razib
Posts by this author
Ed and Mark are asking what's up with Ron Paul and the Neo-Nazis? I think...it's complicated. Colugo sketches out the general lay of the land pretty well, Ron Paul is a "paleo," specifically a paleolibertarian. He derives his ideology from the Old Right, and promotes a personal bourgeoise ethic…
On this Sunday's Weekend Edition on NPR there was a piece titled Removing Religion from the Holidays a Tall Order. Much of the story focuses upon Greg Epstein, a Humanist Chaplain at Harvard, and his attempt to forge a new more humane secular cultural sensibility which does not reject all that…
Found out something interesting today. In the Russian republic of Mari El there exists an indigenous pagan tradition which is not a reconstruction. That is, the pagans of Mari El trace their practice in an unbroken line back to their ancestors, as the Christianization during the period of Ivan…
M. Yglesias seems to be dissing Rihanna's "Umbrella." Well, I'll raise him "Pon de Replay"....
Hometown Reacts: Residents Respond To Pregnancy News in relation to Jamie Lynn Spears & Casey Aldridge's impending parenthood:
But we did manage to talk to a few locals, who, quite honestly, weren't too shocked to learn that Britney's little sister was pregnant, either because teen pregnancies…
From Different Matrilineal Contributions to Genetic Structure of Ethnic Groups in the Silk Road Region in China:
Although our samples were from the same geographic location, a decreasing tendency of the western Eurasian-specific haplogroup frequency was observed, with the highest frequency present…
Are you getting enough vitamin D?:
The research, which is awaiting publication in a medical journal, found that 100 per cent of those of African origin were short of vitamin D, as were 93 per cent of South Asians (those of Indian or Pakistani origin), and 85 per cent of East Asians (those of…
No, this should not be in the "Physical Science" category. By hypersphere I'm thinking of the model that R.A. Fisher popularized as opposed to Sewall Wright's conception of the adaptive landscape, a multidimensional sphere within which was located a position which was the adaptive optimum. While…
Specifically, as evolgen points out the acceleration paper was focused on adaptive evolution, the subset of allele frequency changes driven predominantly by the force of natural selection. What's the rest? Read the post.
Why does this matter? Evolution is a science, and in science this sort of…
In response to my post Mixed-race but homogeneous appearance? several individuals mooted the possibility that admixture may result in the vanishing of race as a social construct. Actually, I don't think this is the true. To the left is a photo from my post Can you tell if you're black or white?…
Ross Douthat introduces The Table: Atlantic Voices in Conversation. I dig the head bob! Very professional.
Ed, Greg & PZ have commented on the strange reaction of the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary toward Richard Dawkins' enthusiasm for Christmas traditions. So "why would an atheist want to sing Christmas carols?"
The same reason that the study and reading of literature has…
EVOLUTIONARY ADAPTATIONS: THE IMPACT OF LIGHTER SKIN:
It would take someone with dark skin of African or South Asian ancestry about 60 minutes at the same time of day to make the amount of vitamin D that a person of European ancestry would make in about 10 minutes, estimates Reinhold Vieth, one of…
So The Superficial is reporting that Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant by her boyfriend Casey Aldridge. Jamie Lynn is Britney Spears' younger sister, and at 16 she will be a "teen mother," but not a stereotypical one. Jamie Lynn Spears has her own television show and seems to have her shit "together…
Family Ties That Bind: Maternal Grandparents Are More Involved In The Lives Of Their Grandchildren:
For grandparents living within 19.5 miles (30 km) of their grandchildren, over 30% of the maternal grandmothers had contact daily or a few times a week. Around 25% of the maternal grandfathers had…
The acceleration story has finally cooled down a bit judging by my google news feed. That being said, I suggest you check out the comments threads on p-ter's two posts, here & here. John Hawks and some of the other authors of the paper have been participating in the back and forth. The paper…
Greg Laden has a pretty thorough critique of Life history trade-offs explain the evolution of human pygmies.
I received this email today:
Hi, I have a younger cousin who ran with a protestant fundamentalist crowd early in high school and as result started turning her nose at the notion of evolution, I thought she was a lost cause but now in her senior year she as mellowed (probably due to the mellowing of…
Here is an article suggesting that Creationists should be scared of the accelerated human adaptation paper. At first, I would be skeptical, after all, this is microevolution, which Creationists ostensibly accept.1 But the reality is that anti-evolutionary thinking is pretty shallow, most…
I've blogged about The Grandmother Hypothesis. Roughly, the question is why do women go through a "change" which rapidly shifts them from being able to become pregnant, though at sharply reduced rates by the time that menopause occurs, to a state of infertility where they may survive for up to…
A few years ago, a new paper, SLC24A5, a putative cation exchanger, affects pigmentation in zebrafish and humans, made some waves. It used zebrafish to elucidate the genetics of a locus, SLC24A5, which is responsible for 1/3 of the between population difference between Europeans and Africans in…
Two articles in PNAS caught my attention, Rapid dental development in a Middle Paleolithic Belgian Neanderthal & Life history trade-offs explain the evolution of human pygmies. Here are the abstracts:
Recent evidence for developmental differences between modern humans and Neanderthals…
In Britain there's a story circulating about a young woman of Pakistani ethnicity who converted to Christianity and was persecuted by her family. Specifically:
Last week, it was reported that the daughter of a British imam was living under police protection, after receiving death threats from her…
In light of the recent work on the acceleration of human evolution due to increased population size, this paper in Genetics, Inferring Human Population Sizes, Divergence Times and Rates of Gene Flow From Mitochondrial, X and Y Chromosome Resequencing Data:
We estimate parameters of a general…