razib | June 10, 2008I was poking around Fund Race 2008 and was curious how different scientist professions were giving in regards to political parties in the USA. Below is what I found....
profession
Repub #
Dem #
Repub $
Dem $
Ratio #
Dem $
mathematician
18
98
13740
72837
5.44
5.3
physicist
86
532
65722
425105
6.19
6.47
chemist
172
397
111058
247742
2.31
2.23
biochemist
23
117
16567
100415
5.09
6.06
biologist
27
278
13809
156868
10.3
11.36
geologist
321
294
321835
195143
0.92
0.61
electrical engineer
321
374
184539
244717
1.17
1.33
mechanical engineer
155
149
109542
86466
0.96
0.79
civil…
razib | June 10, 2008This is cool, Intraspecific phylogenetic analysis of Siberian woolly mammoths using complete mitochondrial genomes:
We report five new complete mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genomes of Siberian woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), sequenced with up to 73-fold coverage from DNA extracted from hair shaft material. Three of the sequences present the first complete mtDNA genomes of mammoth clade II. Analysis of these and 13 recently published mtDNA genomes demonstrates the existence of two apparently sympatric mtDNA clades that exhibit high interclade divergence. The analytical power afforded by…
razib | June 9, 2008Carl has an excellent post up, Engineering Life: The Dog that Didn't Bark in the Night:
...Erwin Chargaff, an eminent Columbia University biologist, called genetic engineering "an irreversible attack on the biosphere."
"The world is given to us on loan," he warned. "We come and we go; and after a time we leave earth and air and water to others who come after us. My generation, or perhaps the one preceding mine, has been the first to engage, under the leadership of the exact sciences, in a destructive colonial warfare against nature. The future will curse us for it."
At the same time, people…
razib | June 8, 2008Will Wilkinson and Jon Haidt just did a bloggingheads.tv. I've blogged Haidt's ideas before (Chris is skeptical). During this bloggingheads.tv interview Haidt lays out the difference between college age liberals and other societies with a scenario where a beloved dog dies and the family decides to consume the creature. Most non-college age non-liberals think that that's immoral, while many of the liberals express a more guarded utilitarian evaluation where its morality is ambiguous. That's fine, but later on Haidt mentions that a lot of New Age liberals are always going on about "toxins…
razib | June 8, 2008A long response by me at my other weblog to Alan Jacob's piece, Too Much Faith in Faith. A sample:
As they say, read the whole thing. Alan, as a Christian, place particular focus on the New Atheists who wish to leave at religion's feet all evil done it in its name but explain away as incidental all the good whose motivation was putatively supernatural. But he does note there are those such as Rodney Stark, an extremely pro-Christian sociologist, who would ascribe to religion all the good in the world while staying relatively silent on the evil enacted in the name of God (or, the usual…
razib | June 7, 2008Twilight for the Forest People:
If they are removed and survive the exposure to diseases they have never encountered, it is likely that the unique knowledge and beliefs that define them, the spirit of their life, will probably slip away.
I am to understand that governments like Brazil are better about this, but there has long been a problem with these tribal groups disappearing in 2-3 generations because of their lack of immune faculties to deal with the pathogens they're newly exposed to. Something to think about.
razib | June 6, 2008Notes on Sewall Wright: Population Size:
Continuing my series of notes on the work of Sewall Wright, I come to the question of population size. This is important in Wright's formulation of population genetics and his evolutionary theory generally. One of the major differences between Wright and R. A. Fisher is that Fisher believed that, in general, evolutionary processes could be treated as if they took place in a very large random-mating population. He did not believe, contrary to some caricatures, that species were literally random-mating across their entire range (which is obviously false…
razib | June 5, 2008Inductivist looked into the General Social Survey and found that the mean IQs of white college graduates has been dropping:
1960s 113.72
1970s 110.59
1980s 108.04
1990s 104.42
2000s 105.12
Remember that the popualtion mean is around 100, with a standard deviation of 15. That means that since the 1960s the college graduate has gone from being, on average, in the 17.5th percentile to the 37th percentile of the population! What's going on here? I think it has to be the fact to a great extent a college degree is now substitute for a high school diploma, the pool is getting larger and so of…
razib | June 4, 2008You've probably read Carl and Ed's posts, but the paper is finally out, Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli:
The role of historical contingency in evolution has been much debated, but rarely tested. Twelve initially identical populations of Escherichia coli were founded in 1988 to investigate this issue. They have since evolved in a glucose-limited medium that also contains citrate, which E. coli cannot use as a carbon source under oxic conditions. No population evolved the capacity to exploit citrate for >30,000…
razib | June 3, 2008John Hawks has a post up, Handling exponential growth in demographic models. You might like to read it in concert with p-ter's post Modeling human demographic history. One question I have in regards to human evolutionary genetic history is this: how typical are our population dynamics up to this point for a typical sexually reproducing species? And therefore, how might that impact deviations for our species from the norm? Also, if you are interested in the intersection of evolutionary genetics and models of demography you can go back to R. A. Fisher's Genetical Theory of Natural…
razib | June 3, 2008When I was a kid I was what you might call a "climate nerd." I would be at a party my parents took me to and pour over atlases and maps, as well as descriptive books on climatology, just to pass the time. Though it was just a phase I have kept a lot of that knowledge with me, and I've found it really useful. Many times I'm shocked at how ignorant many of my friends are of geography. If one was to choose between learning technique or information (e.g., math vs. history) I would pick technique because my own feeling is that technique is very versatile. But in the real world we don't choose…
razib | June 2, 2008A week ago I posted on the gender gap in politics; today Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science critiques a similar argument:
Via Craig Newmark, I saw a column by John Lott summarizing his 1999 paper with Lawrence Kenny, "Did women's suffrage change the size and scope of government?" Lott and Kenny conclude Yes, by comparing the spending and revenue patterns of state governments before and after women were allowed to vote. I haven't looked at the analysis carefully and would need a little more convincing that it's not just a story of coinciding time trends (they have a…
razib | June 1, 2008I realized today that my post about doing quantitative genetic back-of-the-envelopes was rather wordy. And, I have a hunch that those who "got it" already have an intuitive feel for what I'm talking about, so I thought perhaps the easiest way to get people to develop a better feel was to roll up the calculations into a small Javascript calculator. You can find it below the fold. The terms are defined in the earlier post, but I plugged in the default values (you can change them if you want). Obviously you enter in inches or centimeters depending on whether you're normal or Canadian.…
razib | June 1, 2008Shrimp is my favorite food; I really like shrimp. When I was an undergrad I used to stuff myself during "shrimp night" at the cafeteria. Basically I would show up at 4:30 and hang out eating until 7:00, then I would recline for an hour because moving was going to be really, really, painfull. Once I managed to walk without discomfort I'd go and lay down on my bed in the dorm room because I was worried about my stomach exploding. I really like shrimp. So with that, check out Deep Sea News as CJ posts about sustainable seafood. To my chagrin I ordered fried shrimp when I was visiting CJ in…
razib | June 1, 2008I was chatting with a friend about a few quantitative genetic "back-of-the-envelopes." Specifically, about the expectation of the heights of the offspring of any given couple in the United States. I say the United States because it is a nation where most people get enough to eat; that means that heritability is on the order of 80-90% for this trait. By this, I mean that 80-90% of the variation in height we see within the population is due to variation in genetics. Those who are tall are likely to have tall parents, and those who are short are likely to have short parents. The key is…
razib | May 31, 2008Haven't had a time to check this paper out, but looks real interesting, Assessing the Evolutionary Impact of Amino Acid Mutations in the Human Genome:
Although mutations are known to cause varying degrees of harmful effects, it is difficult to quantify the distribution that best describes the variation of fitness effects of these mutations. Here we present a new method for inferring this distribution and inferring population history using Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) data from human populations. Using 47,576 SNPs discovered in 11,404 genes from sequencing 35 individuals (20 European…
razib | May 29, 2008Here's another example of how genetic methods can shed light on archaeological questions, Paleo-Eskimo mtDNA Genome Reveals Matrilineal Discontinuity in Greenland:
The Paleo-Eskimo Saqqaq and Independence I cultures, documented from archaeological remains in Northern Canada and Greenland, represent the earliest human expansion into the New World's northern extremes. However, their origin and genetic relationship to later cultures is unknown. We sequenced a mitochondrial genome from a Paleo-Eskimo human, using 3400- to 4500-year-old frozen hair excavated from an early Greenlandic Saqqaq…