razib | September 1, 2008Notes on Sewall Wright: the Adaptive Landscape:
My series of posts on the work of Sewall Wright is now approaching its (anti?)climax. The next post, on the shifting balance theory, should be the last. The present note deals with a closely related subject. Wright introduced the concept of the 'adaptive landscape' largely in order to illustrate the shifting balance theory. It does however have great interest in its own right, and there is a substantial literature on the concept of adaptive landscapes. [Note 1]
Wright's own treatment of the subject has attracted some controversy following the…
razib | August 31, 2008My post The Genetic Map of Europe drew a lot of interest, but there's even a cooler paper on the same topic out, Genes mirror geography within Europe:
...Despite low average levels of genetic differentiation among Europeans, we find a close correspondence between genetic and geographic distances; indeed, a geographical map of Europe arises naturally as an efficient two-dimensional summary of genetic variation in Europeans. The results emphasize that when mapping the genetic basis of a disease phenotype, spurious associations can arise if genetic structure is not properly accounted for. In…
razib | August 30, 2008Sciencedebate 2008 got some answers from Barack Obama. Props to Chris and Sheril who put some labor hours into this....
razib | August 29, 2008Seems like there's a 14% chance that if the Republicans keep the White House this year that Sarah Palin will be President of the United States in the interval 2009-2013. Of course, you could modulate the probability up or down based on plugging in more priors into the model, but I think it gives a rough qualitative sense.
razib | August 29, 2008War and the evolution of belligerence and bravery:
Tribal war occurs when a coalition of individuals use force to seize reproduction-enhancing resources, and it may have affected human evolution. Here, we develop a population-genetic model for the coevolution of costly male belligerence and bravery when war occurs between groups of individuals in a spatially subdivided population. Belligerence is assumed to increase an actor's group probability of trying to conquer another group. An actor's bravery is assumed to increase his group's ability to conquer an attacked group. We show that the…
razib | August 29, 2008In my post below I pointed out that there was no sex difference in terms of attitudes toward the legality of abortion on demand. But the question remains: is there a difference of intensity? Yes. Women care more. Specifically, pro-choice women care a great deal more than pro-choice men. There is a slight sex difference between men and women in the pro-life camp, but far less. I wonder if this difference might explain why many liberals seem to assume that abortion is a "woman's issue" and that women would by their nature support abortions rights; in their own social circle avowed apathy…
razib | August 29, 2008Those with more education, wealth and intelligence. Those with less pigment in the skin and more liberal politics. There is no sex difference. Charts below.
The question: "Please tell me whether or not you think it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion if: The woman wants it for any reason?"
razib | August 29, 2008A comment:
In Canada, places in the far west like Alberta and British Columbia contain a higher percentage of atheists and other non-religious, but also a higher percentage of evangelical Christians.
This is true in the USA to some extent...but I didn't want to compare to "evangelical Christians" because the relatively low proportions of evangelicals in the Mountain West and the Northeast are historical artifacts due to their particular religious demography. So I used the same methodology as earlier and plotted the proportion of atheists vs. those who attend religious services at least once a…
razib | August 29, 2008At least when it comes to choosing his VP candidate. Joe Biden as a "safe" choice; Sarah Palin is not.
razib | August 28, 2008Over at Island of Doubt James Hrynyshyn says:
As far as I can tell, North Carolina's no different from the rest of America when it comes to religion. About a tenth of the population is free of religious conviction....
Well, I was pretty sure that there is a statistically significant difference between most Southern states and the rest of the country in regards to these things, so I decided to check out the data in detail. The US Religious Landscape Survey allows me to see what proportion of each state's population are atheists; that is, they don't believe in God. Unfortunately the margin of…
razib | August 28, 2008'Pristine' Amazonian Region Hosted Large, Urban Civilization:
The paper also argues that the size and scale of the settlements in the southern Amazon in North Central Brazil means that what many scientists have considered virgin tropical forests are in fact heavily influenced by historic human activity. Not only that, but the settlements - consisting of networks of walled towns and smaller villages, each organized around a central plaza - suggest future solutions for supporting the indigenous population in Brazil's state of Mato Grosso and other regions of the Amazon, the paper says.…
razib | August 28, 2008Fortune favours the brave; but the brave are motivated by favours of another kind:
If courage makes it significantly more likely that small bands of tribes-men will win military confrontations with their neighbours, its overall advantages can easily outweigh its risks, a mathematical model has shown.
Some men who carry genetic variants that promote bravery might perish because of them, but the ones who survive may win more battles through their greater daring. The resulting opportunities for rape and pillage can create a net evolutionary benefit.
The study is published in The Proceedings of…
razib | August 27, 2008As I have said before biology is quite often the science of exceptions, of variation. Evolutionary biologists spend a great deal of time wondering about the origin of sex, but across vast swaths of the tree of life sex is simply not a consideration. W. D. Hamilton made his name with models of inclusive fitness, but complex social structures are constrained and fully elaborated to only a few branches of the tree of life. Like economics then what interests us in biology often has normative priors; we are a homocentric species. On a fundamental level we understand that we do not exist at the…
razib | August 27, 2008Tectonic environments of ancient civilizations in the eastern hemisphere:
The map distribution of ancient civilizations shows a remarkable correspondence with tectonic boundaries related to the southern margin of the Eurasian plate. Quantification of this observation shows that the association is indeed significant, and both historical records and archaeoseismological work show that these civilizations commonly suffered earthquake damage. Close association of ancient civilizations with tectonic activity seems to be a pattern of some kind. In the hope that dividing the civilizations into…
razib | August 25, 2008Update: Please read Sandman's response after you look over this post....
New Evidence Debunks 'Stupid' Neanderthal Myth:
Blades were first produced by Homo sapiens during their colonization of Europe from Africa approximately 40,000 years ago. This has traditionally been thought to be a dramatic technological advance, helping Homo sapiens out-compete, and eventually eradicate, their Stone Age cousins. Yet when the research team analysed their data there was no statistical difference between the efficiency of the two technologies. In fact, their findings showed that in some respects the flakes…
razib | August 25, 2008A lot of comments have revolved around whether I am a Post-Modernist when it comes to the definition of religion. This post is to make explicit and clarify my own position so I don't have to waste so much time in the comments. Most readers can therefore ignore this and wait until I go back to posting on genetics or something more interesting! :-)
One model of religion goes like so:
Axiom (e.g., One must follow all 612 commandments) → Entails → Entails → Specific belief and practice
In other words, there is a contingent relationship between the initial set of beliefs, and the elaborated set of…
razib | August 24, 2008Pew has a nice survey up right now, A Closer Look at the Parties in 2008. Here are three questions, and the Republican - Democrat difference on the responses:
Do you think the US made the right or wrong decision in using military force against Iraq?, a 50 point difference on both "yes" and "no." I'll let you guess the signs!
Do you think abortion should be...
Legal in all cases -13 difference
Legal in most cases -10 difference
Illegal in most cases +19 difference
Illegal in all cases +6 difference
Books that contain dangerous ideas should be banned from public school libraries
Agree +4…
razib | August 24, 2008John Hawks points me to a "He said, she said," piece which wonders whether there is an inverse relationship between belief in the paranormal and religion. The basic thesis is that the mind abhors a vacuum so without institutionally guided supernatural beliefs people simply revert to "default" intuitions. The article doesn't come to any conclusion, citing contradictory results. So of course I decided to look at the GSS. Specifically, two variables, ASTROSCI and SCITEST3, which query how scientific individuals believe astrology to be. I paired them up with belief in God, GOD, highest…
razib | August 23, 2008A rather pontifical commenter promoted me to do a little digging on the demographics of American atheists, as I was pretty sure that it would reinforce my point about the subjectivity of definitions. The product is a post at my other weblog, Large minority of atheists are religious:
...20% of atheists in the United States self-identify as a member of a religion. By atheist, I mean someone who states that they "Do not believe in God." 19% of Buddhists are atheists. 10% of Jews. 5% of Muslims and Hindus. 9% of "Other Faiths." And of course, 22% of the Unaffiliated (those without a…