razib
Posts by this author
Kambiz @ Anthropology.net has an excellent review of the case of the Chinese warlord with "European" ancestry.
Chris has a long response to Paul Bloom's recent argument about intuition & science & education. You can also see Jake Young's critical take here, as Chris responds in part to some of his issues with the piece.
I've been blogging since spring of 2002. I've seen 'em come and go. Interestingly, I've noted that three blogs I once followed have sprung back to life after going silent relatively early on in the blosphere's evolution, Ideofact, Rachel Lucas and Brink Lindsey. It's all rather strange to see…
Want to make analytic philosophy papers the exemplars of lively and clear prose? Just read some articles from The Harvard Law Review. My own personal experience with lawyers is that most of them know the law as well as a heating & cooling engineer knows the temperature systems of the typical…
Radio Open Source is trying to raise some money to stave off shut-down.
I've received a few emails from friends about this piece in Edge titled Why the Gods are Not Winning. The reason is that I've made it clear that in many ways I think religiosity as we understand it naturally arises out of the intersection of our societies and our cognition, that atheism is not the…
The emergence of a superorganism through intergroup competition:
Surveys of insect societies have revealed four key, recurring organizational trends: (i) The most elaborated cooperation occurs in groups of relatives. (ii) Cooperation is typically more elaborate in species with large colony sizes…
I know most readers have/watch TV, so the Geico Neandertal commercials aren't new to them. But I thought I'd post this on the chance that some haven't seen them, because I really like this one....
I was having coffee with a friend of mine. She's an attractive young woman who was once a professional model of some promise (she's not single guys, no emails inquiring please!). I simply note this fact to frame the following anecdote appropriately and make clear how incongruous it was. I was…
I have a long review of God's Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe's Religious Crisis over at my other weblog. This is part 1 of 2 for this review, with the second focusing on European Islam. If you are a data junkie I highly recommend God's Continent.
Check out Julian Sanchez's v-log. I agree with the general thrust of his critique, but I'm also intrigued by the possibilities of turning v-logs into mini-Daily Shows as he does with the video splicing here (I assume he didn't spend a lot of time on this). I don't think it is really appropriate…
Blackbirds Evolving Uptown:
More than a century ago, some European Blackbirds gave up the commuting life. The traditional routine was to nest in northern forests but head for southern Europe or northern Africa at the first sign of winter. Then some populations discovered that winter in the city isn…
Martin mulls over the question, Are Humans Polygamous? There is lots of interesting discussion, with a FinnXPer & reindeer lover in the fray. I think part of the confusion here is simply semantical. Cultural anthropologists often tend to define an -ogamy based on the preferred ideal within a…
I don't watch many films, but I thought I would pass this along...
Live and Become, never checked the time. Great film. It was long, but the time flew by.
Hot Fuzz, checked the time only once, 3/4 of the way through the film. Pretty good.
The Namesake, checked the time a fair amount, especially…
In my post on religious diversity I received this comment:
And for the record, I don't think anybody's religious sensibilities deserve to be put above the law. You want a driver's license, you show your face for the picture. You want to be pharmacist, you sell anything legal. You want to take…
The New York Times has a piece which goes over the issue of genetic testing and abortion. Most of the coverage is given over to people who support abortion rights but are not particularly happy about the consequences of the rhetoric of "choice." I'm not old enough to remember, but does this…
Over the past few years I've reach a position which I'm not particular happy with: religious neutrality & diversity together are pretty much doomed. In the United States the separation of church & state crystallized at a time when Protestantism was normative, and despite all their…
Science Daily has a summary of new fly research in behavioral genetics which puts the spotlight on deep time evolutionary dynamics. Here's the important bit:
The researchers found that when the fruit fly larvae were competing for food, those that did best had a version of the foraging gene that…
I have two blogs from The Atlantic's small flotilla, Ross Douthat & M. Yglesias, in my RSS reader. Now, one thing I notice is that there is a faux-tab1 at the top that allows you to toggle between these two blogs, as well as James Fallow's & Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. But here's the…
Via William Saletan, Prenatal Test Puts Down Syndrome in Hard Focus. Being an numbers man, I found this interesting:
Until this year, only pregnant women 35 and older were routinely tested to see if their fetuses had the extra chromosome that causes Down syndrome. As a result many couples were…
The American Naturalist is celebrating 140 years. Check out their list of most cited papers over the decades, gives you a good flavor of major issues in evolution & genetics.
A local coffee shop that I frequent carries Barista Magazine. Though I'm not a "coffee nerd," I pick it up to pass the time, and I noted an article which mentioned that the coffee is New York City is shockingly bad. Not that it is as bad, for example, as the coffee in Billings, Montana (no offense…
Most of you know that I am generally skeptical of first order functional explanations of religion (I am more open to second order explanations which posit religion as one of the manifold social glues which bind together communities and facilitate sociality). That being said, I did find this…