razib
Posts by this author
April 30, 2006
Here is a long article titled Catholicism and Evolution which covers a lot of ground and seems pretty accurate. The interesting thing though is that this is published at Islam Online. Weird huh?
April 28, 2006
There's a hilarious, and often thoughtful, comment thread over at The American Scene. Ross Douthat is a Roman Catholic, and many of his readers are serious intellectual Christians. So, I am always interested when they object to the bizarre and obviously anthropogenic hocus-pocus of Mormonism. Some…
April 28, 2006
The lion roars...by the way, in case anyone cared, my evil black cat is only up to three birds this spring. I think the worst is over.
Update: More cat below the fold.
April 27, 2006
Over at John Hawks, Has the dam broken on mtDNA selection?. I don't know if this matters that much scientifically since non-human phylogeography tends to be more cautious than the field of historical human population genetics, but it matters a lot for the public which has been habituated to a…
April 26, 2006
There is a preprint in the website of The American Journal of Human Genetics titled "Genetic variation in the CCL18 - CCL3 - CCL4 chemokine gene cluster influences HIV-1 transmission and AIDS disease progression." The title is a mouthful, but the short of it is what we've known for a long time,…
April 26, 2006
Greg Cochran's comment below is worth turning into a post:
There's more to it than that. Tribes often have extremely limited HLA variation, contain only a small subset of the variation that you see in a wider set of Amerindians. Whereas in the old world, even little tiny groups with very low gene…
April 25, 2006
Evolgen says:
Let's focus on two things: the hypothetical deductive method and essential information that you must know to be able to read the science section of a newspaper.
Hm. Amen. Sort of. Scientists in many fields needed to be straight-jacketed into the "hypothetico-deductive" model for a…
April 25, 2006
The San Jose Mercury News has a review up of Ann Gibbons' The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors. It concludes:
But too many pieces are still missing from the puzzle -- including fossils of the ancestors of our closest relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas -- to allow for a…
April 24, 2006
Earlier this week I hinted that I had a priori genetic reasons for being skeptical of a "two wave" theory for the peopling of the New World. Well, I was going to do some literature searches and slap something together that was meaty, but I don't have time, so I'll just offer up an attenuated but…
April 24, 2006
John put up his last thoughts on race, and Evolgen chimed in with his ruminations.
First, nice exchange. Quick points....
1) I'm not hung up on a word. If you want to agree on another word that captures what I'm trying to say, I'm willing to go along with it.
2) One key point I want to make is…
April 24, 2006
Check out John Hawks' commentary on this story about chimpanzees attacking a taxi and killing the driver. Never forget that we are a relatively gracile species.
April 23, 2006
John responds to the "race" response from Matt & I. I'm not interested in making a point-by-point response to the response because I don't think the "objective" difference in opinion is that great, rather, it seems to be that we are clashing in the turbulent waters of nominalism.
First, I…
April 22, 2006
John Wilkins has a post on race where he expresses skepticism about its biological reality. He comment was in response to a post on my other blog (by another individual), but I'll stand by it.
I've talked abut race in the past, and I'm not into the topic at this point since it is going over old…
April 21, 2006
Just a note for those of you who don't read my other weblog, Greg Cochran has two new ideas that we're trying to guess at. First, he's got a new theory about the origin/evolution about the Hobbits of Flores. Second, he thinks it might be a possibility that there are living Neandertals. Anyway, I…
April 21, 2006
How deep do the seams of tolerance run in this country? Sometimes you wonder...ultimately, I'm pessimistic about the human love of liberty. I tend to agree with Matt McIntosh that to some extent American defense of individual freedoms is based on custom & tradition rather than reasoned…
April 20, 2006
Check out this cool paper in PLOS Genetics:
In this first application of the approximate Bayesian computation approach using the serial coalescent, we demonstrated the estimation of historical demographic parameters from ancient DNA. We estimated the timing and severity of a population bottleneck…
April 20, 2006
Since I will use vulgar language, this post will be mostly below the fold.
This commenter asked me to justify a claim, to which I responded by calling him an asshole. The reason is simple, the question is a simple factual query which could have been answered by checking the source I cited. The…
April 19, 2006
The late 4th century witnessed the death of the pagan world and the rise of the early medieval era. Today, our culture focuses on the here & now and we neglect the past. But the past is important because we can learn from the rivers explored by our ancestors. In our modern age of religious…
April 19, 2006
Richard Dawkins pioneered the popularization of the "selfish gene" concept in the book of the same name in the 1970s, and yet it is clear that most people haven't really internalized this idea. Otherwise, how to explain the success of books like The Journey of Man and The Seven Daughters of Eve…
April 19, 2006
I've been a bit anal about genetic drift over the past few days. The reason is simple, replace "random genetic drift" with "sampling error", and note how ridiculous some of the things scientists will say to journalists when they come a callin' sound all of a sudden. "Hm...no, I haven't done…
April 18, 2006
PZ's readers are in a tizzy over this somewhat counterintuitive map:
Notice something weird? If the "Bible Belt" is measured by "religious adherents," then it is slapped vertically across the middle of the country, not in the south. Something is wrong here.
Religion means many things to many…
April 18, 2006
The spawn of TomKat lives! Abiola Lapite speculated that Cruise had holoprosencephaly, which would result in miscarriages in his partners. I emailed Lapite and his response was "And how exactly do you know it's his?" Good point. The Superficial has more of course.
April 18, 2006
I just found out that a 19th century geologist, John Phillips, was so struck by discontinuities in the stratigraphy of fossil depositions that he believed there had been multiple Creations. What Phillips was seeing were the mass extinctions, like the Permian event, which resulted in an elimination…
April 17, 2006
Beliefnet has a story about Opus Dei disavowing the publication of a cartoon by a local group which put Muhammad in Hell taking after Dante. The officials make it clear that the decision was in part driven by pragmatic concerns of violence after the Danish cartoon controversy, but I found this…
April 17, 2006
Interesting profile of Roman Catholic evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala. As an aside they note:
In conducting the studies he had suggested, Ayala also made the unexpected discovery that the parasite P. falciparum can reproduce not just sexually, but clonally as well: it can fuse male and…
April 17, 2006
Just a quick review about some issues that I assumed implicitly in my post where I took issue with genetic drift as a force for population variation. It isn't like genetic drift can't result in variation...but the researcher seemed to be pointing to founder effect which would homogenize…
April 17, 2006
Below the fold is an image of a fine specimen of fitness being signalled by aesthetic characters....
Update: Behold, the oogly-cat:
April 17, 2006
Via grrlscientist I found the Personal DNA test. I was attracted to the title before I realized it was a personality test, but it seems a rather good one. I am a:
More details here.
Seems about right, though personality tests tend to skew toward positive labels to make you accept their…
April 17, 2006
I read the paper that Afarensis pointed me to, Cranial morphology of early Americans from Lagoa Santa, Brazil: Implications for the settlement of the New World. I found it somewhat persuasive. The authors basically posit two primary waves of humans that settled the New World, a "generalized" form…