razib
Posts by this author
May 16, 2006
Between 3 million & 200,000 years ago the average cranial capacity of this planet's dominant hominids increased along a upward trendline, in starts and stops. Bipedal apes went from having nearly chimp sized crania to one similar to modern human beings (Neandertals had larger brains that H.…
May 16, 2006
John Hawks has the details on the rumors that have been swirling for a while (and now confirmed by a conference talk) about sequencing of autosomal Neandertal DNA. The previous work was mtDNA, which is easier since mitochondria are copious throughout the cell. But, this will give us a lot more…
May 16, 2006
Don't have much time to comment, but I thought I'd point you to pending paper in PNAS (as usual, PNAS' webmaster is slow in getting this out though the press release says it is on their website) which suggests chimps have copy number variations similar to H. sapiens. The human genome is obviously…
May 15, 2006
This week Seed is asking the question:
"Will the 'human' race be around in 100 years?"
Since I suggested the question, I have a quick set of answers. I believe there are three primary categories of alternatives:
1) The rate of technological (both bio & computational) change will continue to…
May 15, 2006
In an update to my previous post, I point you to David B's post at my other blog where he expresses skepticism about the recent study that applied Hamiltonian principles to royal fratricide.
May 14, 2006
I welcome Jason Rosenhouse to SB. But, I take issue with the way he frames the issue of politics & evolution. He states:
People like Shapiro, George Will, or Charles Krauthammer are lonely voices in the conservative wilderness, accorded about as much respect in the Republican party as pro-…
May 14, 2006
Seeing as this is Mother's Day, I want to point to this working paper, Menopause and post-generative longevity: Testing the 'stopping-early' and 'grandmother' hypotheses. It is a 44 page review of a lot of literature that is out there. The short of it is that menopause is something of a mystery,…
May 14, 2006
Ed Brayton says:
To see an atheist taking a position that is usually held by those who claim to be Christian, typically southern nationalists, is quite disconcerting.
This is interesting. Here is what some might not know about: the racialist far Right tends to be populated by many individuals…
May 13, 2006
Discovery News has a fascinating review of new research which suggests that royal fratricide tended to follow Hamiltonian principles, that is, cousins were killed so that nearer relations could prosper. Hamilton's Rule states that an "altruistic" behavior is genetically beneficial if Cost over…
May 12, 2006
I'm reading Austin Burt & Robert Trivers' Genes in Conflict, and I'm in the chapter on genomic imprinting. They make a reference to a paper published a few years back which I vaguely remembered, by I decided to look it up again. Titled Paternally inherited HLA alleles are associated with…
May 11, 2006
OK, some fluff...it seems that the Greek Neo-Pagans have received permission to worship in pagan temples. That might sound obvious, but most pagan temples in Greece are historic treasures, and so the purview of the government. The Greek Orthodox Church is not happy:
But Greece's powerful Orthodox…
May 11, 2006
...because they die!!!!. I got to thinking about this when I saw this article titled Leaving the Wild, and Rather Liking the Change, about the emergence of an isolated tribal population into the Columbian mainstream. This caught my eye:
Though it is unclear how big the Nukak population once was…
May 10, 2006
Evolgen points me to another paper about positive selection for an allele which doesn't always help us out. Intelligent Designer my ass, Mr. Omnipofuck-up needs to go back to bioengineering school!
May 9, 2006
A friend of mine, a biology graduate student, emailed me the following:
i did recently get in an argument with a fellow student (and friend) because he said he thought he was verging on being a militant agnostic eugenicist, but i said being a militant agnostic was idiotic because agnostics are…
May 9, 2006
A new paper by Daniel Kruger posits a general framework for why women tend to live longer than males across cultures when environment is equalized (obviously there are cultures where strong sex bias in quality of life is more important than underlying genotypic variation). The idea is simple, it…
May 9, 2006
I would like to give a heads up that the last volume of W.D. Hamilton's papers are out, Narrow Roads of Gene Land, The Collected Papers of W. D. Hamilton Volume 3: Last Words. Of course, you should check our volume 1, on social theory, and volume 2, the evolution of sex. If you don't know who…
May 8, 2006
Weird finding:
A mutation in a gene commonly associated with deafness can play an important part in improving wound healing, a scientist told the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, today (Monday 8 May 2006). Dr. Stella Man, from the Institute…
May 6, 2006
Over the past few years I have cast a skeptical eye at human phylogeography. Researchers like Spencer Wells have parlayed the study of uniparental lineages into books and television specials. Taking gene trees constructed from the Y chromosome Wells fashions the story of our species, in…
May 6, 2006
I really don't know what to make of this paper I just stumbled upon, The Structures of Letters and Symbols throughout Human History Are Selected to Match Those Found in Objects in Natural Scenes:
...Our first result is that these three classes of human visual sign possess a similar signature in…
May 5, 2006
Seed is asking which invention I'd uninvent. My reflexive response is atomic weapons. I want to emphasize weapons because I think nuclear energy is going to be important, just as James Lovelock does. But if I was God who could change the world by fiat, well, atomic weapons would probably be it.…
May 5, 2006
Recently I stumbled on to this long article, titled Race and the Church, which examines racism and racial theory from a Catholic perspective. I don't have time to comment in detail. Obviously there are many issues I would have with the piece, but, I will offer that I tend to be of the opinion that…
May 4, 2006
I see that UC Davis is touting that its ecology & evolutionary biology program was ranked #1 by US News and World Report. Check out the "Best Graduate Schools" online sampler at US News and World Report. I had a friend who narrowly chose Harvard over Davis for evolutionary ecology, so it…
May 3, 2006
Pten Regulates Neuronal Arborization and Social Interaction in Mice:
...PTEN mutations in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have also been reported, although a causal link between PTEN and ASD remains unclear. In the present study, we deleted Pten in limited differentiated neuronal…
May 3, 2006
Some reader emailed me to explain that my secret identity has been blown. Well, you can read about it here. But note that I'm staying positive. Remember, Clay sold more than Reuben. Yes, I love science, but singing is my soul!
May 2, 2006
Mike Lynch and Bruce Walsh are working on a "sequel" to Genetics and Analysis of Quantitative Traits. Thanks to the glory of the internet you can read draft chapters of Evolution and Selection of Quantitative Traits in PDF form.
May 2, 2006
Study: Geography Greek to young Americans:
...33 percent could not point out Louisiana on a U.S. map....
...showed that 88 percent of those questioned could not find Afghanistan on a map of Asia....
..."half or fewer of young men and women 18-24 can identify the states of New York or Ohio on a…
May 1, 2006
The New York Times has an article that reviews the problems with peer review. I don't know what to think, as it has something of the "and the other side says" air to it, never really coming to any conclusion. There's a lot of shoddy crap being published in stuff like the Tuvan Journal of…