razib | October 31, 2009Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and the Dynamics of Inequality in Small-Scale Societies:
Small-scale human societies range from foraging bands with a strong egalitarian ethos to more economically stratified agrarian and pastoral societies. We explain this variation in inequality using a dynamic model in which a population's long-run steady-state level of inequality depends on the extent to which its most important forms of wealth are transmitted within families across generations. We estimate the degree of intergenerational transmission of three different types of wealth (material,…
razib | October 30, 2009Ruchira Paul has a post up, "Religious, superstitious, nonsense" and other harsh words. The point at issue is the fact that a teacher who expressed anti-Creationist views in harsh tones was sued. Ruchira asks somewhat rhetorically as to the sort of things parochial schools say about other religions and atheists. The bigger issue is one of public decorum, and decorum is very contextual. When my 7th grade teacher had us read Medea she explained a bit about the context of Greek society, including the nature of their religion. She spoke of "their gods" and "our God." Her reference to "our God"…
razib | October 30, 2009I've discussed menopause as an adaptation and the grandmother effect before. I was also pleased to see the responses of Larry Moran's readers when he presented his standard anti-adaptationist line of argument. I don't want to retread familiar ground here, I'm not sure if menopause is an adaptation, but let's assume so for the purposes of reviewing a new paper which has come out and offers a slight but fascinating twist on the grandmother hypothesis. Grandma plays favourites: X-chromosome relatedness and sex-specific childhood mortality:
Biologists use genetic relatedness between family…
razib | October 29, 2009
In the wikipedia entry for "ballad" there's the image with caption to the left. Am I weird for finding that just really, really, funny? I start having these weird flashbacks to lots of pink hair,screaming weirdos, and Every Rose Has Its Thorn. Am I the only one who feels that the fashions and styles of the 70s and 80s were just way stranger than those of the 50s and 60s? Or is it just that the 50s and 60s are so far back that we've forgotten their own variant of Cherry Pie?
razib | October 29, 2009Carl Zimmer points me an article about a former anthropologist who has some weird ideas about the origin of man:
Since his resignation from the university in 1990, however, Horn has changed his tune. Once a staunch Darwinist and tenured CSU anthropology professor, Horn has devoted the last 19 years of his life to the study of alternative theories of human origin.
After receiving a doctorate in anthropology from Yale University and while teaching at CSU, Horn focused his energies on the study of the evolution of non-human primates, his wife Lynette Horn said.
He now advocates the theory that…
razib | October 29, 2009The Spittoon points to a new paper, Drawing the history of the Hutterite population on a genetic landscape: inference from Y-chromosome and mtDNA genotypes, which I've been meaning to look at more closely. Unlike some attempts to use genetics to illuminate questions about the human past here the historical record is rather complete. The 16th century was the high tide and maximal efflorescence of German Protestantism. Not only were vast swaths of what we think of as redoubts of German Catholicism in the Austrian lands brought into the Protestant fold, but the diversity was also at a peak, as…
razib | October 28, 2009There's something cool about Canada, I just found out that Alberta is the only large region of permanently inhabited human territory which lacks brown rats. One thing you have to remember is that the brown rat only began spreading within the last 1,000 years (in the process displacing the black rat), and it seems to have arrived in the British Isles only within the last two to three centuries. North America did not have the rat until Europeans arrived, and it didn't show up in Alberta until 1950. At that point the government attempted an eradication program. Apparently this can work because…
razib | October 28, 2009This critique by Ted Goertzl, Myths of Murder and Multiple Regression, is making the rounds. It made me think of this old apocryphal story:
There is a famous anecdote inspired by Euler's arguments with secular philosophers over religion, which is set during Euler's second stint at the St. Petersburg academy. The French philosopher Denis Diderot was visiting Russia on Catherine the Great's invitation. However, the Empress was alarmed that the philosopher's arguments for atheism were influencing members of her court, and so Euler was asked to confront the Frenchman. Diderot was later informed…
razib | October 27, 2009Dr. Thomas Mailund has posted a YouTube interview of Svante Paabo. Looks like the previous post was off-base, though I'm not really totally sure.
razib | October 27, 2009I show that Protestants like Israel; Midwesterners not so much, at Secular Right. Also, many nations are getting more religious, but young people are still less religious, at Gene Expression Classic.
razib | October 27, 2009My co-blogger at Gene Expression Classic, David, has completed a very interesting series today.
1: The Pattern of Evolution
2: Mechanisms of Evolution
3: Heredity
4: Speciation
5: Gradualism (A)
6: Gradualism (B)
7: Levels of Selection
razib | October 26, 2009The US State Department has released International Religious Freedom Report 2009. Here the list of countries where "violations of religious freedom have been noteworthy."
Afghanistan
Azerbaijan
Brunei
Burma
China
Cuba
Egypt
Eritrea
Fiji
India
Indonesia
Iran
Iraq
Israel
Laos
Malaysia
Nigeria
North Korea
Pakistan
Russia
Saudi Arabia
Somalia
Sudan
Tajikstan
Turkey
Turkmenistan
Uzbekistan
Venezuela
Vietnam
Yemen
H/T: Talk Islam.
razib | October 26, 2009Neanderthals 'had sex' with modern man:
Professor Svante Paabo, director of genetics at the renowned Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, will shortly publish his analysis of the entire Neanderthal genome, using DNA retrieved from fossils. He aims to compare it with the genomes of modern humans and chimpanzees to work out the ancestry of all three species.
...
Paabo recently told a conference at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory near New York that he was now sure the two species had had sex - but a question remained about how "productive" it had been.
"What I'm…
razib | October 25, 2009Lawyer: Death complicates Madoff investment case:
The death of Jeffry Picower, accused of profiting more than $7 billion from the investment schemes of his longtime friend Bernard Madoff, will make it more difficult for suing investors to recoup their money, attorneys said.
...
But the trustee's lawyer said Picower's claims that he was a victim "ring hollow" because he withdrew more of other investors' money than anyone else during three decades and should have noticed signs of fraud.
According to the lawyers, Picower's accounts were "riddled with blatant and obvious fraud," and he should…
razib | October 25, 2009When Mendelism reemerged in the early 20th century to become what we term genetics no doubt the early practitioners of the nascent field would have been surprised to see where it went. The centrality of of DNA as the substrate which encodes genetic information in the 1950s opened up molecular biology and led to the biophysical strain which remains prominent in genetics. Later, in the 1970s Alan Wilson and Vincent Sarich used crude measures of genetic distance to resolve controversies in paleontology, specifically, the date of separation between the human and ape lineage. Genetics spans the…
razib | October 23, 2009If you haven't been following the goings-on via Twitter, Luke Jostins has been posting some tidbits on his blog, Genetic Inference. If you get interested in something, remember you can search abstracts.
razib | October 22, 2009I've pointed out before that the most (reputedly) secular Muslim majority country, Turkey, is more friendly to Creationism and more religious than the United States. This is why I get really agitated by those who argue that Turkey should join the European Union, it isn't culturally appropriate. Europeans might be prejudiced against Turks because they're "oriental" (in the old sense) and Muslim, but that doesn't mean that Turks are just like any European in values. Liberal elites terrified of seeming prejudiced and Eurocentric don't want to acknowledge this generality of difference, but it is…
razib | October 22, 2009The past few months Technorati really stopped working for me. Hardly any new links back in, at least that they detected. They unveiled a new site recently, you can read about it at TechCrunch. I really hate it, though to be honest I'd stopped using Technorati for a while. It looks like they pruned a lot of blogs, and that might be why I stopped seeing new links. In any case, here's an unrepresentative and personal reason why I really think it's a step back:
The page for Gene Expression at ScienceBlogs (this domain).
The page for Gene Expression at gnxp.com, the original blog I started in the…