razib | February 1, 2006Chad Orzel is asking about misconceptions in science that irritate. Evolgen and Afarensis have chimed in. My problem is not an misconception, it is a pet peeve. As I've noted before, random genetic drift is a catchall explanation for everything.
I am not saying drift is not powerful, it is the basis for the neutral theory of molecular evolution. This theory states that the rate of substitution on a neutral locus is proportional to the rate of mutation. Substitution would be when you have allele X at 99% frequency at time 1 and allele Y at 99% frequency at time 2 on a particular locus…
razib | January 31, 2006I've been getting queries about the ear wax paper...below the fold I've copied table 1, which shows the frequencies of the haplotypes in various populations.
First, note the sample sizes.
Keep these sample sizes in mind as you try to get an understanding of the clines the authors were talking about.
Greg Cochran points out that since dry ear wax is a recessive trait it seems plausible that the phenotype being selected is different. It might be dominant or additive so that a total approach toward fixation of the allele would not be necessary for the fitness to be maximized. Consider the…
razib | January 31, 2006
The Guardian has a piece titled Steve Fuller: Designer trouble, in reference to testimony that the aforementioned professor gave to the Dover court. After reading the article I have to say that I'm not surprised that he testified, he seems to not be of any camp aside from that of Steve Fuller, and oh how he loves himself. Fuller notes that "It is not like people love you for doing this" in reference to his pro-ID testimony at Dover. Sure, but it gets you 1400 word write ups in The Guardian, along with putting "social epistemology"1 on the map that has to make you somebody.
razib | January 31, 2006When I use terms not in regular circulation like linkage disequilibrium, or those which I suspect aren't as well understood as I think they should be, like random genetic drift, I usually make reference to the companion website to Mark Ridley's text Evolution (if you followed the links to the terms you will note this). If you have a little spare time you should check it out, it isn't too taxing. Of course, those with a strong lay interest in evolution might want to purchase Ridley's Oxford Reader anthology, Evolution. This is the closest thing to "airport reading" that I've seen that still…
razib | January 31, 2006In response to a skeptical response to my post below from RPM I have posted an entry on my other weblog asking whether I am deluding myself in thinking that our generation is at an axial pivot in the progression of ages. If previous posts on this topic are any clue, the discussion should be spirited.
razib | January 30, 2006Radio Open Source is calling for Blogs of the Union (BOTU)posts. So here I go....
Ten years ago the internet was a new and innovative technology that was going to change our lives as it entered into mass culture. Today I doubt most citizens of this union could imagine a world without the internet or wireless technology. What was once cutting edge is now banal. No doubt when we reflect on our lives many of us old enough to remember the Jetsons wonder why so little has changed, but I believe that is a false perception, for when the future is the present it fails to elicit awe. We may not…
razib | January 30, 2006Life can be really funny. When I was in college I was incorrigibly curious and I asked a Korean American friend if his ear wax was dry (I'd read that East Asians had dry ear wax once) and his response was, "Isn't everybody's?" When it comes to interpersonal differences there are many things we take for granted and extrapolate to others that aren't necessarily true.1 Nick Wade in The New York Times has an interesting write up about the genetics of the ear wax phenotype. While the populations of Europe and Africa have wet ear wax, those of East Asia have dry ear wax. Other populations are…
razib | January 29, 2006Newsweek has an entertaining story which highlights the recent penetration of science into the venerable enterprise of genealogy. The good:
...Adopted at birth, Royer knew nothing about her biological parents. But certain physical traits-wide nose, dark skin-led people to guess that she was Iranian or even Cambodian. "I always wondered," she says. Two hundred dollars and a swab of her cheek gave her an answer: Royer's maternal ancestors were most likely Native American. The knowledge, she says, "makes you feel more of a person."
The dumb:
DNA testing is forcing some people to rethink…
razib | January 27, 2006Science isn't perfect, it often misses obvious truths. Consider the 2005 Nobel in medicine, awarded for the work of Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren in establishing the connection between Helicobacter pylori and ulcers. After the fact you hear many stories of doctors who had stumbled onto the solution, antibiotics, long before the scientific consensus. Many others now understood why they always saw these pathogens in samples taken from patients with ulcers. Now it all makes sense, but these sort of screw ups make you wonder how far we've gone past Galen! Falsification is a decent…
razib | January 26, 2006All of the other science bloggers are talking about the finding that the British might be more Creation-friendly than we'd have thought. My first thought is that we need to be careful about the survey. But my second thought is to remind myself that a 1988 survey (page 8 of the PDF) found that "...one-third of British adults understood that the Earth rotates around the Sun once a year...." vs. "...half of US adults know that the Earth rotates around the Sun once a year...." (year 2000 for the American survey). The difference in anti-evolutionary activism in the two nations is, I suspect, a…
razib | January 26, 2006Over the past 5 years Matthew Harris has been doing some interesting research into feather morphogenesis, and he has produced some must watch videos. His work on quantitative modeling of development via the activator-inhibitor system is, I believe, a necessary precursor in fruitfully talking about the evolutionary context of feathers. To my mind the videos are essential for anyone who isn't fluent in molecular developmental biology (like me), so we can have the big picture in mind when digging through the essential details.
razib | January 25, 2006Since Chad Orzel hasn't posted on it, I figured I'd link to this story about a Nature letter which announces the discovery of a planet 5.5 times as massive as our own! This is pretty cool, I was a big fan of astronomy when I was a kid, and it certainly is the science with tickles my "shock & awe"-o-meter. But combined with the possibility of sub-thousand dollar genomes in the next 5 years, it really does make me feel like we are at the End of Times and soon we shall be as gods. OK, that was a hyperbole, but I can dimly grok the difficulty of a extrasolar detection feat like this....…
razib | January 25, 2006Judith Rich Harris is author of The Nurture Assumption and the forthcoming No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality. Her controversial thesis is that parents don't matter, genes and peers do, in making you who you are as a person. You can read my Q & A with her over at my other website. Here is the paper (PDF) that started it all....
razib | January 25, 2006This article about the halting of land development in Scotland because of "fairies" under a rock is illustrative. When comparing nations in regards to belief in the paranormal we often assume that "modernity" and education have banished magical thinking. I don't believe it is so, rather, magic is still there, ready to surface when given an opportunity. Many would commend Europeans on their acceptance of evolutionary theory, but it is important to note that surveys of public opinion on the other side of the Atlantic suggest a folk far more demon-haunted imagination than one might suppose (…
razib | January 24, 2006A few weeks ago Edge.com asked prominent thinkers what their Dangerous Idea was. The poser of the question was Steven Pinker, and he's on Radio Open Source today (you can listen on the web, wait 'till 7 PM EDT). I offered my 2 cents in the comments, the basic gist of which was that the explosion of information and the ability to access it in the modern world makes secure understanding and knowledge more difficult than in the past. Professionally obfuscatory paradigms like Post Modernism and neo-Creationism can arise precisely because trust and good faith are more crucial in a world where…
razib | January 23, 2006Yesterday I was talking to a friend of mine who is a graduate student at a university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the department of "Organismic and Evolutionary Biology." My friend asserted that most people within her department are dumb, overbearing, arrogant and uninformed. Her concern was that this was within a department specializing in evolutionary theory at the nation's elite university!
Then we got to talking about Intelligent Design, and I mentioned how a link from The Corner resulted in an influx of Intelligent Design proponents on my other weblog. Now, as a kid growing up in…
razib | January 21, 2006I have a post on the importance of understanding human psychology in relation to evolution and Intelligent Design/Creationism on my other weblog.
Related: Ed Brayton has the nitty gritty on what's going on in Utah.
razib | January 21, 2006The Harvard Crimson reports on George Church's attempt to develop super-cheap genomic sequencing, though this time he's giving a $10-20,000 price point quote instead of $1,000. Scientific American has a subscription only piece.
razib | January 20, 2006In the interview below with anthropologist Dan Sperber I allude to the "naturalistic paradigm" in anthropology. What does this mean? Sperber, along with Scott Atran, Pascal Boyer and Laurence Hirschfield are anthropologists who treat culture as an outgrowth of a natural and reducible process mediated by the human mind. Sperber often speaks of the "epidemiology of representations." He examines the dynamics which constrain the transmission of cognitive representations within and between cultures, in short, memetics with an awareness of the limits and biases of the mind as elucidated by…
razib | January 19, 2006Over at my other weblog I have been doing a "10 questions" series. Here are the ones I've done so far:
John Derbyshire of National Review and author of Prime Obsession
Armand Leroi of Imperial College and author of Mutants
Warren Treadgold of Saint Louis University and author of A History of Byzantine State and Society
Dan Sperber of Institut Jen Nicod and author of Explaining Culture
Ken Miller of Brown University and author of Finding Darwin's God