razib
Posts by this author
Our old friend Noah Feldman has a new article in The New York Times Magazine exploring the subtly of shariah law. I know that Feldman is exceedingly bright, and as someone raised as an Orthodox Jew and a law professor, he is very well placed to explore this topic and translate to a Western…
I generally skim only a few political/public policy weblogs via my RSS to get a sense of the Zeitgeist. M. McArdle and M. Yglesias are two of the blogs I sample. Anyway, if you read their blogs, check out the latest installment of The Table, the intro is really hilarious. Most-def trying to do…
A few days ago I mooted the possibility that balancing selection may be more common than we had assumed, and that much of the recent evolutionary action in our species' history might be characterized by non-fixed allele frequencies which exhibit the signatures of positive selection because of their…
Steve Waldman has been blogging some of the major arguments from his new book, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America. He says:
As for their religious beliefs, someone in the comment thread said I was being incoherent or contradictory by saying the Big…
A new story highlighting the waxing of Creationism within modern Turkey. A depressing tidbit:
Education Minister Huseyin Celik, an AKP member, said he has an open mind over the debate about evolution, but in 2005, the Ministry reportedly suspended five teachers for advocating evolution too…
Scientist calculates an equation for the common cold: "Ten percent of your life is spent fighting colds." Wow. That makes sense though. I've read that common cold viruses need at least the population density of agricultural societies to persist endemically. No wonder the recent work on natural…
Just noticed that Carlos Bustamante's chapter from Statistical Methods in Molecular Evolution, Population Genetics of Molecular Evolution, is online (PDF). Enjoy.
Chris at Mixing Memory has a post up, Respecting the Religious (or the A-Religious), pointing to a Simon Blackburn working paper, Respect and Religion. I enjoyed Blackburn's Think, but the chapter on God left me a bit cold. Blackburn is a philosopher, and his thoughts reflect that training. If I…
You've probably heard about this story. Check out Afarensis and Anthropology.net for a summary of the science. But Kambiz also has some juicy gossip about the back-story here....
A few of you have noticed that I'm a little darker skinned than I was previously (see photo to left). Well, the explanation is simple, it's a recent photo and I was at the beach getting my ultra-tan on. I happened to be at the BIL Conference, and was in Monterey where the beaches are. BIL was…
Dan MacArthur has a post up, Climate genes: positive or balancing selection?, where he questions the interpretation of data from a recent paper, Adaptations to Climate in Candidate Genes for Common Metabolic Disorders:
The critical point I want to make is that while positive selection will usually…
Dave Munger has a post up about discernment when it comes to wine. The Munger sayeth:
Researchers have known for some time that not everyone has the same ability to detect tastes. Some people -- "super-tasters" -- are especially sensitive to a wide range of tastes. As it turns out, whether or not…
As I have noted before one of the consequences of genomic analysis techniques becoming relatively cheap and accessible is that they are now viable tools toward exploring a host of fundamentally non-genetic questions. That is, instead of exploring the dynamics of evolutionary biology, they can be…
John Hawks has everything you need to know. Question: how did this get by peer review?
Genetic evidence and the modern human origins debate:
A continued debate in anthropology concerns the evolutionary origin of 'anatomically modern humans' (Homo sapiens sapiens). Different models have been proposed to examine the related questions of (1) where and when anatomically modern humans…
Small kerfuffle about the fact that ScienceBlogsTM is so white. Some amusement that I am one of the white science bloggers. In any case, this comment caught my attention:
Second, it is no secret that minorities of most stripes are seriously underrepresented in science. Bloggers are even more…
Yann points me to a new paper, Complex signatures of selection for the melanogenic loci TYR, TYRP1 and DCT in humans:
Diversity patterns clearly evidence adaptive selection in pigmentation genes in Africans and Asians. In Europeans, the evidence is more complex, and both directional and balancing…
David B gives an excellent overview of some of the issues with Stephen Oppenheimer's The Origins of the British.
Josh Donlan has joined Shifting Baselines. If you don't know who Donlan is, read Re-wilding North America. A few months ago I suggested that biologists who argue against mass extinction on basically aesthetic or normative grounds need to remember that these are distinct from consequentialist…
There's a new paper which is getting some press buzz; here's a typical headline, Immune system differences found. That's as banal as can be: of course immune systems differ, there's a reason that MHC loci are very polymorphic. Our own immune diversity is the only way we can equalize the unfair "…
Evolgen points me to a new blog, Computational Biology and Evolution. Only quibble, http://bioinf.cs.auckland.ac.nz/ isn't a memorable domain....
Lots of articles on the radical reinterpretation of the Hadith in Turkey. The Hadith serve as the basis for Islamic law, and orthopraxy more generally. I am on the record as saying that texts don't in the end determine anything, so obviously I'm skeptical. But, I will simply point to a…
In my post below about a possible locus to look at to explain the normal variation in hair form we see around us a reader asked:
I was once suckered into giving a course on animal ecophysiology (I was told it was basic ecology until after it was too late to back out) which was a traumatic…
If you haven't, check out Slate's delegate calculator. It looks hard for HRC....