razib | March 8, 2006In a comment a post below Oran Kelly states:
The findings are interesting, but I don't think the populace at large is going to have to rethink their assumptions about life.
Sometimes you need to be explicit, so here I will make clear what I believe is implicit in many of my posts because it is important in framing how I view people, and how I believe they think. For example, consider evolution. To some extent Science Blogs might be called Evolution Blogs, not only is there is a strong bias toward biology, but there is a strong bias toward discussing evolution and the Intelligent Design…
razib | March 7, 2006Nick Wade in The New York Times has a piece out titled Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story, based on a paper published today in PLOS, A Map of Recent Positive Selection in the Human Genome. This paper is an extension of the research project that emerges out of the International HapMap Project. In short the HapMap is an assay of ~300 individuals from 3 populations, European Americans from Utah, ethnic Yorubas from Nigeria, and a collection of Japanese and Chinese. What can a few hundred individuals tell you? A lot.
Wade's piece is a soft landing survey of the major points. His…
razib | March 6, 2006Results below (via Grrlscientist).
Other science bloggers results:Kevin VranesGrrlscientist
You scored as English. You should be an English major! Your passion lies in writing and expressing yourself creatively, and you hate it when you are inhibited from doing so. Pursue that interest of yours!
English
100%
Biology
100%
Mathematics
100%
Philosophy
100%
Engineering
100%
Psychology
92%
Anthropology
92%
Chemistry
83%
Sociology
83%
Theater
67%
Art
67%
Journalism
58%
Linguistics
42%
Dance
42%
What is your Perfect Major? (…
razib | March 6, 2006Evolgen points me to the fact that even our hosts here at Seed are spreading the "blondes are going to go extinct" hoax/meme which first cropped up 3 years ago. I also noticed that someone as informed about biology as John Wilkins was was taken in. An altered iteration of this hoax/meme that focused on redheads was also spreading last year. As Evolgen notes, this meme has been thoroughly debunked. To make it short, if you assume that blondness is a monogenic recessive trait (a gross simplification), its expression in the population will be q2, derived from Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium p2 +…
razib | March 5, 2006This story about the consumption of Bonobos is getting a lot of circulation today. Several years ago there was a book published on this topic, Eating Apes, so this shouldn't surprise anyone. To some extent the "ape eating" stories are partly fueled by P.T. Barnum like fascination, I believe that ape consumption is cognitively redolent of cannibalism, without quite fitting the bill. The stories about ape consumption in Africa highlight two opposing tendencies, the first to treat apes as just another food source, and the second to consider apes a form of human. It seems likely to me that…
razib | March 5, 2006I listened to Dan Dennett on the most recent Tech Nation with Moira Gunn (not online yet), and he went on about the ideas proposed in his book Breaking the Spell. Some of the ideas were interesting, though I've read more well developed versions in most of the supporting literature. Nevertheless, Dennett's schtick that those who think that religious people can't analyze their beliefs rationally are being patronizing seems really laughable to me. Most atheists I know have a hard time getting around the fact that many people who are extremely bright (no pun intended in the context of Dennett…
razib | March 5, 2006Check this hilarious site, Indians are Asian. I think you can appreciate it even if you are demelanized and round-eyed!
via Sepia Mutiny.
razib | March 4, 2006Since everyone else is, I took this quiz, and I should be on....
You scored as Moya (Farscape). You are surrounded by muppets. But that is okay because they are your friends and have shown many times that they can be trusted. Now if only you could stop being bothered about wormholes.
Moya (Farscape)
81%
Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix)
75%
Serenity (Firefly)
75%
Deep Space Nine (Star Trek)
75%
Babylon 5 (Babylon 5)
63%
Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda)
56%
Millennium Falcon (Star Wars)
56%
Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica)
56%
Enterprise D (Star Trek…
razib | March 4, 2006Dan Jones has a very thorough review of the recent paper in Nature which argues that negative epistasis will emerge out of sexual reproduction and so perpetuate itself. The only thing I'll add is what W.D. Hamilton noted in Narrow Roads of Gene Land, questions of fitness need to be evaluated over the long term, rather than just across a few generations. Also check out the lead author's blog.
Related: Through the rugged roads of gene land.
razib | March 3, 2006USA Today has coffee shop rankings up. I've been to two on the list, Stumptown in Portland, and Caffe Dante in Greenwich Village. All I've got to say is that Caffe Dante is weak compared to Stumptown's muddy blend. They should have kept World Cup on the list. Frankly, Starbucks was the best coffee I found in New York. Pacific Northwest representing!
razib | March 3, 2006I saw this post about human population diversity the other day...and though it was interesting, there was something that stuck in my craw:
Actually, this will be sharper for genes under selection, since selection should be weaker in bottleneck populations.
I don't think this is true. Selection isn't weaker, random genetic drift is stronger. Consider the probability of fixation of a new mutation. If the mutation is neutral so selection is non-existent its frequency is being buffeted only by random genetic drift. As you probably know, the probability of fixation is 1/(2Ne), where Ne is…
razib | March 2, 2006Life is about choices made in the context of scarcity and constraint. In an ideal world (OK, my ideal world) I would be dictator, and all would do my bidding and satisify most proximate desires. Alas, it doesn't work that way. We all have to jump through hoops to get where we want. Whatever our core, or ultimate, values, most people have to compromise to fulfill them. If you are a religious soul for whom God and family are the summum bonum of your existence, well, by the nature of your two ultimate ends you can't go into the cloister or spend all your waking hours with your family. You…
razib | February 28, 2006I'm calling out for evolution & genetics raps on my other weblog. A few players have represented, but not nearly enough. I mean, if the Assemblies of God could produce Scott Stapp, surely the evolution & genetics community has some freestylin' thugs lurking in the shadows?
razib | February 28, 2006I have a friend who is a graduate student in evolutionary biology at an elite university...and she told me that when she went to a seminar on adaptive landscapes...everyone was making hand movements and gesturing wildly. She pantomimed it out for me, it was pretty funny.
razib | February 28, 2006Here is a popular press piece on Geert Vermaij's paper in PNAS where he argues that evolution is not highly contingent process on particular historical events, in other words, if you rewound the clock and let it flow the rivers would occupy the same channels. These ideas seem rather similar to those of Simon Conway Morris. In the end, I think this might be a "hillist vs. mountainist" issue, draw a conceptual line somewhere, give it a label and defend your position like hell. All the while characterize your position as reasonable and moderate and caricature your "opponents" so that they…
razib | February 27, 2006This new Science Blog is hilarious. I love their tagline!
Update: OK, I take it back. What kind of dreamworld do these bitches think they're living in? I post something EDT giving props to their blog, and they're still on top of the Science Blogs front page because they posted at "5 P.M." It's 11 AM while I write, what the hell? Are these fuckers on another continent or something???
Yo cousins, new boys don't jump to the front of the line!
razib | February 26, 2006Just found this web site that has a good bibliography of R.A. Fisher's work. Good supplement to the R.A. Fisher digital archive. Why do I obsess with Fisher? First, ANOVA is ubiquitous. Second, stories like this would shock & awe a lot less if people read The Correlation Between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance (PDF of full paper). Now, the text of the paper can be rather opaque, and the dancing flow of algebraic manipulations and moments magic can elude your grasp, but the gist is simple: the variance components of the offspring of heterozygous parents can be…
razib | February 26, 2006Nathanial Blake, editor of the conservative campus publication at Oregon State University, has a good piece addressing the issue of evolution and evangelicals over at the Town Hall website. He points out that even C.S. Lewis, that exemplar of modern Protestant Christian orthodoxy, accepted evolutionary theory. The coupling of anti-evolutionary feeling and a segment of conservative Protestant movement goes to show that culture can tack in bizarre directions not under control from on high, the fact is that evolution was generally a marginal issue in early 20th century Christian circles, and…
razib | February 24, 2006Norm Levitt throws an excellent broadside against Steve Fuller (yes, it is a polemic, but a delicious one!).
Update: Ron in the comments suggests we be cautious about accepting Levitt's jeremiad in its totality. He concludes:
And from our own point of view, we must view the whole universe, including those parts which the candle of our scientific knowledge does not reveal. In this effort, religion, understood as the rational ordering of our values, ethics, wisdom and compassion, is an indispensable guide.
A does not imply Z here. That is, I cautioned that Levitt's piece was a "polemic" and…