razib | February 12, 2006Anyone who has long read my other weblog knows I have a strong interest in several historical questions. With John Emerson I share a deep interest in Central Asian history, so with that in mind, I point you to the refurbished essay (it has maps!) 2000 years of barbarians in 50 minutes.
razib | February 12, 2006Diana of Letter from Gotham expresses some of what I've been thinking. I am rather uninspired by what I perceive as the relative silence on the Left and the swarming hysterics on the Right.1 Though I tend to sympathize with the suspicion of Islam evinced by many on the Right, I have commented on the problems with a singular focus on reiteration of values in a vacuum of empirically driven analysis, and attempted to address the issue obliquely later in the form of a post. As for the silence of the Left, I am silent myself because the gut reaction is so inchoate and underwhelming.
Addendum: I…
razib | February 12, 2006Today is Darwin Day. Chris at Mixing Memory has qualms about the name, and suggests "Evolution Day" as a more appropriate celebratory appellation in keeping with the spirit of Charles Darwin's scientific insights. I tend to have sympathies with Chris' point, though I would assert that Darwin was the Newton, not the Kepler, of evolutionary biology. Many scientists observed the reality of evolution and formulated "laws" before and after his time, but it was Darwin who placed natural selection upon heritable variation at the center of the process of evolutionary change over time. But Chris'…
razib | February 11, 2006I've commented on the African American Lives series a few times. One thing I've said in other threads is that these massively more data rich ancestry analysis tests aren't going to tell you anything you don't already know in 99% of the cases. That doesn't mean that it's not worth it to get tested, but if the kit costs you hundreds or thousands of dollars, most people are really better off passing I think. When these tests get down to the $10-20 range then I'll be sanguine if a friend of mine starts mooting the possibility of purchasing a kit. By analogy, I wouldn't get worked up over a $…
razib | February 10, 2006Science & Spirit has a long piece that reports on the outreach toward some churches on the part of anti-Creationist activists.
razib | February 10, 2006Yesterday in my conversation with David Miller I told him I didn't think that the new autosomal "ancestry" tests really delivered the extent of separability of ancestral quanta that most people really expect. Well, look at this principal component chart that Dienekes put up from a paper published by Dr. Mark Shriver. Granted, these tests are good at differentiating continental races...but many people want to know if they are "pure Hakka" or "pure German," as opposed to Cantonese whose ancestors picked up the Hakka dialect or Slavic Sorbs who were Germanized. In terms of the autosomal tests…
razib | February 10, 2006I fancy myself good at geography. I took this quiz, and are my results: 35 out of 50 states perfect, average error 27 miles, 70% in 494 sec.
Via GrrlScientist.
razib | February 9, 2006Blonde children exhibit more fear response? A new paper reports:
...Hair pigmentation was found to be significantly associated with behavioral inhibition in the sense that blond children exhibited higher fear scores. As in American samples, blue-eyed children had a higher fear score than did other children, but this difference was not statistically significant.
Jerome Kagan has reported these sort of findings before. Coloration is a funny trait, for example, there is now evidence that Europeans are highly constrained on one locus which affects complexion, while being high polymorphic on…
razib | February 9, 2006Years ago on the now cancelled show Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher Peter Coyote was on a panel with a Republican pundit. They were discussing the issue of flag burning, and the latter asked Coyote why he remained in this country if he thought it was OK to burn its flag. Coyote responded, "Because in this country, I can." To this the Republican pundit could only smile and respond, "touche." There are many values that as an American I cherish, but freedom is the queen of them all.
razib | February 9, 2006About 1/4 of the way into the Radio Open Source The Al-Jazeera Effect episode Brendan mentions my comments regarding the science of genealogy (he notes that I'm "producing" their show for them). I just talked to David, the staffer that started that thread, this afternoon, and we bounced some ideas off each other. So, the moral is that blogging gets results!
In related news, Dienekes has a review of some of the findings in African American Lives.
razib | February 8, 2006NPR has a piece, Evangelical Leaders Urge Action on Climate Change. Paging Chris Mooney for commentary (and Ed Brayton).
You can see the full list of signatories here, I was surprised that some heavy hitters are on the list. For example, the presidents of Calvin College, Wheaton College and Whitworth College. This isn't selection biased from the liberal wing of the evangelical movement (though some of those are there). Calvin is American's premier Reformed liberal arts institution, and produced Alvin Platinga, the Protestant philosopher in the United States. Wheaton has been called the "…
razib | February 8, 2006As I have said before, sometimes you actually have to play the game. An interesting thing that surprised me years ago was that the time until fixation of a highly deleterious allele was lower than a neutral allele. In other words, if you had an allele with negative fitness implications the time it takes to traverse 0% to 100% on the frequency chart for the population will be shorter than for one with no fitness implication (neutral fixation in generations is 4 * effective population size). Why? Because for a highly deleterious allele to fix it has to do it quickly, selection works…
razib | February 7, 2006Radio Open Source is going to do a show on The Genetics of Genealogy. I've recently expressed some skepticism about many of the tests peddled by corporations and their scientist promoters, so I'm primed to jump into this discussion. I have already offered a few comments, and will probably post more as the show comes up. Until then, I also highly recommend John Hawks' comment on this topic.
Update: On Point with Tom Ashbrook interviewed Henry Louis Gates Jr. on his new series African American Lives, which leverages genetic science in exploring the genealogy of many prominent black Americans…
razib | February 6, 2006What is a hill? I mean, how do you define a hill as opposed to a mountain, or, flat, level ground. The reality is that all surfaces on the planet which aren't artificial seem to have discontinuities and wrinkles on the macroscale.1 Here is a dictionary definition:
A well-defined natural elevation smaller than a mountain.
That is rather vague. Is a small mound of dirt that my cousin made a "hill." And what is a mountain? Here is a definition:
A natural elevation of the earth's surface having considerable mass, generally steep sides, and a height greater than that of a hill.
Since a…
razib | February 5, 2006Update: Trivial prediction: more Muslims will die because of "protests" and riots because of the Danish cartoons than non-Muslims.
Matt McIntosh has posted a piece titled We Have Met the Enemy, and He Is Us at my other blog. It has spawned a lot of comments. Many people were offended by the way Matt couched his thought experiment and the character of his exposition. I jumped in to defend him, and below is a somewhat florid summation at the end of the thread (excuse the lack of capitalization, it is not an affectation, just a way to save keystrokes when I'm entering comments):
ok, here is…
razib | February 3, 2006One of the things that really pisses me off about the Evolution-Creation "debate" is that it uses up oxygen that could be profitably allotted to documenting the tsunami of data emerging out of the "post-genomic" era. The actual examination of evolution is not just an academic exercise, as much of the recent work coming out of laboratories deals with humans.1 For example, Dienekes points me to this preprint in The American Journal of Human Genetics, Spread of an inactive form of caspase-12 in humans due to recent positive selection:
...There is strong evidence for positive selection from…
razib | February 2, 2006Wired has an article up about urban coyotes:
...coyotes are thriving in city suburbs like Itasca and Palatine Village, and have even been spotted in the heart of Chicago's metropolitan area.
They've also been sighted in other major urban areas, including St. Louis, Minneapolis, Detroit, Cleveland and Boston, Gehrt said -- a result, in part, of increased urban sprawl and coyotes' adaptability.
Update: It's been pointed out to me that Seed has already covered this topic.
razib | February 2, 2006Instead of an update, I want to specifically point readers to Evolgen's extended post on the nearly neutral theory. He takes my 10 yard pass on genetic drift and jukes and jives all the way to the end zone (with a good block from John Hawks). The take home message is that science is about successively more accurate approximations of nature, with the caveat that in probabilistic field like much of genetics the "answer" is the most likely explanation (expectation), around which there will be exceptions to the rule galore (variance). Chad's initial post seems to have been a little epidemic in…
razib | February 2, 2006John Derbyshire compliments me a bit in his January Diary over at NRO, under "Jeunesse." Who wouldn't link to someone patting them on the back? He takes a jab at Intelligent Design under "The Blogger's Life." Derb's almost finished reading Mark Ridley's Evolution, I'm praying he'll mention his insights in another column and keep taking a stand against what he considers a "folk religion." His new book, Unknown Quantity: A Real And Imaginary History of Algebra, should be out sometime in April.
razib | February 1, 2006From the BBC: Muhammad cartoon row intensifies: Newspapers across Europe have reprinted caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to show support for a Danish paper whose cartoons have sparked Muslim outrage. I have posted comments over at Ed Brayton's weblog on this topic, they are verbose, but they encapsulate many slivers of my thinking. I will assume you know the general outline of this story, so, from the BBC piece:
Newspapers across Europe are reprinting the offensive cartoons to show solidarity with the Danish paper.
An editor at a French newspaper was sacked over this by the owner, his…