razib | November 21, 2009Perhaps because we only remember the good stuff? Or only the good suff & famous authors get reprinted. I'm prompted to offer this hypothesis in response to Chad Orzel's commentary that there was a lot of bad space opera even during the "Golden Age" of science fiction. I recall that Zadie Smith once noted that 99.99% (or something to that effect) of Victorian fiction is forgotten and out of print. All that remains read are the "classics," so contemporary audiences have a biased perspective as to the median quality of Victorian-era writers. Of course the insight can be generalized to the…
razib | November 21, 2009No, this isn't about intellectual property issues and piracy. Whole Genome Distribution and Ethnic Differentiation of Copy Number Variation in Caucasian and Asian Populations:
Although copy number variation (CNV) has recently received much attention as a form of structure variation within the human genome, knowledge is still inadequate on fundamental CNV characteristics such as occurrence rate, genomic distribution and ethnic differentiation. In the present study, we used the Affymetrix GeneChip® Mapping 500K Array to discover and characterize CNVs in the human genome and to study ethnic…
razib | November 20, 2009Pleistocene Megafaunal Collapse, Novel Plant Communities, and Enhanced Fire Regimes in North America:
Although the North American megafaunal extinctions and the formation of novel plant communities are well-known features of the last deglaciation, the causal relationships between these phenomena are unclear. Using the dung fungus Sporormiella and other paleoecological proxies from Appleman Lake, Indiana, and several New York sites, we established that the megafaunal decline closely preceded enhanced fire regimes and the development of plant communities that have no modern analogs. The loss of…
razib | November 18, 2009
During the first few years of ScienceBlogs there was a lot of talk about religion. Yes, there's talk about religion now, but it's toned down in the wake of the ebbing of the publicity around The God Delusion. Naturally in the wake of the New Atheism a raft of conventional apologetics have been published, The Dawkins' Delusion being a typical example. More recently more nuanced books which wend the middle ground between militant atheism and conventional apologetics have taken center strage. Karen Armstrong's The Case for God approaches this from a philo-theistic angle, while Robert Wright's…
razib | November 18, 2009I actually saw this SNL Digital Short parody of the Twilight movie trailer before I saw the real one on YouTube.
Make sure to watch the real thing after the parody, makes it way funnier.
razib | November 18, 2009The evolutionary history of the extinct ratite moa and New Zealand Neogene paleogeography:
...We synthesize mitochondrial phylogenetic information from 263 subfossil moa specimens from across NZ with morphological, ecological, and new geological data to create the first comprehensive phylogeny, taxonomy, and evolutionary timeframe for all of the species of an extinct order. We also present an important new geological/paleogeographical model of late Cenozoic NZ, which suggests that terrestrial biota on the North and South Island landmasses were isolated for most of the past 20-30 Ma. The data…
razib | November 18, 2009In the post below I pointed to an article which claimed:
It's hard to say exactly how much support the theory of evolution enjoys in the world's Muslim countries, but it's definitely not very much. In one 2006 study by American political scientists, people in 34 industrial nations were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the idea that human beings evolved from earlier life forms. Turkey, the only Muslim country in the survey, showed the lowest levels of support - barely a quarter of Turks said they agreed. By comparison, at least 80 percent of those surveyed in Iceland, Denmark,…
razib | November 17, 2009There was recently a conference on evolution in Egypt. Some interesting numbers:
Dr Guessoum, who is a Sunni Muslim, said that in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and Malaysia, only 15 per cent of those surveyed believed Darwin's theory to be "true" or "probably true". This stand was equally prevalent among students and teachers, from high school to university. Most alarmingly, he claimed, science teachers were misrepresenting the facts and theories of evolution by mixing it with religious ideologies.
A survey of 100 academics and 100 students that he conducted at his own…
razib | November 17, 2009The relationship between language families and historical population genetics has a long history. In the 19th and early 20th centuries anthropologists were wont to substitute and synthesize the connections discerned in linguistic relationships with those of presumed biological affinities. This resulted in great hilarity. Older works sometimes labeled the Finns a "Mongoloid" people because of their Uralic language. But once the physical substrate of genetic inheritance (DNA) was ascertained some correspondences did emerge.
The figure to the left is from an L. L. Cavalli-Sforza paper, Genes,…
razib | November 16, 2009Changes in the world of personal genomics. Dan MacArthur has the details on 23andMe changing up its offerings, perhaps signalling that the money gush is long over. And deCode is finally dead. Of course, just because the .com bubble burst doesn't mean that the internet is no longer a part of our lives. New players will likely emerge in the wake of this creative destruction, and old players will adapt to survive.
razib | November 16, 2009This discussion between Michael Specter & Chris Mooney pointed me to an interesting new book, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives. Instead of Global Warming or Creationism, Specter addresses less pervasively disputatious issues such as genetically modified food, the anti-vaccination movement and the politics of the FDA approval process (at least judging from the discussion). Mooney & Specter also point to the reality that denialism exists in Blue America (though anyone who has followed the dabbling of the Huffington…
razib | November 15, 2009'2012' Opening Earns $65 Million:
It is rare for a movie not based on a pre-existing brand, franchise or hit novel to deliver such robust results. Sony said "2012," with a budget of $200 million, had the highest worldwide opening ever for an original movie.
razib | November 14, 2009Peter Suderman on 2012, the stupid new film based on the stupid 2012 phenomenon:
And with its never-ending parade of glorious, ludicrous, and utterly improbable catastrophes, it more or less succeeds. 2012 is the sort of movie so aggressively hyperbolic and devoutly over-the-top that it makes traditional descriptive labels obsolete and thus requires the invention of whole new words. My suggestions? How about catastrophaganza--the subgenre to which 2012 (and most of Emmerich's oeuvre) belongs--and retardiculous--a combo word to describe its barfy blend of low-quality yucks; treacly, social-…
razib | November 13, 2009John Emerson points me to some interesting data crunching over at Open Left. The diarist, "dreaminonempty," is analyzing the past few years' election results against demographic variables. What's there not to like? Though I do think the perspective is a bit too The Emerging Democratic Majority. Yes, it does look like the Republicans, as a white Christian party, are in a world of demographic hurt. But, be cautious about projecting current trends too far. By that, I mean that the trends working against the Republicans are clear, but we aren't quite where the Republicans were during the 1970s-…
razib | November 13, 2009First, in The New Republic, Malcolm Gladwell's Secret Of Success:
The first sentence here is a classically Gladwellian assertion about what the rest of us think. The rest of the paragraph consists of, more or less, made up numbers and figures which Gladwell claims constitute a "rule". Seriously, read these sentences again. Where does he get these figures? Anyway, the exchange ended on this note:
CHARLIE ROSE: Everyone always has this question when I tell them your story and hand your book out to people, and they say what does that say about gift and superb talent?
MALCOLM GLADWELL: I remain…
razib | November 13, 2009Two Are Charged With Helping Madoff Falsify Records:
Two computer programmers who worked for Bernard L. Madoff's brokerage firm were arrested on Friday on criminal charges of helping perpetuate his long-running Ponzi scheme.
The two men -- Jerome O'Hara of Malvern, N.Y., and George Perez of East Brunswick, N.J. -- were also sued by securities regulators, who said they had helped keep the Madoff fraud running for more than 15 years and took "hush money" to keep it secret.
The criminal and civil complaints accuse the men of creating and maintaining the software that enabled Mr. Madoff to…
razib | November 13, 2009Dynamic of the Cats as some commentary on the LCROSS landing the moon. The "big news" is the very high confidence now that one can put on the proposition that the moon does have water. Since humans are mostly water by weight, this is very important when assessing the practical difficulties of colonization or settlement. Would have been a drag to lug or synthesize H2O.
razib | November 12, 2009Greg Laden vs. Matt Springer. Here are some Nidal Hasan headlines (via Steve).