razib | July 25, 2008Because of the increased prices in gasoline and the perception of scarcity in terms of power, there has been a lot of talk about nuclear. There have been many comments of late from the Right that the Left is opposed to the utilization of nuclear power, and often gleeful the observation that many European countries such as France and Sweden are highly reliant on this technology. But is it true that liberals are more averse to nuclear than conservatives? I checked the GSS for the following questions:
- Nuclear power dangerous to the environment?
- Likelihood of nuclear meltdown in 5 years…
razib | July 25, 2008I've been reading Critique of Pure Reason and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in the evenings. It should be no surprise that the former is a more tedious read than the latter, David Hume being the better stylist than Immanuel Kant. In faireness, one presumes that translation from the German might add some overhead in terms of obscurity (though I've heard that the German isn't the model of clarity either). Nevertheless, I'm struck by the fact that Kant's prose reminds me a great deal of Stephen Jay Gould. I think this is interesting because Gould drew so much inspiration from out…
razib | July 24, 2008I've posted a fair amount about the new field of historical population genetics. Some of the most popular mass-market books in genetics deal with this field, for example Spencer Wells' Journey of Man. On the other hand, there's a lot of sloppy overreach on the part of some practitioners, especially due to the excessive reliance on uniparental lineages; the unbroken female and male lineages (mtDNA and NRY). Nevertheless, in specific narrow cases where hypotheses are being tested they can be very illuminating.
For example, here is a question: do the mixed-race populations of the Caribbean…
razib | July 23, 2008Sandman has a post up, Can There Be A Synthesis Between Cultural And Biological Evolution?, taking off on the PLoS Biology article, Across the Curious Parallel of Language and Species Evolution. Read both. I would add one important point though: linguistic and biological evolution are simply subsets of evolutionary dynamics. That is why Martin Nowak's book of that name, Evolutionary Dynamics, naturally has a section on the evolution of language. Several evolutionarily oriented thinkers have attempted to translate models originally developed for biology into the domain of culture. Cultural…
razib | July 23, 2008I posted before on Why scientists should do drugs (if they choose), via Tyler Cowen, a Jonah Lehrer article in The New Yorker:
Many stimulants, like caffeine, Adderall, and Ritalin, are taken to increase focus -- one recent poll found that nearly twenty percent of scientists and researchers regularly took prescription drugs to "enhance concentration" -- but, accordingly to Jung-Beeman and Kounios, drugs may actually make insights less like, by sharpening the spotlight of attention and discouraging mental rambles. Concentration, it seems, comes with the hidden cost of diminished creativity…
razib | July 22, 2008Half Sigma points me to The Legend of a Heretic, which chronicles the close relationship between Robert G. Ingersoll, a prominent American agnostic of the 19th century, and the Republican Party elite of that time. It seems ironic that though we are a nation which explicitly bans formal religious tests, we live at a time where an implicit religious test exists. This despite the fact that Andrew Jackson was probably the first of our presidents who would be considered an orthodox Christian. But even as late as 1908 a Unitarian, William Howard Taft, was president (despite some grumblings…
razib | July 20, 2008One social science finding which I've wondered about over the past few years is the result that women care much more about the race of a potential mate than men do. The fact that individuals tend to want to mate assortatively with those who share their characteristics is no surprise. Rather, what does surprise are a series of papers that show a very strong asymmetry in strength of preference between males and females. To be crass about it, an attractive warm body will do for a man, but women strongly prefer a body with the packaging of their own race!
First, let's keep this in perspective…
razib | July 19, 2008Over the past few days I've blogged a bit about the story about an HIV susceptibility allele; Evolution, a reason for the African HIV epidemic?, Overplaying "AIDS genes" and HIV susceptibility, a "black" thing, not a Duffy thing?. But there's an important post Genetic Future, Duffy-HIV association: an odd choice of ancestry markers:
In the Duffy study the authors attempt to perform this type of correction using a set of just 11 markers they describe as "differentially distributed between European and African populations". p-ter notes that several of these markers are not particularly ancestry…
razib | July 19, 2008Just a quick follow up to my post about genetic screening of embryos and subsequent implantation. The spontaneous abortion rate for humans is very high. Probably on the order of 50% of fertilized ova implant and complete to term. I've seen numbers all over the place. In any case, I assume many of these are chromosomal abnormalities. But I've also posted to data which strongly suggests that immunological incompatibilities between mother & fetus also play a role in spontaneous abortions and may result in natural selection which we're not too well aware of. In The Cooperative Gene the…
razib | July 19, 2008DARC and HIV: a false positive due to population structure?:
The authors are aware of this potential confounder, and develop a measure of admixture based on 11 SNPs to include as a covariate in their regression. However, this measure is kind of weak, which I imagine in the sticking point for the skeptics in the Times article. If you have access to the supplemental information, take a look at it--several of these 11 SNPs are in the same gene, which means they're not independent, and several don't even have big frequency differences between African and European samples (if you're trying to…
razib | July 18, 2008Genetic Future points me to a Nature News story, Making babies: the next 30 years. He highlights this section:
There's speculation that people will have designer babies, but I don't think the data are there to support that. The spectre of people wanting the perfect child is based on a false premise. No single gene predicts blondness or thinness or height or whatever the 'perfect baby' looks like. You might find genetic contributors but there are so many environmental factors too.
The details are important here. Height is a tough cookie; it seems like there are going to at least hundreds of…
razib | July 18, 2008David takes a slight detour in this Sewall Wright, series, R. A. Fisher and Epistasis:
My next note on Sewall Wright will cover the exciting subject of the adaptive landscape. As every schoolboy knows, Wright considered epistatic gene interactions very important in determining the 'peaks' of the landscape. A sharp contrast is sometimes drawn between Wright and R. A. Fisher in this respect....
This is a preamble to a very long and dense post. If it interests you in the subject, I'd also recommend Epistasis and the Evolutionary Process. You might also check out this older post of mine on…
razib | July 17, 2008I was curious why an old Genetics and Health post, Twins with Different Skin Color Genes, was sending me many referrals today. Now I know, Two in a Million: Twins Born - One Black, One White:
The twin boys, named Ryan and Leo, are the offspring of a mixed-race couple.
The mother, Florence, hails from Ghana in western Africa, and dad, Stephan, is from Potsdam in Germany.
"Ryan came first, and everything was as usual," said the hospital's doctor, Birgit Weber. "But when Leo was born, I couldn't believe my eyes."
"Both kids have definitely the same father," the doctor added.
These aren't the…
razib | July 17, 2008I agree with all the other ScienceBlogs that Olivia Judson is right. Do we talk about Newtonism? Einsteinism? We do talk about Epicureanism, Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Aristotelianism, etc. I think that says it all....
razib | July 17, 2008Brandom Keim at Wired says Genes Don't Explain African AIDS Epidemic:
Seen in the wrong light, the numbers could present Africa's AIDS tragedy as a biological inevitability. Several press accounts do exactly that. The New York Times credits the mutation for "explaining why the disease is more common there than expected." Reuters says it could "help explain why AIDS has hit Africa harder than all other parts of the world," as this can't be fully rooted in "sexual behavior and other social factors." The Guardian says it "may go some way" to explaining the African prevalence of AIDS. And the…
razib | July 16, 2008Please read: Follow up post.
Genetic Variation Increases HIV Risk In Africans:
A genetic variation which evolved to protect people of African descent against malaria has now been shown to increase their susceptibility to HIV infection by up to 40 per cent, according to new research. Conversely, the same variation also appears to prolong survival of those infected with HIV by approximately two years.
...
HIV affects 25 million people in sub-Saharan Africa today, an HIV burden greater than any other region of the world. Around 90 per cent of people in Africa carry the genetic variation, meaning…
razib | July 15, 2008There's a fair amount of evidence for greater social pathology among whites of Southern origin. One of the major issues that Blue State liberals like to point out that is that on metrics of moral turpitude Southern whites stand out; those who promote a narrow and strident conception of ethical behavior are the most likely to transgress those very norms. Logically one might contend that in a society where there is no murder there need be no laws against it. Similarly, in our society we don't have specific laws against consumption of one's own children for food because it is such a rare…