razib
Posts by this author
You might remember the Donors Choose drive a few months ago. It worked out well, we here at Gene Expression raised nearly $2,000! Now that it's back to school time, I encourage you to give if you can. A few of my projects are still underfunded (though it is nice to see that most of them have hit…
A few days ago Alex Palazzo posted about Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong. The title is pretty self-explanatory. The author has a Moral Sense Test that you can take. I took it. If you plan on taking the Moral Sense Test, please click now before you read…
Apropos of my comment about sex & civilization, a reader brought up Sparta, and over @ 2 Blowhards there's a nice post, Case Studies in State Formation - Sparta:
There was an extreme egalitarianism on the surface in Sparta, where all men ate in messes and dressed identically until getting…
One of the things that I like emphasize on this site is that human psychology isn't as straightforward as we might assume. In the area of religion this is important because religion intersects a great deal with public policy and culture, and, I think my fellow atheists often have a fallacious…
The Guardian has a short piece titled Humans 'hardwired for religion'. The researcher quoted makes the point that humans seem to exhibit strong, powerful and sometimes
irrational intuitions and sentiments. And intuitive belief in gods is like part of this set of psychological phenomena. As I've…
The current issue of Current Biology is about sex. I really dig David C. Queller's primer on sex ratios, Fisher in 'da house yo!
In the annals of they had to do "research"?, Researchers identify 'male warrior effect'":
In experiments with 300 university men and women students, Van Vugt and his team gave the volunteers small sums of money which they could either keep or invest in a common fund that would be doubled and…
As of this moment RPM has not commented on a new paper in Science, Gene Transposition as a Cause of Hybrid Sterility in Drosophila. Here is an accessible summary. The basic idea is found in the abstract:
...Genomic and molecular analyses show that JYAlpha transposed to the third chromosome…
A few weeks ago I explored the issue of smart individuals generally not being particularly fecund. I thought some readers might find this table from Cavalli-Sforza and Bodmer's Genetics of Human Populations interesting:
Sperm Donors
% Females Participating (p)
IQ
Mean of…
Janet has declared a "Nerd off." Here are two tales which made me reflect upon my nerdiness.
Once a friend and I mocked another friend because of their clumsy pipetting technique (he transferred volume like a girl! Oops, sorry Janet, that was a joke :-)
In a linear algebra study session I once…
From The Genetics of Human Populations:
Considering only recessive genes for which the hetrozygotes are at present distinguishable [present is 1971]...only about 30 percent of the human population would be eligible for reproduction. These genes are, however, only a small minority of the recessive…
I love Thai peppers for their "fresh" flavor. The very hottest of these (according to the Scoville scale) overlap with the mildest of the Habenero. The Thai is spicy enough and slight enough that unlike the Serrano it never feels like you are a munching on a salad. My own particular favorite are…
As I've been posting about effective population and inbreeding, I thought this re-post would be appropriate.
Begin repost
Reading a bit about inbreeding and population bottlenecks I came upon the extreme example of the northern elephant seal. In the late 19th century its population was reduced to…
In a few posts below I mentioned long term effective population. The effective population is basically the breeding population as opposed to the census size. Depending on the species this can vary quite a bit. One important point to consider (and this is obviously relevant to inbreeding and…
Inbreeding is bad. At least that is the take home message of my various posts. But biology doesn't have one final answer, it is a serious of approximations which capture part of a given system. My posts on racial hybridization point to this issue. Today in the West we live in an anti-racist age…
As someone who makes no bones about being against politically correct evolutionary biology, I will take up RPM's call to link to Panda's Thumb's chapter-by-chapter rebuttal of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. They fight Creationism so I don't have too!1
1 - I…
A reader pointed me to this fascinating, if tragic, article about the rise of rare recessive diseases among a schismatic Mormon sect which dominates Colorado City. This group has been in the news since the their "prophet" was just arrested. The article points out that because of the inbred nature…
Lubos Motl asked me to comment on this majestic post by a computational biologist at Stanford. This paragraph is worth quoting:
I will enumerate three main points, all of which represent both a challenge and an opportunity. The first will deal with a scientific challenge of a theoretical…
I stand with the other science bloggers in encouraging everyone to do what they can to oust the Creationist on the Ohio School Board. More from Ed Brayton, Chad, John, Bora, Kevin and Tara. If you lose enough small battles the big war is lost.
In the 10 Questions for A.W.F. Edwards, a mathematical geneticist, he was asked:
Like Fisher you have worked in both statistics and genetics. How do you see the relationship between them, both in your own work and more generally?
Edwards responded in part:
Genetical statistics has changed…
I noticed some blogs were talking about a new Pew Political Typology, and I decided to take their survey to see where I fit in. It said I was an Upbeat, which seemed wrong to me as I'm not that partisan (I voted for Kerry though my registration is Republican). So I took the Political Compass test…
To the right you see a habanero pepper, 100-350 K Scoville units (Jalapeno is 2.5-8 K). I can eat 2 habeneros in one sitting and enjoy it. And what does not kill you can cure cancer. Hot dog! On the other hand, if I want something which is a little less spicey and has a more tangy, aromatic…