razib | May 11, 2008I have a new sublog over at Talk Islam. My first post, A wrong track for Western Islam?:
Thabet mentioned the spread of Salafism among British Muslims. Of course most of you know that North Indian Islam has an indigenous form 'reformist' Islam, Deobandism, which is not in intents all that different from Salafism. But the majority of North Indians are 'traditionalist' Barelvis, a variant of Hanafism. Despite these historical precedents there is a tendency among non-Arab Western Muslims to 'Arabicize' their Islam, or at least reform it so as to expunge local accretions & interpretations (…
razib | May 10, 2008Via The Corner, Turkish Islamic author given 3-year jail sentence:
Controversial Turkish Islamic author Adnan Oktar was sentenced to three years in prison on Friday for creating an illegal organization for personal gain, state-run Anatolian news agency said.
...
Oktar, born in 1956, is the driving force behind a richly funded movement based in Turkey that champions creationism, the belief that God literally created the world in six days as told in the Bible and the Koran.
Istanbul-based Oktar, who writes under the pen name Harun Yahya, has created waves in the past few years by sending out…
razib | May 10, 2008I've commented on height genetics now & then. It seems that the quantitative genetic supposition that variation on this trait was due to the cummulative effect of numerous loci of small effect is correct. Recent research has pinpointed about ~5% of the variance. In contrast, skin color variation is mostly due to polymorphism on about 6 loci; most of the variance is due to genes of large effect. This makes specific discussion of skin color easy, but height difficult.
I've been thinking about this when it comes social phenomena. Much of the verbal treatment presupposes a few large…
razib | May 9, 2008Over at The Scientist Neil S. Greenspan has an article up, Darwin and deduction:
One of the most remarkable but insufficiently noted features of Charles Darwin's conception of evolution is that its logical implications are still being worked out. I am not merely claiming that experimental and observation studies continue to make use of and bear on Darwinian ideas and principles. I am calling attention to the fact that after almost a century and a half, new deductions are still being teased out of his very fertile axioms of descent with modification and natural selection.
One of the primary…
razib | May 8, 2008I notice that the Moon-man is flogging Carl Zimmer's new book. So I feel it's time to pile-on, buy Microcosm! Carl is of course giving a series of talks at fine bookstores near you....
razib | May 8, 2008Notes on Sewall Wright: Genetic Drift:
Continuing my series of notes on the work of Sewall Wright, this one deals with the subject of genetic drift. I had originally planned to call this note 'Inbreeding and the decline of genetic variance', but anyone interested in the matters covered here, and searching for them on the internet, is far more likely to search for 'genetic drift'. This is one of the subjects most closely associated with Wright, to the extent that genetic drift was formerly often known as the 'Sewall Wright Effect'. My main aim is to help people follow Wright's own derivation…
razib | May 6, 2008Last fall I argued that the relatively light death toll of hurricane Sidr was due to improvements in the institutional framework of the Bangladeshi polity. More recently, I suggested that Burma's social & economic deficits vis-a-vis Bangladesh were due to negative government action. Now Chris Mooney has an article up on the reverberations of hurricane Nargis. Here's what caught my attention:
Hurricanes have been dramatically active in the North Indian region in the past year, just as they were in the Atlantic region in 2004 and 2005. There is quite a body of scientific research now…
razib | May 2, 2008Saw Iron Man with that genderist SOB Jake Young. All I can say is that it is nice that G. K. Paltrow finally has a hit on her hands after all these years....
razib | April 30, 2008From The evolution of human skin coloration, page 12:
The main reason I post is that I don't think that intuitively people have a good idea of how far north the north of Europe is, and the fact that "temperate" East Asia is at the latitude of the Mediterranean (as is most of the United States).
razib | April 29, 2008John Derbyshire has a long column excoriating Ben Stein and the Discovery Institute titled A Blood Libel on Our Civilization:
And there is science, perhaps the greatest of all our achievements, because nowhere else on earth did it appear. China, India, the Muslim world, all had fine cities and systems of law, architecture and painting, poetry and prose, religion and philosophy. None of them ever accomplished what began in northwest Europe in the later 17th century, though: a scientific revolution. Thoughtful men and women came together in learned societies to compare notes on their…
razib | April 28, 2008Over @ Stranger Fruit John Lynch points a section from a paper which recounts the Christian assocation with eugenics:
On the whole the evangelical mainstream in the decades following the turn of the century appeared apathetic, acquiescent, or at times downright supportive of the eugenics movement. In this article, I argue that the evangelicals often accepted eugenics as a part of a progressive, reformist vision that uncritically fused the Kingdom of God with modern civilization.
In Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity the…
razib | April 26, 2008Welcome to the 30th Gene Genie!
Indulge in the fascinating world of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine has a "genetics lifestyle" post, Home Improvement For Geneticists. Not quite Tim Allen. Fellow ScienceBlogger Sandra illustrates Mapping polymorphisms in 16S ribosomal RNA. Definitely worth checking out, anyone interested in biology should be down with ribosomes, and rRNA has also been critical in taxonomy. Biotech Weblog notes that Gene Therapy May Treat Cocaine Addiction. 'nuf said. Migraines affect about 1 out of 6 people in the world; so pay attention when Genetics and Health suggest…
razib | April 25, 2008Just a heads up, I've been posting now and then to the quasi-Twitteresque site Talk Islam run by my friend Aziz Poonawalla. I also have a sub-weblog where I'll be posting some of my longer form ruminations...but it might be best to just sign up for the RSS so you're notified when I start posting there regularly. I've been reading God's Rule - Government and Islam: Six Centuries of Medieval Islamic Political Thought on & off for weeks now, and I think I'll put up a review over there after I'm done....
razib | April 25, 2008If you read this weblog you are aware that I have a fascination with the intersection of human history and human evolutionary genetics. There are many questions I have about the finding from evolutionary genomic studies that light skin evolved at least twice independently in Eurasia within the last 20,000 years or so at the extremities. The selection coefficients are large, so I am confused as to why even minimal gene flow did not result in equilibration and homogenization of the allelic profiles of the populations. I have posited that the answer has to do with very low population densities…
razib | April 24, 2008Genetic variation in human NPY expression affects stress response and emotion:
Understanding inter-individual differences in stress response requires the explanation of genetic influences at multiple phenotypic levels, including complex behaviours and the metabolic responses of brain regions to emotional stimuli. Neuropeptide Y (NPY) is anxiolytic...and its release is induced by stress...NPY is abundantly expressed in regions of the limbic system that are implicated in arousal and in the assignment of emotional valences to stimuli and memories...Here we show that haplotype-driven NPY…