razib | June 15, 2006Question: Ask a Science Blogger June 15:
How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically?
My guess: blogging is easy. What it takes is a little courage to speak your mind (or foolhardiness, depending on how you look at it). For myself, I'm juggling a lot of different things in my life right now, so I always make sure I "clock" myself. Believe it or not, a lot of the posts do not take much time because I'm ruminating on a lot of these topics all the time. Once it…
razib | June 15, 2006Time to represent...no point pulling one's hair about the ignorance of the anti-evolutionist unwashed unless one is willing to do something about the problem, right?
Small update: Props to those of you who have given so far! Small $$$ can go a long way. In any case, just so you know, everyone should feel free to give directly to whichever project they want to give to. If you do give to this weblog's Donor account, know that I'll probably throw most of the cash first to the genetics & evolution related stuff.
[end update]
Those of us who blog here at ScienceBlogs think science is cool,…
razib | June 15, 2006Bora's reference to popular misconceptions about evolution and RPM's post which points to some of Francis Collins' bizarre contentions in regards to human evolution (talk about "End of History") got me thinking, how about I be a unifier and not a divider? If you had 10 words or less, what would you have the public master (and I mean internalize, not spit back as a creed) about evolutionary theory?
Here is my shot:
Differential fitness correlated with heritable variation results in evolution
This an attempt to condense Richard Lewontin's "three conditions" for biological evolution:
(i) there…
razib | June 14, 2006Manish has a post up on this YouTube video of a South Indian movie where the male lead has an out of control bouffant. The weird thing is that whenever I hear South Indian languages I always get a weird feeling like I'm listening to aliens chattering in an Indian accent. Myself, I can speak Bengali with about an 8 year old level of fluency, and so Hindi (an Indo-European language like Bengali) doesn't sound too weird and I can make out many of the words...but when I hear people going off in Tamil or something it is really strange (the languages of South India are Dravidian, not Indo-…
razib | June 14, 2006RPM got me thinking about two things today. First, what's up with the new picture. Second, Francis Collins' is repeating his experiences with religion. Four points
The equanimity of his religous patients in the face of cruel fate fascinated him
He was struck by the arguments in C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity (i.e., "Christians can make rational arguments!").
An epiphany as he was hiking through the Cascade mountains.
This is an area where you have to be careful to distinguish between the reasons people sincerely believe they believe in x, and the real causes at work here. Psychologists…
razib | June 14, 2006Simon of Bloggasm asked me 5 questions, and I responded. Now, I will admit that I found being "interviewed" to offer my "opinion" kind of hilarious (another interview with me should pop up on the web at the end of this month, "watch this space," or, better yet, read another genetics blog regularly). As a blogger basically I am offering a never-ending stream of opinion, so it seems like going to the ice-cream parlor when you've got two fridges of Costco creams sitting at home. But hey, food is more than about ingestion, and interaction with other human beings means kicking back control to…
razib | June 14, 2006Bora made two quick references to "group selection" today. I don't have much time...and shouldn't be blogging, but I want to make a few quick points before this topic goes down the memory hole (I know, unnecessary caveat, but I am driven by personal guilt in expressing it, not public shame). For those "not in the know" (e.g., most readers), Bora and I have a history.
Update: Robert Skipper's ruminations are worth a read, as always. And of course I was just making shit up about his political views and draft....
My problem with Bora comes down to assertions like this:
And I have realized…
razib | June 13, 2006Every few months I take a political test just to see where I "fit in." Jason Soon reminds me of The Libertarian Purity Test. Funniest question?
58. Should the courts be privatized?
Yes
No
I scored 35, "Your libertarian credentials are obvious. Doubtlessly you will become more extreme as time goes on." They probably got the directionality wrong, but oh well....
razib | June 12, 2006Regular readers of this weblog know that there are some quick "back of the envelope" prediction equations that one can appeal to to get a rough sense of how quickly evolution can proceed. For example, the time until fixation of a neutral (no selection + or -) mutant is 4Ne generations, where Ne is the effective breeding population. On a quantitative polygenic trait the response to selection, R is proportional to h2, the heritability, multiplied by the selection coefficient, S (R = h2*S being the classic empirical breeder's equation). Nevertheless, sometimes it is important to get an…
razib | June 10, 2006Yes, the title is a bit asinine, but it got your attention didn't it? This post is a response to Chad Orzel's response to my response to his response to last week's "Ask a Science Blogger" where I allude to the benefit of tightening labor for our working classes (these United States). Chad states:
...the point is to make it possible for the children of the lower classes to become scientists and engineers rather than factory workers and farmers. Economic class should not be hereditary, and one of the purposes of public education is to keep economic class from being hereditary.
There is a…
razib | June 9, 2006This week they ask:
Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why?
Cosmology. Transcendence.
razib | June 9, 2006In response to a few reflective posts of mine in regards to the "big picture" of evolutionary dynamics Brown Gaucho has his own summation of the issues at hand. Worth a read. He tends to take a slightly different tack than myself, but ultimately I think the issues we can agree upon relate to the "unity within the diversity" of the biological sciences. Yes, we all have different interests and emphases, but we deal in one reality which trades in the same general currency of laws. And of course, I highly recommend Armand Leroi's paper which elaborates my general position on this issue.
razib | June 9, 2006The famous pictures of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's baby, Shiloh, below the fold....
Sike!!!!! Sucker!!!!!
razib | June 8, 2006My comment about the basics of evolutionary biology and how they enter into non-scientific discourse elicited this response from RPM:
You may not like the concept of speciation, but the parts that make it up (reinforcement, geographic isolation, pre- and post-zygotic barriers, etc) are real. They are also worth studying, imo. In studying those factors, scientists are, for all intents and purposes, studying "speciation". And to study speciation, we must come up with a definition for what we consider species. Coyne and Orr argue that the best definition (in terms of practicality when studying…
razib | June 8, 2006Evolutionary genetics nerds might find this picture of interest. Look to the top right.
razib | June 8, 2006Over at my other weblog, Gene Expression "Classic", I addressed the polemics of one David Stove, author of Darwinian Fairytales. I won't go into the details of Stove and that book, but if you follow the comment thread you will see that sometimes shit can be a very good fertilizer and give rise to food for thought. The comment thread made more explicit in my mind a few issues I have in regards to evolution.
First, I hold to the scale independence of evolution, that is, there is no fundamental difference between microevolution and macroevolution. Macroevolution is in reality simply a…
razib | June 7, 2006Over at Genetics & Health Lei is commenting on the genetic character of Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, and referencing an old post of mine on this topic re: genetics. It is all pretty amusing, but, here is a prediction:
The level of spontaneous abortion should be increasing in modern populations
"Spontaneous abortions" are the half of pregnancies which naturally terminate without the woman ever knowing. It is often said that modern populations are subject to relaxed selection, that is, the genetically less fit can, and do, reproduce at a healthy level. Over time this should increase the genetic…
razib | June 6, 2006Evolgen has a has a nice little post poking fun at the late Ernst Mayr. A few comments.
1) R.A. Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane and J.M. Smith were trained as mathematical/physical scientists before their biological days. Fisher did work in statistical mechanics before he went off to Rothamsted. Physical scientists can and do say stupid things about biology, but that is only when they aren't biologists.
2) I think what Mayr was getting at was denigrating "bean baggery" and "reductionism." Theoretical population geneticists break down complex evolutionary dynamics to analytically tractable…
razib | June 6, 2006Chad's response to this week's Ask a Science Blogger pointed to two issues which I think need some clarification.
First, that brain drain might be good for the species in that it distributes the "wealth" of human capital around. This is not a trivial or baseless argument, but, The World Bank has done a study, and it is important to note that the impact of the "brain drain" on "donor" nations differs as a function of size. In other words, nations like China and India lose a relatively small percentage of their intellectual capital, while nations like Guyana lose a lot. So the key is…