razib | January 12, 2007I just found this article by Heather Mac Donald in Slate, Send a Message to God: He has gone too far this time. She published it two years ago, and somehow I missed it!
razib | January 12, 2007Jason Rosenhouse has a nice post on the rate of mutation within the genome. David plumbs the depths of J.B.S. Haldane's 2s. Peromyscus posts on the ladies looking for possible "extra-pair matings." A**man posts on short guys.
razib | January 11, 2007Yesterday I watched Will Wilkinson and Ezra Klein on Blogging Heads. Will, as many of you will know, is a pragmatic libertarian (oh, they exist), while Ezra is a liberal. I was struck by (somewhat appalled in fact) by Ezra's irritation and contempt for the philosophical nerdiness of many libertarians. Ezra's emphasis on the empirical and the proximate, on a narrow sui generis fixation on a sequence of finite policies was set against a more expansive and theoretically scaffolded conception of the Good Life which Will seemed to be promoting (even a question of the nature of the Good Life).…
razib | January 11, 2007Jonah over at The Frontal Cortex has some commentary up on the gay sheep story. A reader pointed out that this controversy started off with some wild claims made by PETA. Nevertheless (more at Andrew Sullivan's), no matter the details of the claim, there are a few points I'd like to pick up on....
Jonah says:
So here's my hypothesis: if you select against homosexuality in a biological community, you will also be selecting against our instinct for solidarity. The same genes that give rise to gayness might also give rise to cooperation. When scientists create a population of all heterosexual…
razib | January 10, 2007Jason Rosenhouse and John Hawks have both commented on the introgression of cattle alleles into wild bison. J & J have hit many of the salient points, but let me suggest one issue: not all genetic loci are created equal. That is, "neutral" markers should be weighted less than "functional" markers. Of course, neutral markers probably aren't all neutral, and many functional markers are functionally relevant only in specified environmental contexts. The problem with these sort of questions is that I believe our "species concepts" are derived from gestalt psychology and our intuitive…
razib | January 5, 2007With all the controversy around Keith Ellison, the first Muslim in Congress, no one seems to be publicizing the first two Buddhists in the House, Mazie Hirono (Hawaii) and Hank Johnson (Georgia).
razib | January 5, 2007Over the past month or so I've been blogging chapter 5 of Evolutionary Genetics: Concepts & Case Studies. This chapter covers "stochastics processes," basically the random elements in the flux of gene frequencies in biological populations. Now, I'm a selection man for real, but to understand selection you need to put it into the context of evolutionary dynamics as a whole, and chance is essential to properly comprehending necessity.
First I covered the immediate danger of extinction for a new mutant allele, even those favored positive selection's kiss. Then I traced out the…
razib | January 4, 2007Over in The Corner they are talking about eugenics. Of course my friend John Devilshire, I mean, Derbyshire, started it all off.
1) I think Jonah Goldberg is correct that eugenics we do will be not called eugenics, while eugenics which is ethically objectional will be thrown under that term.
2) I think that the "Great Risk Shift" combined with greater discernment powers of medical genomics will make some form of government subsidized health care in the United States pretty inevitable (the short of it is that the middle class will start to get scared and want protection, and what the middle…
razib | January 4, 2007Over at Accidental Blogger Ruchira Paul has a profile up of Barbara Forrest, philosopher and science activist. I've long admired her coauthor Paul Gross, who I've had the pleasure of being mildly acquainted with on internet mailing lists, and I props to Dr. Forrest as well. I don't talk much about Creationism here because I don't feel it is part of my brief, but I'm very glad that there are people out there who are active on that battle front.
razib | January 3, 2007Differential fitness costs of reproduction between the sexes:
We found that increasing number of offspring (parity) and rates of reproduction were associated with reduced parental survivorship, and significantly more for mothers than fathers. Parental mortality resulted in reduced survival and reproduction of offspring, and the mothers' mortality was more detrimental to offspring than the fathers'. Increasing family size was associated with lower offspring survival, primarily for later-born children, indicating a tradeoff between offspring quantity versus quality. Also, we found that the…
razib | January 2, 2007Over at my other blog 10 questions fo Heather Mac Donald. You might remember Heather from her recent dust up with other conservatives in regards to her secularity.
razib | January 1, 2007The headline says it all: Down screening urged for all pregnant women.
Related: To breed a better human - we have the technology.
razib | January 1, 2007Science told: hands off gay sheep:
Scientists are conducting experiments to change the sexuality of "gay" sheep in a programme that critics fear could pave the way for breeding out homosexuality in humans.
You can read the whole article yourself. Randall Parker has been saying for years that genetic engineering will accentuate human differences as parents will choose to invest in alternative enhancements with their finite dollars. The vectors may remain the same, but the magnitudes could increase, as religious parents breed super-religious offspring, secular parents start spawning born…
razib | December 31, 2006Genetic Evidence for the Convergent Evolution of Light Skin in Europeans and East Asians:
...these results point to the importance of several genes in shaping the pigmentation phenotype and a complex evolutionary history involving strong selection. Polymorphisms in two genes, ASIP and OCA2, may play a shared role in shaping light and dark pigmentation across the globe while SLC24A5, MATP, and TYR have a predominant role in the evolution of light skin in Europeans but not in East Asians. These findings support a case for the recent convergent evolution of a lighter pigmentation phenotype in…