razib | January 29, 2008...Das Kapital! So says Bora:
Forget Dennett's strawmen destruction - read Gould carefully for what GOULD is trying to say. The Big Book is 'Das Kapitaal' of the 21st century biology - someone now needs to write a shorter, simpler Manifesto for the masses to read and understand....and we can go from there.
Go from there? Jerry Coyne better watch out! Genetic roaders are going to be swept away by the vanguard of the scientific revolution!1 Now, in all seriousness Das Kapital is an important book, a significant book. And there is truth in it as well; my understanding is that Karl Marx was…
razib | January 29, 2008Chapters read:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
Booyah! Over 10% of the way through The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Unfortunately, I'm still in heavily exegetical territory. Personally I much prefer Richard Elliott Friedman when it comes to textual interpretation of ancient works, but I knew what I was getting into. In any case, in chapter 2 Stephen Jay Gould mentions the Bible and Shakespeare considerably less, though his verbosity keeps on a truckin'. Instead of an exposition of Gould's own view of evolutionary theory he recapitulates and interprets Charles Darwin's argument in Origin of…
razib | January 29, 2008Last year a group out of Australia published a paper which purported to explain eye color variation based upon a polymorphism around the OCA2 locus. The paper was A Three-Single-Nucleotide Polymorphism Haplotype in Intron 1 of OCA2 Explains Most Human Eye-Color Variation, and I blogged it here. Basically the paper showed that three SNPs arranged on several haplotypes could be plugged into a function to generate a relatively good prediction of eye color. Why does this matter? First, because eye color is one of the first things you learn about "genetics" in high school, but we're still stuck…
razib | January 28, 2008Chapters read:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
So I'm reading Stephen Jay Gould's magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. I figure if I read this I won't have to read anything else by the guy; if he couldn't squeeze it into 1,464 pages, it really wasn't worth mentioning I'm assuming. Here are impressions from the 90 page first chapter, which is a general overview of his ideas and biography....
1) There is the fact of evolution (descent with modification), and the mechanism of evolution promoted by Charles Darwin (gradual phyletic change operating through natural selection at the level of…
razib | January 28, 2008Didn't know there was a State of the Union today until I got home and turned on NPR.
razib | January 28, 2008Over at Greg's place, Brian Switek notes:
Thanks for the link Greg (and thanks for the compliment, Steve). I've generally been unimpressed with Coyne's popular articles, especially given that he seems to go out of his way to attack Gould and evo-devo whenever it seems fit to do so (which is just about anytime, apparently). Criticism and controversy is fine (even expected), but the way Coyne reacted to Judson's post was a bit too harsh and condescending. Part of the problem, I think, is that there doesn't seem to be a good definition of what a hopeful monster is or is not, what a saltation is…
razib | January 27, 2008In The Hopeless Monster? Not so fast! Bora says:
In a back-and-forth with a commenter, Coyne defends himself that he is talking about the changes in genes, not evolution. This just shows his bias - he truly believes that evolution - all of it - can be explained entirely by genetics, particularly population genetics. His preferred definition of evolution is probably the genocentric nonsense like "evolution is a change of gene frequencies in a population over time". I prefer to think of it as "evolution is change in development due to ecology" (a softening of Van Valen's overly-strong…
razib | January 27, 2008Long time readers of this weblog will know I have an interest in Vitamin D. It has been hypothesized to be one of the major causal factors in generating human skin color variation, and we know from evolutionary genomics that the genes which underly skin color have been under very recent & powerful selection pressures. There is also data that Vitamin D levels may have a relationship to endemic diseases such as flu, and chronic ones such as arthritis. And then we find out nuggets such as the fact that most non-whites in Canada are Vitamin D deficient.
But what if we're putting the cart…
razib | January 26, 2008Was checking out the exit poll data. Two things that jumped out at me....
Here are the votes for Obama from non-blacks in the South Carolina primary by age:
18-29 - 52%
30-44 - 25%
45-59 - 23%
60+ - 15%
Here are the votes by income for Edwards:
Under $15,000 - 14%
$15,000-$30,000 - 15%
$30,000-$50,000 - 16%
$50,000-$75,000 - 22%
$75,000-$100,000 - 26%
$100,000-$150,000 - 24%
$150,000-$200,000 - not enough data
$200,000 or more - 29%
Update: Andrew Sullivan says:
Then this: Obama won every demographic among the religiously observant. And the more devout they are - judging by their church…
razib | January 26, 2008A few weeks ago, I posted some stuff about what genetics an tell us about the Slavic expansion into the lands of Finno-Ugric tribes. Obviously, I don't think this is a line of inquiry is specific to that situation; and used judiciously it can add a lot of value toward answering many questions. From PNAS, Maternal traces of deep common ancestry and asymmetric gene flow between Pygmy hunter-gatherers and Bantu-speaking farmers (Open Access). Here's the conclusion:
The mtDNA data presented here suggest that the ancestral population in CA [Central Africa] that eventually gave rise to modern-…
razib | January 25, 2008Over at Half Sigma there's some really interesting crunching of the GSS data. Some of it was not surprising to me, you see the same results in national polls on the topic; blacks are more Creationist than whites, who are more Creationist than Asians. Women are more Creationist than men, as are the poor vs. the rich and the uneducated vs. the more well educated. Then there are the obvious ones; evangelicals are more Creationist than mainline Protestants & Roman Catholics, who are more Creationist than those with no religion. You can find these data pretty easily with 30 seconds of…
razib | January 24, 2008Wow. Well, Jerry Coyne has never been one for weak words. A few days ago evolutionary biologist & journalist Olivia Judson posted The Monster is Back, and It's Hopeful on her blog The Wild Side. Jerry Coyne, a prominent evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and co-author of the magisterial Speciation, has posted a strongly worded response over at Carl Zimmer's weblog:
Judson commits two errors of reasoning when arguing a la Goldschmidt (or Gould). The first is what I call the "macromutationist fallacy," for this error is so common that it deserves a name. It is this: we…
razib | January 23, 2008A few days ago I put up a post, Why red Indians aren't white, where I offered up a rough & ready model for why the indigenous peoples of the New World are relatively swarthy at the same latitudes as Europe compared to Europeans. Regular readers of this weblog know that I have somewhat of an obsession with skin color genomics, and am puzzled by some issues, both empirical and theoretical, and have been attempting to generate plausible explanatory scenarios for what we know, and what we expect. But in the process I assume a lot, so I'm going to hit the primary background assumptions in…
razib | January 22, 2008Austin Bramwell has a very enjoyable review up of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism in the most recent issue of The American Conservative. I don't plan on reading Goldberg's book myself, but Bramwell is an intimidating combination of substance & style, and I'm always interested in what he has to say. I generally prefer literature to literary criticism, but in many cases reviews of non-ficition works are more insightful than the ostensible object of their critique. Though his lawyerly deconstruction is elegant as always, it is Bramwell's clear mastery of the waters of intellectual…
razib | January 22, 2008Since I've been flogging Just Science, I should note the launch of Research Blogging. Dave has the details.
razib | January 22, 2008The always interesting Inductivist has a post up where he cranks through the GSS to figure out how belief that astrology is somewhat or very scientific relates to belief in God. Below the fold I've taken his results and turned it into a chart.
The further you go the right, the more one is confident of belief in God. Note that the frequency who accept astrology increases, but note the bump for those who accept the appellation atheist! There are two primary points. First, atheism does not entail scientific materialism. Sometimes we need to reiterate this. Second, there might be issues…
razib | January 22, 2008Variation in neural V1aR predicts sexual fidelity and space use among male prairie voles in semi-natural settings:
Although prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster) are socially monogamous, males vary in both sexual and spatial fidelity. Most males form pairbonds, cohabit with one female, and defend territories. Wandering males, in contrast, have expansive home ranges that overlap many males and females. In the laboratory, pairing is regulated by arginine vasopressin and its predominant CNS receptor, vasopressin 1a receptor (V1aR). We investigated individual differences in forebrain V1aR…