razib
Posts by this author
I know this paper will make some ScienceBloggers very happy, Assortative sociality, limited dispersal, infectious disease and the genesis of the global pattern of religion diversity:
Why are religions far more numerous in the tropics compared with the temperate areas? We propose, as an answer, that…
My post from a few weeks ago, Why does race matter for women?, elicited a lot of response (made it to the front page of Digg). Most of the open public discourse on race is bracketed in a few coarse frameworks; it is a social construction, and no one cares who is truly enlightened anymore, white…
Listen to Lee Siegel, Internet Reading: Speeding Us Up by Dumbing Us Down?. He's positively unhinged, totally out of control. I don't really mind Siegel, he obviously going to spend as much of his professional capital as possible attacking the internet after his own negative self-inflicted…
I've been reading up on the field of cliodynamics recently. But despite the importance of broader macrosocial dynamics, the suicide of the Anthrax scare suspect is a reminder that proximately one determined person can sway the actions of nations....
Some results from the GSS on what people perceive the ideal number of children is based on social variables. Additionally, the realized number of children the respondent has. I limited the sample to whites who were 40 or older (there are people who have children past 40, but I assume that most of…
Chris Orr at The Plank reports that Isaac Asimov's Foundation series is going to be given the film treatment. Orr is skeptical, and so am I. As far as space opera goes the Foundation universe was a cerebral and sedate treatment; they'll have to rewrite a lot of it to get some action to spice up…
I was curious about a few social variables which often associate across generations, and also within families. So I looked in the General Social Survey for denomination, highest degree and socioeconomic index, which I knew were surveyed for the individual (respondent), their parents and their…
Indo-European and Asian origins for Chilean and Pacific chickens revealed by mtDNA:
European chickens were introduced into the American continents by the Spanish after their arrival in the 15th century. However, there is ongoing debate as to the presence of pre-Columbian chickens among Amerindians…
One of the problems with intellectual conversations is that they are generally restricted to intellectuals. By their nature intellectuals tend to value reflection and some semblance of comprehension and consistency. This is a "curved" scale; I'm not contending here that intellectuals really…
Chad has a post up The Innumeracy of Intellectuals, where he goes on a rant against humanities academics and their blithe complacency in relation to their ignorance of science & mathematics. Two points....
1) One of the major issues with humanistically oriented intellectuals, I believe, is a…
Because of the increased prices in gasoline and the perception of scarcity in terms of power, there has been a lot of talk about nuclear. There have been many comments of late from the Right that the Left is opposed to the utilization of nuclear power, and often gleeful the observation that many…
I've been reading Critique of Pure Reason and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in the evenings. It should be no surprise that the former is a more tedious read than the latter, David Hume being the better stylist than Immanuel Kant. In faireness, one presumes that translation from the…
I've posted a fair amount about the new field of historical population genetics. Some of the most popular mass-market books in genetics deal with this field, for example Spencer Wells' Journey of Man. On the other hand, there's a lot of sloppy overreach on the part of some practitioners,…
Sandman has a post up, Can There Be A Synthesis Between Cultural And Biological Evolution?, taking off on the PLoS Biology article, Across the Curious Parallel of Language and Species Evolution. Read both. I would add one important point though: linguistic and biological evolution are simply…
I posted before on Why scientists should do drugs (if they choose), via Tyler Cowen, a Jonah Lehrer article in The New Yorker:
Many stimulants, like caffeine, Adderall, and Ritalin, are taken to increase focus -- one recent poll found that nearly twenty percent of scientists and researchers…
Half Sigma points me to The Legend of a Heretic, which chronicles the close relationship between Robert G. Ingersoll, a prominent American agnostic of the 19th century, and the Republican Party elite of that time. It seems ironic that though we are a nation which explicitly bans formal religious…
One social science finding which I've wondered about over the past few years is the result that women care much more about the race of a potential mate than men do. The fact that individuals tend to want to mate assortatively with those who share their characteristics is no surprise. Rather,…
Over the past few days I've blogged a bit about the story about an HIV susceptibility allele; Evolution, a reason for the African HIV epidemic?, Overplaying "AIDS genes" and HIV susceptibility, a "black" thing, not a Duffy thing?. But there's an important post Genetic Future, Duffy-HIV association…
Just a quick follow up to my post about genetic screening of embryos and subsequent implantation. The spontaneous abortion rate for humans is very high. Probably on the order of 50% of fertilized ova implant and complete to term. I've seen numbers all over the place. In any case, I assume many of…
DARC and HIV: a false positive due to population structure?:
The authors are aware of this potential confounder, and develop a measure of admixture based on 11 SNPs to include as a covariate in their regression. However, this measure is kind of weak, which I imagine in the sticking point for the…
Genetic Future points me to a Nature News story, Making babies: the next 30 years. He highlights this section:
There's speculation that people will have designer babies, but I don't think the data are there to support that. The spectre of people wanting the perfect child is based on a false premise…
David takes a slight detour in this Sewall Wright, series, R. A. Fisher and Epistasis:
My next note on Sewall Wright will cover the exciting subject of the adaptive landscape. As every schoolboy knows, Wright considered epistatic gene interactions very important in determining the 'peaks' of the…
I was curious why an old Genetics and Health post, Twins with Different Skin Color Genes, was sending me many referrals today. Now I know, Two in a Million: Twins Born - One Black, One White:
The twin boys, named Ryan and Leo, are the offspring of a mixed-race couple.
The mother, Florence, hails…
I agree with all the other ScienceBlogs that Olivia Judson is right. Do we talk about Newtonism? Einsteinism? We do talk about Epicureanism, Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Aristotelianism, etc. I think that says it all....
Brandom Keim at Wired says Genes Don't Explain African AIDS Epidemic:
Seen in the wrong light, the numbers could present Africa's AIDS tragedy as a biological inevitability. Several press accounts do exactly that. The New York Times credits the mutation for "explaining why the disease is more…
Please read: Follow up post.
Genetic Variation Increases HIV Risk In Africans:
A genetic variation which evolved to protect people of African descent against malaria has now been shown to increase their susceptibility to HIV infection by up to 40 per cent, according to new research. Conversely, the…
There's a fair amount of evidence for greater social pathology among whites of Southern origin. One of the major issues that Blue State liberals like to point out that is that on metrics of moral turpitude Southern whites stand out; those who promote a narrow and strident conception of ethical…