razib | September 7, 2008A quick rebuttal (of sorts) to my post Science is rational; scientists are not:
Peer review and the scientific community is not what distinguishes science from other areas of knowledge. After all history community decides what is good history knowledge, theology community decides what is good theological knowledge and the law community decides what is good law knowledge. Since they have similar process for publication and dissemination of knowledge, why are they not also "a superior method of extracting information about the world"?
What distinguishes science from other fields of knowledge is…
razib | September 6, 2008Earlier this week I posted a link to new research on the genomics of Mexican populations and the impact of selective evolutionary pressures within the last 500 years. I also pointed to the fact that despite Argentina's self-conception as a European settler nation, a non-trivial Amerindian ancestral proportion remains detectable. Puerto Rico is another interesting case; new research strongly suggests that Taino ancestry exists among the modern peoples of the island, contrary to the assumption by many scholars that they disappeared within the first generation of European settlement.
Today I…
razib | September 6, 2008It sucks. I downloaded it and tried it out. I made the sacrifice so you don't have to.
razib | September 6, 2008Wayne Allyn Root's Million-Dollar Challenge:
But the thing Root really wanted to talk about was Obama's grades. Specifically, he was willing to bet a million dollars that he earned a better grade point average at Columbia than his old classmate, and that the only reason Obama went on to Harvard Law School was the color of his skin.
Here's an article in The New York Sun, Obama's Years at Columbia Are a Mystery. For what it's worth, note that:
Mr. Miller acknowledged that Mr. Obama displayed academic achievement at Harvard, where he graduated magna cum laude and led the Harvard Law Review.…
razib | September 5, 2008Language Log has an excellent critique of the media stories around AVPR1a and its effect on male behavior. This sort of media criticism is warranted, but I don't know exactly how headline writing will clearly communicate that a given dependent variable might have myriad independent variables. Huntington's disease was easy to write a headline for; trying to juice up a story about genes which explain 0.3% of the variation in height is going to be a taller order....
razib | September 5, 2008One "urban legend" which is in common circulation among my friends is that liberals are smarter than conservatives. From my own personal experience this seems plausible, and I doubt I'm the only one as evidenced by the furious speed at which the "Bush voting states have lower IQs" meme spread around the blogosphere several years ago. But is this true? I've seen enough data to suggest that this really isn't so, and my psychologist friends have told me the biggest predictor of liberalism isn't IQ, but a strong tendency toward "openness" on personal tests.
But I just couldn't leave it alone…
razib | September 4, 2008A Woman's History of Vaginal Orgasm is Discernible from Her Walk:
In the sample of healthy young Belgian women (half of whom were vaginally orgasmic), history of vaginal orgasm (triggered solely by penile-vaginal intercourse) was diagnosable at far better than chance level (81.25% correct, Fisher's Exact Test P < 0.05) by appropriately trained sexologists. Clitoral orgasm history was unrelated to both ratings and to vaginal orgasm history. Exploratory analyses suggest that greater pelvic and vertebral rotation and stride length might be characteristic of the gait of women who have…
razib | September 4, 2008PalMD has a post, Science is politics. I would respond that science is normative. Or, more precisely, the practice of science intersects naturally with our normative presuppositions. There's a big universe out there, and the stuff we study is skewed toward topics which interest humans. For example, there's a whole science, anthropology, devoted to humans. Why? Well, because we humans think we're mighty important. This isn't a scientific assessment. You could reply that we are important in terms of how we impact the biosphere, but privileging the biosphere of the third planet in the Sol…
razib | September 4, 2008Chrome is Google's browser, and Blogger is Google's weblogging service, but Firefox is much better in the Blogger editing box.
razib | September 4, 2008Genome-wide distribution of ancestry in Mexican Americans:
Migrations to the new world brought together individuals from Europe, Africa and the Americans. Inter-mating between these migrant and indigenous populations led to the subsequent formation of new admixed populations, such as African and Latino Americans. These unprecedented events brought together genomes that had evolved independently on different continents for tens of thousands of years and presented new environmental challenges for the indigenous and migrant populations, as well as their offspring. These circumstances provided…
razib | September 3, 2008Years before Genetic Future, there was Future Pundit. If you haven't checked out, I think you should. Yes, the title is cheesy, but so what?
razib | September 3, 2008Well, today something popped into my RSS which is likely to make many neoatheists somewhat excited; Participating In Religion May Make Adolescents From Certain Races More Depressed:
But new research has found that this does not hold true for all adolescents, particularly for minorities and some females. The study found that white and African-American adolescents generally had fewer symptoms of depressive at high levels of religious participation. But for some Latino and Asian-American adolescents, attending church more often was actually affecting their mood in a negative way.
Asian-American…
razib | September 3, 2008Since I pointed to a blog geared toward reviewing technologies which serve to benefit the perpetuation of the white European hegemony yesterday, I thought I should make it known that you should check out Not Exactly Rocket Science. Dawg has been bringing his game.
razib | September 3, 2008Just a small point. I do not believe scientists are particularly rational people as compared to the normal human. Because the average scientist has a higher IQ than the average artist I am willing to grant marginally higher rationality to an average scientist. Their ability to decompose and abstract any given conceptual system is greater. That being said, the contrast between the disciplines of art and science are far greater than those of individual artists and scientists. Why?
Because at the end of the day science does not rely on the rationality of a scientist. It relies on the…
razib | September 2, 2008The post below on AVPR1A and fidelity alluded to the fact that this locus has been implicated in many other behavioral traits. I spent some of today digging through the literature. So check it....
AVPR1a and SLC6A4 Gene Polymorphisms Are Associated with Creative Dance Performance
AVPR1A and OXTR polymorphisms are associated with sexual and reproductive behavioral phenotypes in humans
Link Between Vasopressin Receptor AVPR1A Promoter Region Microsatellites and Measures of Social Behavior in Humans
Association between a vasopressin receptor AVPR1A promoter region microsatellite and eating…
razib | September 2, 2008After about 3 hours of use I have switched to Chrome as my default browser. Read all about it. Some are skeptical. But, I'm tired of the "Application Not Responding" :-) Also, I just ran a quick test of SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark Results, and Chrome was 2 X the speed of Firefox 3.01 beta.
razib | September 2, 2008Commentary has a long piece, Jews and Their DNA, which covers the recent findings coming out of genetics in regards to the "Who is a Jew" question. It's a fair summary of the field, though I would note that the author relied heavily on uniparental lineages passed purely through males and females, and that autosomal studies which look at total genome content are now coming to the fore and fleshing out the picture. I suspect that the main result that will come out of these findings is that many, many, groups are going to be unhappy. Some will find that Jewish ancestry is admixed and that…
razib | September 2, 2008Enter the new hegemon, ScienceBlogs welcomes another white male, Genetic Future.
razib | September 2, 2008Over the years I've blogged a fair amount on the AVPR1A gene. Variation on this locus has been associated with differences altruism in humans and mating preferences in voles. Now a new paper is out in PNAS, at some point in the near future (not online, but will be here), which shows differences in martial behavior based on AVPR1A. From Study Links Gene Variant in Men to Marital Discord:
About 40 percent of men have one or two copies of the allele. Walum, a PhD student, said that men with two copies of the allele had a greater risk of marital discord than men with one copy, and that men with…