razib
Posts by this author
August 28, 2009
Addendum to my two posts below, here's Michael Behe's side. He notes:
...and John emailed back that he himself requested the video to be pulled because people thought he was too easy on me, which was supposedly contrary to that old Bloggingheads spirit. I find that quite implausible (other shows on…
August 27, 2009
Just a quick follow-up to the previous post, as I finished watching the whole Behe-McWhorter exchange. Notes:
1) McWhorter is an atheist, and implies he's always been an atheist (or at least not a theist).
2) He's really impressed by Michael Behe's arguments, to the point where he might assent to…
August 27, 2009
So a friend of mine started IMing me about how crazy the John McWhorter & Michael Behe diavlog was on bloggingheads.tv. I was a bit surprised since there is no such diavlog, either on the bloggingheads.tv website, nor in their podcasts (which is where I usually am made to be aware of them).…
August 26, 2009
Dan MacArthur did a lot of legwork in this post on Complete Genomics.
August 26, 2009
There's a new National Geographic special out, The Human Family Tree, which readers might be interested in. Next showing is on the 30th. Seems to be an extension of The Genographic Project.
Clips below the fold:
August 25, 2009
Kambiz Kamrani of Anthropology, normally a rather staid blogger, has posted something titled Science Suffers From The Idiots At Scientific American. It's in reference to this widely circulated editorial, Fossils for All: Science Suffers by Hoarding. I can't really summarize it, and I think the…
August 25, 2009
Speaking of Richard Dawkins, he's back to science, in this case an excerpt from his new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution:
The evolution of the dog, then, if Coppinger is right, was not just a matter of artificial selection, but a complicated mixture of natural selection…
August 24, 2009
Officials Weigh Circumcision to Fight H.I.V. Risk:
Public health officials are considering promoting routine circumcision for all baby boys born in the United States to reduce the spread of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.
...
He and other experts acknowledged that although the clinical trials…
August 24, 2009
Lawyers for Broker in Madoff Case Call U.S. Suits Unfair:
"What the commission has done here to Robert Jaffe is simply unfair," the defense motion argued. "The agency has called him a cheat, a knowing participant in the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Yet, it has failed to back up these charges…
August 24, 2009
Dienekes points to a new paper, Amerindian mitochondrial DNA haplogroups predominate in the population of Argentina: towards a first nationwide forensic mitochondrial DNA sequence database:
The study presents South American mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data from selected north (N = 98), central (N =…
August 24, 2009
A month ago Larry Moran made reference to Fern Elsdon Baker's new book, The Selfish Genius: How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwin's Legacy. Moran was a bit disappointed by the previews, his pet hobby-horse being the revolutionary impact of the neutral theory of molecular evolution, while Elsdon-…
August 23, 2009
If you haven't, you might want to check out the Revolutionary Minds weblog. Good for browsing and sampling.
August 23, 2009
Or at least that's the joke. Interesting post from Tom Rees which illustrates the utility of cross-cultural tests of general theories-of-religion. Rees notes:
One of the leading theories of why religion is so popular goes by the ominous name of 'Terror Management Theory'. Put simply, this is the…
August 23, 2009
Arnold Kling mulls over various options when it comes to tacking the American national debt. Here's the one which is out "get-out-jail-free" card:
2. Technology to the rescue. Some major technologies, probably either wet or dry nanotech, produce so much economic growth that the ratio of debt to GDP…
August 23, 2009
In the post below I combined some of the Census Regions for reasons of sample size. But I decided to do this again without combining, but removing some of the questions because of small sample sizes. Again, I also limited the sample to whites between 1998-2008.
But, I added another category:…
August 22, 2009
UK Sikhs accuse BBC of racism:
"We should not be paying a licence fee for promoting the ignorance-based ramblings of those bent on self-promotion who sneer at Asian religion and culture," said Hardeep Singh, a spokesman of the Sikh Media Monitoring Group, which accused BBC's Asian Network of being…
August 22, 2009
Update: Follow up post.
This Michael Lind piece bemoaning liberal contempt for white Southerners made me want to look a bit deeper and compare interregional differences and similarities. I went into the General Social Survey and limited responses to whites only and compared by region. The regions…
August 21, 2009
Switched back to Firefox from Chrome. I've been using it for the past 2 days and there isn't a discernible difference in speed. I got tired of some of Chrome's minor bugs which emerge in AJAX driven websites which haven't been test-driven on that particular browser, so I thought I would see if…
August 20, 2009
Thomas Mailund on Doubts about complex speciation between humans and chimpanzees:
Two patterns from large-scale DNA sequence data have been put forward as evidence that speciation between humans and chimpanzees was complex, involving hybridization and strong selection. First, divergence between…
August 20, 2009
How inevitable was modern human civilization - data:
To me it looks like life, animals with nervous systems, Upper Paleolithic-style Homo, language, and behavioral modernity were all extremely unlikely events (notice how far ago they are - vaguely ~3.5bln, ~600mln, ~3mln, ~200k or ~600k, ~50k years…
August 20, 2009
A question below:
I'm curious about the demographics of this category, specifically their geographic distribution, religion and ethnicity.
First, I limited the sample to whites to remove confounds of ethnicity. Interestingly, in the GSS in the period between 1998-2008 24% of black Democrats/lean…
August 20, 2009
Common body mass index-associated variants confer risk of extreme obesity:
To investigate the genetic architecture of severe obesity, we performed a genome-wide association study of 775 cases and 3197 unascertained controls at 550 000 markers across the autosomal genome. We found convincing…
August 20, 2009
Question below about the details of what conservative Democrats or liberal Republicans might believe, etc. I decided to look for a few questions. I removed Independents because their sample sizes are a bit smaller. I clustered all those with socioeconomic status 17-47 as "Low" and those from 47-98…
August 19, 2009
It was a pleasure to hear Tom Rees, one of my favorite religion & data bloggers, on Thinking Allowed, one of my regular podcasts. Epiphenom is of particular interest because Tom Rees offers up original data and analysis, instead of anecdote laced speculation. As they say, if you enjoy Thinking…
August 19, 2009
Andrew Gelman has a post up, Who are the liberal Democrats and the conservative Republicans?, which shows that conservative Republicans tend toward higher incomes, while conservative Democrats tend toward lower incomes. I decided to see if something similar was discernible in the General Social…
August 19, 2009
Americans know that the Ogallala Aquifer is important, and declining. This is much more of an issue in India, Satellites Unlock Secret To Northern India's Vanishing Water:
Using satellite data, UC Irvine and NASA hydrologists have found that groundwater beneath northern India has been receding by…
August 18, 2009
Rod Dreher is aghast at the fact that Americans don't assent to the views of "orthodox" Christianity. The problem that many secular and religious people on the extremes don't get (the anti-devout and the devout) is the cognitive complexity, and, frankly, the fundamental incoherency of the religious…
August 17, 2009
Check this out from Google Trends:
Did Facebook hit an inflection point in early 2009? Google must have much better data sets, probably one reason Hal Varian left Berkeley for Google.
August 17, 2009
Fat Tax:
Which is why it is so striking to talk to Delos M. Cosgrove, the heart surgeon who is the clinic's chief executive, about the initiative. Cosgrove says that if it were up to him, if there weren't legal issues, he would not only stop hiring smokers. He would also stop hiring obese people.…