razib | August 28, 2009Addendum to my two posts below, here's Michael Behe's side. He notes:
...and John emailed back that he himself requested the video to be pulled because people thought he was too easy on me, which was supposedly contrary to that old Bloggingheads spirit. I find that quite implausible (other shows on the site feature discussions between people who agree on many things). Rather, I suspect the folks at the website weren't expecting the vitriolic reaction, began to worry about their good names and future employment prospects, pictured themselves banished to a virtual leper colony, panicked, and…
razib | August 27, 2009Just a quick follow-up to the previous post, as I finished watching the whole Behe-McWhorter exchange. Notes:
1) McWhorter is an atheist, and implies he's always been an atheist (or at least not a theist).
2) He's really impressed by Michael Behe's arguments, to the point where he might assent to Michael Behe being the Isaac Newton of evolutionary genetics (though his summation of some of the jaw-dropping talking points in The Edge of Evolution leaves me a bit skeptical as to McWhorter's deep knowledge of basic evolutionary ideas).
3) Part of the issue really has to do with the…
razib | August 27, 2009So a friend of mine started IMing me about how crazy the John McWhorter & Michael Behe diavlog was on bloggingheads.tv. I was a bit surprised since there is no such diavlog, either on the bloggingheads.tv website, nor in their podcasts (which is where I usually am made to be aware of them). Well, here's the story:
John McWhorter feels, with regret, that this interview represents neither himself, Professor Behe, nor Bloggingheads usefully, takes full responsibility for same, and has asked that it be taken down from the site. He apologizes to all who found its airing objectionable.…
razib | August 26, 2009There's a new National Geographic special out, The Human Family Tree, which readers might be interested in. Next showing is on the 30th. Seems to be an extension of The Genographic Project.
Clips below the fold:
razib | August 25, 2009Kambiz Kamrani of Anthropology, normally a rather staid blogger, has posted something titled Science Suffers From The Idiots At Scientific American. It's in reference to this widely circulated editorial, Fossils for All: Science Suffers by Hoarding. I can't really summarize it, and I think the title certainly does invite you to read the whole post at Anthropology.net
razib | August 25, 2009Speaking of Richard Dawkins, he's back to science, in this case an excerpt from his new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution:
The evolution of the dog, then, if Coppinger is right, was not just a matter of artificial selection, but a complicated mixture of natural selection (which predominated in the early stages of domestication) and artificial selection (which came to the fore more recently). The transition would have been seamless, which again goes to emphasise the similarity -- as Darwin recognised -- between artificial and natural selection.
Nothing new in the…
razib | August 24, 2009Officials Weigh Circumcision to Fight H.I.V. Risk:
Public health officials are considering promoting routine circumcision for all baby boys born in the United States to reduce the spread of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.
...
He and other experts acknowledged that although the clinical trials of circumcision in Africa had dramatic results, the effects of circumcision in the United States were likely to be more muted because the disease is less prevalent here, because it spreads through different routes and because the health systems are so disparate as to be incomparable.
Clinical trials…
razib | August 24, 2009Lawyers for Broker in Madoff Case Call U.S. Suits Unfair:
"What the commission has done here to Robert Jaffe is simply unfair," the defense motion argued. "The agency has called him a cheat, a knowing participant in the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Yet, it has failed to back up these charges with factual allegation
I think using broad-brush terms like "unfair" which aren't precise & legal is probably not a good move. Life isn't fair, and many people screwed by Bernie Madoff will never be made whole. That's not fair, but that's reality.
razib | August 24, 2009Dienekes points to a new paper, Amerindian mitochondrial DNA haplogroups predominate in the population of Argentina: towards a first nationwide forensic mitochondrial DNA sequence database:
The study presents South American mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data from selected north (N = 98), central (N = 193) and south (N = 47) Argentinean populations. Sequence analysis of the complete mtDNA control region (CR, 16024-576) resulted in 288 unique haplotypes ignoring C-insertions around positions 16193, 309, and 573; the additional analysis of coding region single nucleotide polymorphisms enabled a fine…
razib | August 24, 2009
A month ago Larry Moran made reference to Fern Elsdon Baker's new book, The Selfish Genius: How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwin's Legacy. Moran was a bit disappointed by the previews, his pet hobby-horse being the revolutionary impact of the neutral theory of molecular evolution, while Elsdon-Baker seems rather fixated on the potential of Neo-Lamarckism, especially epigenetics. Well, I've read the book, and Larry Moran would probably be disappointed, though she mentions Stephen Jay Gould and pluralism a bit, there's really very little engagement with the 20th century debates in evolutionary…
razib | August 23, 2009If you haven't, you might want to check out the Revolutionary Minds weblog. Good for browsing and sampling.
razib | August 23, 2009Or at least that's the joke. Interesting post from Tom Rees which illustrates the utility of cross-cultural tests of general theories-of-religion. Rees notes:
One of the leading theories of why religion is so popular goes by the ominous name of 'Terror Management Theory'. Put simply, this is the idea that people turn to religion to ease their fear of death.
...
While Christians did indeed have a lower death anxiety than the non-religious, Muslims did not. In fact, their death anxiety was markedly higher than both the other groups.
When the participants were asked to explain why they felt the…
razib | August 23, 2009Arnold Kling mulls over various options when it comes to tacking the American national debt. Here's the one which is out "get-out-jail-free" card:
2. Technology to the rescue. Some major technologies, probably either wet or dry nanotech, produce so much economic growth that the ratio of debt to GDP stays under control. I give this a 20 percent chance. Sometimes I think the chances are higher, maybe even 50 percent. It's a difficult estimate to make--today, I'm in a mood to say 20 percent.
I think information technology is great, but at some point we probably need to increase productivity more…
razib | August 23, 2009In the post below I combined some of the Census Regions for reasons of sample size. But I decided to do this again without combining, but removing some of the questions because of small sample sizes. Again, I also limited the sample to whites between 1998-2008.
But, I added another category: blacks. Michael Lind said:
Drum's creepy bigotry becomes clear when other groups are substituted: "There are, needless to say, plenty of individual blacks who are wholly admirable. But taken as a whole, black culture is [redacted]. Barack Obama can pretty it up all he wants, but it's a [redacted]." Or…
razib | August 22, 2009UK Sikhs accuse BBC of racism:
"We should not be paying a licence fee for promoting the ignorance-based ramblings of those bent on self-promotion who sneer at Asian religion and culture," said Hardeep Singh, a spokesman of the Sikh Media Monitoring Group, which accused BBC's Asian Network of being insensitive towards listeners from the minority community.
The Sikh Group has written to the BBC asking for a full transcript of Adil Ray's show, which was removed from their website after threats from angry Sikh listeners who accused the popular Muslim presenter of denigrating the "kirpan" dagger…
razib | August 22, 2009Update: Follow up post.
This Michael Lind piece bemoaning liberal contempt for white Southerners made me want to look a bit deeper and compare interregional differences and similarities. I went into the General Social Survey and limited responses to whites only and compared by region. The regions in the GSS are those of the US Census:
I combined New England & Mid Atlantic as the Northeast, the North Central regions as the Midwest, Mountain and Pacific as the West, and finally the other three regions as the South. Results below....
Northeast Midwest South…
razib | August 21, 2009Switched back to Firefox from Chrome. I've been using it for the past 2 days and there isn't a discernible difference in speed. I got tired of some of Chrome's minor bugs which emerge in AJAX driven websites which haven't been test-driven on that particular browser, so I thought I would see if version 3.5.2 had closed the speed-gap. Seems like it has. At least with only a few extensions.
razib | August 20, 2009Thomas Mailund on Doubts about complex speciation between humans and chimpanzees:
Two patterns from large-scale DNA sequence data have been put forward as evidence that speciation between humans and chimpanzees was complex, involving hybridization and strong selection. First, divergence between humans and chimpanzees varies considerably across the autosomes. Second, divergence between humans and chimpanzees (but not gorillas) is markedly lower on the X chromosome. Here, we describe how simple speciation and neutral molecular evolution explain both patterns. In particular, the wide range in…