razib | July 2, 2008Mike the Mad Biologist has a post up, A Biologist Confuses Artificial and Natural Selection:
There's a really interesting article in last week's NY Times magazine about global warming and the spread of weeds....
...Artificial selection occurs when the fitness criterion--that is, what trait or phenotype will have higher survivability or reproductive output--is directly chosen by the experimenter. In the case of the weeds, if we were delibrately trying to grow better weeds--that is, mowing down rice biovars that aren't sufficiently 'weedy'--that is artificial selection. Simply changing the…
razib | July 1, 2008If you have ever used the Perl programming language then you have heard the name Larry Wall. But, you might not know that Larry Wall is an active member of the Church of the Nazarene (the "bless" function anyone?). According to the Religion in American Culture survey 63% of Nazarenes accept a literal interpretation of the Bible, as opposed to 46% of Ameican Protestants as a whole. James Dobson is probably the most prominent American Nazarene. So with that, Larry Wall's opinion on evolution might interest:
A great deal of my theological thinking has been driven by the notion of trying to…
razib | July 1, 2008You probably know that Carl Zimmer has moved to Discover Blogs. Coke always needed Pepsi to step up its game....
razib | July 1, 2008From page 33 of Brian Magee's Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy from Plato to Popper:
I came to realize, then that what matters above all else in politics is what happens, not what people say about it. And for the most part what happens is independent of my wishes. In politics especially, people tend to allow their wishes to influence their assessment of reality, and to mix up the two even at conscious levels of thinking. For instance, all my life I have bet on elections, and all my life I have found that many people assume that what I am betting on…
razib | June 30, 2008PZ Myers outlines synteny. RPM says he's kind of wrong. Check out the definition in Wikipedia. Since RPM came down on me for confusion on this term I knew he would bring this up. I don't really care much about which definition is "correct," but I thought I'd point interested readers to the debate.....
razib | June 30, 2008Chris of Mixing Memory is doing us the service of a chapter by chapter review of George Lakoff's The Political Mind. This should be fun! I told Chris that reading Lakoff talking about the minds of conservatives is kind of like me opining with supreme confidence as to the deep motivations behind why so many homosexual men prefer being "bottoms." The is fact that I'm not a homosexual male myself, nor have I read a great deal of literature on the topic, or even communicated with homosexual males about the issue and their motivations behind their preferences, is besides the point. Now only if…
razib | June 29, 2008A few weeks ago I read Brink Lindsey's The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture. One strange thing is that because I've watched Brink on BloggingHeads.TV on occasion could hear the prose with his particular cadence and delivery. Really weird. In any case, The Age of Abundance is a social history of the 20th century which makes the case that despite the persistence of a partisan divide our culture has operationally congealed around a rough libertarian consensus. In short, a free market of money and lifestyle choices. I think there is a strong argument…
razib | June 29, 2008Baby to be born free of breast cancer after embryo screening:
The couple produced 11 embryos, of which five were found to be free from the gene. Two of these were implanted in the woman's womb and she is now 14 weeks pregnant.
By screening out embryos carrying the gene, called BRCA-1, the couple, from London, will eliminate the hereditary disease from their lineage.
Obviously the headline is hyperbolic in this specific case. Changing probabilities is not necessarily a guarantee. But I think the bigger picture here warrants serious notice. Armand Leroi has outlined the major issues, so I…
razib | June 27, 2008I just read an interesting new paper, Genetic Variation in Political Participation:
The decision to vote has puzzled scholars for decades...The results show that a significant proportion of the variation in voting turnout can be accounted for by genes. We also replicate these results with data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and show that they extend to a broad class of acts of political participation. These are the first findings to suggest that humans exhibit genetic variation in their tendency to participate in political activities.
Here's a figure which really…
razib | June 27, 2008The best summary so far here of the bird phylogeny paper. Also, Greg Laden. Most definitely I was surprised and interested to learn that falcons are not closely related to eagles & hawks.
razib | June 26, 2008Sandy pointed me to letter to Nature by a group which has done some earlier pigmentation work, Two newly identified genetic determinants of pigmentation in Europeans:
We present results from a genome-wide association study for variants associated with human pigmentation characteristics among 5,130 Icelanders, with follow-up analyses in 2,116 Icelanders and 1,214 Dutch individuals. Two coding variants in TPCN2 are associated with hair color, and a variant at the ASIP locus shows strong association with skin sensitivity to sun, freckling and red hair, phenotypic characteristics similar to those…
razib | June 24, 2008Humans, being who we are, are really interested in how our external phenotype is shaped. Since the year 2000 many of the genetic underpinnings of the gross physical features which we use to categorize people, the sort of thing that might show up in a people description, have been elucidated. We know, for example, the genes which control variation in skin color to a first approximation at this point. It also seems that we've zeroed in on the primary gene responsible for eye color variation. Additionally, recently there's been the discovery of the gene which seems to control East Asian hair…
razib | June 24, 2008One of the great things about evolutionary genetics is that it is such a diverse field in terms of the cognitive toolkit which one must access as a matter of course. Since R. A. Fisher's The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (along with the contemporaneous work of Sewall Wright and J. B. S. Haldane) we've been habituated toward thinking of evolutionary processes on an abstract level which might allow us to make general deductive inferences from first principles. Genetic drift, selection, migration, etc., are parameters which are used to construct models that allow us to generate…
razib | June 23, 2008Last month my posts Biblical literalism or low IQ: which came first? and Educational levels & denomination got a lot of play around the blogosphere. I used the US Religious Landscape Survey to get demographic data for denominations, but I had to cobble together numbers on Biblical literalism, etc. But with a further release of data I can now flesh out almost all the denominations plotting postgrad education % vs. belief that the Bible is the literal word of god.
Clarification: Y axis = % with postgrad education. X axis = % who believe the Bible is the literal word of god.
As you can…
razib | June 23, 2008Another story about recent human evolution, this time, really recent. The paper in PLOS is A Drastic Reduction in the Life Span of Cystatin C L68Q Carriers Due to Life-Style Changes during the Last Two Centuries. A mouthful, but the authors are really good at explaining what they're finding and why it's important:
....The detrimental phenotypic impact of the L68Q mutation appears to have emerged in reaction to common life-style changes almost three centuries after the mutation occurred. We believe that this is the first report of phenotypic flexibility of a monogenic disease in reaction to…
razib | June 23, 2008Britain's Last Neanderthals Were More Sophisticated Than We Thought. I don't need to comment/summarize because Anthropology.net already has....
razib | June 23, 2008One of the points that I run into all the time is that Buddhism is a religion without god, that is it is an atheistic religion. I admit this assertion as an ideal or elite belief, but contend that the vast majority of the world's Buddhists are theists, so one can't simply present Buddhism as an atheistic religion when most Buddhists are not atheists. I do tend to agree that Western converts to Buddhism are often atheists, and that's one reason Westerners view it as atheistic religion since the Buddhists they are most likely to know are not ethnically Asian ones. The US Religious Landscape…