razib | October 22, 2008Most of you know that Europe (like Japan and South Korea) has very low fertility; below replacement even. One of the main explanations is that with the decline in religiosity it naturally follows that fertility will decline (the psychological or sociological proximate models vary). Atheism kills with its pessimism. On first blush I think this is plausible because I've heard so many post-religious individuals who simply assert that they could never have children because of the state of this world. That is, with various catastrophes on the horizon they would simply be perpetuating suffering…
razib | October 21, 2008Matt Yglesias moots the reasons behind America's anti-socialist/individual tendencies. This is no illusion. America's Left party, the Democrats, have links with the Centrist Democrat International. This is an organization which roughly represents the international Center-Right, e.g., the Christian Democratic parties of Europe. The Democrats used to have observer status when this organization was more explicitly termed the Christian Democrat International. The point being that dirigiste and One Nation tendencies are much more common among Right parties than classical liberalism (in Germany…
razib | October 21, 2008If you are interested in the Personal Genome Project, you can get the all the down-low over at Genetic Future. Really, just go read Genetic Future.
razib | October 21, 2008Finding Hidden Tomb Of Genghis Khan Using Non-Invasive Technologies. Cool right? My first thought was Serpentor:
...He was created through a breakthrough in cloning research by Dr. Mindbender from the DNA extracted from the unearthed remains of the most ruthless and effective military leaders in history, including Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Attila the Hun, Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Vlad the Impaler, Hannibal, Genghis Khan, and Grigori Rasputin....
With ancient DNA extraction techniques if there's genetic material perhaps we could actually…
razib | October 20, 2008There is a new blog some readers might find of interest, Culture and Cognition. Dan Sperber, who did a 10 questions nearly 3 years ago, is a contributor. Imagine, what if cultural anthropology was dominated by people who didn't behave like literary critics or aspire to be political revolutionaries?
razib | October 19, 2008A commenter points me to a post by Robert Frank, The Rich Support McCain, the Super-Rich Support Obama:
More than three quarters of those worth $1 million to $10 million plan to vote for Sen. McCain. Only 15% plan to vote for Sen. Obama (the rest are undecided). Of those worth more than $30 million, two-thirds support Sen. Obama, while one third support Sen. McCain.
...
Among Lower Richistani's, 88% cited tax policies as being "important" in making their decision. Only 11% cited the environment, 22% cited health care and 45% cited social issues.
Among the Upper Richistani's supporting Sen.…
razib | October 18, 2008Check out Howard Fineman's new column, Why Is the Race So Close?. His method of "analysis" is simple; list a number of factors which should favor the generic Democrat, and then contend that Obama's average 6 point lead in the polls is not large enough. Actually, I put the 6 point lead part in there, Fineman uses no real numbers in the column aside from McCain's age, it's all qualitative hand waving. Now compare this sort of intellectual production to what pollster.com went about doing, Is Obama Underachieving?:
Despite the fact that pundits have claimed that Obama is not performing as well…
razib | October 17, 2008If there is one "politics" book you should read this year, it is Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do. Now, this sort of acclamation does need to be tempered by the fact that I myself don't really read "political" books very often. But despite the modest N, I'm rather confident that anyone who picks up Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State will not be disappointed. To a great extent the collective of Andrew Gelman, David Park, Boris Shor, Joseph Bafumi and Jeronimo Cortina have produced a work which is a response in substance, if not…
razib | October 15, 2008FuturePundit reports on research which suggests that smoking removes 10 years from your life expectancy. It's nice to see a number on this; it isn't like this is a counterintuitive finding. But this sort of quantification is important. I don't smoke, and I never have, but my experience in college was that people who smoked found it pleasurable and a social lubricant. There's some value in that. On the other hand, unlike alcohol consumption, smoking seems to have uniformly deleterious health effects, so the utilitarian calculus is more straightforward. Greasy food, alcohol, sweets,…
razib | October 15, 2008
Photo Credit: Wired
Wired has a story about pod cars! Awesome. Pod cars are one of those things ubiquitous in science fiction (like humanoid robots) that just never come to be. In contrast, computer technology has advanced so far in the past generation that older science fiction resembles some sort of alternative history where Apple didn't transform home computing more than extrapolation from the present.
Granted, I don't have much of an opinion on the feasibility of pod cars. Nor do I really care. It just would be fun to have a little bit of Logan's Run around (mind you, just a little…
razib | October 14, 2008To the left is Bandar bin Sultan. To the right, Barack Obama. Bandar bin Sultan is the son of a Saudi prince and his Sudanese "servant" (probably a slave). So we know that Bandar bin Sultan is 1/2 Arab and 1/2 Sudanese. Anwar Sadat had a Egyptian father and a Sudanese mother. In any case, here is Bandar's father. Because of the fact that violent terrorists are Arab Muslims and various East-West dichotomies Arabs are coded as "brown," but really many of them are not that brown (trust me, I'm brown, I know brown, and many Arabs are not the real deal). This is why Ralph Nader never gets any…
razib | October 14, 2008The BBC interviews Steve Jones. Nothing new. I think Jones' fixation on natural selection as a function of parameters exogenous to the population is part of the problem. A lot of evolution is probably due to intraspecific dynamics, that is, individual vs. individual competition within a population, not to mention host-parasite co-evolution via the evolutionary arms race. And there is the ever present empirical contention that Jones' makes that humans used to breed like elephant seals. He's wrong. But, I have to say I understand why the media loves him, he exudes confidence and is not…
razib | October 13, 2008Over at Anthropology.net Emanuel Lusca has a post, Science As A Human Practice. I sniped a little in the comments, to which Emanuel responded:
My intention was not to refine, clarify, or elevate science. My intention was to point out that science should not be put on a pedestal, that it is like any other human practice, e.g. religious practice. In my mind science and religion are equally valuable and insightful. And of course, you and many others will criticize me for that, but that's okay.
Photo Credit: Kim Fulton-Bennett 2005 MBARI
This is the sort of problematizing which makes cultural…
razib | October 13, 2008The August issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, has a supplement of articles, Vitamin D and Health in the 21st Century Update. ScienceDaily has some quotes from one of the main researchers:
... Norman identifies vitamin D's potential for contributions to good health in the adaptive and innate immune systems, the secretion and regulation of insulin by the pancreas, the heart and blood pressure regulation, muscle strength and brain activity. In addition, access to adequate amounts of vitamin D is believed to be beneficial towards reducing the risk of cancer.
I think a focus on…
razib | October 13, 2008If the trolley problem is not known to you, I would recommend Kwame Anthony Appiah's Experiments in Ethics. It is one of those works which combines brevity with density, a feast of ideas laid out before you which is nevertheless consumable in a minimal span of time. And Appiah is an engaging writer to boot, switching seamlessly between informal and elevated registers. I suspect the last is a reflection of his interactions with younger people in the form of graduate students in concert with his British philosophical training.
In Experiments in Ethics Appiah takes the tack of an…
razib | October 13, 2008Photo credit: AP
In light of last week's posts about why human evolution continues, I think it is critical to make concrete the reality of reproductive variance. It seems highly likely now that Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant again. This might be a moot point if she has an abortion, though now that the word is out the public relations fall out might reduce the likelihood of that choice. The behaviors and outcomes of the lives of the Spears sisters are in the public spotlight, so let's leverage this into an illustration of evolutionary theory. Last year I wrote Jamie Lynn Spears: it runs in…
razib | October 12, 2008Just an update on the DonorsChoose drive for this year. I've removed some funded challenges from my drive, and added a whole lot more. In general they're either bioscience related, or, they're projects from really poor schools. This year I haven't raised much money through my drive, though some of the other ScienceBlogs are doing really well on the Leaderboard. Obviously "winning" isn't that big of a deal here, but both years this weblog's challenges have finished out really strong, so I'm not too worried....
(shout out to those who gave early!)