razib | March 19, 2008Everyone on ScienceBlogsTM is talking about Arthur C. Clarke. I put up a short post where I noted his passing. I wasn't a super fan of Clarke's fiction, though I found it interesting and thought provoking. My personal favorite was the The City and the Stars, which tells the story of a future human civilization of immortal citizens who have turned away from the cosmos. Clarke, being a science fiction writer, does not depict this inward looking conservatism positively, though to some extent one might posit that it is a sort of Benthamite utopia.
And that is the significance of men like…
razib | March 18, 2008Read all about it. He was no prose stylist or a crafter of character, but oh the ideas!
razib | March 18, 2008John Hawks responds to the new paper in PNAS, Close correspondence between quantitative and molecular-genetic divergence times for Neandertals and modern humans.
razib | March 18, 2008I read Christmas: A Candid History walking home last night. It's a small compact book so walking and reading works well. In any case, there was some surprising information here. The basic outline that Christmas, as we understand it, is in large part a co-opted pagan complex of festivals is there. No surprise. But the author claims that the suppression of St. Nicholas and his festival during the Reformation in northern Europe had the side effect of enabling the resurgence of pagan supernatural folk-heroes! In other words, without St. Nicholas the rural peasantry of German and Scandinavia…
razib | March 17, 2008Why White People Like 'Stuff White People Like':
...Basically, this joke breaks down as "Congratulate a white person and they will feel smugly good about themselves." It's the perfect go-to punchline for Stuff White People Like, because it's really what the site is all about. Because if there's one thing white people really like, it's pretending to poke fun at themselves while actually being allowed to feel superior.
My friend Reiham Salam is not a fan. I have only read a few entries on Stuff White People Like over the past month. I don't have a visceral dislike of the site, but it is…
razib | March 16, 2008Hasidic actor walks off Portman movie:
First he couldn't hold Natalie Portman's hand - and now a Williamsburg Hasidic Jew-turned-actor has to give up his chance to hit it big in a Hollywood movie.
....
"I am backing out of the movie," said Karpen, a kitchen cabinet salesman. "It's not acceptable in my community. It's a lot of pressure I am getting. They [the rabbis] didn't like the idea of a Hasidic guy playing in Hollywood.
Sounds kind of meshugana to me. But there's more:
Then came the howls of protest about his unorthodox job.
"This is when I woke up and saw that I made a big mistake. My…
razib | March 16, 2008David has finally initiated his series on the major ideas of the great evolutionary biologist Sewall Wright. Check out his post on path analysis.
razib | March 16, 2008OK, the title is somewhat of an exaggeration, but not much. Out of Africa, Not Once But Twice:
Modern humans are known to have left Africa in a wave of migration around 50,000 years ago, but another, smaller group -- possibly a different subspecies -- left the continent 50,000 years earlier, suggests a new study.
While all humans today are related to the second "out of Africa" group, it's likely that some populations native to Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia retain genetic vestiges of the earlier migrants, according to the paper's author, Michael…
razib | March 16, 2008Daniel Larison says:
Reliable information is a bit hard to come by, but it seems as if the policy of increased Han Chinese colonisation in Tibet has finally run up against a violent popular backlash. I haven't anything very insightful to say about this, but it is one of the major foreign affairs stories this week and merits some mention here.
Made me wonder. Wikipedia says that the Tibetan Autonomous Region is still a little over 90% Tibetan. In contrast, in Xinjiang at least 40% of the population is Han. The main city, Urumqi is 3/4 Han. So comparatively Tibet is actually not much…
razib | March 14, 2008Our old friend Noah Feldman has a new article in The New York Times Magazine exploring the subtly of shariah law. I know that Feldman is exceedingly bright, and as someone raised as an Orthodox Jew and a law professor, he is very well placed to explore this topic and translate to a Western audience. There are many resemblances between Rabbinical Judaism and Islam when it comes to civil jurispurdience. But details do matter to me, and Feldman oversimplifies the nature of Islam and underestimates its boundary conditions in my opinion. For example, he says, "All Muslims would agree, for…
razib | March 14, 2008I generally skim only a few political/public policy weblogs via my RSS to get a sense of the Zeitgeist. M. McArdle and M. Yglesias are two of the blogs I sample. Anyway, if you read their blogs, check out the latest installment of The Table, the intro is really hilarious. Most-def trying to do the Gen-X ironic thing.
razib | March 14, 2008A few days ago I mooted the possibility that balancing selection may be more common than we had assumed, and that much of the recent evolutionary action in our species' history might be characterized by non-fixed allele frequencies which exhibit the signatures of positive selection because of their shallow time depth. I was interested in the idea for an important reason. Below the fold are are a range of data for two loci implicated in skin color variation in human populations; SLC24A5 and SLC45A2.
SLC45A2
SLC24A5
Mozabite
0.4
0.87
Bedouin
0.23
0.97
Druze
0.51
1…
razib | March 13, 2008Steve Waldman has been blogging some of the major arguments from his new book, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America. He says:
As for their religious beliefs, someone in the comment thread said I was being incoherent or contradictory by saying the Big Five (Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Washington & Madison) were neither Deists nor orthodox Christians. Again, we're viewing this through a somewhat warped lens. "Deist" and "Orthodox Christian" were not the only two spiritual choices. For one thing, each Founder was slightly different from each…
razib | March 12, 2008A new story highlighting the waxing of Creationism within modern Turkey. A depressing tidbit:
Education Minister Huseyin Celik, an AKP member, said he has an open mind over the debate about evolution, but in 2005, the Ministry reportedly suspended five teachers for advocating evolution too strongly.
...
"In my school three out of five science teachers only teach creationism and I face pressure from them everyday. They also try to turn the children against us in their classes, saying we are atheists," a teacher told ISN Security Watch on the condition of anonymity.
The AKP is a moderate…
razib | March 12, 2008Scientist calculates an equation for the common cold: "Ten percent of your life is spent fighting colds." Wow. That makes sense though. I've read that common cold viruses need at least the population density of agricultural societies to persist endemically. No wonder the recent work on natural selection among humans shows that immune related loci exhibit strong signatures of recent evolution.
razib | March 12, 2008Just noticed that Carlos Bustamante's chapter from Statistical Methods in Molecular Evolution, Population Genetics of Molecular Evolution, is online (PDF). Enjoy.