razib | August 11, 2008Today I stumbled on to this article in The New York Times, In U.S., Partisan Expert Witnesses Frustrate Many, and thought of Steve Fuller; the sociologist of science who testified for the Creationists at the Dover trial. John points me to this awesome take-down of Fuller's book, Science v. Religion? Intelligent Design and the Problem of Evolution. A nice sample:
...Newton is supposed to have "presented his mathematical physics as the divine plan that was implicitly written into the Bible [emphasis added]" (p. 54). Fuller must have access to an otherwise unknown veridical edition of the…
razib | August 11, 2008A few weeks ago I reread large portions of A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics. There were several chapters near the end which focused a great deal on the men that Galton mentored; from his protege Karl Pearson to the eventual nemesis of the Galtonian tradition in biology, William Bateson. In particular, I was struck by the social and scientific dynamics of the first 10 years of the 20th century, when Mendelism broke onto the scene and slowly eroded the primacy of biometrical theories of inheritance. A deeper exploration of the topic can be found…
razib | August 10, 2008Georgia. John Edwards love-child. Olympics. Bernie & Isaac. A lot happens when you aren't paying attention in this big world....
razib | August 7, 2008In case you were curious.
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 3%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 97%
SiteMale-Female Ratio
google.com0.98
yahoo.com0.9
youtube.com1
wikipedia.org1.08
amazon.com0.9
craigslist.org1.13
facebook.com0.83
walmart.com0.77
paypal.com1.04
cnn.com1.35
blogger.com1.06
imdb.com1.06
flickr.com1.15
weather.com1.08
nytimes.com1.13
typepad.com0.94
washingtonpost.com1.15
orbitz.com0.83
drudgereport.com2.08
indeed.com0.72
slate.com1.11
wired.com1.41
npr.org0.98
politico.com1.7
salon.com1.13
beliefnet.com0.45
salary.com0.77
abebooks.com0.96
poetry.com0.68
gmail.com0.9
slashdot.…
razib | August 6, 2008New Results On The Domestication Of Barley In Iran & Cattle In Turkey. And stuff on milk a little earlier than we thought...obviously relevant to lactose tolerance.
razib | August 6, 2008Differential Greek and northern African migrations to Sicily are supported by genetic evidence from the Y chromosome:
The presence or absence of genetic heterogeneity in Sicily has long been debated. Through the analysis of the variation of Y-chromosome lineages, using the combination of haplogroups and short tandem repeats from several areas of Sicily, we show that traces of genetic flows occurred in the island, due to ancient Greek colonization and to northern African contributions, are still visible on the basis of the distribution of some lineages. The genetic contribution of Greek…
razib | August 6, 2008At my other weblog, Cliodynamics, the rise & fall of empires and asabiya and Historical Dynamics and contingent conditions of religion. The first is a bit long. The second is rather long. My Voice will not be Silenced!
razib | August 6, 2008Richard Dawkins: Muslim parents 'import creationism' into schools:
"Most devout Muslims are creationists so when you go to schools, there are a large number of children of Islamic parents who trot out what they have been taught," Prof Dawkins said in a Sunday newspaper interview.
"Teachers are bending over backwards to respect home prejudices that children have been brought up with. The Government could do more, but it doesn't want to because it is fanatical about multiculturalism and the need to respect the different traditions from which these children come."
Fact: a greater proportion of…
razib | August 5, 2008A few months ago I was talking to a friend who is pretty highly "connected," insofar as he seems to know everyone. So we were talking about some genetics issues and I asked him, "You know who Lee Silver is, right?" There was a pause, and my friend was like, "I just got off the phone with him."
razib | August 4, 2008I know this paper will make some ScienceBloggers very happy, Assortative sociality, limited dispersal, infectious disease and the genesis of the global pattern of religion diversity:
Why are religions far more numerous in the tropics compared with the temperate areas? We propose, as an answer, that more religions have emerged and are maintained in the tropics because, through localized coevolutionary races with hosts, infectious diseases select for three anticontagion behaviours: in-group assortative sociality; out-group avoidance; and limited dispersal. These behaviours, in turn, create…
razib | August 2, 2008My post from a few weeks ago, Why does race matter for women?, elicited a lot of response (made it to the front page of Digg). Most of the open public discourse on race is bracketed in a few coarse frameworks; it is a social construction, and no one cares who is truly enlightened anymore, white racism keeps people of color down, etc. Though of utility in sloganeering I think most of these generalizations are such half-approximations that they mislead a great deal of time. So for example the interesting repeated finding that women in the United States are consistently more race conscious in…
razib | August 2, 2008Listen to Lee Siegel, Internet Reading: Speeding Us Up by Dumbing Us Down?. He's positively unhinged, totally out of control. I don't really mind Siegel, he obviously going to spend as much of his professional capital as possible attacking the internet after his own negative self-inflicted experiences. Why is the media putting this guy on the phone? A 7 year old farting on air would be more informative and edifying. Siegel's been all over the place basically claiming that the internet heralds the arrival of Gog and Magog. I really wouldn't be too shocked if during the next interview…
razib | August 1, 2008I've been reading up on the field of cliodynamics recently. But despite the importance of broader macrosocial dynamics, the suicide of the Anthrax scare suspect is a reminder that proximately one determined person can sway the actions of nations....
razib | July 30, 2008Some results from the GSS on what people perceive the ideal number of children is based on social variables. Additionally, the realized number of children the respondent has. I limited the sample to whites who were 40 or older (there are people who have children past 40, but I assume that most of the discrepancy, or not, between ideal and realized will be evident by that age).
razib | July 30, 2008Chris Orr at The Plank reports that Isaac Asimov's Foundation series is going to be given the film treatment. Orr is skeptical, and so am I. As far as space opera goes the Foundation universe was a cerebral and sedate treatment; they'll have to rewrite a lot of it to get some action to spice up the story. David Brin's Uplift based novels read much more like the outlines of scripts; but after The Postman they probably won't want to risk that. Even if there's a lot going on space opera doesn't always translate well. Remember David Lynch's take on Dune? Because of the success of Peter…
razib | July 29, 2008I was curious about a few social variables which often associate across generations, and also within families. So I looked in the General Social Survey for denomination, highest degree and socioeconomic index, which I knew were surveyed for the individual (respondent), their parents and their spouse. Below the fold are the correlation matrices generated. Remember that if you assume a linear dependency you square the correlation (e.g., 0.50 → 0.25) to find out how much of the variation in X can be accounted for by variation in Y.
Religious denomination
Denomination
Father's Denom.
Mother'…
razib | July 29, 2008Indo-European and Asian origins for Chilean and Pacific chickens revealed by mtDNA:
European chickens were introduced into the American continents by the Spanish after their arrival in the 15th century. However, there is ongoing debate as to the presence of pre-Columbian chickens among Amerindians in South America, particularly in relation to Chilean breeds such as the Araucana and Passion Fowl...The modern Chilean sequences cluster closely with haplotypes predominantly distributed among European, Indian subcontinental, and Southeast Asian chickens, consistent with a European genetic origin.…
razib | July 28, 2008One of the problems with intellectual conversations is that they are generally restricted to intellectuals. By their nature intellectuals tend to value reflection and some semblance of comprehension and consistency. This is a "curved" scale; I'm not contending here that intellectuals really attain a very high absolute level of analytic clarity or coherency, but, the process itself tends result in a minimal baseline of plausibility to a propositional sequence.
I've pretty much come to the conclusion that the problem with attempting to understand human cognition as a sequence of inferences…
razib | July 27, 2008Chad has a post up The Innumeracy of Intellectuals, where he goes on a rant against humanities academics and their blithe complacency in relation to their ignorance of science & mathematics. Two points....
1) One of the major issues with humanistically oriented intellectuals, I believe, is a lack of anthropological fluency with the culture of science. As a case in point, a contributor to the literary weblog The Valve dismissed my assertion that scholars who study science should have some immersion in scientific education at some point with the quip that experience with multiple choice…