razib | March 11, 2008Chris at Mixing Memory has a post up, Respecting the Religious (or the A-Religious), pointing to a Simon Blackburn working paper, Respect and Religion. I enjoyed Blackburn's Think, but the chapter on God left me a bit cold. Blackburn is a philosopher, and his thoughts reflect that training. If I believed that religiosity was grounded in the sorts of arguments presented in Summa Theologica, I would take more interest in philosophical deconstructions of theism. As it is, I doubt that this is the case, a reality which Summa Theologica's author, St. Thomas Aquinas, acknowledges as well.…
razib | March 11, 2008You've probably heard about this story. Check out Afarensis and Anthropology.net for a summary of the science. But Kambiz also has some juicy gossip about the back-story here....
razib | March 10, 2008A few of you have noticed that I'm a little darker skinned than I was previously (see photo to left). Well, the explanation is simple, it's a recent photo and I was at the beach getting my ultra-tan on. I happened to be at the BIL Conference, and was in Monterey where the beaches are. BIL was cool; the proactive social evangelism by the people behind it seemed to work pretty well. Out of the 200 people there was only one super-freak who parasitized everyone's attention (you know who I'm talking about if you were there). I met two bloggers, Lexi Bright and Shannon Clark; we bonded over…
razib | March 10, 2008Dan MacArthur has a post up, Climate genes: positive or balancing selection?, where he questions the interpretation of data from a recent paper, Adaptations to Climate in Candidate Genes for Common Metabolic Disorders:
The critical point I want to make is that while positive selection will usually tend to increase the frequency of an allele until it reaches 100% frequency, balancing selection can result in a situation where an allele reaches a stable frequency that is less than 100%. For a case of heterozygote advantage, the stable frequency will be the point at which the selective advantage…
razib | March 7, 2008Dave Munger has a post up about discernment when it comes to wine. The Munger sayeth:
Researchers have known for some time that not everyone has the same ability to detect tastes. Some people -- "super-tasters" -- are especially sensitive to a wide range of tastes. As it turns out, whether or not you're a super-taster may come down to your ability to detect a single molecule: 6-n-propylthiouracil, or PROP for short. Those who can taste PROP find it incredibly bitter, but super-tasters are also extra sensitive to saltiness, sweetness, and even tactile sensations in the mouth.
I've posted on…
razib | March 7, 2008As I have noted before one of the consequences of genomic analysis techniques becoming relatively cheap and accessible is that they are now viable tools toward exploring a host of fundamentally non-genetic questions. That is, instead of exploring the dynamics of evolutionary biology, they can be used to shed light upon other sorts of dynamics. Sometimes the questions are fuzzy and the techniques can be laborious; e.g., the extraction and analysis of ancient DNA and their subsequent insertion into an explanatory framework where the non-genetic data are patchy. On other occasions, the…
razib | March 6, 2008John Hawks has everything you need to know. Question: how did this get by peer review?
razib | March 6, 2008Genetic evidence and the modern human origins debate:
A continued debate in anthropology concerns the evolutionary origin of 'anatomically modern humans' (Homo sapiens sapiens). Different models have been proposed to examine the related questions of (1) where and when anatomically modern humans first appeared and (2) the genetic and evolutionary relationship between modern humans and earlier human populations. Genetic data have been increasingly used to address these questions. Genetic data on living human populations have been used to reconstruct the evolutionary history of the human species…
razib | March 6, 2008Small kerfuffle about the fact that ScienceBlogsTM is so white. Some amusement that I am one of the white science bloggers. In any case, this comment caught my attention:
Second, it is no secret that minorities of most stripes are seriously underrepresented in science. Bloggers are even more pointedly underrepresented in the pool of scientists. (Hard to categorize the "pool" from which the non-working-scientist SBers are drawn, so let's not even go there). It takes no genius to see that even if minority scientists were more likely to blog that this pool would be pretty dang small.
This is…
razib | March 5, 2008Yann points me to a new paper, Complex signatures of selection for the melanogenic loci TYR, TYRP1 and DCT in humans:
Diversity patterns clearly evidence adaptive selection in pigmentation genes in Africans and Asians. In Europeans, the evidence is more complex, and both directional and balancing selection may be involved in light skin. As a result, different non-African populations may have acquired light skin by alternative ways, and so light skin, and perhaps dark skin too, may be the result of convergent evolution.
As noted above the paper, which is provisional and subject to later…
razib | March 4, 2008David B gives an excellent overview of some of the issues with Stephen Oppenheimer's The Origins of the British.
razib | March 3, 2008Josh Donlan has joined Shifting Baselines. If you don't know who Donlan is, read Re-wilding North America. A few months ago I suggested that biologists who argue against mass extinction on basically aesthetic or normative grounds need to remember that these are distinct from consequentialist homocentric and professional rationales (i.e., we must preserve for medical research and we must preserve so we can study evolution).
I think Donlan does a good job being up front about his normative biases. I tend to share those beliefs and the values which inform those beliefs. I know that some…
razib | March 3, 2008There's a new paper which is getting some press buzz; here's a typical headline, Immune system differences found. That's as banal as can be: of course immune systems differ, there's a reason that MHC loci are very polymorphic. Our own immune diversity is the only way we can equalize the unfair "arms race" with the bugs who are always an adaptive peak ahead of us. It seems very likely that on the MHC loci many alleles become more fit as their frequency declines to very low levels because the pathogens which are optimized to "beat" them in the game of life can't find hosts and disappear. At…
razib | March 2, 2008Evolgen points me to a new blog, Computational Biology and Evolution. Only quibble, http://bioinf.cs.auckland.ac.nz/ isn't a memorable domain....
razib | February 28, 2008Lots of articles on the radical reinterpretation of the Hadith in Turkey. The Hadith serve as the basis for Islamic law, and orthopraxy more generally. I am on the record as saying that texts don't in the end determine anything, so obviously I'm skeptical. But, I will simply point to a historical analogy; in the 19th century Egypt and Japan attempted to modernize and catch-up with Western nations. Egypt did not truly succeed, Japan did. Where there's a will there always isn't a way; Japan had the necessary preconditions in terms of human capital for the task at hand (e.g., high literacy…
razib | February 28, 2008In my post below about a possible locus to look at to explain the normal variation in hair form we see around us a reader asked:
I was once suckered into giving a course on animal ecophysiology (I was told it was basic ecology until after it was too late to back out) which was a traumatic experience as I've only taken one university-level animal physiology course in my life. One of the students asked what the advantage is of kinky hair. I wondered if it might be a better insulator against the heat of the sun but that's just guessing. I also said that perhaps the question should be the other…
razib | February 28, 2008If you haven't, check out Slate's delegate calculator. It looks hard for HRC....