razib | February 24, 2009Wings, Horns, and Butterfly Eyespots: How Do Complex Traits Evolve?:
Complex traits require co-ordinated expression of many transcription factors and signaling pathways to guide their development. Creating a developmental program de novo would involve linking many genes one-by-one, requiring each mutation to drift into fixation, or to confer some selective advantage at every intermediate step in order to spread in the population. While this lengthy process is not completely unlikely, it could be circumvented with fewer steps by recruiting a top regulator of an already existing gene network, i…
razib | February 23, 2009The Kindle: Good Before, Better Now. A woman was using a Kindle at Starbucks the other day. She really didn't get much reading done, people kept wanting to talk to her about her Kindle, and look at it themselves. The Kindle will have made it when people can actually use it in a public place without being harassed.
razib | February 23, 2009Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street:
In hindsight, ignoring those warnings looks foolhardy. But at the time, it was easy. Banks dismissed them, partly because the managers empowered to apply the brakes didn't understand the arguments between various arms of the quant universe. Besides, they were making too much money to stop.
...
They didn't know, or didn't ask. One reason was that the outputs came from "black box" computer models and were hard to subject to a commonsense smell test. Another was that the quants, who should have been more aware of the copula's weaknesses,…
razib | February 23, 2009
Mystery of the 'Land of Twins': Something in the Water? Mengele?:
There was no evidence of the use of contraceptives or fertility drugs among the women, nor of any genetic mixing with people of African origin, who have higher twinning rates than caucasians, Dr. Matte said. But the rate of identical twins here, at 47 percent of all twin births, is far higher than the 30 percent that is expected in the general population, she found.
The part about monozygotic (identical) vs. dizygotic is strange. I knew about this village, but not the high frequency of identical twins. The between population…
razib | February 23, 2009Seed Magazine has a nice review of the brewing controversy over shoddy statistical methods in the field of fMRI. To some extent science is politics, this is a sexy and appealing field. A friend of mine who is a psychologist mentioned that though he doesn't think much of fMRI the head of his lab group wanted to make sure that there was always some neural imaging in their papers to increase the likelihood of acceptance. A few vivid images is worth a lot of turgid prose; even if some of the criticisms of fMRI are overblown I suspect that it was necessary that the field be brought down a few…
razib | February 23, 2009Since I asked regular readers to fill out a survey, I've received over 300 responses. My own experience with these surveys is that about 50% of the total responses come within 24 hours. Next weekend I'll put up the .csv file with all the data, and present some of my analyses as well. But below the fold I've placed the raw frequency data if you are curious; there isn't likely to be any major changes in proportions with the next 300 respondents, and there weren't any great surprises. Here's a foretaste of weirdness in the survey data that I'll present next week. 66 respondents claimed they…
razib | February 22, 2009
Obit Magazine has a fascinating rumination on the life & times of Socks Currie-Clinton:
One of the most telling political photographs of the past few decades is a snapshot of a cat. Against an unassuming suburban backdrop, the picture shows a black-and-white feline crouched on a sidewalk while an equipment-laden quintet of photographers close in. The paparazzi, it turned out, had lured the cat outside so they could get the shot all America wanted to see. It was November of 1992, and that animal's owner, Bill Clinton, had just been elected president of the United States.
razib | February 22, 2009In light of my previous comments on Judeo-Christianity, here is a interesting survey about Israeli Jewish views of other religions, in particular Christianity. Some results:
* 41% believe that Christianity is closest religion to Judaism
* 32% believe than Islam is closest religion to Judaism
* 50% agreed that Jerusalem was central to the Christian faith
* 75% percent believe the state should not allow Christian organizations to purchase land to construct new churches in the city (the state or state-sanctioned organizations own most land in Israel)
* 80% of secular Jews believe it is…
razib | February 22, 2009In Turnabout, Children Care For Sick Elders:
Partly paralyzed, with diabetes and colitis, Linda Lent needs extensive care at home.
But with her husband working long hours at a bowling alley, Ms. Lent, 47, relies on a caregiver who travels by school bus toting a homework-filled backpack: her 13-year-old daughter, Annmarie.
Younger people caring for the aged or ill is nothing new, it's the way it's always been. Widespread outsourcing the care of the elderly and the very young to "professionals" is an innovation of the market economy. But there are other issues that the modern world imposes
1)…
razib | February 22, 2009I was curious as to how trust in science related to questions like human evolution or the danger of nuclear power. So I looked at the variables NUKEGEN, SCITEST4 and TRUSTSCI in the GSS, which ask questions about the danger of nuclear power, the truth of human evolution and our trust in science, respectively. Below I report those who:
1) Agree or strongly agree that we trust too much in science
2) Definitely accept, or believe it is probable, that humans evolved from animals
3) Believe that nuclear power is not very dangerous, or not dangerous at all
I combined the weak and strong opinions…
razib | February 22, 2009I recently got bored and played a joke on Southern Fried Science a few days ago...my usual PC-tard schtick,* see the comments. In any case, the author of the weblog suggests that I was being unkind at his expense. I won't stop playing these sorts of jokes (see this Greg Laden comment thread), but I figured it would be a mitzvah to send some traffic his way. It takes some courage for a privileged white male to attempt to abolish cant when it comes to discussion about race in this nation of cowards.
* My usually method is to not think about what I'm typing, but just stick together random…
razib | February 21, 2009It's been a while since I did a reader survey, so I posted 15 questions here. I'll put up a csv file with the results in a week.
razib | February 21, 2009Ed Yong has an excellent post reviewing new research which suggests that collective religious rituals are more predictive than religious belief as to support for suicide bombings. The novelty and insight from these studies is that they decompose the independent dimensions from which religious phenomena are constructed. Consider for example that religion may consist of:
A) Belief in supernatural agents
B) Participation in communal rituals
C) Regulation of personal behavior under religious law
D) A metaphysical system which explains the nature of the universe
And so forth. A study like the…
razib | February 21, 2009Ziel points me to an amusing post, The Credit Snobs:
I rather like the title "voodoo priest of free market economics" so I am happy to take the blame for the sub-prime mortgage defaults and at the same time stick a few pins in Nouriel Roubini.
Roubini and others generating hysteria about defaults in the mortgage market are credit snobs - they think credit is something that only the rich can handle. Just look at the language that Roubini uses to analogize borrowers - they are "reckless patients" who "spent the last few years on a diet of booze, drugs and artery clogging junk food." Similarly…
razib | February 20, 2009I mentioned a few months ago that Socks was in end stage cancer. It ended today. R.I.P. Socks.
razib | February 20, 2009One of the great things about the internet is that you can always look back. See the 5 star reviews for The Bush Boom: How a Misunderestimated President Fixed a Broken Economy. Pretty funny. Here's a sample:
Jeff and Larry have written a volume destined to stand alongside "The Hoover Miracle" and "Lyndon Johnson: Triumph in Vietnam". If you have to buy one book about a nonexistent phenonmenon this year, this is it. In the bizarro world there really is a Bush boom. But over there Larry Kudlow is a vegan with a ponytail delivering tofu pizzas for minimum wage.
That's a review which came out…
razib | February 20, 2009Over at The Atlantic. Shiller is the author of Irrational Exuberance, The Subprime Solution and Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global. As I've noted before, Shiller's specific arguments about the causal sequences behind manias and crashes leave a lot to be desired, but it seems entirely correct that he bet on the right horse when it comes to behavioral economics and the importance cognitive biases outside of the bounds of rationality in a market. The same phenomenon can be described from a different angle, such as Benoit Mandelbrot's The…
razib | February 19, 2009Sheril's post, Chimpanzees Are NOT Pets!, is good. She notes:
1 Chimpanzees are wild animals. Animals that make good PETS like dogs and cats, have been domesticated for [thousands] of years. There has been selection on them against aggression, which is why a dog, unlike a wolf, will not automatically tear you to pieces. Anyone who has a pet chimpanzee for long enough will eventually no longer be able to control them and will either get a body part bitten off or will have to use extreme force to control them. Chimps live to be 50 years old and grow almost as big as a human male. They have…
razib | February 18, 2009Dienekes points to a paper by Yann, Estimating Genetic Ancestry Proportions from Faces:
Ethnicity can be a means by which people identify themselves and others. This type of identification mediates many kinds of social interactions and may reflect adaptations to a long history of group living in humans. Recent admixture in the US between groups from different continents, and the historically strong emphasis on phenotypic differences between members of these groups, presents an opportunity to examine the degree of concordance between estimates of group membership based on genetic markers and…
razib | February 17, 2009My post below outlining the possible future of genomics and intelligence made me recall a paper from last fall, Predicting Unobserved Phenotypes for Complex Traits from Whole-Genome SNP Data:
Results from recent genome-wide association studies indicate that for most complex traits, there are many loci that contribute to variation in observed phenotype and that the effect of a single variant (single nucleotide polymorphism, SNP) on a phenotype is small. Here, we propose a method that combines the effects of multiple SNPs to make a prediction of a phenotype that has not been observed. We apply…