razib | February 6, 2008Extraordinary Sex Ratios is the paper that William D. Hamilton seems most proud of if the effusive self-praise in the biographical preface can be trusted. In it Hamilton claims his theoretical insight peaked, and it was within this paper that his ideas exhibited the most pluralism of purpose as he began to perceive the shape of his future research. Extraordinary Sex Ratios also marks the beginning of Hamilton's long utilization of computer simulations to push through the impasses of analytic intractability and empirical unverifiability. On occasion he even claims that in this particular area…
razib | February 5, 2008The moulding of senescence by natural selection is not one of William D. Hamilton's favorite papers. In the biographical introduction he notes that both Peter Medawar & George C. Williams covered the same ground in the 1950s; a fact that he was not aware of by the time he had already invested a great deal of thought on the topic at hand. The general mathematical treatment within this paper extends the arguments of Williams in particular; but Hamilton admits that his value-add is on the margins and likely not worth the mathematical formalism which he spun out to converge upon insights…
razib | February 5, 2008I hope you have yesterday's post "out of your system." I will admit here that I don't know if I was particularly intelligible, but the prose and formalism of Hamilton's paper isn't exactly the picture of transparency. I find his later works much more intelligible; I suspect part of it has to do with the fact that Hamilton was responding and extending a tradition of evolutionary genetic modeling which reached back to R. A. Fisher and continued into the 40s and 50s. Reading a paper in 2008 which presupposes familiarity with a corpus of work from nearly three generations in the past can be a…
razib | February 4, 2008Inclusive fitness is something you've heard of before no doubt. J. B. S. Haldane, one of the greatest evolutionary geneticists of the 20th century, once quipped that he would "...lay down [his] life for two brothers or eight cousins," a succinct expression of the subset of this framework which is bracketed under kin selection. The logic is pretty self-evident, but in the 1960s a lonely graduate student in England, William D. Hamilton, toiled away attempting to formally explain the mystery of altruism. The fruit of his labors were two papers, The genetical evolution of social behaviour - I and…
razib | February 2, 2008I stated earlier this week that I would post on papers from William D. Hamilton's Narrow Roads of Gene Land. I've narrowed down which ones I'll blog:
Day 1: The genetical evolution of social behaviour. I
Day 2: The genetical evolution of social behaviour. II
Day 3: The moulding of senescence by natural selection
Day 4: Extraordinary sex ratios
Day 5: Innate social aptitudes of man
razib | February 2, 2008John has a post where he offers:
This reminds me of one of the paradoxes about Gould. Among historians (and the public) he was believed to represent mainstream science, a belief not shared by many scientists. Among scientists (and the public) he was believed to represent mainstream history of science, a belief not shared by practicing historians.
As I said elsewhere, most of the substance in Gould's work I have found in Peter J. Bowler's work. There are some issues and topics which get more limelight in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory because of the larger point of Stephen Jay Gould's…
razib | February 1, 2008Chapters read:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
And so it goes on as I march through chapter 4 of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, more of the same. Chapter 3 was a history of 19th century evolutionary thought viewed through the lens of the concept of hierarchies of selection. Though Stephen Jay Gould stayed on topic much of the time, it seems that on many an occasion the link of the exposition to the notional theme would become extremely tenuous as he followed a particularly fascinating tangent and the prose just snapped off the chain. In Chapter 4 Gould exhibits many of the same tendencies…
razib | February 1, 2008The story about HERC2 & OCA2 is getting a lot of press; that is, the genetics behind how people have blue eyes. But see this in ScienceNow:
There are still large questions, though. Why did blue eyes persist? Scientists say it is difficult to see how eye color would have an environmental advantage, as skin color does. Some theories suggest that women may have played a role in driving the selection. Perhaps, Kayser says, "the females thought it more exciting to have a male with blue eyes."
I already posted this before: the SNPs which are used to predict blue eyes also track skin color…
razib | February 1, 2008My friend Reihan Salam, the svengali behind The American Scene, is on blogginghead.tv talking about the primary races. Reihan often has a high signal to noise ratio in large part because of his low analysis to data ratio.1 He's chatting with Chris Hayes, who wrote up a really interesting piece on heterodox economics in The Nation this spring. Check it out.
1 - That is, unlike many people he is a compulsive collector of data.
razib | January 31, 2008Sound familiar? Well, good things come in pairs. A few days ago I posted on a paper which used a linkage analysis to come to the conclusion that an SNP on HERC2 was responsible for the variation in eye color in Europeans. Some background, a gene, OCA2, was implicated in the variation in eye color, and it turns out that a few haplotypes on this locus can be used to predict with reasonable accuracy the phenotype in question. The paper I blogged a few days ago was a extension of the work of this work; the same group found that one SNP on HERC2 could actually better explain the variation (…
razib | January 30, 2008If science is a culture it needs a way to punish free-riders & cheaters. Otherwise the whole system will collapse. So check out Tetrapod Zoology; Darren has some details on shady goings-on.
razib | January 30, 2008Chapters read:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
17% of the way through The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, can I get a w00t, w00t!?!?! Chapter 3 was a change. I am wondering if the verbal excesses on garish display in the first two chapters was just an extended fart that Stephen Jay Gould had to get out of his system so that he could be a bit more comfortable. Barely a mention of Shakespeare, medieval architecture or the Bible. An occasional gratuitous toss of Latin here and there, but a most definite improvement in that most nebulous character, readability. Though Gould won't be accused of…
razib | January 30, 2008ScienceDaily has a most-retarded title up for a report on some new research, Blue-eyed Humans Have A Single, Common Ancestor. I already blogged the paper at my other blog. The paper roughly confirms the previous finding that I blogged that an SNP on the gene HERC2 might regulate expression of OCA2 so that there is depigmentation; in particular in the iris. I have another post coming up tomorrow morning on another study on HERC2 (it's in schedule).
Anyway, the title is stupid, because yes, the HERC2-OCA2 region probably has increased in frequency from a single gene copy, but blue-eyed…
razib | January 30, 2008Over at Laelaps. Too busy wrestling the 5-pound monster as I tread water attempting to process the copious verbal excreta, so I appreciate the effort!
razib | January 30, 2008Give the lady her due, Olivia Judson can lay down some serious exposition when she's on:
There are a couple of interesting things about this discovery. The first is that the molecular basis of the change from pelvis to no pelvis does not involve a mutation to the protein-coding region of the Pitx1 gene itself. In other words, the protein made from the gene hasn't changed. What has changed is the way the gene is expressed. This is in contrast to the sorts of mutations one often reads about as being involved in evolution, which typically involve changes to the protein itself.
A second…
razib | January 30, 2008Since Just Science starts next week I'm going to have to take a break from Stephen Jay Gould blogging due to the constraints that I'm going to have to adhere to when it comes to posts (i.e., it has to be science). Expect blogging to focus on chapters from W. D. Hamilton Narrow Roads of Gene Land, Volume 1: Evolution of Social Behaviour. You know about kin selection, but do you know kin selection?