razib
Posts by this author
March 15, 2006
In my post below there is a reference to fast evolution in a relatively slow-breeding species, H. sapiens. For this to be plausible you need high selection coefficients, that is, the difference between mean population fitness and the fitness of those who are carrying the favorable allele. How…
March 14, 2006
Chris of Mixing Memory has a long post on the cognitive science of evolutionary biology, or, more precisely, how people tend to interpret and perceive evolutionary biology. The whole post is worth reading (and linking if you have a weblog). I hit upon some of the points in my post Endless Forms…
March 13, 2006
John Hawks has a massive smackdown post on the quadruped family story.
March 13, 2006
The t-shirts which depict the "ascent of man" from hairy semi-ape to upright Homo sapiens might make you think that human evolution has been trivial since the emergence of our own species. Modern genomics suggests this isn't so, selection coefficients on the order of 1-10% are probably rather…
March 12, 2006
I am going to cut & paste whole a comment from Jemima Harrison of Passionate Productions, who is behind the upcoming documentary about the family who exhibits quadruped locomotion:
The mutation on 17p has been identified by a Turkish/German team in Berlin headed by Professor Stefan Mundlos.…
March 11, 2006
I commented on the "throwback family" a few days ago, well, The Times (of London) has two articles which reduce the likelihood of this being a hoax in my mind. It seems clear that there is a family, highly inbred, which lives in Turkey where a number of the children walk on all fours and exhibit…
March 10, 2006
Everyone and their mother has commented on the water found on Enceladus. There is speculation about life. If life doesn't exist on Enceladus, and to a good second approximation we should know in a few decades, I suggest seeding the moon with Terran organisms that might be able to survive and…
March 10, 2006
An author of the paper on recent human evolution was interviewed for the last 15 minutes of the first hour of Science Friday. The audio archive will be available soon. Also, I hear that you'll see a new article on this paper in The New York Times this weekend, so check for Nick Wade's byline.
March 9, 2006
By now some of you have heard of the family that walks on all fours. I got a tip on this story weeks ago from World Science, which has been tracking this for a while and has a new update from a researcher that says this is a "credible" empirical finding. I didn't really intend to post about this…
March 9, 2006
Which sense do you value the most? I think many people, if they had to choose, would stick to their vision as the must-have sense. One thing that I want to get beyond on this blog is the tendency to find the one-gene-that-causes-all phenomenon. This tendency to fix on genes of large and singular…
March 8, 2006
In a comment a post below Oran Kelly states:
The findings are interesting, but I don't think the populace at large is going to have to rethink their assumptions about life.
Sometimes you need to be explicit, so here I will make clear what I believe is implicit in many of my posts because it is…
March 7, 2006
Nick Wade in The New York Times has a piece out titled Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story, based on a paper published today in PLOS, A Map of Recent Positive Selection in the Human Genome. This paper is an extension of the research project that emerges out of the International HapMap…
March 6, 2006
Results below (via Grrlscientist).
Other science bloggers results:Kevin VranesGrrlscientist
You scored as English. You should be an English major! Your passion lies in writing and expressing yourself creatively, and you hate it when you are inhibited from doing so. Pursue that interest of yours…
March 6, 2006
Evolgen points me to the fact that even our hosts here at Seed are spreading the "blondes are going to go extinct" hoax/meme which first cropped up 3 years ago. I also noticed that someone as informed about biology as John Wilkins was was taken in. An altered iteration of this hoax/meme that…
March 5, 2006
This story about the consumption of Bonobos is getting a lot of circulation today. Several years ago there was a book published on this topic, Eating Apes, so this shouldn't surprise anyone. To some extent the "ape eating" stories are partly fueled by P.T. Barnum like fascination, I believe that…
March 5, 2006
I listened to Dan Dennett on the most recent Tech Nation with Moira Gunn (not online yet), and he went on about the ideas proposed in his book Breaking the Spell. Some of the ideas were interesting, though I've read more well developed versions in most of the supporting literature. Nevertheless,…
March 5, 2006
Check this hilarious site, Indians are Asian. I think you can appreciate it even if you are demelanized and round-eyed!
via Sepia Mutiny.
March 4, 2006
Since everyone else is, I took this quiz, and I should be on....
You scored as Moya (Farscape). You are surrounded by muppets. But that is okay because they are your friends and have shown many times that they can be trusted. Now if only you could stop being bothered about wormholes.
Moya (…
March 4, 2006
Dan Jones has a very thorough review of the recent paper in Nature which argues that negative epistasis will emerge out of sexual reproduction and so perpetuate itself. The only thing I'll add is what W.D. Hamilton noted in Narrow Roads of Gene Land, questions of fitness need to be evaluated over…
March 3, 2006
USA Today has coffee shop rankings up. I've been to two on the list, Stumptown in Portland, and Caffe Dante in Greenwich Village. All I've got to say is that Caffe Dante is weak compared to Stumptown's muddy blend. They should have kept World Cup on the list. Frankly, Starbucks was the best…
March 3, 2006
I saw this post about human population diversity the other day...and though it was interesting, there was something that stuck in my craw:
Actually, this will be sharper for genes under selection, since selection should be weaker in bottleneck populations.
I don't think this is true. Selection…
March 2, 2006
Life is about choices made in the context of scarcity and constraint. In an ideal world (OK, my ideal world) I would be dictator, and all would do my bidding and satisify most proximate desires. Alas, it doesn't work that way. We all have to jump through hoops to get where we want. Whatever…
February 28, 2006
I'm calling out for evolution & genetics raps on my other weblog. A few players have represented, but not nearly enough. I mean, if the Assemblies of God could produce Scott Stapp, surely the evolution & genetics community has some freestylin' thugs lurking in the shadows?
February 28, 2006
I have a friend who is a graduate student in evolutionary biology at an elite university...and she told me that when she went to a seminar on adaptive landscapes...everyone was making hand movements and gesturing wildly. She pantomimed it out for me, it was pretty funny.
February 28, 2006
Here is a popular press piece on Geert Vermaij's paper in PNAS where he argues that evolution is not highly contingent process on particular historical events, in other words, if you rewound the clock and let it flow the rivers would occupy the same channels. These ideas seem rather similar to…
February 27, 2006
This new Science Blog is hilarious. I love their tagline!
Update: OK, I take it back. What kind of dreamworld do these bitches think they're living in? I post something EDT giving props to their blog, and they're still on top of the Science Blogs front page because they posted at "5 P.M." It's…
February 26, 2006
Just found this web site that has a good bibliography of R.A. Fisher's work. Good supplement to the R.A. Fisher digital archive. Why do I obsess with Fisher? First, ANOVA is ubiquitous. Second, stories like this would shock & awe a lot less if people read The Correlation Between Relatives…
February 26, 2006
Nathanial Blake, editor of the conservative campus publication at Oregon State University, has a good piece addressing the issue of evolution and evangelicals over at the Town Hall website. He points out that even C.S. Lewis, that exemplar of modern Protestant Christian orthodoxy, accepted…
February 24, 2006
Norm Levitt throws an excellent broadside against Steve Fuller (yes, it is a polemic, but a delicious one!).
Update: Ron in the comments suggests we be cautious about accepting Levitt's jeremiad in its totality. He concludes:
And from our own point of view, we must view the whole universe,…