Alcohol's Good for You? Some Scientists Doubt It:
For some scientists, the question will not go away. No study, these critics say, has ever proved a causal relationship between moderate drinking and lower risk of death -- only that the two often go together. It may be that moderate drinking is just something healthy people tend to do, not something that makes people healthy.
"The moderate drinkers tend to do everything right -- they exercise, they don't smoke, they eat right and they drink moderately," said Kaye Middleton Fillmore, a retired sociologist from the University of California, San…
With the Iranian election and the protests there are occasional references to ethnic groups in Iran. For example, Mousavi did not do as well in Azerbaijan as one would expect knowing that he is an ethnic Azeri Turk. The father of the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamneini is also an Azeri Turk. So despite the fact that ethnic Persians, who speak Farsi, are the dominant group in Iran and to a large extent define its national identity, minorities have prominent roles. Iran is about 50% Persian and 25% Azeri Turk, with the balance being defined by a host of other groups such as Kurds.
But does this…
FWIW, I've taken to using Bing for image and video searches. A lot of the time "Web 2.0" dynamism and interactivity are irritating to me, but I think M$ added some value compared to Google's relatively vanilla interfaces. Intuitive too. Thoughts? This other blogger agrees.
Joshua Trevino points out that Khomeini's original conception of how the Iranian state was governed was to be governed was derived from Plato's Republic. This is not that surprising, the Shia clerical elite of Iran has been engaged in various innovations from the 18th century on.
Dr. Daniel MacArthur has the must read post on the $48,000 whole-genome sequence. Dr. MacArthur notes that the price point isn't quite within reach for most of the population. Nevertheless, I do find it interesting that I asked Armand Leroi 4 years ago if he would forgo 1 month salary for a whole-genome sequence in 10 years. It looks like this will be possible much sooner than 2015.
Seems appropriate to point to the "Iran So Far" SNL digital short from fall 2007 which features Mahmoud Ahmadinejad again. Hopefully it will be irrelevant after today, but who knows?
There is currently a presidential election going on in Iran. The buffoon Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is running against a "reformist," Mir-Hossein Mousavi. There is some controversy because Mousavi's wife, Zahra Rahnavard, has been active in the campaign, and held hands with him in public! (and I thought that the principal banned PDA?) It is a quirk, though not too significant, that both candidates are from ethnic minorities. Mousavi is an ethnic Azeri Turk (as is the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) while the buffoon is Talysh (the Talysh language is mutually intelligible with standard Persian). But…
FuturePundit points to a New Scientist piece on a new study profiling older virgins. Who is the 40-Year-Old Virgin and Where Did He/She Come From? Data from the National Survey of Family Growth:
A total of 122 (13.9%) men aged 25-45 reported never having had sex, representing approximately 1.1 million American men in this age cohort. Among female participants, a total of 104 (8.9%) women aged 25-45 reported never having sex, representing approximately 800,000 American women in this age cohort. Both men and women who reported that they attend religious services one or more times per week were…
Seed interviews Richard Wrangham about his new book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
The locus MAOA pops up every year or so in a study which attempts to correlate variation in these region with behavior. In particular, anti-social or pathological behavior. So another one is out, Monoamine oxidase A genotype is associated with gang membership and weapon use:
The low MAOA activity alleles conferred an increased risk of joining a gang and using a weapon in a fight for males but not for females. Moreover, among male gang members, those who used weapons in a fight were more likely to have a low MAOA activity allele when compared with male gang members who do not use weapons in a…
In Defense of Inaccuracy
Chaos
Daydreaming and Booze
Why the double standard on genomic data release policies?
Galileo, the Leaning Tower, and Bull@%#$!
Recently I've been seeing a lot of Chris Patil's posts over at Ouroboros on Twitter. Worth checking out. He's hosting on the Hourglass on the biology of aging right now, though readers of this weblog might find Did aging evolve to prevent epidemics? of more interest.
Domestication has a long history. It predates the invention of writing by thousands of years. In the history of biology the study of domestication is closely connected to the emergence of experimental and theoretical biology out of the shadow of natural history. Chapter I of The Origin of Species is preoccupied with animal breeding. The various modifiers of selection, artificial, natural and sexual, are to some extent human constructions. When the constraint of human preferences and needs are removed feral populations of dogs and pigs tend to shift back toward an ancient modal wild type. I…
Back before the Iraq War invasion there was some talk about the human and cultural capital of the nation. That it was the Germany of the Middle East. That it was in a good position to benefit from liberation. There was some theorizing that Iraq could be a linchpin of a new geopolitical axis which was friendly to the United States and Israel. Much of this was pushed by Ahmad Chalabi, but there were a host of others who made such arguments because they wanted the invasion for their own reason.
In any case, it didn't work out. That's obvious. But looking at the World Values Survey the past few…
It looks like the PirateParty will gain 1 seat in the EU parliament. This means Christian Engström will have a job and income. He's been spending the last 3 years as an activist living off his savings.
What Darwin said - and was he right?:
In this Darwin year many popular accounts of 'Darwinism' have appeared, but these seldom make a clear distinction among the different components of Darwin's theory of evolution. Many popularisations are simplified to the point of caricature, and presented in an absurdly uncritical way. I yield to few in my admiration for Darwin, but I do not think his memory is best served by oversimplifying his ideas or pretending that he was always right.
So I will attempt to identify the key propositions of 'Darwinism', with an assessment of their current standing.…
There are particular correlations about attitudes toward abortion rights within nations. For example, in the United States thereis no sex difference but more educated people tend to be pro-choice. But what are the international trends? In this post I look at attitudes toward abortion by Catholics and non-Catholics within various nations. Though Catholics tend to be slightly more pro-life, it turns out that the vast majority of the variance is between nations, not between religions. In other words, a Catholic in Germany tends to have the same attitudes as a Protestant in Germany, while a…