razib
Posts by this author
I've been blogging a lot about "religion" recently, but I haven't reallly spelled out what I mean by religion. The answer is many things. Religion, or religious belief and practice, are a suite of behaviors and concepts which explore a multi-dimensional space. This space is inhabited by a wide…
The "standard model" of intellectual history presents the Presocratics as the pioneers of naturalistic explanations of the universe around us. This narrative explains how the messy natural philosophy of the Presocratics gave way to the more metaphysical and ethical schools of the late Classical…
A few science bloggers have referred to Daniel Dennett's new book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, and the controversy that is erupting around it. I haven't read the book, but this piece in The Boston Globe gives a very quick sketch of the ideas Dennett covers. It seems that…
I have a review of Nick Wade's Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors coming out in the May/June issue of Science & Spirit magazine. Wade's book covered the intersection of genetics and human evolution, so it was a quick and interesting read.
Below the fold are the results from a politics quiz I took. Nothing surprising, but just a testament that Seed is politically latitudinarian....
You are a Social Liberal (71% permissive) and an... Economic Conservative (68% permissive) You are best described as a: Libertarian…
Biology is sloppy. I always say "all parameters held equal" or "all variables controlled" because there are so many factors to consider. I am now reading a classic, The Genetics of Human Poulations, by L. L. Cavalli-Sforza and W. F. Bodmer, and here is an interesting bit from the chapter on…
A few days ago Janet posted on the importance of critical faculties in science in response to a series of posts by PZ and John on how we get the public to understand science (mostly evolution in this case). Critical thinking is obviously important in science, as is experimentation, model building…
A story in The Economist, titled the fertility bust (in the "Charlemagne" column), offers this interesting tidbit:
Germany is something of an oddity in this. In most countries with low fertility, young women have their first child late, and stop at one. In Germany, women with children often have…
I've increased the security of comments (required email, etc.). This might cause issues, more here.
Chad is not happy with my previous post where I consider that we shouldn't expect that everyone should be able to pass algebra conditional upon a deep understanding of the subject. First, let me state that my post was in part operating outside what I will call the "Cohen narrative." Rather, I…
Update: Link fixed.
I have a long post on my other website commenting on Amartya Sen's new piece in The New Republic, Chili and Liberty. First paragraph below:
Amartya Sen has an interesting piece in The New Republic titled Chili and liberty: the uses and abuses of multiculturalism. Sen's piece…
OK, a question. Imagine that you are the only adult left in the world and everyone else is under the age of 6. Assume helper robots obviate the need to micromanage the lives of the children, toddlers and infants in your care. You can choose one book from each of the disciplines of humanity to…
Tim posts on the recent PLOS paper Gene Losses during Human Origins published by the Wang et al. If that gets you all excited, check out The Origin of Subfunctions and Modular Gene Regulation and Preservation of Duplicate Genes by Complementary, Degenerative Mutations. I might lionize the…
Orac is having technical issues with SB, and on some blogs comments post very slowly. I just wanted to post a notice because the problems are spotty and some of us aren't having issues.
Janet Stemwedel has a long post which elucidates various angles of the Cohen & algebra story. I agree with many of Janet's points, and I tend to believe that knowing algebra is an important necessary precondition for being a well rounded modern intellect. But I want to emphasize modern, I've…
A friend of mine told me that they thought my comment on Richard Cohen's infamous algebra column was pretty lame and lightweight. I had to plead that time was at a premium when I threw that up there, and a lot of the ground had been covered. But, as someone who writes posts titled 8th grade math…
A few days ago I saw that Dienekes commented on a recent paper published in The American Journal of Human Genetics where the authors used 10 markers, specifically single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), to discern continental level population differentiation. Dienekes has generated a map which…
Richard Cohen's column dismissing the importance of algebra is so plainly stupid that it beggars the imagination. Nevertheless, I would like to point out that mathematics is important in "practical" contexts because it is a collection of unified techniques which happen to have wide ranging utility…
With all the hoopla over Darwin Day (justified in my opinion) I thought I'd point you to this article, Gregor Mendel: The father of genetics. The contemporaneous insights of Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel illustrate the beauty of science, nature's gift to us in its underlying unity of form.…
Anyone who has long read my other weblog knows I have a strong interest in several historical questions. With John Emerson I share a deep interest in Central Asian history, so with that in mind, I point you to the refurbished essay (it has maps!) 2000 years of barbarians in 50 minutes.
Diana of Letter from Gotham expresses some of what I've been thinking. I am rather uninspired by what I perceive as the relative silence on the Left and the swarming hysterics on the Right.1 Though I tend to sympathize with the suspicion of Islam evinced by many on the Right, I have commented on…
Today is Darwin Day. Chris at Mixing Memory has qualms about the name, and suggests "Evolution Day" as a more appropriate celebratory appellation in keeping with the spirit of Charles Darwin's scientific insights. I tend to have sympathies with Chris' point, though I would assert that Darwin was…
I've commented on the African American Lives series a few times. One thing I've said in other threads is that these massively more data rich ancestry analysis tests aren't going to tell you anything you don't already know in 99% of the cases. That doesn't mean that it's not worth it to get tested…
Science & Spirit has a long piece that reports on the outreach toward some churches on the part of anti-Creationist activists.
Yesterday in my conversation with David Miller I told him I didn't think that the new autosomal "ancestry" tests really delivered the extent of separability of ancestral quanta that most people really expect. Well, look at this principal component chart that Dienekes put up from a paper published…
I fancy myself good at geography. I took this quiz, and are my results: 35 out of 50 states perfect, average error 27 miles, 70% in 494 sec.
Via GrrlScientist.
Blonde children exhibit more fear response? A new paper reports:
...Hair pigmentation was found to be significantly associated with behavioral inhibition in the sense that blond children exhibited higher fear scores. As in American samples, blue-eyed children had a higher fear score than did…
Years ago on the now cancelled show Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher Peter Coyote was on a panel with a Republican pundit. They were discussing the issue of flag burning, and the latter asked Coyote why he remained in this country if he thought it was OK to burn its flag. Coyote responded, "…
About 1/4 of the way into the Radio Open Source The Al-Jazeera Effect episode Brendan mentions my comments regarding the science of genealogy (he notes that I'm "producing" their show for them). I just talked to David, the staffer that started that thread, this afternoon, and we bounced some ideas…