razib | October 22, 2009If you have more than a marginal interest in evolutionary biology you will no doubt have stumbled upon the conundrum of sex & sexes. Matt Ridley's most prominent work, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, covered both the theoretical framework and applied implications of the subject. Ridley leaned heavily upon William D. Hamilton's scientific work, which extended upon Leigh Van Valen's concept of the book's titular Red Queen. The complex interplay between pathogens & multicelluar organisms across the eons is a topic of such breadth and depth that a substantial…
razib | October 21, 2009I'm not a close follower of the news, but the past week I've checked The New York Times for David Rohde's chronicle of his period of captivity and escape from the Taliban. All five articles are up now (and an epilogue).
razib | October 21, 2009I stumbled onto a fascinating working paper today (via the sagacious Andrew Gelman), All Together Now: Putting Congress, State Legislatures, and Individuals in a Common Ideological Space. It uses the NPAT survey of political opinions to construct an ideological scale (as opposed to self-reports). This is a wide ranging piece of proto-scholarship, with a lot of ideas and results, but one thing that struck me are the probability density distributions on page 13 & 14. The title says it all, but the charts are reproduced below....
Stupid people tend to be politically moderate. Probably also…
razib | October 21, 2009Pamela Ronald of Tommorow's Table, author of Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food. Additionally, David Sloan Wilson, has moved his blog to ScienceBlogs. It's called Evolution for Everyone, after the book of the same name. You can read my review of his book here.
razib | October 21, 2009One of the banes of modern life is the stack of papers in one's "to-read" list. I guess that goes to show how cushy modern life is, as what sort of complaint is that? In any case, I began to consider this after reading Joe Thornton's magisterial response to Michael Behe's giddy excitement over his most recent paper, An epistatic ratchet constrains the direction of glucocorticoid receptor evolution. Thornton dispatches Behe's muddled misconceptions with economy and precision, but after reading the paper, as opposed to cogent summaries such as Carl Zimmer's in The New York Times I'm even more…
razib | October 20, 2009Eric Michael Johnson is doing some serious science blogging. Worth checking out.
razib | October 20, 2009I've gotten a few emails about this new article, The White City, illustrated by this chart:
This isn't news. It's only of interest because people like hoisting others up by their petards. When I lived in Portland I ran into several people who would complain about the city's lack of diversity, but why had they moved from San Francisco in the first place? As for Minneapolis, the most famous black person I can think of from that city is Prince.
But this isn't just white racism. Progressive whites and black Democrats are part of a political coalition which has been fruitful, but that doesn't…
razib | October 20, 2009Evolutionary ideas have been around a long time, at least since the Greeks, and likely longer. I accept the arguments of researchers who suggest that humans are predisposed to Creationist thinking; after all, cross-cultural data shows the dominance of this model before the rise of modern evolutionary biology. But this does not mean that the possibility of evolution would be totally mystifying to the human race before Charles Darwin's time. After all, it may be that humans as a species have a predisposition toward theism as well, and yet all complex societies produce atheistic movements as…
razib | October 19, 2009Relative to atheists, and conventional religious people (though conventional religious people are more delusional than atheists). Tom Rees has more:
Overall, the New Agers were more delusional than the Religious. That was particularly true for belief in witchcraft and telepathy (not shown in the graph). But the New Agers were also more likely to think that people are not what they seem, that they are being persecuted, that electrical devices like computers can control their thoughts, and that their thoughts are 'echoed back'.
On a mass scale people with orthodox beliefs who are affiliated…
razib | October 19, 2009If you're at ASHG, a session you might want to attend, Scale Effects and Recent Brain Evolution: Theory and Preliminary Evidence. Here's the abstract:
What forces have driven human evolution since the grand human diaspora? In this paper, I argue that the scale effects so central to endogenous growth theory in the field of economics (e.g., Kremer's widely-cited "Population Growth and Technological Change: 1,000,000 B.C. to 1990," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1993) have been important drivers of human brain development since the diaspora. Scale effects have made prominent appearances in…
razib | October 18, 2009Fascinating interview with Richard Heene's former assistant:
But he was motivated by theories I thought were far-fetched. Like Reptilians -- the idea there are alien beings that walk among us and are shape shifters, able to resemble human beings and running the upper echelon of our government. Somehow a secret government has covered all this up since the U.S. was established, and the only way to get the truth out there was to use the mainstream media to raise Richard to a status of celebrity, so he could communicate with the masses.
As the weeks progressed, his theories got more and more…
razib | October 17, 2009In the comments of this post I mildly disagreed with Eric Michael Johnson that humans are "polygynous" and the relevance of the fact that "estimates range between 5-10% that all children have been sired by men other than a woman's partner."
The human monogamy vs. polygamy argument is long-standing, with anthropologists on both sides. Myself, I'm not sure what I believe, because I think binning into two categories is simplistic. In terms of evolutionary biology societal ideals matter less than the relationship of the distribution of reproductive output of males to females.
Rather, I want to…
razib | October 17, 2009From the comments:
Jizya is only a financial tribute / aid to the Muslim State which is in-charge of safeguarding the security of the state and non-muslim's lives and properties on their behalf.
Non-muslims pay Jizya BUT they are EXEMPTED from any other taxes which muslims pay in a Muslim State i.e. Zakat, Khums etc.
As compared to taxes which the Muslims are subjected in a Muslim state, the amount of Jizya is very low.
As such, Jizya should not be interpreted as "Additional Tax" imposed on non-muslims. It is rather a "lesser" obligation as compared to that of a Muslim.
I've heard this…
razib | October 17, 2009Another episode with me interviewing John Hawks on Bloggingheads.tv. Mostly we're talking about about Ardipithecus. The last 1/3 is about Indian genetics. We recorded on Thursday, but since then I've changed my mind on some issues and now disagree with some of what I said. I will likely post on my revisions soon, though have a rather low degree of certitude as to the accuracy of what I suspect, so I am poking through the literature to see if I can become more confident, or just falsify (if you missed my last discussion with John from two weeks ago, it's here).
razib | October 15, 2009What's different about Kiva:
Contrast Kiva with, for example, UNICEF. Kiva makes it possible to trace the path of your donation, to the extent that such tracing is realistic (and it largely turns out to be more along the lines of "you funded a certain MFI" rather than "you funded a certain person"). UNICEF doesn't even seem to have a breakdown of how much money is going to each continent. We definitely can't find information on questions like (a) What specific projects are you funding? (b) What is your role in each? (c) What new projects are planned, and where? (d) How is each project going,…
razib | October 15, 2009Owen Lovejoy has some theories which he is using to process the data from the spate of Ardipithecus ramidus papers. When it comes to the argument about social structure based on the anatomy of the extant remains I'm skeptical. I just recorded a diavlog with John Hawks which is 2/3 devoted to Ardi-issues (should be up Saturday), and he pointed out that Lovejoy has been laying out the case for a monogamous social structure for early hominins for years. This is why I'm not that surprised that some of the numbers he cites from the literature are off. He's probably quoting older values, and hasn't…
razib | October 15, 2009In the interminable debate on Wall Street compensation Ryan Avent makes an important point:
Officials in Washington scrutinising the pay packages of TARP recipients are primarily focused on the incentive effects of those pay structures--whether financial pay packages are inducing financial employees to take excessive risks. But the bigger incentive problem may be--almost certainly is--the drain of talent from other fields, into finance. If there were more evidence that this drain was producing significant net benefits for the economy, than there would be less cause to worry. To an increasing…
razib | October 15, 2009
In the OkCupid post on response rates and race & sex there are two charts which show how males and females respond to inquiries of the opposite sex by race. So, you can see that black women on OkCupid respond positively to men in general, while women respond positively in particular to white men. In fact for many racial minorities women respond more positively to inquiries from white men than they do co-racialists (the same is not true of men). I suspect some of this has to do with the excess of men on OkCupid, combined with selection effects in terms of who joins OkCupid. OkCupid is…