of The Family that Walks on All Fours.
razib | March 17, 2006Steve Olson in Why We're All Jesus' Children has a gimmicky exposition on the reticulated character of our genealogies. But Olson tries to pull a fast one here:
It gets even stranger. Say you go back 120 generations, to about the year 1000 B.C. According to the results presented in our Nature paper, your ancestors then included everyone in the world who has descendants living today. And if you compared a list of your ancestors with a list of anyone else's ancestors, the names on the two lists would be identical.
The reality is that quantity, not quality, counts, you need to know how many…
razib | March 17, 2006I wonder, do readers know much about "Post Modern" biology? Radio Open Source contacted me about this topic...the thing is that I don't usually pay much attention to the "overthrow" of the "orthodox" doctrine because I don't think these "doctrines" are really adhered to in the same way that Marxism or Christianity are. Science is about change, falsification is a feature and not a bug! Myself, contravention of standard orthodoxy is cool, that means the low hanging fruit might still be around. Epigenetics and phenotypic plasticity seem to be well acknowledged phenomena which might be…
razib | March 16, 2006A recent story of a non-feathered dinosaur in a presumably feathered clade is stirring the pot a bit right now. The importance of shared derived characters in systematics is one reason that something like feathers tends to elicit a response from many scientists, since one character might result in the reworking of the tree of life. But there are other ways to study feathers aside from paleontology, in particular, I point you to the work of Richard Prum (in particular, this paper) and Matthew Harris. Development and genetics can be crucial supplements to the fossil evidence in this case,…
razib | March 15, 2006John Hawks has a piece in Slate critiquing the recent scientific genealogy trend. Congrats for John for going "mainstream," and kudos for Slate to contributing something substantive to the discourse. And I've noted before, most of the people taking the tests won't find out anything they don't know....
razib | March 15, 2006In my post below there is a reference to fast evolution in a relatively slow-breeding species, H. sapiens. For this to be plausible you need high selection coefficients, that is, the difference between mean population fitness and the fitness of those who are carrying the favorable allele. How plausible is this? R.A. Fisher argued against selection coefficients of large effect because he believed that mutations of large effect would usually "overshoot" the idealized fitness peak, and it was mutations of small gradual effect which were the real drivers of evolution. But recent work has…
razib | March 14, 2006Chris of Mixing Memory has a long post on the cognitive science of evolutionary biology, or, more precisely, how people tend to interpret and perceive evolutionary biology. The whole post is worth reading (and linking if you have a weblog). I hit upon some of the points in my post Endless Forms Most Continuous, but Chris points out three primary blocks to an acceptance of evolutionary biology:
1) Intuitive theism, the tendency to see design in complex objects and phenomena.
2) Intuitive essentialism, the tendency to not frame populations as populations as opposed to iterations of an…
razib | March 13, 2006The t-shirts which depict the "ascent of man" from hairy semi-ape to upright Homo sapiens might make you think that human evolution has been trivial since the emergence of our own species. Modern genomics suggests this isn't so, selection coefficients on the order of 1-10% are probably rather normal, and iterated over hundreds of generations that could result in a nontrivial amount of change on a quantitative trait.
I bring this up because a few days ago in The New York Times a piece was published titled The Twists and Turns of History, and of DNA. Greg Cochran (interest divulgence, a…
razib | March 12, 2006I am going to cut & paste whole a comment from Jemima Harrison of Passionate Productions, who is behind the upcoming documentary about the family who exhibits quadruped locomotion:
The mutation on 17p has been identified by a Turkish/German team in Berlin headed by Professor Stefan Mundlos. They suggest, some would say controversially, that this mutation could have knocked out a gene that plays a role in bipedal walking, atavastically exposing an earlier form of walking.
Professor Humphrey believes, however, that this mutation has merely caused the cerebellar hypoplasia confirmed by MRI…
razib | March 11, 2006I commented on the "throwback family" a few days ago, well, The Times (of London) has two articles which reduce the likelihood of this being a hoax in my mind. It seems clear that there is a family, highly inbred, which lives in Turkey where a number of the children walk on all fours and exhibit other forms of impairment.
Nevertheless, the exact details of what is going on here is problematic to me. As usual, the newspapers tend to garble and confuse many issues. Consider this sentence: "All five are brain-damaged because of a mutation in a gene 17p, located on chromosome 17, which…
razib | March 10, 2006Everyone and their mother has commented on the water found on Enceladus. There is speculation about life. If life doesn't exist on Enceladus, and to a good second approximation we should know in a few decades, I suggest seeding the moon with Terran organisms that might be able to survive and flourish. In a few decades genetic engineering might also progress to a point where exotic prokaryote metabolisms could be synthesized with the physiology of more complex aquatic organisms.
Nuts? Yeah, probably, but so what. I don't believe that God exists, but I suspect It might in the future.…
razib | March 10, 2006An author of the paper on recent human evolution was interviewed for the last 15 minutes of the first hour of Science Friday. The audio archive will be available soon. Also, I hear that you'll see a new article on this paper in The New York Times this weekend, so check for Nick Wade's byline.
razib | March 9, 2006By now some of you have heard of the family that walks on all fours. I got a tip on this story weeks ago from World Science, which has been tracking this for a while and has a new update from a researcher that says this is a "credible" empirical finding. I didn't really intend to post about this for the following reasons:
1) A high probability that it is a hoax. The British media was the first mainstream organ to really take off with this, and they aren't known for their scientific credibility (Nature, The Daily Telegraph is not). Additionally, the findings are coming out of the heart of…
razib | March 9, 2006Which sense do you value the most? I think many people, if they had to choose, would stick to their vision as the must-have sense. One thing that I want to get beyond on this blog is the tendency to find the one-gene-that-causes-all phenomenon. This tendency to fix on genes of large and singular affect, traditional Mendelian phenotypes like cystic fibrosis (a recessive disease), has been dictated by the lack of power of and limitations in studying quantitative traits, where I think the real uncharted territory is going to be with the next few decades. Nevertheless, a new paper in Nature…